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“Doctor! I think something’s wrong.”

60

Jack asked the driver to stop as soon as they reached Primrose Hill. He got out and strolled away from the two-wheeler with no destination in mind and a clear sense of anticipation. Fate would provide. Fate and the city.

And so, when he turned the corner, he was not surprised to see a man standing at a door at the end of the street ahead. The man was very tall and very thin and, Jack thought, quite beautiful. But he was dressed in a shabby blue uniform that appeared to have dirt pressed into its many creases. The jacket might have been taken from a corpse. Lying on the footpath behind the man was a boy’s bicycle, cast hastily aside. This could be no one but Sergeant Hammersmith.

Hammersmith was pounding on the door of the last house and took no notice as Jack passed behind him in the lane.

“Claire!” Hammersmith said to the door. “Fiona! Someone answer!” No one did, and Hammersmith began to frantically pull the bell cord.

Jack turned the corner and passed out of sight of the agitated policeman. There was a low fence behind the house, just above waist level, and Jack hopped it, landing neatly on the other side of a nettle bush. The instruments in his medical bag clattered against one another, but the clasp held tight.

Jack strolled across the garden, staying as close as possible to the house’s rear wall without snagging his trousers on the nettles, and peered around the edge of an open door. He was looking into a kitchen, which seemed to have been decorated in the fashion of an abattoir. The floor was pooled with congealing blood, and a fine red spray had coated most of the vertical surfaces that Jack could see. A pair of legs belonging to a prostrate man extended out of sight behind a long wooden table that was too large for the room. There was another door at the far side of the room, and another man was passing through that door now, walking away from Jack down a hallway. Even from behind, Jack had no trouble recognizing his foolish little fly. He shook his head and clucked his tongue and carefully sidled into the room.

Cinderhouse did not hear him or turn around. The fly was hurrying toward the front door, directly in front of him along the hallway. The doorbell was pealing in the most annoying way, and Jack could faintly hear Hammersmith’s voice on the other side of the house, still calling out women’s names.

It occurred to him that he might very well have saved Walter Day from a bit of trouble by detaining him belowground on this fine spring afternoon.

Jack stepped over the largest plash of blood and around to the other side of the table. He looked down at the dead man who had decorated the room with his blood. The man didn’t look familiar. He was young, but it was difficult to tell more than that because his throat had been torn open and his mouth and eyes stitched shut. Jack frowned at the dead man. He had been transformed, that was certain. But there was no artistry in this. It was savagery for the sake of savagery. A waste of sticky blood.

A thumping noise distracted Jack and he turned toward yet another door, next to the one leading out into the hall. This second door, which Jack presumed separated the pantry from the rest of the kitchen, was closed, and someone was pounding on it as if in response to Sergeant Hammersmith’s attack on the front door. Jack stepped closer to the closed door.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” said a girl on the other side of the door. “Is someone there?”

Oh, little fly, Jack thought, I told you to leave the children alone.

“Your back door was open,” he said. “There’s a terrible mess out here. What’s happened?”

“Be careful. There’s a very dangerous man out there.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right.”

“He locked the door. Can you open it?”

Jack shrugged and glanced around for a key, but he didn’t care very much whether the girl stayed in the pantry.

“I don’t see a key,” he said.

He set his black leather bag down in a relatively clean space on the table and opened it. He leaned to one side and looked down the hallway. The tailor was still there, hesitating, his hand on the latch, while Hammersmith battered at the other side of the front door.

* * *

Kingsley had already started to turn back toward the bedroom when he saw a bald man appear at the bottom of the stairs, facing the door. The man was covered in blood and he was twitching. Kingsley felt torn for a moment, then hurried back to the room. Claire was clutching the bedsheets with one hand, her face pale, her baby squirming in the crook of her other elbow.

“Claire,” he said, “what you undoubtedly feel is the placenta coming. It will not be difficult to deliver.”

“It feels just like before. Not easy at all.”

Kingsley found a scalpel in his bag. He didn’t want to tell Claire that there was an intruder in the house. She might panic. And he couldn’t move her. She needed to remain calm.

“You’ll be fine for a moment, Claire. Just breathe slowly and evenly and I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t leave me!”

He went to the bedroom door, swallowed hard, and ran to the staircase. Fiona was somewhere below and the stranger had an awful lot of blood on his suit.

Behind him, the baby began to cry.

* * *

“Who are you?” the girl in the pantry said. “I don’t recognize your voice.”

“I’m…” Jack hesitated, then glanced at the black bag on the table. “I’m a doctor.”

“Can you see… Is there a constable out there somewhere?”

“Oh, I see him.”

Jack looked through the bag and found what he was looking for. He removed a flannel the size of a handkerchief and a small glass vial. He unstoppered the vial and poured a bit of the colorless liquid onto the cloth, careful to keep it far away from his face. The fumes were powerful. He set the vial back on the table and stepped out of the kitchen just as someone ran down the stairs ahead of him at the far end of the hall.

* * *

“Who are you?” Kingsley said.

But he didn’t wait for an answer. He was afraid he might lose his nerve if he hesitated, so he barreled straight at the bloody bald man and knocked him back against the wall next to the front door.

“Don’t move,” he said. Then: “Fiona!”

He looked around wildly, hoping he would not see her body on the floor, shouting as loud as he could, and hoping she was able to respond.

“Fiona, are you all right?”

He had the scalpel in his hand, kept it near the bald man’s throat while he reached over with his free hand and unlatched the door. Sergeant Hammersmith immediately burst into the room, but stopped cold when he saw the bald man, who glared at Hammersmith with fear and rage in his eyes.

“Hongermiff!” the bald man said. “Gie!”

The bald man wrenched himself away from Kingsley as Hammersmith lunged toward them. Too late, Kingsley realized the stranger was holding a pair of sewing scissors. Kingsley brought the scalpel down, trying to stop the bald man’s forward motion or even cut the scissors out of his hand. He sliced through the tendons of the man’s arm as it swept around, and the scissors buried themselves in Hammersmith’s chest.