42
Day!”
He was dreaming about a time when he was nine or ten years old, fording a brook in Devon with his trousers rolled up past his ankles. .
“Walter! Can you hear me?”
There was someone with him, another boy standing in the water, but the sun was behind him and the boy was a rainbow halo blur that was talking, shouting at him. .
“Walter, did he hurt you?”
His words made no sense because they were flavored like orange custards. Day was not fond of orange custards. He turned from the other boy and walked upstream, watching as the water broke against his shins and soaked the ends of his trouser legs where they were rolled and heavy. It became harder to walk and the boy behind him was hollering about something and the lovely sunny childhood afternoon began to seem tedious. His arms were sore and his legs hurt with the effort of pushing back against the streaming water and he wanted to go home.
And so he woke up.
“Walter?”
“I’m here. I’m awake.”
“Oh, thank God. I thought perhaps. . Well, I wasn’t sure you were still with us.”
Adrian March’s voice came from someplace nearby, behind the wall.
“I don’t know where I am,” Day said. “But I think we’re still in the tunnels.”
“We are. He’s got us in these cells we made in the catacombs.”
“Your gentlemen’s club, you mean.” So he was, as he had assumed, shackled in one of the alcoves underground. “Adrian, I think there’s a bag over my head. Something made of cloth. I can’t see anything.”
“It’s probably the hood we used on him. Has he hurt you?”
“I’m chained here. My wrists and ankles.”
“I am, too. But give me a moment. I’ve got my cufflinks on, the set with the lockpick hidden inside.”
Day bent his wrist against the shackle around it, curled his fingers, and strained until his fingers cramped.
“Funny,” he said.
“What is?”
“I’m wearing those same cufflinks, remember?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t reach them. I’m trying, but my sleeve’s been pushed too far up my arm.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here, if given the time.”
“Are we alone here?”
“I think so. Griffin stopped screaming more than an hour ago, if my sense of time hasn’t deserted me.”
“Who is Griffin? Is Griffin the one who did this to us?”
“No.”
“Is he one of the prisoners?”
“No,” March said. “Well, yes, actually, I suppose he is, but not in the way you mean.”
“Are you able to get at the pick?”
“I’ve already got it. It’s just a matter of bending my wrist properly so I can get at the lock on this shackle. Once I get an arm free, the rest will be simple. I’ll be over to fetch you soon enough.”
“Do please hurry.”
“Believe me, I’m doing what I can. Now be silent so I can work at this. It’s not easy picking a lock that is about one’s own wrist.”
“Godspeed, Adrian.”
“If he comes back, if he comes before I finish, keep him busy. Make him talk.”
“Saucy Jack, you mean.”
“He called himself Jack, but I never knew whether it was his real name. He seems to have taken a liking to you.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“It’s no great mystery, my dear boy. The man has been caged for months. You’re the first person to actually listen to him. You are, quite literally, a captive audience. You must continue to listen, to provoke, to distract him if you can. But do be careful.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Day said.
“Why not?”
“All he can do is kill me.”
“That’s not all he can do.”
“What else is there?”
“Don’t be so unimaginative, Walter. You really should be afraid of him.”
“How did you catch him?” he said. The sound of his own muffled voice echoing in the little cell was, at least, better than silence.
“After all those months of chasing Jack, he fell asleep in Mary Jane Kelly’s bed.”
“That was his last victim.”
“Yes. We found him there, covered with her blood, head to toe.”
“That was quite a stroke of luck for you.”
“It wasn’t luck.” There was a long silence before March spoke again. When he did, his voice was so soft that Day could barely hear him. “We used that girl. She was bait for Jack. We were supposed to protect her and we failed.”
“Your Karstphanomen make a lot of mistakes.”
“What we do isn’t very precise. It’s not a science, you know.”
Day said nothing.
“No,” March said. “You’re right. We failed poor Mary Jane and we failed last night. Our ideals are sound, but I’m afraid we are not all up to the task.”
“So Mary Jane Kelly lured him in. .”
“And we were meant to be waiting for him, but there was a miscommunication. Much as there was at the prison.”
“You may have a traitor in your mix.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Then you’re all incompetent and misguided. Do you believe that?”
“We are not incompetent. We thought it all out very carefully and we had Griffin inside the prison. He was our second plan, in case the first went wrong somehow.”
“And what about Mary? Was there a second plan in place to protect her?”
“We learned from her. Her sacrifice was not in vain.”
“Because you caught Jack?”
“We did.”
“Only because he fell asleep. I’ve seen what he did to them. Everyone has. Jack spent so long dismembering that girl that he practically handed himself over to you, isn’t that right?”
March cleared his throat as if about to respond, but then said nothing.
“And yet you didn’t arrest him,” Day said.
“How could we? What we had seen, we who hunted him and cleaned up his messes, it was all too much. We couldn’t let him do those things and just. .”
The images of Jack the Ripper’s victims flooded Day’s head. All the postmortem photographs and artists’ reconstructions. It was overwhelming. Day felt dizzy and nauseated. He fought against blacking out again.
“It was wrong, what you did,” Day said. “It was selfish.”
“I know.”
“The public still fears Jack. You left your fellow policemen to deal with the aftermath of your actions, all of the public’s fears and insecurities. Everybody thinks he got away.”
“Well,” March said, “he did, didn’t he? And now he’s going to kill us if we can’t get ourselves free and stop him.”
“We’ll get out of here. We’ll catch him again and we’ll turn him over to the proper authorities. And then I’m still going to place you under arrest.”
March fell silent. Day concentrated on breathing. In and out, through his mouth, no deep breaths. He had threatened to arrest two people despite being shackled to a wall in a cave.
He was counting on March to get him free, but Day’s mentor had no good reason to help him now. He was afraid he would die there, deep underground, his body lost forever.
But Day was a detective inspector for Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. And if he was going to die, at least he would do so with some integrity.
43
Cinderhouse dreamed that he was falling and he woke with a start. He was sitting in the upstairs hallway of the house with the red door. The first thing he noticed was the excruciating pain in his mouth, shooting through his jaw and up into his head. He put a hand to his mouth and immediately regretted it. He fished in the pockets of his trousers, no easy feat from a sitting position, and found his handkerchief, dabbed at the corners of his mouth. There was a little blood on the cloth when he pulled it back. He held it against his lips again and applied pressure, but it didn’t help. The pain was deep inside.
He realized that the bedroom door was open behind him at the same time he noticed that the knife was missing from his hand. He had been waiting for the spider to wake up and unlock the bedroom door, and now the door was open and the knife was missing. He eased himself up and peered in through the open door, but the room was empty. There was the stale remnant of body odor, and dust motes swirled in the sunlight through the window opposite the big bed.