Page 44 of The Business of Blood
I yearned to confess everything. To blurt to all and sundry what exactly had befallen me the night prior. But then Aberline would ask what I was doing on the Strand at such an hour. Croft would place me in the proximity of the Velvet Glove only moments before he, himself, visited the Hammer.
I risked a glance at him and found him regarding me oddly from beneath the shadows of his sooty lashes.
I could fabricate that I’d been called to work, I supposed, but the canny inspectors would require proof, and I had none. As far as I knew, there were no other violent deaths in London last night save for the one before us.
Drat,I thought glumly before castigating myself for wishing such ill on another for the sake of my own convenience.
A convenient murder. Was there ever such a thing?
“Couldn’t it be both?” Croft lifted his bowler hat away from his hair, threaded his fingers into the dark strands, and then replaced the brim low over his forehead.
“Both what?” Dr. Bond asked.
“The motive. Couldn’t the killer have carefully calculated this murder and still have been driven to do so by a…what did you call it?” He motioned to Dr. Bond. “An erotic mania.”
Both doctors shook their heads. “Calculation and mania do not go hand in hand,” Dr. Bond explained.
“Perhaps not.” Croft glanced at me again. “But I believe in a patient fury. In fact, I believe quiet fortitude is the most dangerous kind of rage.”
Unwilling to ponder his meaning, I extracted the tarot card from my jacket and held the picture over Frank Sawyer’s body for all to see. “You probably already considered this, but I wasn’t certain if you were aware the tarot deck contains a card with a man positioned just as Mr. Sawyer was. The Hanged Man.”
“We were, in fact, not aware.” Aberline snatched the card away, inspecting it closely. “Never pegged you for a spiritualist, Miss Mahoney, being a pragmatic Irish woman and all that.”
“I’m not. The deck belongs to my aunt.”
“Did she tell you what it means, by chance?”
I hesitated. There was the translation Aunt Nola received from her spirit guides, and then there was reality. “She mentioned atonement. Punishment, redemption, that sort of thing. Though, maybe you know someone more knowledgeable about widely accepted card meanings that might offer more insight.”
“See, Croft?” Aberline chuffed. “She’s a right handy girl to keep about. This goes hand in hand with yourpittura infamantetheory. Someone meant to punish poor Mr. Sawyer, here. The question is, wot for? Remind me of the crimes the Italians used to string a bounder up by his ankle for.”
Croft ran his tongue over his teeth, working a tense jaw to the side. “Small infractions, if you remember. The defamation of an innocent woman, libel, bad debts.”
“Like the debts Mr. Sawyer owed to the Hammer?” Aberline said ominously.
My heart leapt into my throat, almost choking my words out of me. “Mr. Sawyer? He knew the Hammer?”
“Can’t say heknewhim, as such.” Aberline scratched beneath his top hat. “But he owed him, or rather his Syndicate, some money.”
The Hammer,that bastard, had lied to me. Not that I should be surprised. He was a notorious criminal, after all. But still, that he’d done so after my show of good faith, knowing what I had riding on the case, certainly demonstrated the trust and esteem in which he held me.
Or the lack thereof.
“That’s no business of hers,” Croft gritted at Aberline, his eyes flashing with an electric fury of the distinctlyimpatientsort.
Both the doctors and Aberline seemed about to spring to my defense, but I wasn’t one to leave such matters to a man. “That’s exactly what this is, Inspector Croft,” I spat. “My. Business. This is how I make my living. And this sort of information keeps me alive.” More than any of them realized. “I’m not hindering your investigation by being here or at the crime scene or anywhere else. Quite the opposite, in fact, as everyone else has pointed out. I aid in the solving of mysteries, and I’m bloody good at it. But what I can’t for the life of me figure out is why you’re so intent upon acting like a horse’s ass!”
His face looked as red as mine felt by the time I’d finished.
His Irish was up, as well.
“Better a horse’s ass than a rat,” he growled, stalking to a sideboard along the white-tiled wall and snatching Dr. Phillip’s morning paper. The twine disintegrated in his hands by the time he reached our speechless circle, and he violently thrustTheLondon Evening Examinerat me.
I’d no doubt in my mind he’d have slammed it down on the table for all to see had there not been a stiff corpse to ruin the effect.
GRUESOME MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL! the headline read, with the byline beneath:THE RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN?
I took the paper, blinking at it in disbelief. “You think I went to the papers?”
