Murder As A Fine Art Part 33

The silence stretched on for several moments.

"While we search under benches and bushes, he can keep moving," one of the men noted.

"Yes, he could be anywhere in the park by now," Brookline agreed.

They lapsed into silence again and listened.

De Quincey's chest ached from not breathing.

"He can't keep running forever," one of the men said. "We'll catch him eventually."

"I want him now."

They waited longer. De Quincey became dizzy from not breathing.

"Colonel!" the coach's driver shouted from the unseen street. "Shall I summon more help?"

Brookline debated, cursed, then shouted, "No!"

He led his men back toward the street.

De Quincey parted his lips, trying to be as silent as possible when he released air from his lungs and slowly inhaled.

But he didn't dare move. For all he knew, Brookline had merely pretended to leave in the hope that De Quincey would feel confident and betray where he was hiding.

The faint sounds of Brookline and his men diminished.

At last, except for a distant barking dog, the night drifted into silence.

Wedged between the branch and the tree trunk, De Quincey's legs were cramped, but he couldn't allow himself to s.h.i.+ft position, and no matter how much his lungs demanded air, he forced himself to inhale slowly and quietly.

The final hours of the night stretched on.

His shoulder ached. His chin throbbed.

The fog became less dense as dawn commenced. Still not feeling safe, De Quincey nonetheless needed to move. It was imperative that he reach the street while there was a chance of his not being seen.

Straining not to make a sound, he descended painfully. When he reached the bottom of the tree, his legs buckled. He needed to rub them, easing the cramps.

The heavy handcuffs irritated his wrists and made them swell. He desperately wanted to remove them. Thanks to Emily, the key was in his coat pocket. But the lock was on the outside of each cuff. There was no way he could reach his fingers around to insert the key into the locks.

As the air became gray, he snuck through the lessening fog, pausing to interpret any sounds he heard. Near the street, he crouched behind bushes and a.s.sessed the risk of moving forward.

No one seemed to be in the area. Creeping past benches at the edge of the park, he reached the gate. Would an enemy be waiting? De Quincey hoped that this would seem the last place to which he would go rather than a distant refuge. With no other choice, shoved by the terrible responsibility of the task he needed to perform, he stepped through the gate.

No one seized him. Hurrying despite his cramped legs, he moved to the right, away from Lord Palmerston's house. His destination was farther along the street, past the park, where buildings occupied both sides of the street.

Bent forward in the gloom, he scanned the edge of the sidewalk and felt his heart expand when he saw what he searched for.

The flask lay in the gutter where Brookline had tossed it. Brookline had said that it belonged there, and De Quincey agreed. It did indeed belong in the gutter.

Nonetheless he needed the flask. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and raced back to the park.

But for once the laudanum wasn't for him. Although his body urgently craved it, he had a far more important use for it.

With its help, he might be able to prevent more people-a lot more, he feared-from dying.

14.

The Woman of Sorrows.

AT VAUXHALL GARDENS, if De Quincey had chosen to pay for an ascent in the hot-air balloon, he would have seen a perspective of London that made sense of the sprawling city in a way that a map could not provide. Rising, he could have viewed the majestic Thames and its numerous bridges. He could have admired Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

But more than anything, what would have captured his attention was a stretch of royal parks that extended through the city. As a sign next to the hot-air balloon had advertised, one of the parks to be seen from above was St. James's, located directly to the west of the Whitehall government offices. That park blended into the next one-Green Park-which in turn blended into much larger Hyde Park, making it possible for someone to walk several miles through the heart of London and have the illusion of being in the countryside.

The Opium-Eater didn't walk, however. In the twilight of dawn, with the fog dissipating and the light growing, he ran as swiftly as he could manage, hoping that the trees and bushes gave him cover. The strain on his body compelled him to take a sip of laudanum from his flask. The drug subdued his agony and allowed him to push his body to its maximum. But he couldn't permit himself to drink much of it. He had a far more important use for the precious liquid.

His worst fright came when he needed to cross the street that separated Green Park from Hyde Park, but after that, he pressed on, stumbling now more than running as he used the dwindling fog for cover, finally arriving at Marble Arch, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park.

He had come here with Emily on Sunday morning, barely two days earlier, when the only complication in his life-apart from his opium habit and his poverty-was the necessity of explaining to Emily that when he was seventeen, starving on Oxford Street, he had fallen in love with a prost.i.tute named Ann.

Oxford Street.

Beyond Marble Arch, it stretched before him. The gradually clearing fog made the street seem as gloomy as it had been fifty-two years earlier, when he had almost died there from hunger and the elements.

He moved past the dark shops on the street's left side, limping now, glancing nervously behind him to see if he was being followed. The noise of horseshoes on paving stones made him flinch. A vehicle was approaching. Was it a police wagon? Would Brookline, who had investigated his life so obsessively, guess that he would come to the one place in London with which he was more familiar than any other? But even Brookline couldn't know precisely where he would hide on Oxford Street.

The clomp of the horse's hooves was louder, closer.

De Quincey came to an alley, moved painfully along it, descended grimy steps, crawled through a hole in a fence, and descended again, this time into a tunnel, which led to another tunnel. There, in the shadows, bodies lay on granite, to all appearances dead but actually in an exhausted sleep made deeper by alcohol.

At the limit of his resources, De Quincey concealed his flask beneath a broken crate. Then he stepped to the middle of the bodies and lay among them.

No matter how cold the stones felt, the enclosure of the tunnel trapped a portion of the heat from the sleeping bodies.

Hiding among the beggars of Oxford Street, the Opium-Eater tried to doze as an angry chamber of his mind brooded.

WITH NO OTHER DESTINATION that they could think of at that early hour, Ryan, Becker, and Emily made their way to Scotland Yard. With luck, word would not have reached there yet that Ryan and Becker had been dismissed. They needed a place to rest while they decided on a strategy.

What would normally have been a twenty-minute walk took them an hour in the fog, but Emily didn't care about that or the numbing cold. What mattered was her father.

The sun was rising as they reached a building marked METROPOLITAN POLICE.

The warmth inside was welcome. Numerous doorways flanked a corridor. A stairway led to an upper level. Everything was quiet.

Ryan glanced at an elderly woman asleep on a bench, then stepped into an office on the right, where the constable on duty looked up from a desk.

Had the man been told that they'd been dismissed?

"h.e.l.lo there, Inspector Ryan. Haven't seen you in a couple of days."

Ryan relaxed somewhat. "I've been busy."

"And likely to get busier."

"I'm afraid you're right. This is Constable Becker."

"Sure, we've met. What happened to your coat, Becker?"

"Tangled with somebody."

"That's been happening a lot lately."

"And this is a witness we need to question," Ryan said, indicating Emily. "Can we use a room down the hall?"

"And get some hot tea?" Becker looked at Emily's frost-reddened cheeks.

"It's next to the stove."

They pa.s.sed the old woman on the bench and entered a room that had three unoccupied desks near a stove. Emily took off her gloves and rubbed her hands together over the heat.

Ryan picked up a teapot and poured steaming liquid into three cups. "Enjoy it while you can. There's no telling when we'll be booted out of here."

A voice interrupted them.

"Ryan."

They turned.

The constable was in the doorway.

Has he learned that we're no longer policemen?

"A woman's been waiting for you," the man said.

"The one asleep on the bench?"

"Not anymore. When she heard you come in, she woke up. I told her you're the man she's wanting to see. Can you talk to her? She's been here since yesterday evening."

The woman stood behind him. Awake, she looked older than when they'd first seen her. She turned her face, as if hiding something. The portion of her face that showed was lined with wrinkles, tight like a net. She clutched her ragged coat as if she would never be able to get warm.

"It's something about the first Ratcliffe Highway murders," the constable explained. "I told her n.o.body cares about ancient history. It's the murders Sat.u.r.day and last night that we want to solve. But she insists the first ones have something to do with the recent ones. She says she's ashamed about something. It wouldn't hurt to listen to her. Even if it's nothing, at least then she'll go home."

"Fine," Ryan said. "Let her in."

The constable motioned for the woman to enter the office.

She looked so tired and pathetic that Emily helped her to a chair at a desk. "Would you like some tea?"

"I don't have any money."

"This won't cost you anything," Emily a.s.sured her.

"Thank you. I'm thirsty."

"You have information about the murders?" Becker asked.

The woman nodded. "Forty-three years ago."

"What about the recent ones?"

The woman stared mournfully at steam rising from the cup Emily gave her. Although she had said that she was thirsty, she didn't drink. Emily was able to see that the woman's left cheek had a burn scar.

"What's your name?" Ryan asked.

"Margaret."

"Your last name?"

"Jewell."

Emily repeated the name so forcefully-"Margaret Jewell?"-that Becker and Ryan looked at her in surprise.

"What is it?" Ryan asked.

"From the Marr killings?" Emily asked the woman.

"Yes." Margaret's voice was edged with sorrow.

"What's going on?" Becker asked.

"Father wrote about this woman. She's the servant Timothy Marr sent to buy oysters just before the killings."

Ryan walked closer. "Margaret?"

The woman looked up at him.

"Tell us why you came here."

"Sat.u.r.day midnight. Forty-three years ago."

"Yes, forty-three years ago." Ryan knelt before her, putting his face level with hers.