Tenfold More Wicked (34 page)

She tugged the chain around her neck free. Turned the ring in her fingers, a rainbow flash. “I meant everything I said, Remy Lafayette, and I still do. You're an extraordinary man and I'll be forever humbled beyond belief that you'd ask me—”

“Eliza, please don't.”

“No. Listen. You're deceived in me. The principles you admire are illusions. I'm not the woman you think I am.”

“Eliza. Stop it. With every breath, you prove yourself ever more that woman.”

“I don't deserve your esteem,” she insisted desperately. “I have not honored it. I'm weak and vain and foolish. I let pride eclipse my reason. And I lied, Remy. I told you I cared nothing for him, but if that's so, then why did I keep this from you?”

“Don't.” His gaze was raw. “For God's sake. I won't judge you. How can I?”

Unnerving, how he bared himself before her. A man who was half-beast, who'd killed his first wife in an animal fit of fury. Who'd lain with Lizzie, loved her, a deeper and more personal betrayal than anything else he could have done.

Still the finest man she'd ever known.

Her throat swelled, choking her. What fatal hubris, to imagine she could live in two worlds. Lord, this was the worst mistake she'd ever made.

“I don't deserve you.” Trembling, she held the ring out to him. The stone shone, flawless, blue as summer sky. Uncom
plicated, like his heart. “Forgive me, Remy. Because I never will.”

Remy tried another smile. “Keep it.”

“I couldn't—”

“Please. Do me the honor. It's yours.”

Tears half blinded her. She clutched his ring, helpless.

“Oh,” he added, “one more thing. I'll probably lose my commission for this, but . . .” A shrug, heedless. “Lady Lovelace is onto Marcellus Finch. I don't know what evidence she has, but he ought to clear out.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. She couldn't bear
good-bye
. She just turned, and stumbled away.

Somehow, she found her way home, along glaring sunlit streets that blurred and tangled like a maze. Her dim hall was chilly, lifeless. Only Hippocrates greeted her, snuffling dolefully at her skirts. She fumbled to pick him up. His brass body was cold. Blindly, she forced her wooden limbs to climb the stairs. Her study door slammed, a prison echo. The curtains were drawn. No fire, no lights, no warmth. She didn't want warmth. She didn't deserve it.

In the dark, she sank into her chair, and let the tears flow.

H
AD SHE SLEPT? HOW MUCH TIME HAD PASSED? HER
eyes stung, her throat hurt from weeping. Exhausted, she teetered back in her chair and poked the study drapes apart. Afternoon sun, red and raw like tortured flesh.

Dully, she set Hipp on the floor. He snuffled in sleepy protest. He'd been slumbering in her lap, cogs clicking as he dreamed.

She leapt up, stumbling in haste. She'd forgotten. How could she be so
selfish
? “Hipp, wake up! Run and telegraph Mr. Finch immediately, in cipher. Tell him to leave town. It's over.”

“Finch,” croaked Hipp woefully, “leave town.” He scuttled out, a flash of brass.

Over. Done. Finished. What a coldly scientific concept. Sick laughter bubbled. She'd imagined herself so logical. Such ugly vanity.

The mantel clock ticked, pressing. She ignored it. What was the hurry? The case was
over,
too, one way or another.
Had Nemo lied? Was he the Pentacle Killer after all? She'd never know, not until another corpse turned up. She'd no further clues to unravel.

Not one.

On her desk, Remy's ring glittered, splashed scarlet by the sun. She wandered over, listless. A flat pasteboard box sat on her blotter, tied with string. Had Mrs. Poole put it there? Where was Mrs. Poole, anyway?

A letter poked from the knot. Wanly, she pulled it out.

               
Dear Doctor Perfect

Her heart lurched, tipping her from her stupor. Unevenly spaced words, jerky underswirls . . .

               
I watched you last night, at that imbecilic gathering. What a farce! Saw you run, too. What a sticky end for that fool Nemo! I
'
m glad that hooded fellow stuck a knife in him. The lying runt deserved it!

                       
Ha ha! Did you think he was me? Wrong AGAIN!

                       
Here
'
s a thing I harvested, just for you. A flash cove this time, just for a change. Take a good look. If you don
'
t want this to happen to you
—
STOP LOOKING FOR ME.

                                                                        
See you in Hell

                                                                        
The Pentacle Killer

(nice nickname! I'll carve one in YOU)

Her gaze swiveled to the box. Dry-mouthed, she folded back the lid.

Arranged neatly on a paper lining sat a golden ring, soaked in gore. A man's finger, severed at the big knuckle, greenish with corruption. And a pale, soft blob of . . .

She recoiled, sick.

A face. Peeled from its skull like rind from ripe fruit.

Part of one, anyway. One eyelid hung crooked, dark-lashed. The flesh looked oddly misshapen. As if the pitiable fellow had a spongy growth around his eye socket.

That headless corpse in Soho had been missing two fingers. Rings stolen, reddish coat torn.
Concealing the victim's identity . . . or something else about him.

Images of Seven Dials, gin and guilt. Men playing cards, a weird-looking fellow in a russet coat, his arm around a lady. His face is bulbous, malformed, and he blows me a kiss over gold-ringed fingers.
Willy, you handsome devil.

The headless corpse was Strangeface Willy. The man who filed off the manufacturer's marks, reset the jewels, melted the silver to ingots. Made your stolen loot untraceable.

But why would the Pentacle Killer—who was demonstrably not Nemo—slaughter a petty fence?

New possibilities flowered, the petals of a dark rose. Sir Dalziel Fleet's closet, ransacked, that yawning safe emptied. Evidence clearly faked. A burglary gone wrong, Reeve had insisted, and she'd laughed at him.

Searching for something, I'll warrant, and not only revenge . . .

What if it really was a burglary?

What if the murderer stole something from that secret
cabinet, and killed Dalziel in the process? Something from the safe? Or . . .

Eve and the Serpent
flashed through her mind. Taken from a police vault by Carmine Zanotti and his gang of thieves. That frame-maker's shop, the Mad Queen's missing portrait.

Stolen artwork.

The box hit the desk, fallen from her numb fingers.

What if Carmine killed Dalziel, and stole an artwork from Dalziel's fabled collection? Something Strangeface Willy could christen . . . and then
someone else
killed them both to retrieve it?

But who? And what could be worth murdering so gruesomely for?

Fresh determination steeled her nerves, and she headed for the study door. She'd return to Dalziel's, search it top to bottom. Break in, if she must. Find Mr. Brigham and demand to know what was missing from that cabinet . . .

The door blew open, knocking her onto her backside.

“At last!” cried Marcellus Finch. “I've been looking for you all day. I say, what are you doing on the floor?” He hauled her to her feet.

She shook her dizzy head to clear it. “Did you get my telegram already?”

“Eh?” Finch goggled, wild white hair bobbing.

“The Royal are onto you. It's serious. You must leave town right away—”

“Oh, never mind that.” He slapped a pocketful of clutter onto the table. “Please explain. Chop chop, don't have all day!”

Her mind boggled. “Marcellus, there's a
face in a box
on my desk. Forgive me if I'm a little distracted.”

“So there is. Spectacular one, too, my goodness.” He sniffed, dismissive. “Well, forget it, dear girl! Concentrate!” He tapped a forefinger on her forehead. “You really should eat more turnips. Why, you're positively puffy-eyed—”

She warded him off. “Will you kindly tell me what's going on?”

“That.”
He jabbed an indignant finger at the clutter. Scrunched papers, a ball of string, a wrapped sweet, her collection of sample phials. And a white-wrapped packet labeled L
ADY
G
RAY'S
F
AMOUS
P
ARISIAN
E
NAMEL
. “That
substance
is evil. He's killing them. He must be stopped!”

“Who? Don't bounce, Marcellus. Slow down.”

“Moriarty Quick, of course.” Finch scrabbled at his hair, raising a white bird's nest. “It's the stuff that killed Sibby! I told you not to trust him, but did you listen to wise Marcellus? Of course not! He's a maniac, I tell you. Souls in jars, heads boiling on the stove . . . Oh, those empty eyes!”

She guided him to the sofa. “Take a breath. Shall I fetch tea?”

She poured a cup, and Finch gulped, not noticing it was long cold. “Haven't anything stronger, perchance?”

I could murder a whiskey . . .
“I'm afraid not.” Her wine carafe was missing. She sat, but her gaze kept flicking impatiently to Willy's disembodied face. “From the beginning. Who's Sibby?”

“We were to be married. Sibyl Finch, eh? Never cared for marriage, me. Always seemed irrational and pointless. But she was something special.”

Vague, Lizzie-flavored memory stirred. “Quick told me she fell ill?”

“I tried everything. Alchemy, of course. Homeopathy, hypnosis, even a witch doctor or two, and you know what I think of that, eh? But nothing helped. Moriarty . . . he wasn't calling himself that then . . . he said he'd distilled a new elemental essence that could restore her.”

“Don't tell me: he lied?”

“It
altered
her. She became cold and jealous and cruel. She'd bait people, steal, trick them just to laugh at their pain. I thought her illness had warped her temper, but the more of Quick's essence she took, the worse it got.”

“Quick insinuated that he and Sibby . . .”

“Oh, yes,” said Finch darkly. “Quite shamelessly. I couldn't understand it. She'd always loathed him. Called him a sly fellow, which for a lady with Sibby's sweet tongue was a veritable rain of curses, eh? But now it was as if they were made for each other. A pair of sniggering devils. And that's when I knew the vile little stoat had tricked us.” He sniffed, teary. “Tricked
me,
I should say. Didn't care for her in the slightest.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had to look, didn't I? Stay away, Marcellus, Henry told me, there are things we're not meant to meddle with. But I
needed to know
.”

Eliza nodded grimly. She understood that compulsion all too well.

“So one night, I sneaked into Quick's secret laboratory.” Finch's face greened. “I'd known he was dabbling with the occult, but I'd never seen anything like it. A shelf of jars, with
things
trapped inside.
Creatures
with pale flesh and staring
eyes. Coiled up tightly, straining against the glass, writhing to get out . . . and screaming. Over and over. Not words. Just . . . despair.” His voice cracked. “One was Sibby. It didn't look like her. Just a lump of flesh. But I knew.”

Icy wire threaded her veins. Those oily silver snail-squeezings, sliding down Lizzie's throat. Eliza's own horrid nightmare of beating against cold walls, trapped . . . Was that what Quick's potion did?

“Moriarty was studying the consciousness, you see. Life force, eh? With every dose of his treatment, the
thing
in the bottle grew, and the rest of her . . . rinsed thin.” At last, Finch met Eliza's eye. “And once he'd finished with her—ruined her utterly, of course, to spite me for turning Henry against him—Sibby died. The thing in the bottle withered away, and took her with it.”

She swallowed, sick. “I'm so sorry.”

“For the best in the end, eh?” Finch's eyes shimmered. “Better die than live in thrall to that maniac.”

“So you had him arrested?”

“Not for the bottled souls, who'd have believed that? Human eyeballs in his icebox, kidneys roasting on the spit. No proof of murder, sadly, but enough to get him transported.”

“And now Quick's doing it again? That sample I gave you is the same substance?” She blanched. That coveted porcelain-white skin. B
EAUTIFUL FOR
E
VER
. Quick was poisoning ladies with that twenty-guinea enamel. They were paying for the privilege of being murdered. “But why? Is he extorting money, or favors?”

Finch leapt up, re-energized. “Who knows? Put a stop to it, say what? You must tell me where you got this right away.”

“But I already told you. I found it at Quick's beauty parlor.”

He swiped the enamel aside. “No, you nitwit! That's just lead steeped in a barbiturate. Ladies spend their husbands' money, develop cravings, come back for more. A money trap, eh? Not that. This!” He shook the sample phials before her eyes.

Shreds of dark flesh. A ball of bloodied canvas. Coagulated plasma. “From Sir Dalziel's cadaver? It's only Quick's alchemical hallucinogen. From the cigar. Remember?”

“Have your wits shriveled? That scintillating stuff isn't the hallucinogen. It's dark alchemy, imbued in the linseed oil and mineral traces. The same essence that stole Sibby's soul!”

“Linseed oil? But—”

“Only now he's added a retrograde tincture of
aqua vitae
. Made the whole process more aesthetic and profitable.” Finch waved his arms. “Don't you see? No one would
pay
to have their soul sicken in a jar while they waste away. No, they want to watch their souls rot with sin, while
they
stay young and beautiful. Never heard anything so repellent in my life. We must stop him!”

Eliza blinked. “But . . .”

Finch wiggled the bottles, frantic. “It's on the canvas the killer stuffed down his throat. It's the paint, dear girl. Paint!”

Her thoughts ricocheted, all the evidence she'd collected zinging with fresh meaning. Arterial spray on Dalziel's carpet, unobstructed by the killer. A crucifix, dangling inexplicably from the dead man's neck. Not the murder weapon. Twin slices under the chin, a neat “X.” Left to right, right to left.

Just like the cuts in that scrap of portrait shoved down the corpse's throat. Dalziel's painted face, healthy, years younger than his sallow cadaver.

Paint. Stealing the soul. Murder.

B
EAUTIFUL FOR
E
VER.

“That's why the blood spatter didn't make sense,” she whispered. “The killer didn't stab the man. He stabbed the painting! Shoved in the crucifix to hide the fact. And then cut his face off. Not to obscure his identity. So no one would see Dalziel had
aged
.”

Finch bounced. “This is what I'm trying to tell you!”

She gripped his arm. “How's it done?”

“Well, you'd have to attune the essence somehow, to the subject's vital force.”

Old Dalziel were nutty as a fruitcake.
Bargaining for eternal life with the “gray man.” L
ADY
G
RAY'S
F
AMOUS
P
ARISIAN
E
NAMEL
. Moriarty Quick. Very funny. “Might an occult blood ritual do the trick? The kind Dalziel attempted at his parties?”

“Bunkum,” muttered Finch. “But it's easy enough to make alchemy look like a ritual. Moriarty loves an audience.”

“And then your soul”—
your shadow,
she almost said—“your soul would be trapped in the picture, and you'd be immortal? Indestructible?”

“Forever young.” Finch shuddered. That's what the retrograde
aqua vitae
is for. “Until you die, that is. Then the link's broken, and everything goes back where it should be. But while you're alive, your painted soul still decays. I'd imagine the portrait would be quite frightful, after a while.”