Alex Grecian - Devil's Workshop

“So Mary Jane Kelly lured him in. .”

“And we were meant to be waiting for him, but there was a miscommunication. Much as there was at the prison.”

“You may have a traitor in your mix.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Then you’re all incompetent and misguided. Do you believe that?”

“We are not incompetent. We thought it all out very carefully and we had Griffin inside the prison. He was our second plan, in case the first went wrong somehow.”

“And what about Mary? Was there a second plan in place to protect her?”

“We learned from her. Her sacrifice was not in vain.”

“Because you caught Jack?”

“We did.”

“Only because he fell asleep. I’ve seen what he did to them. Everyone has. Jack spent so long dismembering that girl that he practically handed himself over to you, isn’t that right?”

March cleared his throat as if about to respond, but then said nothing.

“And yet you didn’t arrest him,” Day said.

“How could we? What we had seen, we who hunted him and cleaned up his messes, it was all too much. We couldn’t let him do those things and just. .”

The images of Jack the Ripper’s victims flooded Day’s head. All the postmortem photographs and artists’ reconstructions. It was overwhelming. Day felt dizzy and nauseated. He fought against blacking out again.

“It was wrong, what you did,” Day said. “It was selfish.”

“I know.”

“The public still fears Jack. You left your fellow policemen to deal with the aftermath of your actions, all of the public’s fears and insecurities. Everybody thinks he got away.”

“Well,” March said, “he did, didn’t he? And now he’s going to kill us if we can’t get ourselves free and stop him.”

“We’ll get out of here. We’ll catch him again and we’ll turn him over to the proper authorities. And then I’m still going to place you under arrest.”

March fell silent. Day concentrated on breathing. In and out, through his mouth, no deep breaths. He had threatened to arrest two people despite being shackled to a wall in a cave.

He was counting on March to get him free, but Day’s mentor had no good reason to help him now. He was afraid he would die there, deep underground, his body lost forever.

But Day was a detective inspector for Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. And if he was going to die, at least he would do so with some integrity.

Cinderhouse dreamed that he was falling and he woke with a start. He was sitting in the upstairs hallway of the house with the red door. The first thing he noticed was the excruciating pain in his mouth, shooting through his jaw and up into his head. He put a hand to his mouth and immediately regretted it. He fished in the pockets of his trousers, no easy feat from a sitting position, and found his handkerchief, dabbed at the corners of his mouth. There was a little blood on the cloth when he pulled it back. He held it against his lips again and applied pressure, but it didn’t help. The pain was deep inside.

He realized that the bedroom door was open behind him at the same time he noticed that the knife was missing from his hand. He had been waiting for the spider to wake up and unlock the bedroom door, and now the door was open and the knife was missing. He eased himself up and peered in through the open door, but the room was empty. There was the stale remnant of body odor, and dust motes swirled in the sunlight through the window opposite the big bed.

Cinderhouse blinked and sniffed and picked gunk from the corners of his eyes. He stood and staggered into the room, just to be sure no one was there, then went back to the hallway and sat at the top of the stairs, moved slowly forward and out, and bounced down each step. At the bottom of the stairs, he grabbed the post at the end of the banister and pulled himself up. He glanced in at the parlor on his way past and noted the absence of Elizabeth. The kitchen was as deserted as every other room he’d seen, but the back door was open and honeybees flitted in and out, visiting the purple blossoms in the garden and taking a wrong turn into the house before finding their way back out.

“Aaaauuoogh!”

He thought he was going to shout hello , but the sound that came from his tongueless mouth was some hideous howl of loneliness and pain. He winced at the sound of it.

He held perfectly still, his back to the butcher block, and listened. There was nothing. The house was empty. The echoes of silence came back to him and proved that there wasn’t a sound being made anywhere except here, except by him and the honeybees.

Jack had left and he had taken Elizabeth with him.

Jack had chosen Elizabeth over Cinderhouse. Never mind that Cinderhouse had planned to kill Jack, had been waiting for him with the biggest knife he could find in the kitchen, had fantasized about plunging that blade deep in Jack’s chest and then taking it out and cutting out Jack’s tongue before the spider died. Never mind any of that. Cinderhouse had helped him, and still Jack had chosen Elizabeth to be his new rock, his Peter, his fly. He had taken Elizabeth away, and Cinderhouse felt certain they would never come back for him.

He pushed away from the butcher block and turned. He opened the drawer behind him and saw a rack of silverware inside. He couldn’t remember where he had found the twine he’d used to bind Elizabeth. He concentrated and crossed the kitchen and opened another drawer beside the water basin. Inside was another ball of rough string, not as thick as the stuff he’d used on Elizabeth, and a corkscrew, three pencil stubs, several thumbtacks, a pair of gloves, a shaker of salt, and a map of London, folded the wrong way round as if someone had consulted it and then been too impatient to fold it back properly.

Cinderhouse pulled out the map and one of the pencil stubs. He went to the table in the room and unfolded the map, spread it out flat across the table. He used the pencil to mark where he thought he must be, Elizabeth’s house on Phoenix Street. He saw that he was still near the prison, despite the many journeys to and fro under the street, the dead dog, the ambushing of the homeowner, and the aborted attempt at friendship with the little girl across the street. None of that had taken as much time as it had seemed to take, and none of it had taken him very far from the gates of Bridewell.

He traced the pencil up along Great College Street and found Kentish Town, then west to Primrose Hill. It was nearby. He sat at the table, got his nose down so that it almost touched the map, and moved the pencil around and around and stopped at Regent’s Park Road. He couldn’t be sure exactly where number 184 was, but he found the rough spot where he thought it must be and he circled that spot again and again with the tip of the pencil until it began to tear through the paper and the stub broke in half.

He had a splinter under his nail from the pencil and he dug that out with a paring knife.

He was much too lonely to go on like this. He needed the companionship of someone who would not confuse him the way that Jack did. Of course, a child would be the perfect companion. Children had always made him feel big and strong and able.

The old lady had seen him and had taken away his chance with the girl. But he knew it had not been much of a chance, since he had no tongue. It wasn’t the old lady’s fault. And it wasn’t Jack’s fault for taking his tongue. Not really. Cinderhouse had earned his punishment.

What he had not earned was a prison sentence. Not when he had been so good to his last child, the lovely little boy named Fenn, who had called him Father just the way he was supposed to. He had been good to that boy. And then the policemen had come to his house and ruined everything.