Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 6

Frere Jacques, Dormez-Vous?

Well I say, December's here already and January,

February and March are waiting for us and I'm one of

those plants which can't stand the cold of winter. Would you

like to see my legs? Then they say, Come along in. And

indoors it's so snug and warm that one immediately wants to

strip to one's chemise and stay like that. A fortnight later

one's so completely forgotten the draughty street-corners up our

way that the mere sight of a wet overcoat is enough

to astonish us.

-LA BELLE OTERO, MY DAYS AND NIGHTS

After our inspection of the death chamber, we were taken to another grand chamber and there sat down to wait. Inspector le Villard seemed much surprised by our composure.

Again ensconced in a grand but empty room, I occupied myself making sketches of the footprints on the scene in my tiny silver-encased notepad.

"Four sets," I noted. "Some dainty slipper impressions. A large man-size imprint, but narrowed with dandified daintiness at toe and heel. A ma.s.sive imprint as undefined as a bottle side. And many man-size boot prints, uniform in shape if not in size."

Irene nodded as she studied my sketches over my shoulder. "The ladies, the police in their uniform boots, and two men, one well shod and one ill shod."

"What would an ill-shod man be doing in such a room in such a place?"

"An excellent question, Nell. We shall have to see if a doctor was called previously, but I doubt it. Officialdom will only fully invade the scene now that our Eminent Personage is well away from the carnage."

Her last word suddenly took my mind and eye from microscopic distance to the enlarged view of everyday reality. I felt my stomach and my senses spinning.

The only remedy was to resume my close-work. I began to wonder if this was why fancywork attracted me.

I attempted a far more challenging artistic task: to draw an approximation of the barber's chair.

Irene inspected my efforts. "Very good."

"What is this thing?"

Her lips pursed as she eyed me. "You have held up very well, Nell."

"You always manage to say 'well, Nell,' as if you were declaiming 'how now, brown cow.' "

Her laugh was weary. "Guilty. I have underestimated you, I admit. But then, you were not reared in America, and are unused to uncivil atrocities."

"Ah. The Red Indians, you mean."

"Ah, the White Devils, I mean."

"Is that not an English play by Webster?"

"You have me there, Nell, as usual. No, what I mean is that because you have not been exposed to the incivilities of life that I and Pink have-"

"That chit!"

Irene eyed me until I blushed. "She is most forward," I said.

"Perhaps she has had need to be." Her look was so abstracted that she spoke to herself more than me. "He, of course would make a thorough job of it. It is not enough to see signs if you cannot read them."

I did not ask who "he, of course" was. "We have the contents of my needle case," I said in consolation, removing it from my pocket.

"Which are teasingly familiar to me, but not in this form." She frowned as she took the slender enamel container to a white-marble table topped by a great-globed lamp.

Sitting beside the table, she shook a pale brown fragment onto the glaring marble.

"A crumb, as you said," I suggested as I followed her to the impromptu specimen table. "But why would anyone have eaten in there?"

"A crumb could have been picked up on a boot or shoe and have dropped off in the murder chamber."

"Then it could have dropped off the footwear of those poor women."

I fought the memory of their feet, one of the few recognizable portions of their anatomy, clad in rumpled silken hose and embroidered satin shoes. Cinderella shoes. And then I remembered the Grimm fairy tale about the girl whose bloodred shoes would not come off until she had danced to her death.

Irene lifted my spectacles to her face again, peering at the single crumb as through a lorgnette. "Not bread, though brown and crumbly. Yet it reminds me of something. Ah, well." Her smallest fingernail prodded the mote back into the Oriental needle case, which I could finally think of again by its proper name, etui. It was shocking to think that my humble case had carried a grain of evidence from a scene of such chaos.

"The police are right about one thing," Irene said.

I waited.

"They will not know what really happened here until they examine the bodies at the morgue."

"You don't believe that we-?"

"Should view the remains? The police would not let us, and even our anonymous . . . er, client, would not be interested in our opinion of that."

Irene straightened and absently turned down the lamp, an economy we practiced at Neuilly because the oil for them must be hauled in by the barrel.

Here, in this palace of luxurious decadence, I believe her gesture was an instinctive effort to soften the bright light and harsh shadows that made every scene seemed etched in the black-and-white cartoon of a sensational newspaper drawing.

"What do you know of the Jack the Ripper murders in London, Nell?" she asked.

I started, guilty. I recalled feeling the same unhappy emotion what now seemed ages ago (and had only been hours ago), when I realized that I relished the notion of Irene and I alone together again.

Indeed we were.

I started guiltily now because last autumn I had suffered from an irresistible curiosity about that string of atrocities in the city we had left in haste only months before. I had such a case of curiosity, in fact, that I devoured any English-language newspapers available. Luckily, G.o.dfrey acquired them regularly for the political and legal news. Naturally, after seeing the lurid sketches of the Whitechapel horrors, my jaded eyes saw this far-removed death scene as drawn in charcoal on dun-colored paper.

"I ask," Irene said, "because I confess I did not pay them much attention, except to be glad of leaving a capital that was so beset."

"Oh. You do not know much about them." What a rare opportunity. I personally thought that Irene was rarely interested in newspapers unless she was in them. "I could hardly avoid reading of the atrocities. Truly, a madman was abroad. He was so often almost glimpsed, yet still eluded everyone, like some ogre out of a wicked fairy tale, chopping up children, except these women were hardly innocents. No reason for it all but unreasoning savagery. It did not seem at all English."

"No?" Irene's gaze was piercing. "What of Balaclava? Or Mai-wand?"

"Well, that was war. Men murdering men, and used to it. Whatever those poor women were, they were defenseless."

"And poor, quite literally." Irene sighed and handed me the etui. "Store this for a while. It is time to revisit Pink. Now that we have seen what she has seen, she will be more forthcoming."

"Why so?"

"Shared shock creates bonds between strangers."

"And why should we want a bond with a girl who is already on the path to perdition?"

Irene leaned close enough to whisper, every word clipped. "Because we might change her path, Nell. Is that not a n.o.ble goal?"

"But it would require consorting with a fallen woman."

"And how are they to be kept from falling even more if the righteous will not consort with them?"

"I suppose they won't. But the chance for infection-"

"You are saying that the righteous are weak?"

"No. Only that evil is contagious."

"So," said Irene, "is ignorance. I believe that if we can discover why someone would kill these women in such a fas.h.i.+on, we shall know a great deal more about evil, and righteousness, than we did before."

"Oh, my head is spinning like a compa.s.s. We should not be here. We should not be inquiring into these morbid matters: we should not be encouraging a girl of tender years in a life of depravity."

Irene drew back, some of the censorious glint in her eyes dimming. "This place is depraved, I'll grant you that, Nell." Her expression softened as it rested on my troubled expression. "That young woman will be better for sharing her horror. Perhaps this incident will cure her of a life of luxurious vice," she added dryly.

"That is true," I agreed, hastening after her out the door with new heart. "One theory about Jack the Ripper was that he sought to discourage women from taking to the streets."

"An annuity would have perhaps been more persuasive," Irene threw over her shoulder. "I am so relieved that you have some acquaintance with the previous work of this monster."

It was one of those times when I sensed that Irene's words were as double-edged as the most lethal of swords, but I could not say why, nor determine who was the recipient of her highly honed instincts, Jack the Ripper, or I.

Pink had not moved. She might have been the portrait she had resembled when I first saw her.

Her head lifted as we entered the room, and I realized that our ammonia-scoured nostrils were failing to detect the new odor of the charnel house that clung to our clothing.

Pink's face hid in her open hands. "You've seen it."

"As much as we can make out," Irene agreed, resuming her former seat.

"Both of you?" Pink asked incredulously, lifting her eyes from her fingertips like a naughty child peeping through them. They queried me.