She leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I must be off and deliver my gown into Mrs. Ryan’s very capable hands for a final touch with the smoothing iron before tomorrow evening.”
A reception the following evening...18 April!
BRODIE
“There is a woman who has worked for him in the past, according to Mr. Brown,” Mr. Conner explained. “She chose toleave his ‘employment’ after some disagreement over missing payments.
“He heard through one of his other ‘ladies’ that she was no longer working the streets but had gone exclusive with one particular customer, a German fella,” Mr. Conner added.
They had arrived in St. Giles, a poor working-class part of London. They stepped down from the hired hack. According to Mr. Conner, the woman they were looking for lived in a one-room flat in a tenement off Whitecross Street.
“Brown’s ‘employee’ saw him once when she encountered them on the street near Covent Garden. It seems there was a nasty argument, then they went off together.”
“The woman’s name?” Brodie asked, not that it would be her real name. Women often used aliases, either to hide what they did from their family, or as advertisement.
Imma Goodwas one name he recalled from his days with the MET—clever and sad.Miss Plentywas another. Both had ended badly, one lost to drugs, the other from the diseases that were often part of the profession.
“Kitty is her name,” Mr. Conner replied. “This is the place.” He indicated a rundown tenement. “Another tenant I found also recalled seeing Steiner about. First floor, one of the ‘finer’ flats according to the woman I spoke with, where Kitty moved just a few weeks ago at the insistence of her ‘gentleman’ friend.”
As Brodie knew only too well, the word ‘finer’could mean many things in comparison.
The tenement reminded him of countless others, jammed side by side in the poorer parts of London, so that it seemed they held the next one up, and if one collapsed, all on the same street would come down as well. He had once lived in a place very like the one they entered now, as Mr. Conner led the way to that first-floor flat.
This is the one,” he said. “The woman should be here this time of the day. Perhaps Steiner as well,” he cautioned, removing the service revolver that he’d retired with from under his coat.
Brodie retrieved his revolver as well, so generously returned by Sir Avery.
“I’ll keep the watch out here,” Conner whispered, from experience in the old days with the MET.
Brodie knocked on the door, then stood to the side of the threshold. He’d once seen a fellow constable shot through a closed door. The man had survived, but it was a hard lesson learned...one of many.
There was no answer. He then tried the latch. The door opened slightly. He exchanged a look with Mr. Conner, then pushed the door open further.
The all too familiar smell struck them first, the sort of stench that reached to the back of the throat and had nothing to do with usual squalid conditions or stale food.
Kitty’s naked body was sprawled on the floor, and by the smell and the look of her, she had been dead for several days. Left where she fell, she stared with blank eyes, blood dried on the floor from the cut on her throat.
“It would seem that Steiner has left the building for the last time,” Mr. Conner commented in that detached manner of one for whom the scene was all too familiar.
He searched the rest of the single room as Brodie crouched down beside the body. There was something clutched in the woman’s hand. It was a piece of cloth perhaps torn from Steiner’s shirt as they struggled?
The cloth was fine, the sort a man who was paid well might wear. And there was something more. Something cut into the woman’s skin?
“Nothing,” Conner announced. “The man is thorough when it comes to covering his trail.” He paused and gestured to the body.
“What is that mark on the woman’s breast?”
There was no electric in the flat. Conner took out the hand-held he carried on his nightly travels among London’s finest pubs. Some habits were hard to break.
He held the light over the upper body as Brodie gently probed the mark with the tip of the blade of his knife. It was not a cut.
“It appears to be the image of an animal,” Though the mark was slightly distorted from the discoloration and deterioration of the body, he recognized it. He had first seen it on that gold button Mikaela found at St. John’s Wood.
It was the image of a wolf’s head, and it had been burned into the woman’s skin.
Thirteen
It was wellinto the evening when Brodie returned.
