“Do we know who the girl is? A name?”
“Her name is Priscilla Murphy.”
Tiffany had his own pad of paper out and was writing as fast as Hammersmith could talk, the tiny stub of a pencil lost in his curled fist. He looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Address?”
“Not an exact address. There was an arrest record, but the details are a bit sketchy.”
“Christ,” Tiffany said. “There must be a dozen Priscilla Murphys in London. Your clue isn’t much of one, is it?”
Hammersmith shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”
“We’ll take it,” Blacker said.
“Good. She’s somewhere on Victoria Road, near New Hampstead. The arresting officer was working that beat and responded to the girl’s screams. So we know the general vicinity.”
“See there, Mr Tiffany?” Blacker said. “That narrows the search down by a good deal. And it’s not far from here, either. It’s a cinch he’d seek out his old girlfriend.”
“She’s his cousin,” Day said.
“Well, I might’ve gone after my cousin, too,” Blacker said, “if she didn’t know me too well to be interested. She’s a proper bit of frock.” He winked and Day chuckled.
“Listen,” Day said, “we’ve no evidence of this, so I’m not telling you a fact here. .”
“What is it?”
Day glanced over at Hammersmith and took a breath. “We’re reasonably certain that we’re looking for five men, not four.”
“Another one escaped?”
“No, they all escaped together, but the prison’s missing the records of one of them. We don’t know what happened or who he is.”
“Probably the same sort of record-keeping that doesn’t bother with proper addresses,” Tiffany said.
“Perhaps. But I think we need to keep our minds open to the possibility that there’s another man out there. We can’t stop when we’ve found four men.”
“But we don’t have a name? Of the fifth man?”
“Nothing at all. As I say, he may not even exist. But watch for suspicious characters. Mr Hammersmith and I will try to find out more.”
“We’ll be off, then,” Tiffany said. He closed the cardboard cover of his tablet and stowed it carefully in his pocket again, along with his miniature pencil. Day noticed that Tiffany’s pad of paper still looked brand-new, despite being well-used. A stark contrast to Hammersmith’s notebook.
“Right,” Blacker said. “Wish us luck, gents. Sun’ll be up soon.”
“Too soon,” Day said. “Godspeed.”
Tiffany didn’t bother to say his good-byes. He was already stalking away down the street and Blacker had to hurry to catch up to him.
“I wouldn’t want to be paired with either of them,” Hammersmith said.
“Blacker’s not so bad,” Day said. “I worked my first case with him. He tends to lighten the drudgery with his quips.”
“So we’ve given them our only good clue,” Hammersmith said.
“We’ll get more,” Day said.
“Of course we will,” Hammersmith said.
“Then let’s get back to it, shall we?”
13
The cell was well furnished. His captors had left behind the key to his shackles. They had left the barrel of water from which he drank every day and a paper bag with three dry crusts of bread. Jack looked at these things and held them in his mind, knowing that he only needed to endure the present pain in order to enjoy the riches before him. Most of all, his eyes focused on the black satchel, the medical bag, which the doctor kept there in the cell. Jack thought about the doctor, tried to recollect any clues he might have heard to the man’s identity, as he concentrated on everything but the pain in his wrists and ankles. The fool Cinderhouse had used the left-behind key and was working at the shackles now, the shackles that Jack’s skin had healed around and grown over. Jack thought about the black bag and the doctor who left it each day, and he imagined that the doctor had a life up there with a wife who worried over him and might ask about an extra bag. The bag was safer here, safer left in the place where the doctor used it, where the doctor cut Jack the way that Jack had cut all of his ladies: Nichols and Chapman and Stride, Eddowes and Kelly and Tabram, oh my. So many ladies. Jack, you lucky boy.
The doctor had left his bag so that his own lady would not question its purpose. Which meant that all Jack had to do was survive the shackles and the bag would be his.
The things he might do with all those lovely silver tools that lay within!
Cinderhouse mistook Jack’s cry for a cry of pain and he stopped. He backed away from the shackle around Jack’s left ankle as if he’d been burned.
“No,” Jack said. His voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t stop.”
Cinderhouse said something that Jack couldn’t hear above the red roar in his ears and went back to work. The iron had dug deep, had buried itself under a warm layer of flesh, and the bald man was now on his hands and knees tearing it away from Jack’s bones.
Jack glanced down at the red river of blood that trickled between his toes into the dirt, into that soft, malleable clay beneath London, and he smiled and he screamed again and he returned his gaze to that beautiful black bag and its dreadful instruments of instruction.
14
Day spotted Adrian March outside the prison walls, squatting on the curb and staring at a spot in the road. Day held out a hand to stop Hammersmith, and they waited until March stood back up before approaching him.
“What did you find over there?” Hammersmith said.
“Nothing,” March said. “Well, something.” He waved his hand abstractly at the road and the empty field and the train tracks nearby as he walked toward them. “Just something left behind by children.”
“I can’t imagine children out here.”
“Did you discover anything inside Bridewell?”
“Sir Edward was right,” Day said. “At least, I think he was. By the way, where were you?”
“Me? I waited for a bit at Scotland Yard, then followed you out here.”
“Why didn’t you come with the sergeant?”
“I never saw him leave Sir Edward’s office,” March said.
“Well, it’s good to have you here now,” Day said.
“Take a look at this, Inspector,” Hammersmith said. He had knelt on the road and was pointing to the spot where March had been looking.
“It’s nothing, I tell you,” March said.
“I don’t know about that,” Hammersmith said. “I think you might have stumbled across something after all.”
Day squatted next to Hammersmith. He was privately amused that Hammersmith gave no thought to grinding the knees of his trousers into the dirt, even after being reprimanded that very morning for his appearance.
He squinted and brought his lantern in closer to the road and saw a smudge of blue chalk, distorted by uneven cobblestones. The chalk appeared to have been clumsily rubbed out, but there was still a faint impression where it had ground down into the stones.
“It’s an h,” Day said.
“From here, it looks like a four,” Hammersmith said.
“No, you’re right,” Day said. “It’s a four, all right. And an arrow.”
“You think it means something after all?” March said.
“Well,” Day said, “probably not. I don’t mean to contradict you, sir.”
“Not at all,” March said. “Your eyes are no doubt better than mine in the dark. To me it looked like a child’s scribble and nothing more.”
“It may well be,” Day said.
“But it may be something else,” Hammersmith said. “The arrow’s pointing that way, across the field.”
“Shall we follow it?”
“It may be a waste of time.”
“On the other hand. .”
Hammersmith stood and held out his hand to Day, pulled him to his feet, and they set off moving slowly away from the prison, their lanterns held high. March hesitated a moment, then drew his revolver and followed them into the high grass.