City of Light (City of Mystery) Page 13

  The affection he held for Emma Kelly was more sensibly placed and he could only hope that it would have the chance of a different outcome. As the orphan of a country schoolmaster and his middle-class wife, Emma was a far more socially plausible target for Trevor’s attention than Leanna had ever been. Geraldine made constant broad hints that Trevor should court Emma, and had all but said she believed any overtures would be welcomed. But anyone with an ounce of objectivity could see that Emma was in love with Tom Bainbridge, that she held for him precisely the same sort of doomed devotion Trevor had once held for his sister.

  What a muddle.

  He could casually invite Emma to dine, he supposed, or take her to the theater. The problem today, all those awkward misunderstandings, may well have resulted from the fact that their journey was for the purpose of work. That was likely why she was so prickly and quick to take offense. Why he had felt compelled to assume the tone of her superior.

  But in London it was possible. He could contrive some situation which would give her the opportunity to more clearly show her feelings. Emma was a practical girl, and perhaps she was prepared to put her infatuation for Tom in some sort of box and place it on some a high shelf in the back of some very deep closet. Perhaps she was more prepared than he knew to accept invitations from Trevor and she didn’t really think of him as – dreadful phrase! – “like a brother.” She did treat him with affection, but it was the sort of democratic affection that was difficult to interpret. Last night as she showed him the door, she had leaned in and brushed his cheek with hers, sending a sharp and no-doubt inappropriate thrill throughout his frame. But of course then, in a killing instant, she had taken Davy’s hand and likewise brought her cheek to his.

  So Davy and Trevor had turned away. Descended the steps, then parted to walk in their separate directions. Davy had gone home to his family, Trevor to his bachelor’s room. And Emma had gone back into the warm, well-lit house. The house she shared with Geraldine and Gage.

  And, of course, Tom.

  Paris

  4:52 AM

  They could call the tower a marvel of engineering all they wanted, Rayley thought, but to him it would always be a monstrous thing. Especially when viewed from below. Rayley tilted his head to study the structure, which rose into the night like a curved black blade, then pulled his coat around him and shivered. There was only one reasonable explanation for why Isabel had asked him to meet her here at such an hour. Apparently she planned not merely to flee Paris but to also flee the man who had brought her here. And she wished to return to London without the assistance, or even the knowledge, of the husband waiting there.

  Now that he had risen from his bed and dressed, Rayley’s head had cleared and he was less inclined to self-pity. He might not be rich or socially connected, but he did have power of a certain kind. It came in the form of the Queen’s seal, which was embossed upon all his paperwork. The French may have snickered at it when he arrived, but Rayley had no doubt that this smear of gold would be quite enough to silence a border clerk in the channel office. His status in Paris was gossamer, insubstantial, far less than the glamour that lay casually tossed all around her, left behind by – he was fully prepared to admit this – any number of men. But it was still of a type that might afford Isabel a quick journey home with no questions asked, enough to get her back to the rocky shores of England and whatever redemption she hoped she might find there.

  Rayley had now waited for nearly an hour. His notebook was in his pocket, because he had plans of his own. He’d come here to make a deal, the only deal he knew how to make. He would help her escape in exchange for her telling him everything she knew about Patrick Graham - what he had been investigating, and how he had died. Frightened and beautiful the woman might be, but Rayley was still a detective, and he knew on an instinctual level that it had been no accident that he had met Isabel. She had known who he was, or at least what he was, on the day that she seated herself so ostentatiously before him at the café and begun to sketch. And that night at the tower party, she had been sent across the crowded room by someone, most likely her brutal lover, specifically to befriend Rayley and Graham. To distract them, to mislead them, to learn precisely how much the reporter and the detective might have discovered about some scheme her lover had undertaken. Rayley still didn’t know what it was they were all so afraid that he knew, and it was painful to admit, in this cold dark place, that even the giddy Graham must have managed to learn things that he had not.

  Not to mind. Rayley may been slow to see how it was all connected, but he had his wits about him now. The wheel was turning, the play was drawing to a close. Isabel’s lover and his friends were not merely upstart businessmen trying to buy respectability by investing in the Eiffel Tower and the Exposition. Something far more sinister had brought her to France. But Isabel’s usefulness to her lover was waning and her knowledge of the true nature of his business - the very knowledge which had once made her valuable - now made her vulnerable. Graham’s death must have shaken her to the core. She undoubtedly feared a similar fate awaited her.

  Yes, Isabel Blout was frightened and desperate and beautiful but Rayley could not let any of this move him. He would pull out his notebook and he would stand firm in his demands. She would earn her passage back to England only with the truth.

  And then there was a rustle. A sound, subtle but persistent.

  A woman’s skirts, perhaps.

  “Isabel?” he called.

  No answer. Something moved above him. The sensation of swooping, a flapping of wings in the wind. It had been a bird, no doubt. They were nesting amid the legs of the tower. A thousand birds, a thousand nests, perhaps four thousand babies when the full warmth of spring was unleashed.

  “Isabel?” he repeated. He was still looking up. He cursed himself for coming so early, but here he was, shivering and coughing in the morning cold, waiting for Isabel. Waiting for the chance that had been seized by so many men before him, the chance to be useful to Isabel Blout.

  And then he saw it. Another movement, quicker and more definitive. This one coming from the direction of a streetlight. Advancing steadily until at once and at last, it was upon him. A sharp-edged shadow slicing though the bright circle cast by the streetlight. A sheet of darkness falling like a –

  Darkness falling like...what?

  For once he had it. This one he knew. For once the French had the better word, the proper word.

  The darkness fell across him like a guillotine.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  London

  April 24

  9:10 AM

  First thing Wednesday morning, Tom and Trevor made their way to the art dealer in Windsor Square whom Geraldine had theorized might be in possession of the infamous Whistler portrait of Isabel Blout. The dealer himself had not yet arrived, the sale of art evidently being the sort of business that was rarely transacted before luncheon. But a clerk answered Trevor’s persistent rap at the door and confirmed that the Blout portrait was among the ones being sent to the American pavilion in Paris. He explained that they were already crated, due to be shipped tomorrow, as it were, and he responded to Trevor’s request to view the painting with a palpable lack of enthusiasm.

  Trevor did not like to show his Scotland Yard badge, preferring to pass in small matters as an ordinary detective, but this particular occasion seemed to demand it. The man’s derisive snort quickly changed to an obedient sniffle. He consulted the record books to find the proper crate number and escorted Trevor and Tom to the dreary packing room in the rear of the shop. It took him considerable effort to dismantle the crate with a crowbar, nearly as much to unwrap the protective tarpaper and finally undrape the muslin, but eventually the enormous portrait was broken free from its protective layers. With a final exhalation of effort, the clerk turned it around and Isabel Blout stood before them.

  She was not beautiful.

  That was Trevor’s first thought and it surprised him so much that any number of seconds passed b
efore he was capable of another. The portrait was large, nearly six feet from the bottom border to the top, and thus the woman was rendered, Trevor imagined, very nearly to scale. She was taller than he would have guessed from Rayley’s description, with a milkmaid’s sway to her back and substantial hands and feet. Her face was lovely, this he would not bother to deny, but there was a certain coarseness in her person, lingering traces of her working class roots that the teal velvet gown and elegantly styled hair could not completely conceal.

  No, she was not beautiful and yet…for some reason Trevor could not quite bring himself to look away. Isabel had been posed with her back to the viewer and thus her frame was twisted, looking over one shoulder. There was a sense of movement, almost flight, as if the artist had captured her in the act of a forbidden flirtatious glance. The sort of look a woman might give her lover at a party, just as dinner is about to be served and she must return to the side of her husband. Whistler’s skill as a portraitist was evident even to someone who knew as little about art as Trevor. The pose was so natural that it seemed somehow unnatural, or at least very different from the formal seated portraits Trevor was used to viewing. The longer he gazed, the deeper grew his sense of unease and then he realized why. The painting was so startlingly accurate that it reminded him of a photograph. It had the same sense of time interrupted, of someone caught utterly unaware in a single moment, as if the woman had turned without artifice, never knowing that she would be observed by centuries of strangers. The eyes were narrowed in invitation, the lips lifted in the smallest hint of an erupting smile.

  Tom was likewise studying the portrait carefully, his head titled to one side. “So what do we know of the lady?”

  “Only that she is no lady,” Trevor said, with a quick look over his own shoulder to confirm that the clerk had indeed left them in privacy.

  “Perhaps not, but it only serves to make her more glorious. Small wonder Rayley couldn’t resist her.”

  “Truly? I don’t fancy her type at all.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “It’s quite obvious she was born common.”

  Tom exploded into a low guffaw. “Common? Really, Detective, you can be the most appalling snob. I implore you to look more closely. For there’s something quite intimate about the portrait, is there not? Something rather enticing. I mean, on one level she is gowned and styled just as one would expect in a portrait of a society wife. On another level…it makes no sense, but she seems almost naked.”

  “And you find that this heightens her appeal?”

  Tom looked at him incredulously.

  “At the risk of seeming not merely a snob but also a prude,” Trevor continued. “I must repeat that she strikes me as unrefined. Like a stage actress playing at being a lady. The little things give her away. Look at the foot, for example, the one peeking out beneath the skirt. It’s quite large.”

  “The whole painting is large.”

  “But that particular foot seems somewhat…disproportionate. All the silk and satin in London can’t disguise the fact she has the bones of a farmgirl. It’s entirely lost on me why the lady has been so successful at dazzling a lengthy succession of men.”

  “There’s a word for it, Welles. It’s called sex.”

  Trevor gave an uneasy chuckle. “All right, all right, I’ll concede the point. Despite the fact I don’t fully understand Mrs. Blout’s appeal, I can certainly see why the portrait created the sensation Geraldine described. I can even understand why Whistler might have been reluctant to release it, for he somehow managed to create a magnificent portrait of a rather average woman. If my reaction is muted, it’s only because the lady is so different from what I’d been led to expect. Rayley said she was beautiful, and so did Geraldine. But when you really look at the image before us, piece by piece, I don’t see that beauty.”

  “Beauty isn’t meant to be analyzed piece by piece,” Tom said. “Not in art and not in women. Few paintings, and few women, would survive that sort of cold scrutiny.”

  “Indeed? I would say that true beauty grows more so with analysis.”

  “The Mona Lisa isn’t beautiful either, not in the technical way you’re describing. But when you actually see the painting, somehow it glows.”

  Trevor, whose rather spotty rural education hadn’t included much in the way of art appreciation, felt as he often did in these conversations with Tom. Outmatched and vaguely uneasy. “I wouldn’t know,” he said stiffly.

  “Well, that fine lady is in Paris,” Tom said lightly, as if he were suddenly aware he might have pushed Trevor too far. “And the fine lady before us will shortly be joining her there as well. Even taking into account that it isn’t what you’d expected, does seeing the portrait answer any of your questions?”

  Before Trevor could answer, the door from the shop swung open and, to Trevor’s surprise, it was not the clerk who dashed through it but rather Davy. The boy looked flushed and disheveled, as if he had run from the Yard to Windsor Square, and when his eyes fell on Trevor he tried to speak. But his voice came out broken and ragged.

  “Knew I’d find you here, Sir. A telegram –“

  “Here boy, take a breath. There’s no news that can’t wait. What sort of telegram?”

  “From France, Sir, came to you from the chief of the Paris police.” Davy struggled to control his breathing, staring up into the suggestive, languid smile of Isabel Blout.

  “It’s Detective Abrams, Sir,” he finally managed to get out. “They say he’s gone missing.”

  3:40 PM

  “It’s quite out of the question, Detective.”

  “Your Majesty, if I might –“

  The Queen held up a plump hand and Trevor fell silent in an instant.

  “We can predict what you are about to say. That Detective Abrams was a member of our own Scotland Yard, and that the only reason he was even in that dissolute city was because he was following our own direct order. Both statements are correct, but the fact remains that we cannot spare you at present.”

  Trevor could not help but note her use of the past tense in her evaluation of Rayley’s status. Evidently Victoria, long accustomed to trouble, had already assumed the worse.

  “If Your Majesty is speaking about the business in Cleveland-“

  Again the raised hand. Again Trevor’s silence.

  “This is not our concern. A city the size of London will always have its share of distasteful matters. But do we know for certain that the Ripper has truly desisted?”

  “It’s been five months since an incident, Your Majesty.”

  “And you are convinced this is enough time to close the case?”

  Trevor tried not to audibly sigh. He had gradually begun to come to peace with the idea that Jack the Ripper would never be caught and thus that the case would never be definitely closed. If Victoria intended to use the possibility of the resurgence of the Ripper as an excuse to keep Trevor and his forensics team tied to her throne, he would never leave London again.

  “I do not think the citizens of London are in any such present danger, Ma’am,” he said. “And meanwhile the present danger to Detective Abrams is undeniable.”

  “Is it? According to your telegram, he has been missing for no more than twelve hours and there are any number of innocent explanations for why a man might take a day from his professional duties to attend to private business. Do we know for certain he has fallen victim to a crime?”

  “Rayley’s not the sort of man to simply disappear, Your Majesty, and yet his housekeeper reports he was not in his room when she knocked for breakfast. Then he fails to report to work with no explanation for his absence, although we are speaking of a man who is most regular in his habits, ma’am, most responsible in his duties. And furthermore, Your Majesty, he had written me that he was working on a case that was proving –“

  The Queen looked at him in surprise. “Working on a case? Our impression was that we had sent Detective Abrams to Paris to study forensics, not to assist the Frenc
h in their own daily duties.”

  “That’s true, Ma’am, but the victim of this particular crime was English. Someone Rayley had met socially, that he felt he knew. When the fellow turned up dead, he naturally took a personal interest. I can’t help but believe Rayley’s disappearance is connected to the murder of a newspaper man named Patrick Graham.”

  “And you also believe that, based on a few facts gleaned from his letters, you can arrive in Paris and swiftly solve a crime that the French police cannot.”

  He dropped his gaze to the floor and Victoria smiled. She sought a high level of self-assurance in all her advisors and had always rather enjoyed Trevor’s confidence. His certainty in his own skills, as well as in the newborn science of forensics, was one of the reasons she had such faith in him. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I take it Rayley Abrams is a friend?”