End of the Century (6 page)

“Given the amount of bleeding,” he said, kneeling down, his cane laying across his knees, “I deduce that the hands were severed some time before the victim was decapitated.”

Melville grunted in assent. “That's what we came up with, as well,” he said, begrudgingly.

“I've never seen cuts like these,” Blank said.

“And here I thought you had seen everything, Blank,” Miss Bonaventure
said, in a ill-advised attempt to mask her own squeamishness with levity. Blank shot her a hard look, and her weak smile grew even weaker. Subdued, and looking away from the bloody remains, she went on. “But no, I've never seen the like, either.”

“I take it the head and hands have not been retrieved?”

“No.” Melville shook his head. “No sign of them, same as…” He bit the words off, but Blank knew what he'd been about to say.

Same as last time.

“No sign of them,” Melville repeated, his jaw set, his lips drawn tight. “It was a doxy reported it in this morning. Nobody else much comes up to the walkways, so the girls make pretty free use of them.”

“Or are freely used, themselves,” Blank said absently. “And not freely, at that.” He scowled. “But at too dear a cost, oftentimes.” He used the end of his cane to lift the hem of the dead woman's skirts. He examined her shoes, and then peered up her legs, at which Chalmers blushed, turning his eyes away from such indecorous probing.

Blank straightened up, tugging down the front of his waistcoat.

“Though you haven't said as much, Melville, I agree with your surmise that the victim was a streetwalker, given the state of her footwear, the condition of her clothing, and her evident poor health at the time of death. I find it unusual, given that she was dispatched in a place frequented by those of her profession, that she evidently was not engaged in the act of congress at the time of the murder, nor is there any indication that her body was misused in that fashion following her death. The nature of the wounds is indeed singular, and worthy of some study, but despite the superficial resemblance to a case with which we're both intimately familiar, I fail to see the case's significance. As a single murder, it is a matter for pity, but hardly worth the attention of Special Branch.”

Melville narrowed his gaze, but didn't speak.

“Unless,” Blank said, tapping the butt of his cane on the floor, “this is
not
a single murder.”

Chalmers looked nervously at the superintendent, who quieted him with a rough wave of his hand.

“This is the third such body to be found,” Melville answered in even tones. “The third in as many weeks.”

Blank nodded. “But you've managed thus far to keep news of it out of the papers. That couldn't have been easy.”

Melville blew air through his lips with an explosive noise and shook his head ruefully. “Pack of vultures, the lot of them.”

“And both of the other bodies were in similar states?” Miss Bonaventure asked.

Melville locked eyes with Blank, and paused for a long moment. “Yes,” he said at length, nodding. “All three cut up like that, all three with the same clean shears.”

Blank found himself feeling an unexpected and unexplainable welling of sympathy for the superintendent. He knew how the Torso Murders must have eaten at Melville these last ten years, and it couldn't have been easy to be ordered to hand over the present investigation to another, knowing that there might be a connection between the two.

“Given the nature of the injuries,” Chalmers put in, “there was some discussion at the highest levels that this might be a matter for the Strangers…”

“What?” Blank interrupted, flabbergasted. “Absalom Quince and his lot?
Them
?”

Melville shook his head, a scornful expression curling his lip. “That lot is worse than
you
, Blank.”

Blank flashed him a tight smile. “Thanks for saying so, friend.”

Melville sneered, while Chalmers struggled to gain control of the conversation.

“
As
I was saying, the question arose as to whether this should be a matter for the Strangers, who while not officially sanctioned by Her Majesty's Government, have nevertheless prove invaluable in a number of recent instances…”

“Lunatic ghost chasers,” Blank muttered under his breath.

“
However
,” Chalmers said, soldiering on, “given your own history, Mr. Blank, and your role in the speedy resolution of that unfortunate matter in Whitechapel, it was decided instead that you should be approached in this matter.”

“Well,” Blank said, doffing his hat in obvious mockery, “I thank you for this consideration.”

Chalmers either failed to detect Blank's sarcasm or chose not to respond, instead turning his attentions to Melville.

“The prime minister has issued specific instructions that this matter will
not
be made available for public consumption. The newspapers are
not
to be informed of any aspect of the investigation or of the murders themselves until such time as the prime minister deems appropriate. With the Jubilee in the offing and the city already crowded with dignitaries, the last thing we need is another sensation such as the Whitechapel murders engendered. It might be good for the sales figures of the penny papers, gentlemen, but it will do Her Majesty's Government no good at all, and even less good for
you
all, should you allow it.”

Chalmers glanced from Melville to Blank and Miss Bonaventure and to the constable who stood a few yards off, indicating that the prime minister's wrath would know no bounds of rank or privilege were news of these murders to be made public.

“I believe you mean ‘worse' instead of ‘less good,'” Blank said. “But I think we all take your meaning.” He turned to Melville. “I'll solve this one, Melville. You have my word on it.”

Melville drew his mouth into a tight line, but nodded. He evidently could not tell whether Blank had meant the words as a taunt or a reassurance; Blank did not really know himself.

“Now,” he said, resting on his cane, his hands folded on its silver head, “if this is the third murder, I want to know
everything
that you have on the previous two.”

THE BLACK CAB AT THE STAND
looked like something out of an old movie. Like you'd have to wear a fedora just to ride it in, or else hang onto a sideboard with a Tommy gun in either hand. But the guy behind the steering wheel didn't quite meet the dress code, in a ratty T-shirt and slacks. Still, the steering wheel
was
on the wrong side of the car, so that had to count for something.

Alice stood on the curb, while the guy leaned out the window and looked her up and down. “Where you going, love?”

“London.” The guy gave her a little smile and raised an eyebrow. Alice felt a blush rise in her cheek. “The London Eye,” she quickly added. “The one near Westminster Bridge. The big Ferris wheel?”

The cab driver chuckled, and smiled, but gently. “Yeah, I know the one.” He stuck out his lower lip and rubbed it with a thick finger. “How much money you got, love?”

Alice tightened her grip on her backpack's strap. “I've got enough.”

The cab driver shook his head, still smiling. “Nah you don't, sweetie. Here to there'll cost you forty pounds, easy.”

Alice's eyebrows knit as she tried to do the conversion rate in her head. That was something like sixty bucks, a significant percentage of all the cash she had.

She didn't say anything, but evidently she didn't have to, her thoughts
showing themselves on her face. “You don't want a black cab,” the cab driver said, gently. “What you want is to take the tube. A one way ticket on the Underground'll cost you three quid forty.”

Alice tried to look in control, and nodded like she'd known that all along. “That's definitely cheaper.”

“Ennit?”

Alice's cheeks felt like they were on fire. She hadn't even gotten out of the damned airport and already she'd managed to look like a complete hayseed. She stammered thanks at the cabbie, who just waved merrily and went back to studying his racing form. Then she went off to look for the subway station. She'd gone two steps when she realized she could have just asked the cabbie, who was sure to have known, but having committed to turning around and walking away, she couldn't back out now.

Alice had only ever been on a subway once before, in Mexico City, on a school trip a few years before. Her mother hadn't wanted her to go, but Alice had pulled extra shifts after school at the family business, the postal contract unit on Anderson Mill, and saved up enough to cover almost all of the cost herself, and then successfully guilted her mother into picking up the tab for the rest. Alice didn't know much Spanish, and all that she got out of the trip was a suspension for getting caught drinking by one of the trip sponsors, a case of turista that she couldn't shake for a week, and the passport that she later used to get into the UK.

Alice had almost gotten lost on the subways in Mexico, neither her language nor her orienteering skills up to the task of deciphering the posted maps, but she figured she'd have an easier time of it in the London Underground, since a) the maps were in English, and b) the trains were full of people who could answer questions, if she got turned around.

As it was, she managed to get completely mixed up. She'd meant to end up at Waterloo Station, right next to the London Eye, but managed to get onto the Bakerloo line at Piccadilly Circus heading the wrong way and found herself instead in Paddington, a mile or two away.

Alice considered getting back on the train and heading back the other way, but that was another six bucks she really didn't have to spare, and according to the map in her
Frommer's
it didn't look like too far a walk, so she decided to hoof it instead and save the money.

Everything around her seemed disappointingly…
normal.

When she'd traveled in Mexico, she'd never been able to forget for a second that she was in a foreign country—everyone was talking a different language, she had trouble reading all the signs, all of the brand names advertised on billboards and signs were strange.

Here, though, it was easy to forget she wasn't just in another part of the United States. Everything was written in English—though with the occasional extra ‘u' tossed in for extra colo
u
r—and the bus stops all carried ads for the same movies and TV shows she watched back home. The people she passed on the street spoke with accents but were speaking English. And coming from Austin, which was not only a big college town with lots of foreign students but the hub of enough technology and dot-com business that there were always people from all different countries to be found in the stores and restaurants, accents were nothing new to her. At the barbeque joint where Alice used to go with her mother and grandmother, there were even times it seemed they were the only native English speakers in the place, between the Chinese and Japanese and Hindi being spoken at the tables around them and the Spanish being spoken behind the counter. The accountant who kept the books for Alice's mother was Irish, and their neighbors were German on one side and Korean on the other. So it was hardly culture shock to run into new accents in another country. That the majority of them were speaking English just meant it was even more familiar.

When Alice had been in Mexico, the punk rock white chick with the dyed-black hair and nose ring, Doc Martens and leather jacket, she'd gotten more than her fair share of stares. Here? Nobody gave her even a second glance.

Of course, what would they all say if they knew? If they knew that she was on a mission from God?

Technically speaking, Alice didn't know
who
she was on a mission for. She received visions, but for all she knew they could just as easily have come from the Queen of Faerie as from God, or space aliens, or another dimension, or a supercomputer at the end of time. All she knew for certain was that she was receiving visions, and that she had to
do
something about them.

They were, however, visions. Not just voices, not just hallucinations. That was for
crazy
people. And Alice wasn't crazy. At least, she was relatively sure she wasn't.

Her logic was that crazy people didn't know that they were crazy. They just woke up one day convinced that aliens from the Dog Star were communicating to them through the fillings in their back molars, or that the Virgin Mary appeared to them in their Pop Tarts, or that they were really the son of God or something. None of which applied to Alice. She, she wasn't crazy, because she knew for an absolute fact that she was mentally ill.

Alice had been diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and suffered from temporal lobe seizures. Electrical misfires in her brain made her see, hear, and experience strange things. And when she wasn't having an active seizure episode, she had a classic case of Geschwind's syndrome, in particular problems with her temper, hyposexual tendencies, hypergraphia, and hyperreligiosity.

And here was why Alice wasn't crazy. She knew for an absolute fact that the visions she experienced were caused by seizures in her temporal lobe. An EEG had proved it. What Alice also knew, though, was that her visions weren't
merely
the result of abnormal electrical activity in the temporal lobe, stimulating the visual and auditory centers of her brain. Instead, the seizures themselves were being
caused
by something outside herself, and the visions she received were messages intended for her alone.

So it could have been God giving her the seizures and making her see visions, or it could have been aliens, or Queen Titania of Fairyland, or a superintelligent computer at the end of time, or any one of a thousand different things. All that Alice knew was that the visions were
real
, and that she had to do as she was told.

Which, so far as she'd been able to work out, involved coming to London and going up in the London Eye. There was something about ravens in there, as well, and some guy she'd never seen before. But after that it all got a little hazy.

Alice hoped that things looked clearer from the top of the Ferris wheel. Because even though she was in London, half a world away from home, things from the ground still looked more than a little indistinct.

It was when she almost got into a fistfight over the empty soda bottle that Alice realized that she was getting a bit tense. She'd had problems controlling her temper for years, ever since the first accident—not the
other
accident, the one that no one at school liked to talk about, but the earlier one, when the only ones Alice had managed to hurt were her own family—but being aware of the problem didn't make it any easier to handle. The doctors said that it was an aspect of her personality disorder, of her interictal behavior syndrome, which was a fancy way of saying that people with TLE had a tendency to be a mite off even when they weren't having seizures. All cases were different, but in Alice's, it meant that she had a tendency to fly off the handle with little provocation. And when she had major provocation? Well, watch out…

Alice had found a bank that was willing to swap her American dollars for British pounds, since so many of the shops refused to take her bills. After, that is, the first three banks refused. So a number of shops refusing her bills and then a number of banks refusing to change them, all in the attempt to get something to drink. Water, juice, soda, anything. She was desperate. She'd gone a few blocks from the Paddington Underground Station when she realized she'd had nothing but a couple of mouthfuls of water in the last few hours, and after smoking a cigarette at the airport and another couple while walking through the city, her mouth felt about as parched as a Texas highway in the middle of August.

With her nice American bills changed for strangely multicolored British currency that seemed like it belonged with a board game like Monopoly or something, she went into the nearest store and bought a bottle of Pepsi. She picked up a bag of potato chips while she was at it—
crisps
, the package said—since she'd not had much to eat, either. Then she wolfed down the chips as she continued walking, taking big gulps of the soda now and again.

The chips were good, but strange—
lamb & mint
flavor?—but the Pepsi
tasted about like the ones back home. When she'd finished, Alice went looking for somewhere to throw the empty bag and bottle away. The bag was no big deal, she could just wad it up in her pocket, but the bottle was cumbersome and needed to be ditched.