Page 58 of The Business of Blood
I muttered a few of the words I’d learned from him.
An embarrassed cough beside me alerted me to Inspector Aberline’s presence.
“Pardon my profanity.” I made room for him in the doorway. “That man gets my Irish up like no other.”
“You’re not alone in that.” He traced Croft’s trajectory for a moment with a knowing smile as he broke from the thinning crowd and marched toward Whitechapel Road. “Do you know what his problem is?”
“You’re insinuating he only has the one?” I knew I was being unkind, but it was not even noon and already turning out to be a very trying day—the blame belonging in no small part to Croft.
Aberline’s mustache twitched in amusement. “Look there. Croft is the kind of man what walks in straight lines. London has no straight lines. Just twists and turns and labyrinthine corridors behind which any danger could lurk. For men like him, the vagaries of fate are untenable. It is difficult for them to navigate the chasms between what should be, and what is.
He spent some of his formative years as an underground ironworker. Chipping away at the stone until it gave beneath his will, shaping it with rough hands, sharp tools, and brute strength into something he could use. He attacks his cases—his life—in a very similar way.”
“With all the subtlety of a pickaxe?”
“Sometimes.” Aberline chuckled. “Does make for an excellent detective, though he does his best work in the field.”
I could see that. He’d seemed like a caged beast in his office this morning. A vicious dog needing to be let out.
Aberline glanced at me with frank speculation. “Do you like him?”
“Not generally.”
“No, I mean, do youlikehim?” He nudged me with his elbow. “Fiery women tend to take to Croft. They enjoy his indifference. Relish the chase. They like what happens when he lets them catch him.” Aberline winked before waggling his bushy eyebrows at me.
“I doubt that,” I said drolly but cut my grimace short when I marked Aberline’s expression. It would not do to seem bitter. Or interested. “My heart is not free to like anyone.”
“Pity.” At that, he turned back to Dr. Phillips, dismissing all notions of romance for only slightly more gruesome subjects. “We’ve gathered that Katherine Riley was, once upon a time, a prostitute who went by the name of Roxy the Doxy.”
I pressed my lips together, clamping them with my teeth. No matter how ridiculous the moniker was, now was not the time to be amused.
Not whilst gathered around her blood.
“She was popular with sailors and dock workers,” Aberline continued as he consulted his pocket notepad. “Apparently, there was even a song.”
“I’d give my last shilling to hear it,” Nelson remarked, earning him reproving glares from his superiors.
“By all accounts, she gave up that profession a decade ago. These days, either no one knows what she does for a living—what shedid—or no one is willing to tell.” With a frustrated sound, Aberline took up his suit coat and hat. “The landlord’s agreed to your fee, Miss Mahoney. I’ll join the bobbies whilst you tend to the house, here. This calls for some good old-fashioned footwork.”
“It really could be him, couldn’t it, Inspector?” I asked, staring at the blood-soaked carpet and cold, white ashes in the fireplace.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Aberline paused at the door as we both turned to mark Hao Long’s patient progress with my cart through the hastily dispersing crowd.
People tended to lose interest once the body had been taken away. In mere moments, one would hardly be able to tell this street from any other crowded thoroughfare in Whitechapel.
Exhaustion and anxiety pinched the lines at the corners of the inspector’s eyes and lips, turning them a stark, aggressive white. “I’m afraid so.” Aberline shook his head, his shoulders heavy with regret. “Just when I thought the nightmare was long over. It’s been my greatest fear, you know? The return of the Ripper.”
“I know. Mine, too.” As I watched him leave, I swore he’d shrunk three inches in as many days.
Dr. Phillips was next to scuttle to the door, anxious to take his leave. “Well, Miss Mahoney. Must be going. Death waits for no man.”
“Nor woman,” I volleyed back.
He shook my hand like he would a respected male colleague, and somehow, it meant more to me than any kiss brushed against my knuckle, bow, or courtesy I’d ever received. “He’d wait for you, I’d wager. I think he likes you. He’d take his time with you.”
“He certainly keeps me in business.”
