“You don’t have it either, then,” said the man as his face broke out in a broad smile.
Shit. Harold had given up as much information as he’d gotten. But maybe this trade was worth it. If neither of them had the diary…
“You didn’t kill Alex Cale,” said Harold. It was not a question.
“You sure about that?” said the man. He reached into his coat pocket and removed a gun. He pointed it straight at Harold’s face. It appeared impossibly large as Harold stared down its barrel.
Harold’s resolve wavered. How sure was he, really, that this man didn’t want to kill him? Harold couldn’t think anymore. Logic collapsed. Cool, Sherlockian reason was burned up in the heat of his terror.
“I don’t have it,” Harold pleaded. “The diary. I don’t even know where it is. Or who took it.”
Suddenly the black car seemed to shiver. It sighed, then tilted slightly downward, sloping to the pavement away from Harold.
Harold looked over the roof and saw Sarah on the other side of the black car. How did she get there? He saw her rise from a kneeling position by the back tire: She’d punctured it. And, evidently, the front one as well.
“Cab!” she yelled at Harold. “Now!”
Looking down, he could see that the man with the gun was ever so briefly distracted by the commotion. Harold took the opportunity to run as fast as he possibly could.
He yanked open the cab door and flung himself into the backseat. Sarah was half a second behind him.
“Please go now anywhere as fast as you can!” shouted Harold at the driver. There was a recognition in the man’s face that something serious had happened. He didn’t ask questions, but instead threw the cab back into Drive and kicked at the gas pedal.
Harold looked through the back window. No one had gotten out of the black car. And it didn’t give chase. The black car sat motionless, leaning to its left against the curb.
Sarah revealed a small retractable knife in her palm. She folded the blade back into its shell and slipped it into her purse. She looked into Harold’s eyes with an impossible cool.
“So,” said Sarah, “how’d your plan work out for you?”
CHAPTER 21 Virgil and Dante on the Shores of Acheron
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
– Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy
October 30, 1900
Bram Stoker stood before Aldgate Station, examining the printed image in his hand. It was a three-headed crow, rendered in black ink upon a sheet of clean white paper. The crow’s beaks, in the image, were outstretched and open slightly, as if each were about to devour its own succulent prey. The eyes were hollow dots where the white paper showed through. The wings looked like single brushstrokes, or single slices of a knife. The image was menacing. Warlike. Murderous.
Bram handed the paper back to Arthur, who had been waiting in silence while his friend finished his examinations.
“A frightful beast, that one,” said Bram in regard to the image. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor I,” said Arthur with a sigh. “I haven’t a clue as to where it comes from or what it’s meant to represent.”
“Nothing nice, I’d wager. So you discovered these papers in Sally Needling’s rooms? And the Yard had described the same image as having been tattooed onto Morgan Nemain’s leg?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “and I can tell what you’ll want to know next. Did Sally Needling have the image tattooed on her leg as well? The answer, I’m afraid, we don’t have. The useless muffs from the Yard didn’t note anything about a tattoo in their report on the Needling case. But she was a good girl. From a respectable family. Having found her body in a Whitechapel alley was enough trouble for the police. They might have elected to omit a mention of a tattoo, to save the girl’s parents-and themselves, for that matter-a whole lot of bother.”
“Indeed. I gather that your impression of the Yard worsens with every passing day.”
“My God, man, they’re imbeciles! In four days I’m halfway to solving two murders, possibly more, that they’d given up on as lost long ago. They are wretched detectives.”
At that, Bram was forced to smile.
“It’s a good thing, then,” he said, “that we’ve such a master sleuth at our disposal.”
Arthur grimaced. He found Bram to be so flippant sometimes about matters of the utmost seriousness. But he needed the man’s help to once again navigate the East End, and so he held his tongue.
“My hope,” said Arthur, “is to find the tattooist who inked this design upon the leg of Morgan Nemain, and most likely upon the leg of Sally Needling as well. This image meant something to these girls. They kept these papers imprinted with the image, and at least one of them had it permanently inked onto her skin. Perhaps they told the tattooist what it meant. What it symbolized.”
“Have you given any thought to the possibility that the murderer himself drew the tattoo onto Morgan Nemain’s skin, after she died?”
“Lord, Bram, but isn’t that a gruesome thought? I don’t know where you get these ideas. No, I don’t find that a likely scenario. In the first place, the Yard man said that the tattoo had not been drawn recently. Moreover, if Sally was in possession of a stack of the same drawing, it seems most probable that whatever involvement these girls had with the crow image, they had it voluntarily, and they had it long before Sally’s murder.”
“Well reasoned, Arthur. But how do you intend to find the tattooist? There must be a thousand seamen in London who know how to apply ink to a hot needle.”
Now it was Arthur’s turn to smile. He stepped back and gestured to their surroundings. The midday din of Aldgate descended on them. Carriages rattled and banged their way down High Street. A gang of young boys kicked dirt into the air as they jostled one another and chucked pebbles at the passing horses. Beggars shook their rusted tins, and pickpockets followed quietly behind any man with a decent topcoat. And the stench, that horrid dead-fish stench, drifted across it all in gusts from the docks to the south. Arthur inhaled deeply, sucking in the putrid air and puffing it back out again between his grinning cheeks.
“ ‘Now put yourself in that man’s place,’” said Arthur. “ ‘What would he do then?’ Or, in our case, she?”
Bram frowned. “That’s a quote from something, isn’t it?”
“Yes. From A Study in Scarlet.”
“That’s one of your own stories!”
“Indeed. And it’s good advice, don’t you think? Come.” Arthur led Bram east away from the station, along High Street. “Imagine you’re a young girl, fresh-faced and twenty-six years of age, from a northern heath. You come into the city occasionally, for shopping, the theater, and perhaps the occasional suffragist lecture. You and your girlfriends have decided to burn ink onto your bodies, in order to symbolize something or other. Where do you go?”
“To the Strand. She would ask about in the shops there, the places she’d been before, about who in the city could draw the tattoo.”
“Close, Bram, but I fear not quite right. On the contrary, Sally would have gone anywhere besides the Strand. She wouldn’t want to be recognized in those familiar shops, asking around for a tattooist. What if her parents discovered her trip? What would they think? It would be a disaster.”
“But they say that painting on the body is becoming more common in these late days. I haven’t seen a British sailor without a burnt mark on his forearms in years. And, not that I listen to such gossip, but they say that even the Duke of York has been tattooed, that it was done up while he was in Malta.”
“Yes, yes, of course, George of all people would attract such stories. Bit of an Orientophile, that boy. But behavior befitting the rude men who work on the seas, and the rude heir to Wales, is not necessarily behavior befitting a solicitor’s daughter from West Hampstead. If Sally was inked, she was inked in secret.”