Leboux led the way up the steps and knocked. He was a solid Midlands ox of a man. A florid red handlebar mustache was the only decorative flourish he allowed himself, but its immaculately groomed and radiant plumage rendered any other such signatory moot.
Doyle had spent a year as ship's physician with Leboux onboard a navy cutter, sailing to Morocco and ports south, during which their unlikely friendship had gradually germinated. Leboux was Royal Navy, fifteen years older, rudimen-
tarily educated, a man of sufficient reticence to have his intelligence routinely questioned by the sharpies on board. But as Doyle discovered over the course of many card games and desultory conversations in the bow's netting as they languished in tropical doldrums, Leboux's diffidence shielded a sensitive heart and a character of unwavering morality. His mind seldom strayed from the parallel tracks of fact and truth—he prided himself on his lack of imagination. Those tracks took him straight from the navy to the London police and up the ranks in short order to his present position of inspector.
A small, fair Irishwoman Doyle had not seen before opened the door.
" 'Elp you?"
"Scotland Yard, Miss. We'd like to have a look around."
"Wot's this about?"
Towering over her, Leboux leaned in and intoned, "Trouble, Miss."
"I don't live here, you know, I'm just visiting me Mum," she said, backing away as they entered. "She's upstairs, sick as a dog she is, ain't left the bed in weeks. This ain't to do with her, is it?"
"She's a tenant, your Mum?" Leboux asked.
"That's right—"
"Who lives down here, then?" Leboux asked, stopping at the right-hand door the weird boy had opened for Doyle the night before.
"Don't know. Some foreign bloke, I think. Not here much. Neither am I, to be fair, only since Mum took ill."
Doyle nodded to Leboux. "Foreign" was a fair enough description of the Dark Man, and Doyle had mentioned him to Leboux. Leboux knocked on the door.
"Know the name of this man, Miss?" he asked.
"No, sir, I surely don't."
"Were you here last night then?"
"No, sir. I was home. Down Cheapside."
The queer glass bowl was gone from the table, Doyle noted. The pattern of splattered wax indicated someone had taken that candle and moved quickly. Leboux opened the door, and they entered the parlor.
"This as it was, Arthur?" Leboux asked.
"Yes," Doyle replied. "The seance was through here."
Doyle opened the sliding doors. The room as revealed appeared entirely different from the one in which he'd spent those dreadful minutes. Cramped with dusty, fussy furniture. No round table or hanging tapestries. Even the ceiling seemed lower.
"This isn't right," Doyle said, as he moved deeper into the room.
"Somethin' happen to the fella who lives here, then?"
"You go on up and visit your Mum now. We'll call if we need you," Leboux said, closing the doors in the young woman's face.
"They've replaced the furniture. The room was nearly empty."
"Where was the violence done, Arthur?"
Doyle moved to the spot where the table had been sitting. A plump love seat now occupied the space where Lady Nicholson had fallen.
"Here," he said, kneeling down. "There was no rug; the floor was bare."
As he moved it aside, Doyle noticed the imprint of the love seat's leg in the rug was deep and encrusted with dust. Leboux lent him a hand lifting the love seat away, then together they rolled back the carpet. The underlying floorboards were unstained and shiny with wear.
"It's been cleaned, you see. The whole room, top to bottom. They've removed every trace," Doyle said a bit frantic.
Leboux stood above him, stoic, noncommittal. Doyle bent to examine the floor more closely. He took a pipe-cleaning tool from his pocket and scraped at the joist between the slats: His efforts yielded a small portion of a dried dark matter. Doyle brushed the crumbs into an envelope and handed it to Leboux.
"I think you will find this substance is human blood. Lady Caroline Nicholson and her brother were murdered in this room last night. I recommend an immediate effort be made to alert their family."
Leboux pocketed the envelope, took out a pad and paper, and dutifully wrote down the names. They proceeded to conduct a more detailed examination of the room. Nothing discovered led them to further understanding of the crimes
:c rum:tied or the identity of owner or occupant. Following ±e paih through the nest of corridors that had led Doyle and S acker to the alley proved equally fruitless.
As they stood in the alley looking back at the house, Doyle sketched in the details of the murderous engagement. He made no mention of Sacker, or his use of the pistol Leboux himself had given him months before. Leboux crossed his arms, stock-still, betraying no sentiment suggesting the relative credulity of what he heard. A good while passed before he responded. Doyle was accustomed to waiting out his friend's epic silences: One could almost hear the tumblers of his mind clicking like slow hands on an abacus.
"You say this attack on the woman involved the use of a blade," was Leboux's first comment.
"Yes. A wicked-looking affair."
Leboux nodded, and then with some new sense of purpose in his eyes, said, "You'd better come with me then."
They walked three blocks to the vacant lot at the corner of Commercial and Aldgate. Police had sequestered the area. Bobbies manned the corners, directing away passersby. Leboux led Doyle through the cordon to the center of the lot where, that previous night, just as Doyle was arriving back at his rooms, the short, sorry life of the streetwalker known as Fairy Fay had come to a brutal and malicious end.
The rough canvas serving as her shroud was lifted. She was unclothed. The body had been eviscerated and the organs removed. Some were missing; the rest were neatly arranged outside of the body, in a pattern the significance of which was impossible to divine. The job had been quick, precise, and, as Doyle surmised from the absence of ripping at the entry points and edges of the wounds, executed with furiously honed instruments.
Doyle nodded. The canvas fluttered back over the corpse. Leboux trudged a few paces away. Doyle followed. Another Lebouxian silence ensued.
"Would that be Lady Nicholson then, Arthur?" he finally asked.
"No."
"Was this woman at the seance last night?"
"No. I've never seen her before."
With shock, Doyle realized that Leboux was probing for some weakness in his story. A policeman first and foremost, Doyle reminded himself, and the mood among the officers was grim and tight. Few, if any, had ever been exposed to the fruits of an act this savage and willful, certainly never in the routine of London police work.
"No one's come forward?" he asked.
Leboux shook his head. "Prostitute most like. Now. Those blades you described, could they have done this work?"
"Yes. Very possibly."
Leboux blinked myopically. "Could you describe the assailants?"
"They wore hoods," Doyle said, neglecting to mention that both killers had themselves been dispatched. Given that unholy facial stitching and the lack of blood from the mortal wounds they'd received, he didn't feel Leboux was of a mind to consider the question, How do you kill something if it's already dead?
Leboux of course sensed that Doyle was withholding key parts of his story, but was mindful enough of their friendship, and sufficiently convinced that Doyle had been through an authentically dire experience, to allow him to part company at this point. Watching Doyle walk away, Leboux felt daunted by the number of complications left to sort out. But after all, as he invariably said whenever confronted with a task of such complexity, that's what time was for.