City of Light (City of Mystery) Page 7

  “Yes,” he said. “You would see less and less of the earth, only more of the clouds. A man would climb higher only so that he could say that he had.” He looked down at her. “Or a woman,” he added.

  “Or a woman,” she echoed softly.

  “So are you suggesting that if Gustave Eiffel ever invites Isabel Delacroix to his aerie, she will decline the chance to see his Whistler?”

  He said it lightly, his second attempt at gay banter, for even if she was simultaneously in his grasp and beyond his grasp, he wanted to know that in this rarified moment he had been able to flirt with her. That he had momentarily escaped the caged confines of his detective’s brain. That she had taken him, so to speak, to new heights.

  But she frowned, turning her chin away from his. “A Whistler?”

  With her connections to society, Rayley was surprised she hadn’t caught the reference. The man’s name was in all the papers. “James Whistler,” he said. “A portrait painter of some renown and an exhibiter in the American pavilion. Rumor has it that he’s gifted one of his pieces to Gustave Eiffel in tribute. Tribute for the Tower, that is, and I suppose everything. Everything Eiffel has done.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “It was meant as a jest,” Rayley said weakly, for he knew that if one had to announce that a remark was humorous, this rendered it no longer so. “I’m sure there’s no way Eiffel would put a truly valuable painting in a place where no one would ever see it. No one except certain guests of a certain sort, that is, ladies who he –“

  To his relief, Isabel turned her face back to him, saving him from having to say more, or of making an even more disastrous conversational error. She wears powder, he realized. Lip rouge, and a dark line of some sort, drawn very fine and close to the base of her eyelashes. But all applied so expertly, with such a light and subtle hand that he had never noticed until this moment, when the light was so sharp and unforgiving and her face was just inches from his.

  “I shouldn’t say that I would never go to the aerie,” she said. “It’s just that the circumstances would have to be extraordinary.”

  She was looking him right in the eye.

  “Besides,” she added, “the name is Blout.”

  It was his turn to frown.

  “My name,” she repeated calmly, “is Isabel Blout.”

  “You aren’t married to him?”

  “My husband might object. Come to think of it, so might his wife.”

  Rayley’s head once again was spinning. He had a thousand questions but they died mute on his lips. He merely stared at her, face to face, here on this spike rising into the heavens, here on this staircase that led to places they knew neither of them would ever go.

  “He is your lover?”

  “We might have used that word once. Long ago. Not now. No, not for some time.”

  The silence stretched between them. She continued to gaze steadily at him, the corner of one lip slightly lifted.

  “Then why have you come here?” he finally asked her. “Why are you in Paris?”

  Her eyes were damp with tears, or perhaps it was just the wind. “I wanted to find the truth.”

  “How very odd,” Rayley said. “That’s why I’ve come as well.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  London

  April 22

  9:15 AM

  “So, I take it we’ve a new case?” Trevor asked, sliding into one of the three wobbly chairs gathered around the battered table in the Scotland Yard Laboratory of Forensics. A rather ostentatious name for a cold, badly lit room that was in truth little more than an alcove off the mortuary. But the laboratory, primitive though it may be, was Trevor’s unofficial reward for his work on the Ripper case the previous autumn, and he never descended the stairs which led to his small kingdom without pride.

  “Cleveland Street, Sir,” Davy said in a neutral tone of voice, sliding a file across the table.

  Trevor struggled to keep his face equally nonchalant, although he felt like cursing. For the last two weeks the papers had been full of the scandal, so he’d suspected the case would find its way to the forensics laboratory eventually. The disadvantage of running a unit founded on the basis of the Ripper killings was that the rest of the Yard now considered forensics to be the repository of all that was sensationalistic and bizarre. Trevor had hoped he would be given a chance to work on a series of more conventional cases – your everyday murders, so to speak - and gradually gain the respect of his fellow detectives upstairs. When they saw how useful forensic science could be to their inquiries…

  But, alas, it was not to be. They would take any case that drew the interest of the Queen, no questions asked, and when Trevor had read the preliminary report on the Cleveland Street affair, one name had leapt out at him. The same name that seemed to be tied to all the truly lurid stories of London, and the minute he had seen it, he’d known the Queen would expect him to devote everything he had to the matter. After all, Her Majesty herself had approved the funds which paid his salary, as well as that of Davy. Tom, who had the advantages of both a family trust and the eternal hospitality of his Aunt Geraldine, served the unit as a volunteer. Little wonder that the officers upstairs all but guffawed in Trevor’s face whenever he used the term “my team.” Although insightful beyond his years, Davy was a mere bobby and Tom, for all his swagger, was not yet through university and thus only a medical examiner in the loosest possible sense of the term. Even when Rayley returned from Paris and joined them, but they would still be a pitiably small and ragtag force.

  Well, there was Emma too, in her unofficial capacity. Trevor supposed the name for what she did would be “consultant,” an admirably vague word that seemed to cover any number of unorthodox arrangements. Emma may have worked with them in the privacy of the Tuesday Night Murder Games, and she may have in fact proven the cleverest of the lot, but a twenty-year-old girl could hardly saunter into Scotland Yard and down the dungeon-like steps which led to this small room. Dainty and petite, with her large eyes, pointed chin, and small mouth, Emma looked precisely like what she was – the respectable daughter of a schoolteacher, the genteel companion of a society matron, a young woman who could be counted on for discretion and propriety. Only a few people, including the three men at this table, had ever seen the other side of her.

  They had joked many times that Emma should put on britches and tuck her hair under a cap, that she should unsex herself and join them in laboratory, but today Trevor was glad that this was only a joke. Whatever was in the files before him now would be troubling enough to deal with even without the presence of Emma Kelly. Trevor put his palms on the folder and paused a minute before opening it. There would be personal accounts, record books, drawings of the property, and pictures. Photography, he had often mused, was a double-edged sword of an invention, producing crime scene images of the sort Trevor found impossible to forget even after the files had been closed and put away. The blank-eyed gazes of the Ripper victims still followed him in his sleep.

  “They’ve brought one of them in to a holding cell,” Tom said, his voice as carefully even as the others.

  “Victim or suspect?”

  “I’d imagine that’s for us to decide,” Tom said. He and Davy had read the file before he arrived, Trevor realized, along with the stack of folded newspapers on the counter.

  “So in the interest of time, why don’t you two tell me what are we dealing with?” Trevor asked, sighing as he slid the unopened folder back toward Davy. “I mean, besides a bunch of buggered young boys?”

  Paris

  9:20 AM

  The pounding on the door brought Rayley out of his reverie. He’d gotten used to a leisurely breakfast, since the French started their work day far later than the British. The one thing he could say for his landlady was that she provided a superlative variety of pastries for her tenants, as well as a passable attempt at British tea. Rayley was still sitting down in the common room, making a half-hearted stab at reading the morning papers when the poundi
ng at the front door had begun.

  Shooting him a dour glance, the landlady stomped to her foyer. He’d gathered she considered it beneath her station to be renting rooms to a policeman in the first place, but Rayley was in all other ways the ideal tenant – quiet, neat, and prompt to pay. And in the months he had been in Paris this is the first time anyone had come knocking at all, much less in this brusque manner.

  When she jerked open the door, two officers walked in. One of them Rayley recognized from the station, since the man was almost comically rotund and spoke a bit of English. The other, judging by his jacket, was higher in rank.

  “A body, Sir” the chubby man said. “At the river. You must come.”

  “Me? Why?” Rayley had risen to his feet as they entered and he now tossed his napkin to his breakfast plate in some confusion. He carried no authority with the Paris police. Judging by the nods and smiles in the corridors, he had risen slightly in their estimation since the business with the stabbing of the cook, but he was still surprised to find himself summoned to a crime scene.

  “He’s one of yours, Sir,” the man said, his eyes darting around the room, the weight of his body swaying slightly between his widely-planted feet. The familiar nervousness of a street cop in the presence of a superior, trying to do it all exactly by the book. It was good to see that some behaviors, at least, appeared to know no nationality.

  “One of mine?”

  “Yes, Sir,” the man said, his gaze coming to rest on Rayley’s half-finished pastry. “English.”

  London

  9:35 AM

  “So what led the officers to Cleveland Street in the first place?” Trevor asked as he wove his way through the byzantine hallways of the Scotland Yard basement, Davy and Tom lagging behind.

  “Sheer chance, Sir. Some sort of petty theft reported at the London Central Telegraph Office,” Davy said, stepping forward and falling into pace with Trevor. “The coppers were talking to all the delivery boys, trying to see who among them might have taken the money, when they came across fourteen shillings in the possession of a boy named Charlie Swinscow. Fourteen shillings was more than the amount stolen, and quite a bit more than one would expect the lad to have in his pocket for any reason.”

  Trevor nodded. Fourteen shillings would be the equivalent of several weeks’ worth of wages for a telegraph delivery boy.

  “A constable brought him in for questioning,” Davy continued. “And Charlie admitted that he got the money from a man named Charles Hammond, who operates what apparently is some sort of male brothel run out of 229 Cleveland Street. I mean male brothel not in the sense males are the customers, Sir, but that they are also the…um…providers who…”

  “Quite,” said Trevor.

  Davy soldiered on. “Anyway, our Charlie named several other boys his age and said they were all procured, I believe the word is, Sir, all procured into service by an older lad who worked for the General Post. The post and the telegraph offices are in the same building, so the boys in question would have known each other, thus making it easy for the older boy to recruit the whole lot of them at once.”

  “Gives rather a new meaning to the term ‘mail service,’ does it not?” Tom called up cheerfully from behind them.

  Trevor pointedly ignored him.

  “And the age of this Charlie Swinscow?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Trevor winced. He himself had grown up in the country, in a simpler time and place. At fifteen his idea of criminal activity was sneaking off from the village schoolmaster to go fishing, and his entire sexual experience had consisted of a kiss he’d exchanged with that same man’s daughter. The kiss had been brief and clumsy, even a bit off the mark, but the memory of it had informed his nocturnal fantasies for months afterwards. No such innocence existed for the children of London. “And the brothel owner? The procurer?”

  “Not sure the exact age on Hammond, Sir, but he’s an adult. By the time the bobbies went to Cleveland Street to check Charlie’s story, Hammond had evidently gotten wind of the trouble. They found the house locked up and the man disappeared. We’ll round him up, of course. The procurer from the General Post is eighteen or so, although he seems to have given us the slip as well. Charlie claims no one has seen him near the place for the last two weeks. Name of Henry Newlove.”

  “Newlove?”

  “Yes, Sir. Newlove.”

  “Not a word from you, Tom,” Trevor said.

  “I promise that for once I wasn’t going to make a joke,” Tom said. “Didn’t figure I had to.”

  Paris

  9:45 AM

  The body of Patrick Graham lay on the banks of the Seine, legs sprawled, arms flung wide, face turned up to the sky. From a distance, he looked like a man merely flattened from a night of heavy drink, but as Rayley and his escorts cautiously picked their way down the steep bank toward the river, the uglier truth became more apparent with each step.

  Death has a certain smell. Moldy of course, the aroma of decay, but that comes later. In the beginning there is something faintly metallic about it, as if the air around a dead body is shimmering with the departing energy of what was once a human life. Rayley was not sure he believed in souls, much less any evidence of a soul departing, and yet he had noticed it many times, this strange sense of movement around a still body. The Parisian police stood back to let him pass, and a momentary silence fell on the group. Rayley dropped to his knees, heedless of his tweed trousers, and turned Graham’s face toward his.

  The man’s complexion, once florid and bursting with youth, was now greenish-gray, the features so bloated that Graham looked Mongoloid, his eyelids stretched into slits, his cheeks hanging with an unnatural fullness. Rayley put one hand on Graham’s chest and the other hand on top of that one, then used the full weight of his own body to give a strong push. A murmur ran through the French who evidently thought he was trying to resuscitate a corpse, but, with the third push, Rayley was rewarded with a spurt of water from Graham’s lips, dark as brandy and foaming.

  Graham was in the same suit he’d worn two days before, when they’d climbed the tower, Rayley noted, rocking back on his heels as the French began to chatter again. The body clearly had not been submerged for long and the presence of water in the lungs… Well there had been some, certainly, but not as much as you’d expect and probably not enough to prove Graham had been alive when he entered the river. Isabel had described the three of them as all being like fish out of water. And now Graham had gone from a fish out of water to a man who’d found entirely too much of it. Rayley glanced at the body again, then at the river.

  The Seine ran tranquil, at least in comparison with the Thames, and at this particular pass the river was neither broad nor, judging by the succession of boat markers, particularly deep. If Graham had somehow stumbled and fallen in, if he had jumped or been tossed from one of the bridges, this alone should not have led to his death. His hands and feet were unbound and bore no evidence of ever having been restrained, so why had he not merely paddled his way to one of the shores? It was unlikely the man had been completely unable to swim and besides, if he had struggled over time, his lungs would have given up far more water than this single little squirt of fluid. Graham had most likely been dead, or at least dying, when he entered the river.

  Rayley carefully lifted the head, but saw no evidence of a blow. On the hill behind him a few of the young officers were emptying a satchel, a leather folder which had evidently been found along with Graham’s body. The contents must have provided his name and nationality and thus caused the French to summon Rayley. But it must have held these other papers too, which the flics were carefully peeling part from each other and spreading along the bank, securing each sheet with a pebble. It was probably a pointless task, since any words once written on those papers had surely been obliterated by the river, but Rayley was still relieved to see them making the effort. For Graham had said other things that first night too, had he not? Something about how newspaper men wouldn’t stop
until they had gotten all the answers. At the time, Rayley had dismissed it as boyish boast, Graham’s silly attempt to elevate his own profession to the status of Rayley’s. It was hard to imagine that the man, whose primary interests appeared to be flirting with American journalists and passing along gossip, might have stumbled onto a real crime or that such a crime could have led to his death.

  But anything was possible. At least at this stage of the investigation.

  London

  9:55 AM