He looked down at me, and the light from my small illuminator shone in his eyes. They were still spots of exasperation, spoiling an otherwise pleasing countenance. “If you feel it necessary to share your information with us, I cannot stop you, Miss Holmes. But my partner and I are able to draw our own conclusions.” He crouched next to me.
I could smell the clean, lemony scent of his skin and see the freckles on his large, square, capable hands. All at once I felt uncomfortable in my dusty men’s trousers and ill-fitting coat, and wished that I wasn’t dressed like a street urchin. Perhaps if I wasn’t, he would take me seriously.
Inspector Luckworth and Miss Adler approached. “Well, whatta you found, Brose?” asked Luckworth. He sounded disgruntled but resigned.
“A variety of things,” Grayling replied. “Death occurred four hours ago—”
“Closer to three,” I interjected, “based on the morbidity of the fingers.”
He turned those grayish eyes on me. They were close enough that I could see amber flecks in them. “A temperature reading I took from this device,” he said, producing a slender silver implement from some pocket of his vest, “indicates that the body began to lose heat at least four hours ago.”
Drat. I closed my mouth and nodded in agreement, trying not to look at the instrument with too much fascination. I’d never seen one so sleek and efficient. And even though mine was more primitive, I would never leave my thermometer home again. It was a much better measure of time of death than estimating rigor mortis.
“As I was saying,” Grayling continued in a smooth voice touched with Scottish brogue, “death occurred at approximately nine o’clock this evening from an apparent self-inflicted wound on the left wrist.”
“Suicide?” Luckworth said, his face going sharp and serious.
“It wasn’t suicide,” I said, just as Grayling interjected, “I said apparent.”
We looked at each other. His lips tightened, and he said, “Pray go on, Miss Holmes.”
My heart was pounding as I lifted the woman’s right arm, the unwounded limb. “It would be impossible not to get blood on this sleeve if she used this hand to cut her wrist,” I said. “It’s much too clean; only a few tiny drops. And—”
“Aside from that,” Grayling interrupted, “she wouldn’t have cut herself on that hand because—”
“She was left-handed,” we both said in unison.
“Indeed,” said Miss Adler, her eyes going back and forth between us.
“We’ll need to identify her,” said Luckworth, speaking to his partner.
“That won’t be difficult,” I said.
“No, it won’t,” Grayling said. “Based on her clothing, which is well-made of good fabric and from a seamstress, she comes from a well-to-do family. We can observe her shoes—”
“Or Miss Stoker can tell us her name,” I said, perhaps a trifle too loudly. I looked at the young woman in question, who’d been peering into the shadows as if looking for something. Or someone.
Grayling shot me a disgruntled look as Luckworth turned to my companion. “Well?” he said grumpily.
“I believe this is one of the Hodgeworth sisters. Lecia or Mayellen. Of St. James Park.”
Luckworth grumbled under his breath and wrote down the name as I took the opportunity to move toward the knife, which had heretofore been left unexamined. It still lay on the floor where the young man had dropped it at Miss Adler’s command. The blood had long dried on the blade and handle. I resisted the urge to pick it up to examine it.
“Look at this,” I said, forgetting Grayling and I were at odds. “Do you see this?” I crouched once again and lifted Miss Hodgeworth’s wounded arm to show him the incision. “Now look at the blade.”
Grayling knelt to get a closer look. The museum’s light glinted over his hair, highlighting occasional strands of copper and blond in the midst of dark mahogany waves. “That blade couldn’t have made this incision. The cut is too smooth, and—”
“The blade is dull and too thick,” I interrupted. “It would have made the skin jagged.”
“Precisely,” he murmured, still looking down at the wound. Grayling fished in another vest pocket and withdrew a gear-riddled metal object hardly larger than a pince-nez. It clinked as he settled it over one eye, fitting an ocular lens into place. Leather straps held the device over his temples and around the crown of his head; it looked like the inner workings of a clock with a pale blue glass piece through which one eye could see.
I’d never seen an Ocular-Magnifyer of that type before; this particular device seemed not only to magnify the objects, but to measure them as well. Grayling lifted his large, elegant fingers to his temple and turned a small wheel attached to the gears. I heard soft clicking sounds as it measured the wound on Miss Hodgeworth’s wrist.
Uncle Sherlock often complained about the lack of care taken at crime scenes by the authorities. They trampled over grounds and moved objects and, in his words, “wouldn’t notice a weapon unless it was pointed straight at them.” But even he would have found little to fault in Grayling’s handling of this crime scene, except, perhaps, for the use of such fancy gadgetry. My uncle was a medievalist when it came to such devices.
“What’s that there?” said Luckworth as he approached, noticing his partner’s task for the first time. “Wastin’ yer time with the numbers again, Brose? Why aren’t you questioning the witnesses here? They found the girl. Witnesses and people, not mathematics, is going to solve this case—and all of the others on your desk. I’m tired, and I want to get back to m’bed.”
Grayling stood, and his face appeared ruddier than usual. He didn’t look at me, but spoke to his partner in a stiff voice, one greenish-gray eye still magnified behind its lens. “Bertillon’s process has already proven useful in three cases—”
“In Paris,” Luckworth said. “Not here in London. Waste of blooming time—pardon me, Miss Holmes,” he added. “Hasn’t helped us to find Jack the Ripper, now, has it? Or the bloke who done away with the Martindale girl.”
“I thought the Martindale girl hanged herself.” I stood abruptly. “Are you saying she was murdered too?”
Grayling’s teeth ground together, and he shot Luckworth a glare as he yanked the magnifyer off. Then he looked at me for a moment. “There was no step,” he growled at last, as if in challenge. His Scottish burr had gone thick.
“Do you mean to say, there was nothing that she’d stood on to—ah—affix the rope to the tree branch, then knocked away?” I swallowed hard.
Grayling didn’t reply; therefore, I took that as an affirmative response.
If there was no step for her to stand on, Miss Martindale couldn’t have hanged herself. Someone else had to be involved.
We had two cases of young women dying in apparent suicide, that were not really suicides. And a third young woman who’d disappeared. Two of the women were connected by the Sekhmet scarab.
Would Miss Hodgeworth be as well?
Like my uncle, I didn’t believe in coincidences.
Miss Stoker
In Which Miss Stoker Is Fanned by a Glocky Sprite
I watched Mina Holmes climb into the horseless cab that had stopped in front of the building. The marble of the museum’s front colonnade entrance was cool to the touch as I slipped away. A wide stripe of moonlight filtered over the top of the vehicle and illuminated the glistening road. The gas lamps that normally lit the grounds were dark. Someone had been busy, making certain to keep the area in shadows.
Another carriage trundled by, this one pulled by a clip-clopping horse, but otherwise, the lowest street level was deserted. The only movement was a slinking cat and the something small and dark that was its prey.
I still couldn’t dismiss the rumble of shame at the way my insides had earlier pitched and churned at the scene of the dead girl. All that blood . . .
But the sight of poor Miss Hodgeworth had been nothing compared to my memory of Mr. O’Gallegh, his neck and torso torn open, his innards spilling out . . . and the red-eyed vampire that looked up at me, its fangs dripping
