She stood beside the table and straightened her apron and skirts.
Slurping a bit of hot broth, he sighed. “Miss ... Jones. That is your name, is it not? I seem to recall a young lady with pirates after her.” He looked up. “Why are you standing? Spoon up a bowl for yourself and join.” He pushed out a chair.
She fixed a sober stare his way. “I’ve come to ask for a job.” He looked behind him. “From who?”
“From you, Mr. Black.”
“I don’t
employ
servants. Never have. Never will.” He swallowed a lovely bit of sausage. “This is quite good.”
She smiled. “I learned to bake and cook some, on voyages. Papa employed a wonderful Indian man he found in the Adaman Islands who taught me many dishes. And I am neat and clean by nature, so keeping house for you will not be difficult—”
He noted the basket of buns on the table. “Did you make those?”
She nodded.
Phaeton set down his spoon. “I am not going to engage you.” He dipped a piece of warm bread into the stew. “Even if you do make heavenly buns.”
“I’ll work for two and six a week, plus room and board.”
He concentrated on the bowl in front of him. It seems he had no choice but to frown his way through bread and broth.
“I need this job, Mr. Black.”
“Did your father leave you nothing to live on?”
“All that was left of his property was a large repository in the Basin. Father formed a new business and named me as full partner.” He distinctly heard a catch in her throat. “Everything burned to the ground last night. That warehouse was my living, what I could make off the rent to other traders.”
Studying her a moment, he chewed on a crusty piece. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miss Jones, but your misfortune has nothing to do with me.”
“I believe it does, Mr. Black. If I hadn’t been tied up all morning, I might have been able to prevent the break-in and the fire. I hold you partly, if not wholly, responsible. Therefore, you owe me.”
“Hold on—”
“I won’t take up much space. I notice you have a room, across from your own, that would fit a small bed.”
Phaeton raised his voice. “How many times must I say no before you grasp my meaning?” Her persistent pestering caused a sudden onset of sobriety, greatly agitating his nerves.
“I need a job, Mr. Black, and a roof over my head, at least until I can find employment elsewhere.”
“Not here. For a few extra bob a month, Mrs. Parker’s housekeeper sends her daughter down to dust and pick up laundry. And I take my meals out.”
For all he knew, she was a common street thief. This imaginary tea trader father of hers and now a burned out warehouse. She must think him a prize thickhead to fall for such a flimsy pack of lies.
“Get out.”
She untied her apron and tossed it over a chair back.
“I will give you one day to reconsider, Mr. Black. I currently have a bed assigned to me at the Sisters of Mercy Night Home on Lower Seymour Street.” She pulled on a dingy, grey coat with black velvet lapels. It might have been a very nice looking coat at one time, but it was singed and blackened now.
Phaeton leaned back in his chair. “Come here.”
She circled slowly as he brushed off a bit of soot, “If I do not hear from you by end of day tomorrow, I shall be forced to take Mrs. Parker up on her offer.”
Mrs. Parker? Phaeton smiled. “Now, that sort of service I do hire, Miss Jones.”
Chapter Six
A
MERICA KICKED A FEW CHARRED BITS OF RUBBLE
as she picked her way across the burned-out remains of the warehouse. A shiny metal button caught her eye. She turned it over and ran her thumb over the letter
D
. A typewriter key of all things. The shape of the character form was
distorted
—now all she could think about were D words. She stepped over chunks of blackened timber. “Distressed, despairing, devastated, dejected, despondent ...”
“Careful now, Miss Jones.”
“Yes, Officer Wilkie.”
Their district policeman patrolled the burn site to ward off the ragpickers. Scavengers, who would comb through the debris inch by inch, collecting anything they could sell to scrap dealers.
“My orders are to keep trespassers out, everything nice and quiet-like. An agent from Scotland Yard is coming to look about for evidence of arson.”
She stopped in her tracks and slowly eased her way out of the wreckage. So, one of London’s celebrated detectives suspected something. A faster rhythm beat in her chest, as her breath caught for an instant. The possibility that anyone, besides herself, suspected foul play gave America a measure of hope. Something she had given up on, as of late.
“What are you to do, lass, now that the business is gone?”
“I must find employment, Officer Wilkie.” She sighed. “I detest the idea of factory work, but I must labor at something if I am to afford a room in a boardinghouse. The Lucifer Match factory is always looking to hire.”
“Ahh, girl, a bad lot o’trouble for your toil.”
She nodded. Just passing by the dank, malodorous sweatshop made a person choke from the sulfurous air. A girl might contract the disease that gradually rotted a body’s jawbone away. A shudder ran through her body.
Mrs. Parker had offered a job. Said she ran a clean house and encouraged the use of condoms. Still, America wasn’t desperate or frightened enough to earn a living on her back.
A small bit of happiness tugged at the ends of her mouth as she fingered the large bill in her hand. She considered the rude, irritating man who likely planted the five-pound note in her coat pocket last evening.
You are a puzzle, Mr. Black
.
Phaeton stood in the middle of Savoy Row and stared at the basement railing of the mercantile building. The lane was different in morning light. Day laborers pushed hand carts past bookbinders and printing guilds. Bustling, noisy. Completely unthreatening. He recalled a pretty, copper-skinned female with almond-shaped eyes. Out cold, right about—here. She had swung at him and missed, striking her head on the corner of the iron rail.
Had he helped the little minx escape justice? Those pirates she claimed to be hiding from were likely men she had stolen from. He could not shake the idea, however, that an experienced thief would have held onto her blade, taken money over sex, and knocked him, not herself, unconscious. He surveyed the small niche where he had thrust himself into the bonnie lass. There, the narrow outcropping of brick where he rested her plump derriere, just enough leverage to get in between those luscious thighs ...
“Phaeton?” A pale-skinned young man wearing thick, dark spectacles struck a safety match and held it to his pipe. Long tapered fingers curled around the bowl as full lips drew down on the stem.
A blush of tawny color washed over an elegant face shaded partially by a top hat. The glasses, which guarded light-sensitive eyes, gripped the bridge of an aristocratic nose. High cheekbones angled toward ears that were nearly elfish.
He smiled. “Sorry Ping, woolgathering.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “I ended up in circles, following a cold trail. I’m afraid any trace of the fiend has long melted away.”
“Shall we double back and have another look at that dustbin and window ledge? I’ve a mind we might still find some evidence.”
The sweet smell of opium wafted in the air. “Chasing the dragon?”
Ping arched a brow. “Mix in a bit with my tobacco. Helps to ease contact.”
Phaeton retraced his route, staying a step ahead of the pale-faced creature wrapped in a long black coat and carrying a small satchel. The odd, enigmatic Mr. Julian Ping might be the very best forensics man in London, outside of Scotland Yard. He was also a most unusual crime fighter.
Ping used his extraordinary abilities to re-create the scene of a crime, through making some sort of clairvoyant link with the perpetrator. The strange lad connected to the rage, pain, and pleasure of the criminal mind. He saw through the eyes of the beast, even smelled the victim’s blood. The use of opiates dulled the experience.
Phaeton could hardly begrudge the young man a bit of the pipe. He led them back to Savoy Row and into a labyrinth of connecting walkways that meandered from the Strand to the Embankment along the Thames.
Ping set down his instrument case and retrieved a blade the size of a penknife and a small tin. He carefully scraped dried blood off the window ledge and collected a gobbet of unspeakable slime from a nearby refuse bin. Notebook in hand, Phaeton sketched out a crude map of the area. “Three murders. Here. Here.” He placed an
X
at each spot where a body had been found. “And here.”
Sallow cheeks puffed silently as the rare gentleman studied the sketch. “Two of them quite close to the Embankment, actually.” Ping lifted his sunshades and squinted. Bright winter light accentuated the hooded slant to his eyes. He used his bent briar pipe as a pointer. “Let’s have a look down along the Thames.”
A passageway between buildings led to an intersecting alley angled toward the river. A look of intense concentration marked the young mesmerist’s face. “You’re being rather methodical for a man of pseudoscience.”
“When you wired about a walking corpse in the morgue and a possible Empusa, I admit I was skeptical. But now ...” His nose sniffed the air like a bloodhound after a wanted criminal.
Phaeton’s pulse accelerated. Ping sensed something. Rounding a bend, shades of silver-grey water shimmered through a break in the row buildings. “Ah, here we are.”
They reached the corner where the first body was found. “This one was male, and the second—”
“A female, you found her just over there.” Ping flipped down cobalt blue lenses, but his mouth gripped the pipe tight enough to cause a dimple.
The gentleman seer led the way to the second spot. Once again, in the broad glare of day, both crime scenes appeared less than threatening.
Mentally, Phaeton rifled through various field reports of the murders. The bodies had been found early in the morning, the first by a neighborhood policeman, the next by laborers, employed by a nearby engraver’s guild.
Something about the Strand murders continued to niggle at him. An intuition surfaced every time he compared these crimes to the string of unsolved murders that had begun and ended last year in Whitechapel. They were nothing alike and yet there was something coincidentally mysterious about them, mismatched bookends, but a queer pair nonetheless.
Ping used an umbrella to forage about in a crate filled with shredded leather refuse. The eccentric sleuth had often proven himself to be more adventurous than many of the Yard’s field detectives. Phaeton exhaled. “You are aware Chilcott fired me over the Ripper fiasco?”
“Wild conjectures fueled by opium and absinthe, wasn’t it?”
He grimaced. “Close enough.” He dropped his voice a register. “What if I told you that I sense some kind of linkage?”
Ping swiveled slowly toward him, puffing heavily on his pipe. “Between the Chapel murders and the Strand?”
“Let’s have a stroll down the Embankment, shall we?” Phaeton turned away from the scene. “I’d like to review what we know, unequivocally, about each one of these homicides.”
Ping nodded. “I’d like a briefing on the injured party, as well. A prostitute in your employ, I believe?”
Phaeton assembled a list of facts in his head and repeated them aloud. “All killed south of the Strand, most likely after midnight, but before daybreak. All were drained of blood, the bodies marked by scattered puncture wounds. Sometimes two, sometimes more. Always in pairs.” He squinted as the sun broke through at bit of cloud cover. “Two corpses were found lying in a pool of blood. A third was not.”
“The officer at the morgue.” Ping rubbed his chin with the pipe stem. “The corpse you, Zander, and Chilcott stabbed in the heart and cut to pieces.”
“Right.” He took a deep breath. “Pure conjecture, but the poor bloke may have been drained of blood over time. Think of it, a bobby on his beat—about in the Row every evening. A regular meal for the fiend, if you follow. Lizzie has been attacked twice. She shows signs of a personality change. Often wants to sleep walk, as if she was being drawn away from us.”
“What do you sense intuitively, Phaeton? Forget Chilcott and the rest.”
He chewed on his lower lip. His warnings about the Ripper murders had been dismissed as wild talk—raving, unprofessional guesswork. Eventually, due to a mountain of pressure, Chilcott had called Phaeton into his office and given him the sack.
“There were apparitions the first night Lizzie and I worked the row. I have come to believe these were phantom visions—persistent hallucinations meant to lead me off, so the killer could go about her business.”
A sudden brilliant glare off the water caused Phaeton to tilt his bowler forward. “I believe we are after a female. Cunning and powerful, but also injured in some way. I have seen the harpy weaken quickly and turn to frost.” He waved a hand in the air. “A flurry of ice crystals, swirling into the air, much like the magic smoke from your pipe.”
A trail of pale blue vapor wafted from the ends of a broad mouth, which tugged upward at the moment. “Tell me about the gentleman you spotted on the rooftop and later, at the opera.”
Phaeton studied the talented clairvoyant. He had not mentioned the stranger, as yet. Which means Ping had captured the scene through the eyes of the harpy. What had Gaspar, the leader of the Gentlemen Shades, called Ping? A very muscular mesmerist.
“I have a moniker for you. Doctor Asa Alexander Exeter.”
Ping got out a notebook and scribbled. “Believe I’ve heard the name about Pennyfields.”
“Are the Shades courting him? No surprise there, I suppose.” Phaeton grunted. “The man stuck needles in my arm and Lizzie’s—ran a tube between us—transfused my blood into the girl. Then he disappeared. Haven’t been able to get much out of Mrs. Parker.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Ping leaned closer. “What is it like living in a brothel?”
“Convenient.” Phaeton winked.
Ping threw back his head as if to laugh. But he didn’t laugh—he purred. The gentle sensuous rumble made Phaeton stop short. A long shank of black hair clasped neatly at the back of Ping’s head came loose and flowed around his face and shoulders. His pale lips blushed the color of roses.
“Ping?”
“Jin.” His voice was still resonant, but higher and softer in pitch. His face transformed into something decidedly more feminine in appearance. Phaeton froze, spellbound by the transformation.
He received the most alluring smile from this ... female creature.
“Are you attracted to me?”
He clapped his mouth shut. So this was Jin. Phaeton had only heard rumors. It was said Ping could transmogrify himself into other sentient beings. That he was, in effect, a hermaphrodite. This sudden shift in gender was apparently no illusion.
A strong tug on his body pulled him closer to Jin.
“Will you kiss me, Phaeton?”
Echoes of the green fairy. How she haunted him. A swipe of pink tongue moistened Jin’s lips. Phaeton managed a quick glance at his surroundings. Their walk down the embankment had brought them in close proximity to the landmark obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle.
“Detective Black.”
Phaeton swung around.
Maxwell Fyfe, the chief forensics man for Scotland Yard, hustled down the broad thoroughfare toward them.
Phaeton cocked his head and feigned disappointment. “Perhaps another time, Jin.”
“Best make myself scarce.” Ping turned and walked away, his long black hair and coattails billowed with the wind off the Thames.
He called upriver after Ping. “When can I expect to hear from you?”
“Check your evening paper.”
“Having a beastly day, I’m afraid,” the lab director groused.
Phaeton pivoted. “Aren’t we all?”
“Can’t stay long, but I can spare a lab assistant. Collect samples, comb the crime scene again.” Maxwell glanced upward at the obelisk. “I understand they dug several pits before settling on this location. The excavations kept seeping river water. This whole section of embankment is pocked with holes covered over.”
Phaeton craned his neck to see the top of the obelisk. “Odd bit of Egyptian plunder to erect here at the river.”
The lab director checked his watch. “I’m afraid I have to move on. The technician should be along any minute. Show him the locations you want sampled. Try to keep me apprised of any progress.”