City of Light (City of Mystery) (9 page)

He said it lightly,
his second attempt at gay banter, for even if she was simultaneously in his
grasp and beyond his grasp, he wanted to know that in this rarified moment he
had been able to flirt with her.  That he had momentarily escaped the caged
confines of his detective’s brain.   That she had taken him, so to speak, to
new heights.

But she frowned,
turning her chin away from his.  “A Whistler?”

With her connections
to society, Rayley was surprised she hadn’t caught the reference. The man’s
name was in all the papers. “James Whistler,” he said.  “A portrait painter of
some renown and an exhibiter in the American pavilion.   Rumor has it that he’s
gifted one of his pieces to Gustave Eiffel in tribute. Tribute for the Tower,
that is, and I suppose everything.  Everything Eiffel has done.”

“Ah,” she said.

“It was meant as a
jest,” Rayley said weakly, for he knew that if one had to announce that a
remark was humorous, this rendered it no longer so.  “I’m sure there’s no way
Eiffel would put a truly valuable painting in a place where no one would ever
see it.  No one except certain guests of a certain sort, that is, ladies who he
–“  

To his relief,
Isabel turned her face back to him, saving him from having to say more, or of
making an even more disastrous conversational error.  She wears powder, he
realized.  Lip rouge, and a dark line of some sort, drawn very fine and close to
the base of her eyelashes.  But all applied so expertly, with such a light and
subtle hand that he had never noticed until this moment, when the light was so
sharp and unforgiving and her face was just inches from his.  

“I shouldn’t say
that I would never go to the aerie,” she said.  “It’s just that the circumstances
would have to be extraordinary.”

She was looking him
right in the eye. 

“Besides,” she
added, “the name is Blout.”

It was his turn to
frown.

“My name,” she
repeated calmly, “is Isabel Blout.”

“You aren’t married
to him?”

“My husband might
object. Come to think of it, so might his wife.”

Rayley’s head once
again was spinning.  He had a thousand questions but they died mute on his
lips.  He merely stared at her, face to face, here on this spike rising into
the heavens, here on this staircase that led to places they knew neither of
them would ever go.

“He is your lover?”

“We might have used
that word once.  Long ago.  Not now.  No, not for some time.”

The silence
stretched between them.  She continued to gaze steadily at him, the corner of
one lip slightly lifted.

“Then why have you
come here?” he finally asked her. “Why are you in Paris?”

Her eyes were damp
with tears, or perhaps it was just the wind. “I wanted to find the truth.”

“How very odd,”
Rayley said. “That’s why I’ve come as well.”

CHAPTER SIX

London

April 22

9:15 AM

“So, I take it we’ve
a new case?”  Trevor asked, sliding into one of the three wobbly chairs gathered
around the battered table in the Scotland Yard Laboratory of Forensics.  A rather
ostentatious name for a cold, badly lit room that was in truth little more than
an alcove off the mortuary.  But the laboratory, primitive though it may be,
was Trevor’s unofficial reward for his work on the Ripper case the previous
autumn, and he never descended the stairs which led to his small kingdom
without pride.  

“Cleveland Street,
Sir,” Davy said in a neutral tone of voice, sliding a file across the table.

Trevor struggled to
keep his face equally nonchalant, although he felt like cursing.  For the last
two weeks the papers had been full of the scandal, so he’d suspected the case
would find its way to the forensics laboratory eventually. The disadvantage of
running a unit founded on the basis of the Ripper killings was that the rest of
the Yard now considered forensics to be the repository of all that was
sensationalistic and bizarre. Trevor had hoped he would be given a chance to
work on a series of more conventional cases – your everyday murders, so to
speak - and gradually gain the respect of his fellow detectives upstairs.  When
they saw how useful forensic science could be to their inquiries…

But, alas, it was
not to be. They would take any case that drew the interest of the Queen, no
questions asked, and when Trevor had read the preliminary report on the
Cleveland Street affair, one name had leapt out at him.  The same name that
seemed to be tied to all the truly lurid stories of London, and the minute he
had seen it, he’d known the Queen would expect him to devote everything he had
to the matter.  After all, Her Majesty herself had approved the funds which paid
his salary, as well as that of Davy.  Tom, who had the advantages of both a
family trust and the eternal hospitality of his Aunt Geraldine, served the unit
as a volunteer. Little wonder that the officers upstairs all but guffawed in
Trevor’s face whenever he used the term “my team.”  Although insightful beyond
his years, Davy was a mere bobby and Tom, for all his swagger, was not yet
through university and thus only a medical examiner in the loosest possible
sense of the term.  Even when Rayley returned from Paris and joined them, but
they would still be a pitiably small and ragtag force.   

Well, there was Emma
too, in her unofficial capacity.  Trevor supposed the name for what she did
would be “consultant,” an admirably vague word that seemed to cover any number
of unorthodox arrangements. Emma may have worked with them in the privacy of
the Tuesday Night Murder Games, and she may have in fact proven the cleverest
of the lot, but a twenty-year-old girl could hardly saunter into Scotland Yard
and down the dungeon-like steps which led to this small room.  Dainty and
petite, with her large eyes, pointed chin, and small mouth, Emma looked
precisely like what she was – the respectable daughter of a schoolteacher, the
genteel companion of a society matron, a young woman who could be counted on for
discretion and propriety.  Only a few people, including the three men at this
table, had ever seen the other side of her.  

They had joked many
times that Emma should put on britches and tuck her hair under a cap, that she
should unsex herself and join them in laboratory, but today Trevor was glad
that this was only a joke.   Whatever was in the files before him now would be
troubling enough to deal with even without the presence of Emma Kelly.  Trevor
put his palms on the folder and paused a minute before opening it.  There would
be personal accounts, record books, drawings of the property, and pictures.  Photography,
he had often mused, was a double-edged sword of an invention, producing crime
scene images of the sort Trevor found impossible to forget even after the files
had been closed and put away.  The blank-eyed gazes of the Ripper victims still
followed him in his sleep.

“They’ve brought one
of them in to a holding cell,” Tom said, his voice as carefully even as the
others.  

“Victim or suspect?”

“I’d imagine that’s
for us to decide,” Tom said.  He and Davy had read the file before he arrived, Trevor
realized, along with the stack of folded newspapers on the counter.   

“So in the interest
of time, why don’t you two tell me what are we dealing with?”  Trevor asked,
sighing as he slid the unopened folder back toward Davy.   “I mean, besides a
bunch of buggered young boys?”

Paris  

9:20  AM

The pounding on the
door brought Rayley out of his reverie. He’d gotten used to a leisurely breakfast,
since the French started their work day far later than the British.  The one
thing he could say for his landlady was that she provided a superlative variety
of pastries for her tenants, as well as a passable attempt at British tea. 
Rayley was still sitting down in the common room, making a half-hearted stab at
reading the morning papers when the pounding at the front door had begun.

Shooting him a dour
glance, the landlady stomped to her foyer.  He’d gathered she considered it
beneath her station to be renting rooms to a policeman in the first place, but
Rayley was in all other ways the ideal tenant – quiet, neat, and prompt to
pay.  And in the months he had been in Paris this is the first time anyone had
come knocking at all, much less in this brusque manner.

When she jerked open
the door, two officers walked in.  One of them Rayley recognized from the
station, since the man was almost comically rotund and spoke a bit of English. 
The other, judging by his jacket, was higher in rank.

“A body, Sir” the
chubby man said.  “At the river.  You must come.”

“Me?  Why?”  Rayley
had risen to his feet as they entered and he now tossed his napkin to his
breakfast plate in some confusion.  He carried no authority with the Paris
police.  Judging by the nods and smiles in the corridors, he had risen slightly
in their estimation since the business with the stabbing of the cook, but he
was still surprised to find himself summoned to a crime scene.

“He’s one of yours,
Sir,” the man said, his eyes darting around the room, the weight of his body
swaying slightly between his widely-planted feet.  The familiar nervousness of
a street cop in the presence of a superior, trying to do it all exactly by the
book.   It was good to see that some behaviors, at least, appeared to know no
nationality.  

“One of mine?”

“Yes, Sir,” the man
said, his gaze coming to rest on Rayley’s half-finished pastry.  “English.”

London 

9:35 AM

“So what led the
officers to Cleveland Street in the first place?” Trevor asked as he wove his
way through the byzantine hallways of the Scotland Yard basement, Davy and Tom
lagging behind.

“Sheer chance, Sir. 
Some sort of petty theft reported at the London Central Telegraph Office,” Davy
said, stepping forward and falling into pace with Trevor. “The coppers were
talking to all the delivery boys, trying to see who among them might have taken
the money, when they came across fourteen shillings in the possession of a boy
named Charlie Swinscow.   Fourteen shillings was more than the amount stolen,
and quite a bit more than one would expect the lad to have in his pocket for
any reason.”

Trevor nodded. 
Fourteen shillings would be the equivalent of several weeks’ worth of wages for
a telegraph delivery boy. 

“A constable brought
him in for questioning,” Davy continued.  “And Charlie admitted that he got the
money from a man named Charles Hammond, who operates what apparently is some sort
of male brothel run out of 229 Cleveland Street.  I mean male brothel not in
the sense males are the customers, Sir, but that they are also the…um…providers
who…”

“Quite,” said
Trevor.

Davy soldiered on. 
“Anyway, our Charlie named several other boys his age and said they were all procured,
I believe the word is, Sir, all procured into service by an older lad who
worked for the General Post.   The post and the telegraph offices are in the
same building, so the boys in question would have known each other, thus making
it easy for the older boy to recruit the whole lot of them at once.”

“Gives rather a new
meaning to the term ‘mail service,’ does it not?”  Tom called up cheerfully
from behind them.

Trevor pointedly
ignored him.

“And the age of this
Charlie Swinscow?”

“Fifteen.”

Trevor winced.  He
himself had grown up in the country, in a simpler time and place.  At fifteen
his idea of criminal activity was sneaking off from the village schoolmaster to
go fishing, and his entire sexual experience had consisted of a kiss he’d
exchanged with that same man’s daughter. The kiss had been brief and clumsy,
even a bit off the mark, but the memory of it had informed his nocturnal fantasies
for months afterwards.  No such innocence existed for the children of London.  “And
the brothel owner?  The procurer?”

“Not sure the exact
age on Hammond, Sir, but he’s an adult.  By the time the bobbies went to Cleveland
Street to check Charlie’s story, Hammond had evidently gotten wind of the
trouble. They found the house locked up and the man disappeared.  We’ll round him
up, of course. The procurer from the General Post is eighteen or so, although
he seems to have given us the slip as well.  Charlie claims no one has seen him
near the place for the last two weeks.  Name of Henry Newlove.”

“Newlove?”

“Yes, Sir.  Newlove.”

“Not a word from
you, Tom,” Trevor said. 

“I promise that for
once I wasn’t going to make a joke,” Tom said.   “Didn’t figure I had to.”

Paris 

9:45 AM

The body of Patrick
Graham lay on the banks of the Seine, legs sprawled, arms flung wide, face
turned up to the sky.  From a distance, he looked like a man merely flattened
from a night of heavy drink, but as Rayley and his escorts cautiously picked
their way down the steep bank toward the river, the uglier truth became more
apparent with each step.