the West End at Christmas. Jerry’s face and hands were dead, her fingers locked and frozen, her eyes stinging from the intensity of staring into the pulsing fog. She was surprised at how well she handled the bike, but knew she would have to stop before she killed herself, or someone else.
The van began to slow down.
Jerry eased back as it cut through the red lights of an intersection, ploughing across Camden High Street into Delancy Street. She suddenly realized that the driver was lost. The tattered man had missed his turning somewhere and no longer recognized his surroundings.
As she tore on to the empty streets circling the railway lines above the city, she knew that the van would have to stop. Here in this corner of North London, all the roads were effectively sealed off by the tangled network of rail tracks fanning out fifty feet below them. There was no way to safety. The triangular area beyond was known to locals as the Island, hemmed in on each side by Regent’s Park, the railway, and the canal systems.
The van was in trouble. Following raids, getaway cars usually turned left because they followed the traffic flow. Her quarry was doing the same thing. They tore into the street, and Jerry knew that it was over. Ahead was a brick wall, a humpbacked pedestrian bridge, and a long drop to the railway tracks. There was everything but a road.
The van slammed its brakes on hard, to no avail. The vehicle continued to charge forward, fishtailing over tarmac as if the brakes had not even been applied. It hit the metal fencing beside the wall and uprooted two concrete posts. For a moment Jerry thought that the chickenwire might hold. Then the van tore through, the fence screaming over its roof, and slid down the embankment to the lines below.
She had just pulled the bike over and dismounted, planning to head down into the cutting, when blue lights reflected on the walls ahead, and she turned to find herself facing a pair of arriving squad cars.
¦
As Joseph ran down into the Whitstable family crypt to attend to Peggy Harmsworth, the door was pulled shut behind him and an oppressive darkness closed over his senses.
For a moment he heard and saw nothing, nothing at all. Now he knew how Jerry must feel in the dark. There was someone else breathing right next to him. With a shrill shriek of laughter Peggy thrust out her hands, raking her fingernails across his face, spinning him away from the faint light around the entrance. His legs slipped from under him and he hit the stone floor heavily. She leapt on to his back, pulling at his hair, trying to dig her fingers into his eye sockets.
He lashed out at her throat, or where he imagined it to be, and hit stone instead. Trying to force her body away from him, he moved towards the door, but his sense of direction had been confounded.
Before he could think further she was upon him again, shouting laughter in his face, digging her nails into his skin, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, kicking and screaming and lashing him with her hair like an inmate of Bedlam.
As he fought for the door, blinded by his own blood, carrying the ranting maniac on his back, it seemed that he had left the realm of the sane to enter someone else’s nightmare. He fell painfully to his knees as the madwoman dug deeper into him, screaming and howling in an echo chamber of her own insanity.
? Seventy-Seven Clocks ?
27
Guilty Parties
“Welcome back, Miss Gates,” said May wearily. “We had almost begun to miss you.”
Jerry wanted desperately to lie down and go to sleep. It was after midnight, and she ached like hell. A few minutes ago she had rung Gwen from the station pay phone, and the call had quickly disintegrated into a shouting match. The last thing she wanted now was an official interrogation as well as a parental one.
“Where’s Joseph?” she asked, her voice hardly rising above a croak.
“Your friend is next door,” said Bryant. “He’s all right, no thanks to you. Congratulations, we don’t often find you in the company of live people.”
“Can I have a cup of tea? I can’t talk.”
May eyed her suspiciously for a moment, then opened the door and spoke to someone. “You can have a shot of brandy in it,” he told her, “only because it’s Christmas. This had better be good. I was about to go home when they brought you in.”
May pulled out a chair for his partner. “Peggy Harmsworth was attacked in her family vault in Highgate Cemetery.”
“My God, is she dead?” Bryant asked.
“No, but she’s of little use to us as she is.”
“Why?”
“She appears to have taken a vacation from reality. They took her away tied to a stretcher, raving about the power of the moon.”
“What was she doing in a vault, for heaven’s sake?”
“I really have no idea, but guess what? This young lady was on hand to apprehend her murderer. In case you’re not keeping score, this is the third life-threatening experience Miss Gates has managed to witness. If you ever lose your job at the Savoy, you might consider becoming one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Miss Gates. The full gory details, please.”
Jerry tried to explain how she and Joseph had come to be there, but to do that she found herself having to backtrack to the blackmailing of Kaneto Miyagawa and the withdrawal of the Japanese consortium from the Savoy to make way for Peggy Harmsworth’s theatre society. Which meant explaining everything that had happened to her, including the assault in the theatre.
May looked angrier the more he heard. Bryant nodded every once in a while, suggesting that he had guessed as much already.
“So you deliberately withheld information from us.” Bryant sighed. “I thought you had more brains than this.”
“Mr Herrick has been quite taken aback by the events of the evening,” said May. “The poor bloke thought he was helping you by going along with your half-baked plans. Instead he spent his evening shut inside a crypt being mauled by a madwoman. Luckily one of the door bolts was out and it couldn’t swing completely shut, otherwise no one would have known he was inside. There’s a guard living on the premises, and he raised the alarm.”
“You should be pleased,” said Jerry hotly. “I caught your murderer. I saw him run out of the crypt seconds after he attacked Mrs Harmsworth.”
“You think he also murdered Max Jacob?” asked May. “Yes.”
“And Peter, William, and Bella Whitstable?”
“Well – yes.”
“What about kidnapping Daisy Whitstable? He did that as well?”
“Probably. Ask him.”
“He’s also the one who assaulted you at the theatre?”
“I suppose so.” Jerry faltered.
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“Well, he’s much taller than I remember. Different looking, thinner.”
“Good,” said May, draining his tea. “I thought for a minute you’d solved the entire investigation and we could all go home.”
His sarcastic tone bothered Jerry. It seemed out of character.
“You’re holding him in custody, aren’t you?” she asked. “You didn’t let him get away?”
“He couldn’t exactly run off,” replied May. “Seeing as both his legs were broken. He fell out of the van as it bounced down the embankment, where it finally came to rest on his head.”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“Very.”
“Was he a member of the family?” Jerry asked nervously. “Was he a Whitstable?”
“No, he was a gentleman from India. A windowcleaner.”
