'Were you here last night then?'
'No, sir. I was home. Down Cheapside.'
The queer glass bowl was gone from the table, Doyle noted. The pattern of splattered wax indicated someone had taken that candle and moved quickly. Leboux opened the door, and they entered the parlor.
'This as it was, Arthur?' Leboux asked.
'Yes,' Doyle replied. 'The seance was through here.'
Doyle opened the sliding doors. The room as revealed appeared entirely different from the one in which he'd spent those dreadful minutes. Cramped with dusty, fussy furniture. No round table or hanging tapestries. Even the ceiling seemed lower.
'This isn't right,' Doyle said, as he moved deeper into the room.
'Somethin' happen to the fella who lives here, then?'
'You go on up and visit your Mum now. We'll call if we need you,' Leboux said, closing the doors in the young woman's face.
'They've replaced the furniture. The room was nearly empty.'
'Where was the violence done, Arthur?'
Doyle moved to the spot where the table had been sitting. A plump love seat now occupied the space where Lady Nicholson had fallen.
'Here,' he said, kneeling down. 'There was no rug; the floor was bare.'
As he moved it aside, Doyle noticed the imprint of the love seat's leg in the rug was deep and encrusted with dust. Leboux lent him a hand lifting the love seat away, then together they rolled back the carpet. The underlying floorboards were unstained and shiny with wear.
'It's been cleaned, you see. The whole room, top to bottom. They've removed every trace,' Doyle said a bit frantic.
Leboux stood above him, stoic, noncommittal. Doyle bent to examine the floor more closely. He took a pipe- cleaning tool from his pocket and scraped at the joist between the slats: His efforts yielded a small portion of a dried dark matter. Doyle brushed the crumbs into an envelope and handed it to Leboux.
'I think you will find this substance is human blood. Lady Caroline Nicholson and her brother were murdered in this room last night. I recommend an immediate effort be made to alert their family.'
Leboux pocketed the envelope, took out a pad and paper, and dutifully wrote down the names. They proceeded to conduct a more detailed examination of the room. Nothing discovered led them to further understanding of the crimes
:c rum:tied or the identity of owner or occupant. Following ±e paih through the nest of corridors that had led Doyle and S acker to the alley proved equally fruitless.
As they stood in the alley looking back at the house, Doyle sketched in the details of the murderous engagement. He made no mention of Sacker, or his use of the pistol Leboux himself had given him months before. Leboux crossed his arms, stock-still, betraying no sentiment suggesting the relative credulity of what he heard. A good while passed before he responded. Doyle was accustomed to waiting out his friend's epic silences: One could almost hear the tumblers of his mind clicking like slow hands on an abacus.
'You say this attack on the woman involved the use of a blade,' was Leboux's first comment.
'Yes. A wicked-looking affair.'
Leboux nodded, and then with some new sense of purpose in his eyes, said, 'You'd better come with me then.'
They walked three blocks to the vacant lot at the corner of Commercial and Aldgate. Police had sequestered the area. Bobbies manned the corners, directing away passersby. Leboux led Doyle through the cordon to the center of the lot where, that previous night, just as Doyle was arriving back at his rooms, the short, sorry life of the streetwalker known as Fairy Fay had come to a brutal and malicious end.
The rough canvas serving as her shroud was lifted. She was unclothed. The body had been eviscerated and the organs removed. Some were missing; the rest were neatly arranged outside of the body, in a pattern the significance of which was impossible to divine. The job had been quick, precise, and, as Doyle surmised from the absence of ripping at the entry points and edges of the wounds, executed with furiously honed instruments.
Doyle nodded. The canvas fluttered back over the corpse. Leboux trudged a few paces away. Doyle followed. Another Lebouxian silence ensued.
'Would that be Lady Nicholson then, Arthur?' he finally asked.
'No.'
'Was this woman at the seance last night?'
'No. I've never seen her before.'
With shock, Doyle realized that Leboux was probing for some weakness in his story. A policeman first and foremost, Doyle reminded himself, and the mood among the officers was grim and tight. Few, if any, had ever been exposed to the fruits of an act this savage and willful, certainly never in the routine of London police work.
'No one's come forward?' he asked.
Leboux shook his head. 'Prostitute most like. Now. Those blades you described, could they have done this work?'
'Yes. Very possibly.'
Leboux blinked myopically. 'Could you describe the assailants?'
'They wore hoods,' Doyle said, neglecting to mention that both killers had themselves been dispatched. Given that unholy facial stitching and the lack of blood from the mortal wounds they'd received, he didn't feel Leboux was of a mind to consider the question, How do you kill something if it's already dead?
Leboux of course sensed that Doyle was withholding key parts of his story, but was mindful enough of their friendship, and sufficiently convinced that Doyle had been through an authentically dire experience, to allow him to part company at this point. Watching Doyle walk away, Leboux felt daunted by the number of complications left to sort out. But after all, as he invariably said whenever confronted with a task of such complexity, that's what time was for.
Upon first viewing the woman's loathsomely mutilated corpse, one of the troubling thoughts he was still contending with had been, This is the work of a doctor.
THE FIRST PREREQUISITE OF ELABORATE MENTAL EXERCISE
was a full stomach. Doyle hadn't eaten since his ordeal began the night before. He walked into the first crowded tavern he happened across, sat by the fire, and ordered a large breakfast, thankful that what little money he'd left in his rooms hadn't fallen victim to the gelatinous infestation.
Afterward he pushed back his plate, lit a pipe, put his feet up, and felt the onset of that relaxed but heightened state of awareness wherein his mind hummed at maximum efficiency.
If, as Sacker had suggested, there was a conspiracy behind these events, it reasonably involved only a few individuals. Conspiracy requires secrecy. The greater number of people involved, human nature being what it was, the less likely secrecy became. The extent to which 13 Cheshire had been sanitized in those few short hours surely supported conspiracy. How to keep the requisite subordinates in line? Fear. Their ability to inspire it seemed beyond reproach. Black magicians? He was not personally acquainted with any, but that was no guarantee their numbers weren't legion.
As to the manuscript ... true, he'd contrived the villains' identities himself—and a fair piece of invention it was, too, if he did say so—but as to their actual objectives, means, motives, and so forth, the damnable truth was he'd more or less cribbed the 'Dark Brotherhood' from Blavatsky. Which begged the question, if they were after him because of his book, how close to the truth of what they were up to had that lunatic Russian wandered? And if she had that much right, what credence did that lend to the rest of her harebrained works?
The seance. More problematic. Perhaps. The levitation: wires and pulleys. The mirror could have been done with,
well, with mirrors. The head of the beast a puppet of some kind, perhaps concealed in the bundle he'd seen that boy carry into the building. Conclusion: There could be logical explanations for the effects he'd witnessed, albeit of a more ingenious and sophisticated order than he'd encountered before....
Wait just a moment—here he was perambulating around this garden of unearthly delights like a vicar on holiday. The fact remained there were bloodless blind men with Oriental daggers stalking about London trying to
