A Coldblooded Scoundrel

A Coldblooded Scoundrel

JoAnne Soper-Cook

Introduction

Scotland Yard Inspector Philip Devlin's past comes back to haunt him when a series of gruesome murders unsettles Victorian London, and most especially the Yard. Why does the killer single out Devlin for his game of cat and mouse? Is his killing spree something personal?

Interwoven into the suspense of this story is a generous dose of humour, provided by the warm-hearted Devlin himself, as well as his motley group of assistants, amongst them a charmingly inept, infatuated constable, a pair of elegant graverobbers and a couple of free-thinking sapphites, all of whom have a colourful history and personality of their own.

Join JoAnne Soper-Cook's eccentric characters on the killer's trail through clammy London streets, wild clubs, secret societies and country inns.

One

It never got any easier. Inspector G. Phillip Devlin, standing with his head bared to the pouring rain, tried to remember - not for the first time - why he was here. Of course it was tradition, and a custom of his, almost a punishment of sorts, that he turn up here every year on this date and reflect upon her grave, to remember. It was ten years since the fire - since she fell to her death trying to escape the flames, the certainty of her own mortality. Ten years, and every year he made himself come here and remember her, even though it nearly killed him. If only he'd been quicker, if only he'd done more to save her, if only he'd been able to dissuade the other one, the one who'd doused her clothing in alcohol spirits, the one who swore he'd 'set the little bitch afire.'

Of course Devlin had failed, and Elizabeth Hobbs had died - another victim of another crime, all in a day's work for a police inspector, yes, yes.

He still saw her face in his dreams, and relived the occasion of her death in his nightmares. He would never be free of it - it was his fault that she had died, because he hadn't been enough of a policeman to stop the deadly cycle of events. He could never forgive himself for that, for the gross omission of his duties.

He put on his hat, knelt down as he usually did and pressed his lips to the cold, cold stone. "I'm sorry." He could hardly force the words past the lump in his throat, and even though he was alone in the cemetery, he was grateful for the driving October rain that effectively hid his tears. Anything, he thought, was easier than this. Anything at all.

He hailed a cab just outside the cemetery gates and climbed inside, his mind curiously empty of sensation. His gloved hands lay in his lap, nerveless, and his dark eyes gazed openly at nothing at all. For the duration of the ride back to Scotland Yard, he deliberately concentrated on the sense of emptiness - he knew if he didn't, he would weep again, and that would never do.

"Sir?" Constable Lewis stood a respectful distance from Devlin's desk - as thick as he was throughout, even Lewis knew that Devlin was not himself today, and he hesitated to push where he knew he was not wanted. He cleared his throat and began again: "Sir?"

"Yes?" Devlin had been staring at the pile of paper on his desk for half an hour, willing his mind into activity, but so far he'd had no luck. He felt old today - old and tired, worn out and used-up. He'd have to stop going to the cemetery, he thought - it wasn't doing him any good, and it certainly wasn't doing Elizabeth Hobbs any good, seeing how she'd been in the ground this ten years and her murderer gone free on a technicality because of his aristocratic blood and his family's goddamned money.

"I thought you'd like some tea, sir. Bloody wet and cold out there today." Lewis laid down a thick mug of the steaming brew and stood back again. The inspector still hadn't moved so much as an inch, was still occupied with his internal considerations, whatever they were. Lewis hoped to be an inspector himself, someday, and he wondered precisely what sorts of things men like Devlin were wont to think about - but Lewis was a mere twenty-two to Devlin's thirty-five, and could have no real idea.

Devlin blinked, seeming to draw himself back from a great distance, and stared at Lewis as if he'd just then materialised from out of the floor. "What?" He scratched his head in a distracted manner, further disturbing his hair which, when wet, tended to arrange itself into astonishing cowlicks and curlicues which were not at all germane to the habitual dignity of a Yard inspector.

Lewis allowed himself the hint of a smile - he liked it when Devlin allowed himself to become just that little bit disarranged, because, truth be told, Lewis fancied his superior and thought that Devlin was, if not exactly handsome in a conventional sense, one of the most attractive men he'd ever had the privilege to know. But he'd never repeat this to Devlin - it simply wasn't done for constables to mingle with their superiors, and anyway, there remained the thorny problem of the Act. There was no getting round that, and who wanted to end up in Reading Gaol for the price of a weekend bit of slap-and-tickle with a fetching police inspector...a police inspector who looked younger than his thirty- five years and whose dark hair held an auburn gleam when the light was just so, and whose deep brown eyes with their long lashes were, well, quite lovely. Lewis sighed gently.

"Something wrong, Constable?" Devlin picked up the tea and examined it intently before bringing the mug to his mouth and sipping it with great enjoyment.

"No, sir." Lewis withdrew a piece of paper from underneath his left elbow and passed it across the desk to Devlin. "Thought you might want to see this, sir."

Devlin took the paper and examined it carefully. "I am down on whores," he read aloud, "and I shan't quit ripping them - " He tossed the paper onto the growing pile at the front of his desk and treated Lewis to a look of utter contempt. "For the love of God!" he said. "The Ripper case has been done, Freddie!" It behooved Devlin, at a time like this, to use the diminutive of Constable Lewis's first name. "Where did you dig this up, eh? Been foraging in the rubbish bins again?" He sat back and pressed his fingers against his eyes, still sore and gritty from a sleepless night.

"It's not left over from the Ripper, sir - course not, that was two years ago." Lewis shifted his not inconsiderable weight to his other foot and regarded Devlin with a weather eye. "Just came in this morning. Young lad brought it round, he did. Said to give it to Inspector Devlin."

Devlin was too old and too experienced to allow himself the luxury of a wide-eyed expression of shock - but something deep inside him recoiled from the cold, blunt fist of anguish that always struck him whenever he remembered the Ripper. He fumbled in his desk for his cigarettes, struck a match with rather more of a flourish than was strictly necessary, and hoped Lewis didn't notice the overt shaking of his hands.

But Lewis had. "You alright, sir?"

Devlin treated him to a withering look. "Of course I'm alright, Freddie!" He drew hard on his cigarette. "Didn't sleep well last night," he muttered.

Of course, Freddie Lewis reasoned, Devlin had been sleeping alone, in his admittedly mean accommodations, with no one to comfort him...no one to take him into their arms at night and hold him, trace the lines of his lean face with love and compassion and perhaps, just as dawn was lightening the inspector's rooms, coax him into a little bit of the old rumpy-pumpy. It was to Freddie Lewis's credit that his internal dialogue still retained more than a passing familiarity with his working-class origins. He'd have never called it "making love" or even "fucking", the way Devlin was wont to do. Such talk would have been giving himself airs.

"Sorry to hear that, sir." Lewis refused to meet Devlin's eyes, and fixed his gaze stolidly on the worn carpet between his feet.

"Mind your own bloody business!" Devlin snapped, and instantly regretted it. "Look, Freddie - " He sighed noisily, allowed his gaze to rest upon the tall young constable. Freddie Lewis looked like something off a Peak Freans tin, if you caught him in the right light, or else an hyperbolic illustration of "The Glories of the Empire". Freddie Lewis was a shade over six feet tall, with long bones that in another man might have been lanky and ungainly. His hair was a particular shade of curly blond, lighter at the ends, as if he'd just now got back from a holiday in the South Seas. His eyes were brown, but not the deep, nearly-black of Devlin's own - Freddie's eyes were the colour of warm hazelnut cream, and his careful mouth always managed to retain the hint of a smirk. In another set of circumstances, Freddie might have felt at home in the crimson uniform of one of the Foot battalions - he had that sort of bearing. Devlin had no idea how Freddie had managed to become a Peeler.

" - I'm not sure what we've got, exactly," Devlin managed to say. He took another sip of his tea - by God, how did Freddie know he liked it just this way? A hint of sugar, generous amounts of milk - and wondered when the throbbing in his skull was going to subside. "You've got to keep an eye out for these kinds of copycats - every man-jack on the docks fancies himself some sort of dark character, if only for the pleasure of his own vanity." It was one of the longest speeches Devlin had ever made, and it exhausted him.

"Beggin' your pardon, Inspector - " Devlin's pardon was effectively begged by a very junior constable from downstairs, with startling orange hair and a veritable blizzard of freckles. " - the Chief says he's wantin' to see yer in his office, like."

"Did he say what it was about?" Devlin could have bitten off his tongue - here was this morning's first breach of protocol, following hard on the heels of a hellish beginning in the cemetery. Of course this urchin had no idea - how could he?

"No idea, sir. Said for me to fetch you." The lad sketched a quick glance at Lewis and scuttled away down the corridor like a startled land crab.

"Think it's about the note?" Lewis shot a look at Devlin. "Or perhaps Old Brassie's got his knickers in a twist again."

"Constable - " Devlin sounded a warning note: he, like all the others, knew Sir Neville Alcock's nickname among the force, but that didn't mean he had to countenance its use among the junior officers. " - don't let me hear you say it again." The term 'Brassie' had been coined by some semi- literate wag in Special Branch, who thought that a man with a surname like 'All Cock' must have a nether member made of brass. Of course the name had stuck, to the merriment of all concerned, and even those youngest of the constables who were just entering the service were necessarily briefed on its proper uses and abuses. Devlin paused to straighten his necktie and attempted to smooth down his hair with the aid of his palms, but to no effect. He glanced at himself in the small shaving mirror mounted over his filing cabinet: tired eyes, face too pale from lack of sleep, shoulders already sagging even though it was barely eleven in the morning.

"You look fine, sir." Lewis appeared behind him, smiling gently. "Perfectly alright." Privately, he remarked to himself that Devlin needed a good sleep, a hot bath and a hot meal and then a bloody good rogering, not necessarily in that order.

Devlin's eyes met those of the constable in the mirror, and for a moment something indefinable passed between them, something wistful and sweet. "I should be about an hour, depending - " Devlin tossed this off over his shoulder as he flew out the door. "Make another pot of tea!"

Freddie Lewis grinned, and set about doing just that.

Sir Neville Alcock was huge - not plump or merry or even well fleshed, but huge, enormous, a vast rolling bulk of a man with a belly the approximate size of some larger species of barrel. His hands were little, fat and doughy as suet, and his head sat atop the great mound of his body like a Jack-o-Lantern. All in all, he seemed to be composed of several intersecting spheres, rather like a snowman. "Devlin."

Devlin sagged visibly. Sir Neville could manage to fit more disappointment into the two syllables of the inspector's name than most people did; surely this couldn't be good news. "Sir?" He took the glass of brandy that Sir Neville offered, took care not to quaff it too hastily, and sat down at Sir Neville's indication that he should do so.

"The Ripper." It was another feature of Sir Neville's not-inconsiderable personality that he flittered out bits of news in short, staccato bursts, rather like burps - or, as Freddie Lewis was wont to say, like hen farts. Devlin made a mental note to speak to Lewis. "We've had strange happenings of late, Devlin."

"Like what, sir?" Devlin gazed into the brandy, warming the glass between his palms. Odd how, in certain light, the glossy liquid retained the colour of flame -

I'll set her on fire! I'll send the little bitch to Hell! You see if I don't do it! Devlin jerked backwards so violently that some of the brandy sloshed onto the leg of his trousers.

"Devlin, are you quite alright?" Sir Neville was staring at him, irritated that his monologue had been so interrupted.

"Quite, sir. Please - go on." He willed his quivering nerves to still themselves, looked away from the brandy in his glass. It wouldn't do if he were to go to pieces after all this time, and it had been ten years...ten years since he'd stood in that empty flat in Crutchley Road and tried to bargain with a madman. See if I don't do it! The images presented themselves one after the other, a parade of mental photographs: Elizabeth Hobbs, fourteen years old and already habituated to the streets - a whore, a common doxy, procured long ago by someone who'd wanted a taste of virgin flesh and was willing to pay for it. She wasn't the first of her kind, and Devlin knew she wouldn't be the last - but here was someone with a specific grudge against her, a customer who'd paid his money and had his fun, but got something else in the bargain. Devlin wasn't sure how long it took syphilitics to die. Perhaps Elizabeth had already been so far-gone that her murderer had been doing her a favour - no, that was too easy. Devlin shook his head.

"So you don't agree - that's good. I knew I could count on you." Sir Neville heaved his bulk up out of the chair and went to look out the window, feigning nonchalance.

Devlin wondered what, exactly, he'd disagreed with, but the conversation was too far gone for him to start back-pedalling now. "Quite so, sir." He cleared his throat. "So I'll bring some of the constables into it, as well?"

Sir Neville turned and glared at him. "Goddammit, man! Weren't you listening?" His fat hands worked awkwardly at the air directly in front of his chest. "I want to keep it quiet, I told you - find out where this letter came from and if it's genuine, or if some copycat in Chiswick or Brixton thinks to have himself some fun."

Devlin sagged with relief. "Right," he said, with as much crispness as he could muster. "I'll get on it immediately, sir." He laid down the brandy glass and stood, eager to make his exit and grateful that he'd been able to effectively avoid any awkwardness over his small gaffe, his inattention. He was within blessed sight of the doorway when -

"Oh, Devlin - "

Devlin composed his face into appropriate lines before turning round. "Sir?"

"Er...my wife is having a little tea dance on Saturday next - "

Devlin stifled a groan by driving his teeth forcibly into his bottom lip.

" - and she wanted me to invite you and young Lewis."

Devlin had a momentary vision: being wheeled gracefully around the room in Lewis's grip, to the strains of a violin, a cello or two -

"My daughter Phoebe will be there - she's been at her auntie's in Swansea these three months, and I know she will want to make your acquaintance." Sir Neville paused, wrinkling his walrus-like moustache. "Not, er...married, are you, Devlin?"

"No, sir - that is to say, not yet." Devlin coughed - he was about as near to marriage as Gibraltar was to the South Pole. "But it's definitely in my future plans, sir."

Damn!

"Ah...well, you will want to meet my Phoebe, then." Devlin imagined what this paragon must look like: four feet tall and five feet wide, with great rolls of fat barely concealed beneath some hideous haute couture creation. Perhaps there was a way to escape what seemed to be his preordained fate - he might arrange to have Freddie Lewis push him over the Tower Bridge. The foetid water of the Thames would kill him instantly.

"Thank you, sir." Devlin took his leave as gracefully as quickness would allow.

At least old Brassie would see to it that Lewis had to suffer, right along with his favourite inspector. This in itself was enough to draw Inspector Devlin's lean face into a smile.

Two

I'm going to burn her like she's burned me! The sulphurous smell of the lit match, illuminating the small rooms - Devlin drew hard on his cigarette and went to push open one of his windows. Not sleeping again, he thought wryly - haven't slept properly for ten bloody years, now. At times like these, he was glad he lived alone, for there was no one to see or comment on his bizarre hours, or the fact that he sometimes started up out of a sound sleep, a scream of horror dying in his throat.

He rubbed his hand over his tired face, his fingers scraping on stubble, and leaned against the windowsill. The night air was cold, but it was a good cold, and it helped to blow the nasty dreams out of his head, the ones that came just as he was falling asleep, when his ability to tell fact from illusory deception was deadened by exhaustion. He wondered what Freddie Lewis was doing, this time of night - the mantel clock said it was just gone eleven-thirty. Did Freddie have friends that he went out with, drinking in the pubs or chasing pretty little doxies in the Piccadilly Circus? It was hard to imagine him sitting at home, and yet Devlin knew that Freddie had a widowed mother and a younger sister entirely in his charge. What did a lad like Freddie do on cool October nights, when his daylight duties were all effectively discharged?

Right at that moment, Freddie Lewis was in a pub, but not the sort of pub that Devlin might have imagined, and it wasn't doxies he was chasing. Well, Freddie admitted, he wasn't chasing anyone tonight, which wasn't like him - he wondered if he had lost his touch. No, he thought, as he brought his cigarette to his lips, it wasn't that - his mind was entirely on Inspector Devlin.

The inspector hadn't been himself today, and Freddie wondered what that had to do with, or whether Devlin was sick, or merely tired and overworked. The warm brown eyes creased with tender mirth as Freddie imagined myriad ways of making his dear inspector feel much better - things Devlin had probably never thought of, much less heard of.

"Freddie, you raddled old whore - all alone tonight?" Dennis Dalziel tapped him on the shoulder as he went past, in company with an elegant man that bore a certain resemblance to the solicitor, Reginald Harker - but it couldn't be. The older man turned and gave Freddie a wink, and a delicious smile, before disappearing into the evening with Dennis. Thank God for the Peacock, Freddie thought, not without chagrin, for no one of his persuasion was truly safe in London these days, not since the Act. He shuddered, stubbing out his cigarette with an expression of distaste. Even the Peacock Club could, on times, be a most unsavoury venue for a young man who simply wanted the company of his own kind....

He wondered if Devlin was sleeping. Probably not. He checked his watch: a quarter to midnight. Was Devlin asleep? And if so, would it be utterly criminal to wake him? Freddie sighed aloud - what in God's name would he say, once he'd got to Devlin's house? 'I was sitting in this club I go to, called the Peacock? It's a sort of molly house - and I kept thinking about you and I wondered if you'd mind a little bit of Bob's-your-uncle before bedtime....' Christ. Not bloody likely.

What would it be like, though? He knew he shouldn't torture himself with fantasies about what he could never have, but - Freddie rationalised it to himself this way, as he reclaimed his coat from the cloakroom - thinking about Devlin was so delicious in itself that he could hardly refuse to indulge. He'd start with kissing Devlin - taking the inspector's face into his hands and capturing his mouth, kissing long and slow and deep until Devlin's toes curled. He wanted to unbutton Devlin's clean white shirt and lave the warm skin of his chest with his tongue...he wanted the full body press, right there on the floor, on the sofa, on Devlin's or anybody's bed....

Freddie sighed, and slipped out of the Peacock Club, carefully unseen.

In his rooms elsewhere in London, Devlin fell into a fitful sleep, and dreamed of Old Brassie's hefty daughter who had breasts like Easter hams. Towards the middle of the dream Freddie Lewis rescued him, dressed in the scarlet uniform of some illustrious Foot battalion - Freddie put Devlin up on his horse and they clattered out of sight.

Devlin turned over in his sleep, and smiled.

Somewhere beyond his rooms, the Bow Bells chimed the hours, and the traffic of the London underworld moved slowly through its accustomed paces. Nothing touched him in his cocoon of sleep, as he rode with the dream of Freddie Lewis on his ridiculous white charger, looking like Sir Lancelot or some impossibly beautiful officer of the Foot battalion. He rode with Freddie out of London, past the suburbs whose names he knew only slightly, and into the countryside. Time folded in upon itself, as it often does in the elastic language of dreams, and Devlin was lying on the grass, gazing up through oak leaves at the sky. His shirt had somehow contrived to become unbuttoned, but he didn't mind, because the warm air was delicious on his skin, and someone - it didn't matter who - was slowly, gently stripping him of all his clothes and running their warm hands over him, and in his sleep Devlin arched his back, his lonely flesh seeking the caress of the unseen hands. Perhaps a whimper escaped him, but he didn't know, and he would never know, because the loveliness of the dream evaporated into the dingy walls of his bachelor flat -

"Sir."

Devlin blinked, desperate to clear his vision. He saw that he'd thrown the blankets off himself, and he wondered just how much writhing he'd had to be doing...and where the hell had Freddie Lewis come from?

"Sir - Old Brassie sent me over here to rouse you. We've had another letter - it's bad this time." In the pale morning light, Freddie's features were shadowed, haunted by a grievous shock. Devlin knew it was as the constable had said - judging by the expression on Freddie's face, it had to be very, very bad indeed.

Devlin set his bare feet upon the floor, dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his eyes with his palms. "How did you get in?"

"Your landlady let me in - she said you'd been up and pacing the floor till two this morning, so you were probably still sleeping." Freddie moved about Devlin's sparse lodgings, peering into the wardrobe and the dresser drawers, collecting articles of clothing with an appearance of great industry. He withdrew Devlin's shoes from underneath the bed and laid them out, selected a necktie from inside the wardrobe.

Devlin watched this performance with a feeling of immense irritation. "Freddie, since when have you become my personal valet?" He was still tired, and his night-shirt hid the vestiges of a stubborn erection, courtesy of that damned dream - how in God's name could he stand up and let a younger constable see the precise tilt of his yardarm?

"Sorry, sir - only Old Brassie said it was urgent." Freddie's mouth wasn't quite smirking, but Devlin wasn't fooled.

"Well - go out on the landing while I get dressed, for God's sake." His dressing gown was within reach on the end of the bed, and Devlin caught it to him, belted it securely round his lean middle. "If you want to make yourself useful, go ask Mrs. Taylor for some breakfast - I take it you've already eaten?"

Freddie sniffed, clearly wounded. "I wouldn't mind a muffin and a cup of tea," he said. "I've been up since five-thirty and you know how Dobbin makes the tea - "

Devlin didn't wait for him to finish: he knew the litany as well as anyone. "- like a whore's piss on a February morning: steaming, cold, and yellow." He caught hold of Freddie's shoulder and steered him gently towards the landing. "Run along and chat with Mrs. Taylor, there's a good lad." With any luck, Mrs. Taylor would sequester Freddie in her kitchen and rattle his lugs off with discussions of the spider veins along her nether parts. It was a description Devlin had already heard, and one he didn't care to hear again.

"His throat's slit - nearly took his head off." Freddie Lewis straightened up, his mouth compressed so that it was nearly invisible. "Bastard."

"How long?" Devlin spoke through the handkerchief pressed against his nose and mouth.

"Couple of street arabs found him this morning, round about four-thirty."

Devlin removed the handkerchief long enough to grin. "So that's why Old Brassie knocked you up so early?"

It was hard for Freddie Lewis to contain his smirk, but the effort was, Devlin had to admit, admirable. "He said you older fellas need your rest."

"Mmmm." Devlin circled the body, his methodical mind carefully noting pertinent details. "I've seen hogs butchered neater than this," he remarked. "Obviously he's got a taste for serrated instruments - nothing tidy about him."

"There's something else, sir." Lewis bent and deftly flicked the corner of the sheet away from the lower half of the dead man's body. The smell of charred flesh struck Devlin full in the face and he staggered backwards. I'll burn the little bitch! " He tried to cover up his tracks, he did - figured he'd burn the body. Only for the rain we had last night - "

Devlin's distraught mind seized upon this mundane fact and used it to wrench him back into the present moment. "It rained last night?"

Freddie blinked rapidly, as if he hadn't heard Devlin correctly. "Yes, sir - poured buckets round about two o'clock. There was puddles on the street this morning when I got up."

"Puddles."

"Yes, sir." Freddie peered at Devlin. "Are you alright, sir?"

Devlin impaled the constable with a glance. "Cover him up." He gestured at the body, indicated that Lewis should follow him; Devlin was already climbing the stairs and Lewis, for all his youth, was having difficulty keeping up. He could just imagine what a tiger Devlin must be in bed - here he suppressed another smirk - considering how physically adept the inspector was. Freddie's gaze followed the outline of his superior's body through the thick Donegal, resting on Devlin's well-shaped backside. Despite the chill of the morning, and the necessary coldness of the police morgue, Freddie was sweating.

Back upstairs, in Devlin's office, Freddie took himself off to make tea while Devlin pored over the crime scene photographs. His skin had gone icy cold, but for all that, he was sweating as if he'd just run a mile behind a drover's cart. Tried to burn the body, Freddie had said...but it couldn't be. Surely Whittaker had learned his lesson, even if he'd got off on a technicality - surely to God he hadn't come back for another go at it, just on the matter of some sick principle, or to take another slap at Devlin.... It was comforting to think that maybe Whittaker had forgotten, had mellowed in his years away from London, and seen the error of his ways. Devlin had heard the little bastard had been farmed out to Australia by his parents, both of whom understood the principle of money talking and shit, therefore, walking. Devlin reflected sourly that it was always the way with these cases - a toff murdered some dockyard floozy with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody thought twice about it.

He looked up as Freddie arrived with the mugs, laid a steaming cup of the fragrant brew down in front of Devlin. "What time is it?" Devlin asked. He could have pulled out his watch and checked for himself but he felt tired beyond his years, and heavy as lead.

"Half-eleven, sir." Freddie reached into the filing cabinet, rummaging for a biscuit tin. "Still too early for a drink." He cast a grin at Devlin, who responded reluctantly, but in kind, and sat down in the chair opposite Devlin's desk.

He'd hated travelling to Brixton to wake Devlin at the ungodly hour that he had - he understood, if no one else did, the kind of strain that the inspector had been under lately, even if Devlin didn't understand it himself. If it were up to him, Freddie reflected, he'd have let Devlin sleep till the afternoon, and made some suitable excuse to Old Brassie as to why the inspector was so late to his post. Besides - here Freddie savoured a tiny frisson of pleasure - Devlin looked so damned cute when he was asleep.

"It can't possibly be."

Freddie glanced up from his tea. "Sorry, sir?"

"Whittaker - you ever hear of Whittaker, Constable?" Devlin reached into the filing cabinet and pulled out a thick, rather imposing-looking folder and dropped it onto the desk. It made a thick, rather imposing thud and disposed some smaller pieces of paper into the region around Freddie's shoes.

"The original, you mean." Freddie darted a glance at Devlin from underneath his eyebrows, opening the file and paging through it as though he'd seen it all before. Devlin had to admire the lad's sang froid. He'd seen what was in there - he'd written most of the reports himself - and it was hardly what the literate population of the Yard would term light entertainment. "The one this killer is copy-catting."

Devlin permitted himself a mirthless laugh. "Perhaps."

"You don't think this is Whittaker's work?" Freddie thought for a moment, his warm brown eyes holding Devlin's gaze. "Is he stupid enough to come back to London and try this again?"

"You tell me."

Freddie closed the file and sat back heavily. For long moments there was nothing in the room but the sound of their breathing - Freddie's: contemplative, even, and Devlin's: ragged, tense. "Came back to finish the job?" Freddie knew it had to be said, and figured he ought to be the one to say it.

Devlin nodded. "Yes. You see, it's me he's really after - it's me he's always been after - "

" - then tell old Snowman that you want a month or two of leave, and by God, cut and run! I know some people in the Hebrides - "

Devlin had no doubt that Freddie did, indeed, know 'some people' in the Hebrides, but whether they were of the human variety was not entirely sure. "No." He laid one hand flat on the desk between them. "I won't, Freddie."

" - but if he's - "

"That wasn't a request, Constable!"

Freddie subsided into silence, his fingers toying awkwardly with the handle of his cup. "I see. Sir."

"No, you don't bloody well see, Constable - Freddie." How in the name of God to frame it so that someone as young and stupid as Lewis could understand? Devlin wasn't even sure he understood it himself.

"So you stay in London and wait until he comes and finishes you off?" Freddie rose, laid the mug down on Devlin's desk with an audible thump, rage grooming in his eyes. "Just hang about until he turns up - is that it?"

The back of Devlin's neck prickled and his face flushed. "Why the hell should you care?" he snapped.

"I - " Freddie's mouth opened and closed like a dying carp. "Never mind," he said quietly. He snatched his coat from the hook beside Devlin's office door. "I'll see you later."

For once, the obligatory 'sir' was absent.

Devlin decided to let Freddie sulk awhile, perhaps burn off some of his irritation in the Sergeant's room below - it would do him good, and besides, Devlin wasn't up to explaining his motives to Freddie - or to anybody - just now. He spent his time pulling every piece of information that he had on Whittaker, poring through files long since archived in the dusty attic storage room that was, and always had been presided over by Jack Melville. Melville had retired from the Force long before Devlin's time, but was so dedicated an archivist that, when he finally shuffled off the earthly pile, his last will and testament included instructions that his preserved, taxidermied remains be forever interred in the same room he had so long occupied in life. He therefore occupied the space just past the door, preserved in all his withered splendour in a glass box built especially for him. Devlin stopped and gazed in at him, as he always did when venturing into the archives; it might have been his imagination, but he felt old Melville had shrunk a bit in height these last few months. Probably the dryness of the summer, Devlin supposed.

He found what he was looking for in some boxes toward the back, albeit with much sneezing and cursing (no one dusted the archive room or old Melville) and a painful wrench to his left elbow.

I'm going to burn the little bitch. You see if I don't.

Devlin's head snapped up, every nerve taut and quivering. He could have sworn - no, his mind was probably going, in that case. And anyway, there was no one here except himself and the dried remains of old Jack Melville, who couldn't possibly have spoken through the mortician's prongs that held his lips together. He allowed himself the indulgence of a mental shrug and returned to burrowing through the boxes.

Send the little whore to Hell where she belongs.

He was sweating now, and not from any excess of heating in the archives room: his fingertips left several wet places on the papers he was sorting, and his collar was suddenly too tight. He reached to unbutton it, gave himself another mental shake. Damned room was giving him the willies...

Burn you too, Devlin. Just see if I don't.

He'd pulled out the original reports, all signed by him - he remembered bashing them out on the weathered old typewriter in the downstairs office, one painful letter at a time. Whittaker, scion of an old English family, obscure as his Saxon roots and just as bloody...he hadn't taken down any other tarts except Elizabeth Hobbs...and he'd pursued her across the breadth of London...

Devlin had been a stripling constable in those days, proud of the uniform and the fact that he was manly enough to fill it. He'd been assigned to the Complaints desk the first day she'd come in, just off the day shift at the woollen mills, smelling of lanolin and steam. Man chasing her, she said - she kept seeing him loitering in the street outside her lodgings. Did she ever take home gentlemen in the evenings? Devlin had phrased it to her as politely as he knew how, expecting that she would demur, protest that he was casting aspersions on her virtue - but no. She owned up to it, the brazen little doxy, said she often found a john or two amongst the toffs, who liked a bit on the side now and then. Especially a bit from down around the docks, a girl who knew all the proper tricks and still looked like she'd just come up to London from the country. Didn't give him no call to follow her around, she said, "interfere with her." Devlin wondered where she'd got that phrase - certainly not in the woollen mills, or on the streets.

The worst thing was her loveliness, her wide blue eyes, her golden hair, and the skin so pale as to be almost translucent. She seemed a thing made for light to pass through, wholly pure - and even then (though Devlin could not know it) she was in the tertiary stage of syphilis, dying by degrees.

Burn the little bitch.

Devlin grasped the file tightly and willed the shaking in his hands to stop.

He had to admit he liked watching Inspector Devlin. Especially now, when he was lying at the mercy of whatever he'd found in the archives, whatever sordid things were contained in the Yard's old files. Devlin in the midst of mental concentration was a sight to behold, with his collar button undone and his hair falling over his forehead, his long fingers twitching through the pages, oblivious to whatever might be lurking just beyond the door or even in the very room, for God's sake. For someone with as much experience as Devlin, such openly careless behaviour was practically an invitation to disaster. One would think Devlin would understand the kinds of dangers that existed even in this place.

One would hope Devlin had not forgotten.

Three

Freddie Lewis was waiting when Devlin returned from the archives, dusty but beaming in something very like triumph. Freddie had managed to burn off his little fit of pique in a game of cards and a brisk walk around the block; the physical exercise had done wonders for both his mood and his intelligence, and he was certain he was prepared, if need be, to dissuade his dear inspector from his dangerously questionable course of action.

Devlin, characteristically, made no mention of their earlier disquisition. "What time is it?" he asked. He had a smudge of dirt on the tip of his nose, and another on his chin. Freddie had to physically restrain himself from fetching out his handkerchief and cleaning the inspector up.

"Quarter to six." Freddie gestured at Devlin's face. "You seem to have collected a little evidence of your own, sir."

"Eh?" Devlin gazed at him blankly, his mind still wholly occupied with the Whittaker files, the evidence and facts. He followed Freddie's pointing finger to the shaving mirror. "Damn." Devlin chuckled. "How is it you always notice such things, Constable?"

Freddie coughed diplomatically. "It's the light, sir."

"Hmmm." Devlin was having trouble with his collar button, his fingers stiff with fatigue.

"Let me, sir - " Freddie's touch was rather more deft, seeing as how he'd spent the afternoon playing whist with several ageing sergeants down below. Winning all their money had made his fingers rather more supple now than usual.

It was odd, Devlin thought, that it therefore took him so damned long to fasten one small collar button. Devlin found his gaze drawn to the constable's, made to linger there. "You're worrying," he said quietly.

"I am, sir."

"Freddie, for the love of God, we're alone. You can leave off the obsequious bit."

"How long have I been working here with you?" Freddie's hands had finished with the collar button and had somehow come to rest on Devlin's shoulders.

"Five years, give or take."

"Have you ever known me to do anything exceptionally stupid?"

"Well, there was that one time with Lady Digby's parasol and that unfortunate small dog - " Devlin let it go when he realised that Freddie wasn't laughing. "No," he said, "No, you've never done anything stupid, Freddie."

"Who taught me not to be stupid, eh? Who said to me, 'Freddie, for the love of God, get yer head down, don't be such a damned maniac.'?"

Devlin smiled. "Freddie, if you get anywhere near a point - "

The constable's hands tightened on Devlin's shoulders. "You're going to sit about and wait for - "

"Not wait," Devlin assured him. "No waiting required, Freddie. I'm sure he's here - in London already." He grinned, and in his excitement swayed closer to the young constable, so close that their noses were all but touching.

"Oh, that eases my mind a lot, does that," Freddie murmured. He wouldn't have cared less, just then, if Whittaker had sailed in through the window and announced he was the Second Coming. Devlin was close to him: so close that Freddie could see the tiny flecks of gold in the inspector's dark, dark eyes, and the fine lines at their outer corners, and the indentation in Devlin's top lip...

All at once, Devlin was back in the dream again, lying on the grass and looking up through oak leaves at the sky, and warm hands were on his body, burning through his clothing to his skin. Devlin folded into Freddie Lewis like he was made of wet paper....

It wasn't the world's most successful kiss - at least not at the start: their noses mashed together and Devlin wondered for one horribly embarrassing moment what in Hell he'd gotten himself into. Then it was right, beautifully right, his mouth opening despite himself, inviting the caress, hungry for it. He felt Freddie's hands move to clasp his face, a gesture of consummate tenderness that made him whimper aloud, forget himself.

"Freddie -" Devlin caught his subordinate's hands and removed them from his face. "Someone might walk in." He was breathing hard, and his cock felt huge - what the Hell was Freddie thinking? He still clasped Freddie's hands in his: lean, elegant hands, the hands of an aristocrat.

"You're shaking," Freddie observed this most salient point with a grin.

"Get stuffed," Devlin snapped. Freddie tilted Devlin's face up, gazed into his eyes.

"Liked that, did you?" The grin was wider, if that was possible.

"Listen, Freddie, don't - "

"Don't kiss you?" The young constable adopted an appropriately submissive expression. "Thought you liked it, sir." Quick as a thought, he dipped his head and claimed Devlin's mouth again: a deep, devastating caress.

If he keeps this up, Devlin thought, I'll burst into flames. With an effort, he pushed Freddie away. "Flames," he stuttered, his mind still mostly unhinged from the astonishing kisses that his constable, his subordinate - here Devlin groaned out loud - had bestowed upon his too-willing mouth. "How many burned bodies have been through the morgue this month?"

Freddie stared at him as if Devlin had grown extra limbs. "What?"

But Devlin was away, dashing around the desk, snatching up his coat and hat. "Flames, man, flames! Bodies set on fire!" He called back over his shoulder to Freddie as the younger man struggled to keep up. "Has to be some kind of fire starter! Something to make it burn - flesh won't do that on its own."

Whittaker had doused Elizabeth Hobbs in spirits of alcohol, designed to make her burn. Any flammable liquid would do, anything to start the conflagration.

Within three days, Devlin had obtained samples of the eschar from every burned body presently in the morgue. Being naturally squeamish about such things, he'd dispatched Freddie Lewis to do the gathering, taking careful scrapings of the charred and ruined flesh and sealing each piece of vital evidence inside a test tube.

A day after that, he brought his scrapings to Fowler Street.

Devlin decided that there was no time like the present to educate young Lewis about the social strangeness of the pair he had dubbed The Resurrection Men. It would save much embarrassment later, when Freddie finally figured it out and allowed himself the luxury of a mental breakdown. "I don't feel that I need to tell you that Mr. Harker and Mr. Donnelly are rather...unconventional." That was putting it mildly, Devlin thought. "Neither is married and, although it's not widely known in Society, they have...well, an arrangement."

"What?" Freddie's mouth hung open artlessly. "You mean they're... perverts?" Freddie had to bite his lip to keep from laughing aloud - perhaps it was time he introduced Devlin to the Peacock Club.

"You didn't hear it from me," Devlin replied primly - and then there was nothing more to say, for their cab had arrived at its destination. Devlin led the way past Mrs. Cadogan, who took their coats and bid them a good morning. On the landing just outside the Harker/Donnelly household, he took another moment to instruct Freddie about the 'arrangement' between the two, so there would be no misunderstanding or unfortunate social gaffes. Freddie loved it when Devlin got like this - when he got all earnest and concerned, and his dark eyes shone, and two spots of colour bloomed high up on each of the inspector's pale cheeks. Freddie wondered what Devlin would look like after a bloody good rogering.

"Inspector Devlin!" Harker was dressed in a ratty pair of gentlemen's pajamas and a red dressing gown that had clearly seen better days; his expression was one of great pain, and Devlin imagined it irked Harker to have been fetched early out of bed." Donnelly has been called away for the morning, I fear - research in Bow Street - so you have only my company to sustain you." He poured brandy for them both, despite the early hour, and offered them cigars, which Devlin refused and Lewis accepted. Devlin sketched the outline of their problem for the solicitor, as he sat with his head in his hands, contemplating the holes in his dressing gown. It was Harker's way to assume various poses and postures, the result of a lifetime spent among the upper classes (from whose unsuspecting loins he had sprung) and the scions of the Inner Temple. Harker was no longer practising the law, of course, having been summarily ejected from the bar after some shady dealings with the London underworld.

Devlin didn't know the full details, of course, but he'd heard that Harker had been caught in some sort of money-changing racket that involved a billiards table, three rent boys, and a French poodle. Ever since his unfortunate (here Devlin allowed himself an inward chuckle) tumble from the higher echelons, Harker had seen fit to content himself with a wayward residence among the lesser classes of London society, and the occasional foray into some ad hoc research toward dubious academic ends. He was assisted in these affairs by apothecary Donnelly, another upper-class ne'er-do-well who concerned himself with slightly recherche experiments on unwitting corpses. Devlin thought better of wasting his breath in warnings: if Donnelly and Harker wanted to spend their leisure time invading graves, they deserved whatever they got. Besides, he had bigger things to worry about than The Resurrection Men and their esoteric habits.

"It is a thorny little problem, to be sure." Harker opened pale green eyes to peer at Lewis and Devlin in turn. "If this murderer of yours has access to some unusual kind of chemical - say, eau de toilette, for example - then he would tend to use it again and again. Whatever is easiest to lay the hands upon." Harker exposed a hole in his stocking and picked at it resolutely. "What must be established, my dear Devlin, is this: the residues left behind by various chemicals can differ from one another widely, or be frustratingly similar. If your murderer took care to use something which leaves an easily detected signature, so much the better. If that easily detected signature appears in several of the bodies that have so lately passed through the police morgue, again, it is to our betterment. What we are looking for is an esoteric or unusual compound, something which he used as a means of inciting the bodies to burn..."

Devlin waited patiently for Harker to continue, but the solicitor seemed to be sunk in his own musings. "And?"

"Leave the samples with me. This is a problem for a chemist, Devlin, and I daresay you have other lines of inquiry to follow?"

Devlin indicated that he had.

"One more thing, Mr. Harker - " Lewis cut in with a wary, sidelong look at Devlin. "This Whittaker - we think he's only doing this to get at Inspector Devlin."

"Freddie!" Devlin was stayed from further acrimony by the motion of Harker's hand.

"As Inspector Devlin can tell you, Constable, I, too, have followed the Whittaker case from beginning to end. It would not surprise me if this fiend did indeed take it into his head to cause harm." Harker rose grandly, indicating that the interview was at an end. "Thank you, gentlemen. I shall be in touch." He reached into his dressing gown and brought forth a blank piece of paper, approximately the size of a matchbook cover. "My card."

At the door, Freddie turned: "Mr. Harker...you wouldn't be familiar with a pub called the Peacock Club? I'm certain I saw - "

"Ah, Constable, there you have me. I have truck with neither peacocks nor the clubs in which they habitually congregate." Harker replied shirtily, and offered them a chilly smile. "Good day, gentlemen."

As Devlin took Freddie out onto the landing, Harker could be heard bellowing at Mrs. Cadogan for hot water. "What Peacock Club?" Devlin demanded, collaring Freddie at the first turning of the stairs. "What in God's name got into you?"

Freddie shrugged. "Sorry, sir. Must've forgot myself."

"And another thing - " Devlin was winding up for the full speech when Freddie interrupted him.

"What day's this, sir?"

Devlin stared at him as if he'd been poleaxed. "What day? You mean, day of the week?"

"Day of the week, sir."

Devlin thought for a moment. "Why, it's Friday." He stared at Lewis. "Why?"

"You know what tomorrow is, sir."

"What?"

"Mrs. Alcock's tea dance."

Devlin's eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. "Tea dance?"

"Yes, sir - remember Old Br - I mean, Sir Neville - "

Devlin paused on Mrs. Cadogan's final landing and rammed his forehead against the wall. Of course he had forgotten. Of course he had to go. And he had to take Freddie with him. He'd bloody well take Freddie with him, now, whether -

"You do realise Sir Neville expects your presence as well, Constable...?" Devlin tried to keep from grinning as he pulled his gloves on, breathing deep of the bracing October air.

"Me?" Freddie's neck made several contractions, not unlike a dodgy ostrich. "What for?"

Devlin hailed a cab, waited while it stopped, and climbed aboard. It really was rather too much fun, making Freddie squirm like this, but the little bastard had it coming, after all, on account of that awkward questioning just now, with Harker all eyes and ears and ready to pounce upon any shred of evidence. The last thing Devlin needed was that disgraced solicitor and his intimate apothecary prying into his case with hands that were perhaps none too clean.

Devlin sat back and smiled, reached out to clap Freddie briskly on the arm. "I do believe his Phoebe's looking for a husband," he said.

The look on Constable Lewis's face was worth a great deal of money.

Four

It was as bad as Devlin had expected - no, it was worse, for there was absolutely no liquor to be had except Mrs. Alcock's putrid punch and the ever-present pots of tea. Devlin had poured himself a glass of punch and carried it held out slightly in front of him, as if to fend off any eligible women with fantasies of marriage. He wished bitterly that he'd thought to bring his silver brandy flask - a few dollops of that and even Mrs. Alcock's punch would taste remotely palatable.

"You must be Inspector Devlin."

He turned rather more quickly than he ought, sloshed punch out of the glass and onto his shoes. He found he was looking at a woman perhaps his own age, wearing a stunning afternoon dress in navy blue; her face was a perfect rounded oval, smooth as milk, and her eyes were somewhere between brown and green. "I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, Miss....?"

"Oh, bugger that nonsense." She stuck her hand into his and shook it with a surprisingly strong grip. "I'm Phoebe Alcock. I bet Father invited you here because he's trying to marry me off - am I right?" Devlin was caught rather off his balance by her forthright manner, but couldn't take his eyes off her plump white bosom, bared to perfection by the exquisite dress. His collar was too tight again, and he wondered desperately where Freddie Lewis was. "Something like that."

She grinned, revealing two rows of perfect white teeth. "Well, don't worry - I've no intention of burdening you with anything like that. I deplore these tea dances of Mother's - you'd think she'd know by now."

"You're not interested in marriage?" She was the first one yet, Devlin thought. He was certain English females had the homing-nesting instinct infused into their brains at birth, by some sort of magical syringe.

"Marriage?" Phoebe's pretty face assumed a shocked expression. "Are you mad?" She laughed uproariously, her small, plump hands latticed across her lovely mouth. "Not bloody likely." She leaned close to Devlin and spoke confidentially. "Have you got a fag? I'm dying for a puff." She reached into Devlin's silver cigarette case and extracted one, toyed with it for a moment or two. "I can't smoke it in here - Mother would have a fit. Come out into the arbour with me. We can talk." And she took his arm and steered him after her.

It was warm for October, as evidenced by the many doors and windows of Sir Neville's house that were left wide open to the evening breezes. Phoebe led him up a small incline to a gazebo, set behind a stand of poplar trees, out of direct sight of the house.

"You know Freddie Lewis is absolutely mad about you," she began. Devlin struck a match to hide his incipient confusion, held it carefully to light her cigarette. "He tries to make out like he doesn't, but anybody with eyes can see he'd be on you in a minute." She tilted her head and gazed at Devlin. "You're not used to a woman talking this way, are you?"

Devlin conceded that he was not.

"Mother sent me to America to be educated - I suppose it's made me rather sharper with my tongue than I would be otherwise." She slanted a gaze at him. "You're awfully handsome - how come you're not married?"

"Ah...well, you see, I'm very busy and police work - "

"You're going to tell me that a policeman's life is no life for the wife and kiddies, and you wouldn't want to tie yourself to home and hearth while there are criminals afoot." She laughed gently. "I've heard it all before, Inspector. And yet to look at you -" She trailed off abruptly. "I think I've said too much."

But Devlin was curious to hear the rest. "Please - go on."

Phoebe took a long drag on her cigarette, exhaled smoke with a practised air. "You're a lovely man, Inspector," she said softly, "but you have the loneliest eyes I've ever seen." She shook her head, crushed the cigarette under the heel of her dancing slipper. "You're scared to death to let someone close to you - you think you'd be compromising yourself if you did. Losing that keen edge of yours." She grinned. "Oh yes, I've heard all about you, Inspector."

Devlin was silent for a long moment. "I wish there was something else to drink besides that awful punch," he blurted, and could have bitten off his tongue. In a trice, Phoebe reached into her reticule and handed him a silver flask.

"Brandy," she explained. "Mother makes the punch and I can't stand the bloody stuff. I've been tippling ever since this damned thing started."

Devlin couldn't remember when he'd been this drunk - whatever Phoebe Alcock had put into her little flask, it bloody well wasn't brandy, or at least, it wasn't any brandy that he had ever had. "They're going to wonder where we are, inside the house," he slurred. For some long moments he had been discoursing with Phoebe on the nature of humanity, and whether it was possible for anyone to be entirely good. Phoebe told him that she had absolutely no desire to be good - that it was better to be interesting.

"How long have we been out here?" Devlin wondered if Phoebe even had a watch.

She did. "It's nearly midnight," she said. "We've been out here the whole time." She laughed, rolled back on the gazebo seat and tossed her stockinged feet into the air - she had long since discarded her shoes.

"Your father is going to kill me..." Devlin rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. The gazebo seemed to be mounted on wheels and was spinning about him like Mr. Ferris's famous carnival ride. He opened his eyes to the touch of Phoebe's nose against his own. "He'll think I'm presuming on your virtue."

"Presume all you bloody well want," Phoebe cackled. "I'm past the age of marriage and damned well past the age of consent." She gazed at him thoughtfully. "Do you know that Freddie Lewis is in love with you?"

"He kissed me, you know. Twice." A saner Devlin would never have told her this, but the brandy - or whatever it was - was whirling in his head.

"Did you like it?" Phoebe reached out, laid her palm against his cheek. He was such a dear thing - lonely and unutterably sad, and so bloody fragile in his own way.

"Oh, yes." Devlin nodded with the weighty sagacity of the thoroughly drunk. "I don't get kissed very much - " The rest of it died in his throat, unspoken, as she reached for him and kissed him tenderly, a tenderness that was curiously without passion.

She slipped away from him, moving through the darkness towards the house.

"Sir...?" Freddie Lewis's face filled the whole of Devlin's vision. "Are you - " He drew back in astonishment, then began to laugh. "You're drunk!"

"Sh -shut it." Devlin tried to loop an arm around Lewis's neck and thus steady himself, but was unable to make his limbs obey him. "No need to tell - " He waved expansively at the house, including the grounds and all the occupants. " - everyone."

"Are you alright?" Freddie wrapped his arm around Devlin's slim waist, steadying him. "I think I ought to take you home, Inspector." He walked Devlin carefully down the gazebo steps and into the cool night air. "You're in no condition - "

"What if Whittaker comes back?" Devlin fought to make his eyes focus.

"Whittaker?" Freddie felt the hot flush of anger in his face and fought it back. "I'll thrash him from here to Kingdom Come!" He moved Devlin the short distance down the gravel drive to where a four-wheeler was waiting, handed the inspector inside and got in beside him. "I won't let Whittaker anywhere near you." He wondered when he'd become so voluble in his devotion.

"Phoebe said - " But Devlin thought better of it. He closed his eyes and seemed asleep in moments.

Freddie Lewis reached across the dark confines of the carriage, and took Devlin into his arms.

Devlin awoke groaning, in an unfamiliar bed and an unfamiliar set of circumstances. His head felt at least as large as Sir Neville's belly, but not nearly so soft or padded. And he wasn't alone - through weighted eyes he peered at the blond head on the pillow next to his. Freddie bloody Lewis! Devlin reached out gingerly and rapped his knuckles against the constable's forehead. "Wake up!" he snapped, and regretted it instantly. The volume seemed to be causing the insides of his head to slosh about in a most disagreeable manner, and his stomach seemed to be rising to meet the unfortunate condition of his brains. He fairly bolted from the bed and was halfway to the Closet of Ease when it occurred to him that he was absolutely mother-naked - this was the last coherent thought he was to have for some long moments, for all his energies were spent in expelling the contents of his stomach.

Dimly, he heard Freddie speaking behind him, and reached out an arm to wave him away. It was all bloody bad enough - here his thoughts were curtailed by another wave of vomiting - bloody bad enough to be upchucking into Freddie Lewis's facilities, but even worse to be doing it without a shred of dignity. How in God's name could he explain himself, or even look the constable squarely in the eye?

He sat back on his heels, his ribs and abdomen sore from this most recent bout. A hand appeared within his field of vision and passed him a cold cloth, which Devlin took gratefully and applied to his sweating forehead. "What...?" The taste of bile had backed up into his throat and he pressed his eyes closed against another rising wave of nausea. "Where is this?"

"Let me get you sorted, guv'nor - " Freddie reached out to help him to his feet, but Devlin struck out savagely. "Oi! There's no call for that - sir."

But Devlin, his mind elsewhere, didn't bother to reply. His hand had found a towel on the rack nearby and he wrapped it around his middle in the manner of a Polynesian warlord.

"Oh, that suits you right down to the ground, does that." Truth be told, Freddie was in a unique position to appreciate Devlin's unusual attire, seeing as how he was still kneeling on the floor. Nice arse, he thought - nice legs, stomach flat enough to iron bedsheets on...

"Get up!" Devlin staggered against the washbasin and nearly fell. "This is not the time to be commenting on my attire, Constable!" He ground his teeth together in frustration and pain; it felt as if his eyeballs were going to pop out. "Where are my clothes?"

"I hung 'em up for you - keep the wrinkles out." Freddie indicated the wardrobe just beyond, its door standing open, Devlin's clothing clearly visible. Devlin pushed past the younger officer and seized his trousers, yanked them on over the towel.

"Haven't got time for this," Freddie heard him say, "Bloody tea dance at bloody Brassie's house then bloody drinking with his bloody daughter and her bloody brandy - "

"I think it were gin, sir." Freddie coughed apologetically. "Old Br - I mean, Sir Neville's missus said young Phoebe brews the stuff herself."

Devlin levelled an evil glance at Freddie. "Just my bloody luck!" he hissed. He rammed his feet into his shoes and cast about the room for his hat and overcoat. "And what use were you last night, eh? Left me on my own with that spinster and her witches' brew - rubbing elbows with the toffs, were you?"

This was unfair, and both Freddie and Devlin knew it. From another man, Freddie Lewis would never countenance such an attack, and on a reasonable day, he wouldn't countenance it from Devlin, either. But he knew Devlin was horribly hungover and doubtless feeling as if he were even now in the claws of Death. Perhaps he would bring it up to Devlin another time, when the inspector wasn't feeling as if he'd been crushed under the wheels of a costermonger's cart.

"I'm going," Devlin said savagely, "and don't follow me!" The door slammed shut behind him, and Freddie was all alone. He allowed himself a philosophic gesture, in the form of screwing his eyes shut and twitching at his lower lip violently with his index finger. He sighed gustily once or twice, and went into the lavatory, stared at himself in the mirror. "You're a bloody idiot, you." His mouth compressed itself into a line underneath the neat moustache. "Stripping all his clothes off - did you think he weren't going to notice?"

By the time Devlin got into his office, early Monday morning, the whole city of London was humming with the news of a possible Ripper repeat. Devlin wondered sourly who the hell had let it leak to the papers, but then realised it could have been anyone, not necessarily someone inside the Force. This made him feel slightly better. His hangover had gone completely, although he wasn't quite sure what to do with Freddie Lewis's bath towel, now that it had served its appointed function as concealment for his nether parts. He'd given it to his landlady to wash and tried to ignore her pointed questions about its origin, and her never- ending lament that she'd never seen it before, and who knew where it had come from, and what was Inspector doing, bringing home strange towels for her to launder? She dinned his ears with this continually, night and morning, until Devlin wished he'd never seen the bloody thing.

He'd arisen early this morning, and treated himself to a shave and haircut at Windigger's barbershop. Normally he shaved himself, but the events of the past few days, and the reappearance of Whittaker, had convinced him that he deserved a little treat, even if Windigger's rates were exorbitant and Devlin could hardly afford it on a policeman's salary. He would be the last man to think of himself as being niggardly over money, but his colleagues at the Yard made a point of routinely inspecting the seat of his trousers to ascertain the degree of wear.

He slipped into the chair and submitted himself to Windigger's tender ministrations, and was massaged, clipped, pummelled, soaped, scraped, and had his cheeks pinched into what, for Devlin, passed for glowing health. At the end, the stray hairs were brushed from his waistcoat and he presented Windigger with the cost of his ordeal, and what was rather a minuscule tip.

Make no mistake: Devlin hadn't yet found a barber to surpass or even equal Windigger, an elderly Dutchman with a surfeit of nose and ear hair, and the halitosis of a week-dead corpse. "I heard that Ripper fellow is raising havoc again, yes?" He dropped this into one of Devlin's ears as his scissors did their work.

"I've no idea where you got that idea, Mr. Windigger." Devlin felt a knot of anger growing underneath his breastbone: what was the world coming to, he wondered, when one's barber bruited official police business about the streets? "Never heard such silliness in my life."

"But they say that even now - "

"Rubbish." Devlin bit back a sigh. "Look, how much longer is this going to take? I've to be at the Yard in half an hour."

Windigger took his scissors away and twirled Devlin's chair - and Devlin himself - like a carousel. "There. You are handsome, Inspector."

"Humph." Devlin grumbled at his own reflection in the mirror opposite, wondered when he'd achieved those dark rings underneath his eyes.

"But a little tired-looking, if I might say."

"Mind your own business!" Devlin snapped - and anyway, Windigger's breath could peel the skin off your eyeballs. He slipped into his coat and gathered his gloves; the October morning was sunny and bright, but held that unmistakable breath of winter. "And thank you."

He decided to walk the moderate distance to the Yard, to get some fresh air and also to delay the inevitable meeting with Freddie Lewis. Just this once, Devlin wished that Freddie could be elsewhere, for he was still curiously amnesiac about events immediately following Old Brassie's tea dance, and embarrassed that he had evidently turned up in the bed of his subordinate completely au naturel. Of course, Freddie's reasoning in the matter had been perfectly sound: Devlin would have been considerably put out if he had awakened to find he'd slept in his clothing. Still, that didn't warrant being stripped to the skin and deposited into bed beside a man who was in a similar state of undress. Perhaps Freddie merely thought he was doing Devlin a favour, and meant nothing by it. What was it Phoebe Alcock had said? "He'd be on you in a minute." Here Devlin grumbled again, stepped neatly around a steaming pile of horse turds and onto the pavement opposite. Freddie hadn't - as far as Devlin could tell - so much as laid a finger on him. Freddie had been absolutely circumspect. In every regard.

This made Devlin incredibly depressed.

Devlin reached his desk a little after nine, having successfully dodged Sir Neville Alcock, who was deep in heated conversation with three sergeants near the desk. He wondered how much - if anything - Phoebe had said to her father about Devlin's questionable conduct at the dance. He hoped to God she was intelligent enough to understand that even an intimation of inappropriate behaviour would be sufficient to ensure that Devlin's stones became a permanent fixture in Sir Neville's office, alongside the elephant foot rubbish bin and the monkey paw ashtray. He shuddered to think of his bollix floating in ether at Sir Neville's meaty elbow.

There was a cup of tea waiting for him, and Freddie Lewis appeared, all graciousness and good intentions, to take Devlin's coat and hat. If the constable was still upset about Devlin's screaming at him on Sunday, he made no mention of it now - but Devlin thought he could detect the pungent stench of hurt feelings. Freddie was particularly obsequious this morning, which immediately put Devlin on the defensive: every time Devlin so much as looked at Freddie, the constable flinched, until Devlin believed himself capable of any number of heinous acts.

"See here, Constable - "

"There's a telegram for you as well, sir, and shall I freshen up your tea?" Freddie's gaze rested somewhere around the knot of Devlin's tie and moved no higher.

"Freddie - "

"I expect you ought to open the telegram as soon as possible, sir. It might be something important." Here the constable bit his bottom lip and fell into a grievous brown study that rendered him very nearly catatonic. So intent was he upon his private mourning that he completely missed Devlin's immediate directive.

"Sir?"

"I said, shut the bloody door!" Devlin got up from his desk but Freddie was quicker, and closed the door of Devlin's office with a punctilious 'click' that would not have been out of place at the Prussian royal court. He then adopted an attitude of profound humility, and stared at the floor between Devlin's feet.

"Out with it." Devlin leaned against his desk and crossed his arms on his chest. "Come on. Let's get this bloody air cleared before we both smother."

The constable raised his eyes and looked Devlin full in the face. "I wanted to tell you...that is...well, see here, sir - " At this point words failed him, and he appealed to Devlin mutely, his warm brown eyes overbrimmed with misery.

Devlin sighed - there was no way in God's name that he could even think to broach a subject as delicate as this, with Freddie looking like Devlin had just murdered his kitten. "Saturday night," he said finally. He'd had it all planned out, what he'd been going to say, even down to his facial expressions and the placement of his feet. Right now, his feet were betraying the rest of him by creeping ever so slowly towards Freddie Lewis, until finally Devlin was gazing into the constable's eyes. "Thank you for taking care of me." He laughed self-consciously and rubbed a thumb across his eyebrow. "Made a bloody fool of myself, I did." Devlin straightened his shoulders and tried to look authoritative, even though his stomach was attempting just then to invert itself entirely, and come out his windpipe. "And that scene on Sunday morning - "

Freddie smiled gently. "I see you've been to the barber this morning," he said.

"What?"

"Windigger, isn't it?"

Devlin blinked at him like a startled animal. "Yes - yes, I always go to Windigger."

"And he always nicks you in the very same spot."

"Nicks me?"

"When he shaves you - he always gets you right there."

Devlin's hand explored the contours of his naked face. "Where?"

Freddie swayed forward and captured Devlin's mouth with his own, sucking the inspector's bottom lip gently, while his eager tongue flickered and nibbled, teasing. Devlin heard himself groaning, as if from a great distance away, and his body moved of its own volition, into the constable's embrace. His fingertips pressed against the clean white linen of Freddie's shirt, exploring every contour of the young man's back, memorising the texture of barely covered flesh. When Freddie at last released him, Devlin was gasping as if he'd been dragged along the Strand behind an omnibus.

"Oh God, Freddie - " Was that his voice - his voice, so ragged and so pleading? " - we can't do this - someone will walk in and then - "

Freddie pressed his thumb against Devlin's mouth. "I know," he whispered, leaning in to kiss the inspector gently, cherishing the touch of his mouth. Devlin looked absolutely bloody wonderful when he'd been thoroughly kissed; Freddie wondered what he'd look like if he were given a damned good tumble.

"Who's the telegram from?" Devlin whispered, going weak in the knees as Freddie leaned in and pressed his opened mouth against Devlin's neck.

"Reginald Harker."

NOTHING UNUSUAL STOP VARIETY OF SUBSTANCES USED STOP NO PRECISE CONCLUSIONS STOP

Devlin buried his chin in his hands, dimly aware that the hard surface of his desk was exerting an uncomfortable pressure on his elbows. "Damn!" He passed the telegram across to Freddie, who read it laboriously, his lips moving, then affected a frown that would not have looked out of place on an inmate of Madame Tussaud's.

"It's the law of averages," Devlin remarked ruefully, once the initial shock had passed. We've only four bodies currently in the morgue to work with - "

" - two were from the Goulding family - that big fire over in Cheapside," Freddie supplied helpfully.

Devlin wilted him with a look. "And the other two from bodies discovered in SoHo, their previous owners having died under mysterious circumstances." He gnawed on his bottom lip. "Four bodies to work with - a bloody small sample, to be sure."

"They can only keep 'em for so long, sir - they end up stinking after a day or two."

Devlin wondered if he could strangle Freddie silently and toss him out the window. It would be a criminal waste, he decided, if Freddie turned out to have been the great love of his life, but the constable's increasingly inane comments were beginning to grate on Devlin's nerves.

"Sir - " Lewis looked decidedly embarrassed, and Devlin wondered what moronic offence the constable wanted to confess. "I've been wondering if...well, some evening after work...see, there's this club - "

The door of Devlin's office banged back so hard that the knob nearly stuck in the wall. Framed in the entrance was the orange-haired constable with the blizzard of freckles, complete with apologetic expression. Once again, he begged Devlin's pardon before barging in and handing Devlin a slip of paper. He stepped back while Devlin read it, and gazed at Freddie Lewis awhile, while Freddie gazed at a stubborn hangnail on his thumb and wondered if he could get his fingers into his mouth without the guv'nor noticing.

"Constable Lewis - " Devlin's dark eyes seemed to burn through Freddie's guilty conscience. He nodded at the disingenuous moppet in the doorway, dismissing him. Freddie suspected something of import was about to transpire, and so screwed his eyes shut momentarily and stroked his neat moustache once or twice for luck.

Devlin got up and shut the door. "Before Barnicott, just now - "

Freddie's eyes squinted at Devlin as if he'd only then discovered his existence. "Who?"

"Barnicott!" Devlin barked, "The bloody messenger!"

"Bit of an odd name - " But he accurately divined the import of Devlin's expression and let it die a natural death.

"This club you mentioned," Devlin began, getting up from his desk. "What sort of a club is it?" He positioned himself in front of the addled constable, and fixed upon him the piercing look he normally reserved for hardened malefactors.

"A club, sir." Underneath his neat moustache, Freddie's upper lip was sweating. He hoped Devlin didn't notice.

Devlin held the paper up in front of Freddie's face. "There's been another murder," he said.

He was into his Donegal and halfway down the stairs before Freddie thought to follow.

Five

The body was lying in a narrow lane behind a shop, partly screened from traffic by a stack of empty barrels. A young male in his mid-twenties, stylishly dressed, with perhaps an unnecessarily flashy aspect to his tiepin, and several jewelled rings upon his fingers. Nothing had been stolen: his watch was still intact, and his billfold still in his pocket, containing a large number of fresh bank notes.

"What do you think, Lewis?" Devlin bent low over the corpse, his sharp eyes taking in every pertinent detail.

"Oh, I think he's dead, sir."

Devlin wondered if he had been perhaps over-hasty in letting Freddie live: surely a body tossed out the window of a Scotland Yard office wouldn't cause that much of a stir?

"And he's a pouf."

Now it was Devlin's turn to blink. "How the Devil d'you know that?"

Freddie Lewis gazed at Devlin with guileless eyes. "I recognise him, sir. From the club - the Peacock Club. His name is Dennis Dalziel."

If Devlin were perfectly honest with himself, he would have to admit to particular aspects of this case which were already well within his ken. The note upon his desk was not wholly unexpected; he knew that if Whittaker were back in London it would only be a matter of time before he made contact with Devlin.

He turned the paper over in his fingers, but he knew there was nothing to be seen that he hadn't seen already. The only fingerprints upon the letter were his own; the handwriting was deliberately scrawled and

childish, written with a rather dull pencil that had been unevenly and carelessly sharpened. The contents, too, were no more than Devlin had been expecting: various vague threats and allusions to the past, 'secrets better kept between ourselves.' He knew what that meant. And he knew why the queer from Freddie's molly house was killed. The irony of it, the choice of Whittaker's latest victim, was not lost on Devlin. And there would be a reckoning, he knew, and unless he got to Whittaker before he struck again, there would be no telling...no telling what chaos might be wrought.

It would be so easy for Whittaker to upset the balance of a lifetime.

Devlin glanced up as Freddie Lewis slipped into the office, already in his overcoat and carrying his gloves. "If you're not needing me anymore tonight, sir, I thought I'd dodge along."

Devlin was halfway through an absentminded greeting when he suddenly sat bolt upright and shrieked loud enough that he was heard in the cleaner's closet in the basement. Three largish sewer rats and a prostitute by the name of Boompin' Nelly appropriately scattered, thinking that the ungodly scream had been uttered at the instant of the Final Judgement.

Devlin caught up with Freddie on the pavement just outside the door, and seized on him with both hands. "This club," he panted. "Are you going there tonight? Are you going to the molly house?"

Two aged sisters returning from an afternoon's perusal of the merchantware in Covent Garden wheeled an extreme berth around Devlin, and drew their shawls protectively around them.

"Keep your voice down!" Freddie hissed. "Are you telling everyone that I'm - "

Devlin clapped a hand over the taller man's mouth. "Are... you... going... to... the... club?" He spoke with the exaggerated slowness usually directed at lunatics and the hard of hearing.

Freddie, his speech constrained by Devlin's hand, nodded vigorously.

"Any one of them could be a target." Devlin was musing aloud now, his quick mind skipping rapidly over possible scenarios, alternately choosing and rejecting strategies as quickly as his brain disgorged them. "I want to go there and have a look around, question some of the, er, patrons. Someone might have seen something, heard Whittaker talking. Maybe he's luring victims like the Ripper did - "

Freddie disengaged Devlin's hand from his lips. "Maybe he's playing at being a toff!"

Devlin levelled a glance at the young constable. "John Whittaker doesn't have to play at being a toff. He's well able to climb the social ladder with the ton."

Devlin was as uncomfortable as ever in his life, even though the circumstances of his current situation contained no overt goads to his morality, no pricks to his conscience. Devlin found himself frowning, thought that perhaps 'prick' was an unfortunate choice of word, considering the venue.

For half an hour he'd sat beside Constable Lewis at a lavishly appointed banquette; for twenty-nine and a half minutes Constable Lewis had had his hand on Devlin's thigh. It was, Devlin thought, playing it a bit too close to the bone. The entertainment consisted of a rather vapid floor show, wherein young men dressed in frocks mounted - here Devlin chided himself severely for the paucity of his personal lexicon - a low stage and crooned the collected works of Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan, not necessarily in that order. The real entertainment, Devlin thought, was in the club itself, which presented the same overall sentiment as a knacker yard the day after a particularly bad showing at the Ascot.

He saw men openly engage each other for assignations, all within his earshot, and couples ascending the stairs into some shadowy region high above, their arms around each other, their faces close together. Devlin wondered what on earth could possibly be upstairs, but he was willing to bet it had something to do with lust and secrets, things better undertaken in the dark.

His collar was suddenly too tight. And his imagination, he thought sourly, was becoming far too florid. He ought to check himself before it went too far, and undertake some form of chastisement that would effectively curtail such fantastic musings.

A tall form loomed over Devlin, and a smiling blond figure leaned down and caressed his cheek with one elegantly manicured finger. "Hit me," the figure whispered.

"I beg your pardon?!"

The figure offered Devlin the handle of a whip: a quirt or riding crop, a strip of stinging leather. Devlin was suddenly and unpleasantly reminded of the headmaster of his schooldays, who liked to put boys over his bended knees and administer a caning. Perhaps, Devlin mused, his old headmaster was here.

"Oh, come on...give us a few whacks, guv'nor."

Devlin felt faint. He pushed out from underneath Lewis's clutching hand. "Lavatory," he whispered.

This seemed to inflame the whip-bearing gorgon to entirely new heights. "Like it in the lavvies, do ya, guv'nor?"

Devlin plunged through the crowd of men with a kind of maniacal desperation. He felt as though he were trapped in a particularly devious nightmare, and all he could see in front of him were the backs of men and the faces of men, smiling mouths leering wetly under waxed moustaches. He gained the relative safety of the lavatory and leaned against the door, trying to calm his racing heart. Behind his closed eyelids he could see the lurid glances of the stage performers, whinnying their songs to a somewhat less than rapt audience. It was all too sordid.

"Inspector Devlin!" The familiar summons gripped him with a flare of panic; he opened his eyes cautiously, uncertain of what he might find.

Harker had never looked better: the dark suit he wore set off his strange green eyes with a particular inevitability, as if some malicious destiny had decreed that he meet Devlin here in the toilets. "Mr. Harker."

"Ah, Devlin..." Harker smiled gently. "I am sorry that your post mortem efforts on behalf of your charred bodies did not yield more promising results. Donnelly tried his best."

Devlin could well imagine what Donnelly's 'best' entailed. "I appreciate your help, Mr. Harker." What the devil was Harker doing here, Devlin wondered, and more to the point, did his naturally inquisitive mind lead him to make suppositions about Devlin that would prove to be of a devastating truth?

"Are you here alone?" Harker was leaning on the door in what could only be construed as a proprietary manner. His gaze flickered on Devlin's face, travelled to Devlin's throat, his practised eye entirely appreciative of Devlin's appearance.

"Freddie." Devlin couldn't seem to make his vocal cords work; he was mesmerised by the glint in Harker's eyes, the warmth in his expression as he moved, catlike, to cover Devlin's body with his own.

"You have always made much of the distances between us, Devlin..." Harker cupped the inspector's face between his palms, his mouth inches from Devlin's own. "And yet, I see that we are truly not so different...."

It was, Devlin thought, like sucking on one of those new electric wires, with a current that ran from his groin to his brain and back again, in a never-ending loop. He was held back against the door as Harker plundered his mouth with ruthless accuracy, his agile tongue coaxing Devlin's lips apart, devouring him. When Harker finally released him, Devlin found that he had lost his voice completely.

"You know, Devlin..." Harker straightened his tie with a certain aplomb that Devlin had always envied and never been able to achieve. "I have wanted to do that for a very, very long time."

He swept out of the room, leaving Devlin alone.

Devlin, of course, knew why Dennis Dalziel had been killed. It didn't take a genius or someone with the dubious connections of a Mr. Reginald Harker to understand the reasoning behind such a carefully calculated act, and Devlin knew the mechanics of terror, of intimidation. He'd used them himself, in the past, during particularly trying interrogations or when trying to wring information out of suspects he'd taken in for questioning. He knew that Whittaker had chosen Dalziel for one reason, and one reason only - to send a message to Devlin.

Devlin always prided himself on being at least outwardly circumspect, on keeping his 'proclivities' - if they could be considered such - strictly to himself. Even after all these years, it would be hard to pick a man out of the general community who would point at him and immediately declare him deviant. He had become singularly adept at hiding his true nature, even to the point of not revealing his real name to those men with whom he had pursued liaisons. Even Harker and Donnelly knew that their secret was safe with him.

Strictly speaking, Devlin ought to have arrested both of them years ago, under the aegis of the Act, and pursued it as he would any other criminal matter. As it stood he was putting the entire Metropolitan Police Force in jeopardy of ridicule, by turning a wilfully blind eye to what went on at 12 and a half Fowler Street. It was a strange sort of dance that he was doing, Devlin mused, wondering whom to trust and when to keep his mouth shut. Harker probably knew, if anyone did, the extent of Devlin's inclinations, especially after seeing Devlin in the Peacock Club with Freddie Lewis. It was interesting how Freddie knew it would be safe to bring Devlin there, to invite him there as if his inclinations were entirely above whatever board currently denoted public morality. Perhaps Freddie wasn't as stupid as Devlin might think - or else the young constable had the kind of keen instincts that would betray such truths...and yet Devlin knew he wasn't particularly swish. Not like some patrons of the Peacock - not like the one with the whip.

He got up from his desk, went to look at himself in the mirror: a slender man of early middle age, thin face, eyes probably larger and more naïve than was strictly necessary for a man of his profession. As a younger man, he had been perhaps too lean and sharp in the face - no, Devlin realised, he was still too lean, and his expression often tended, without his knowing it, toward cunning. Those of the Yard whom he counted among his friends - and they were precious few - were inclined to overlook his rather hungry-looking eagerness. His enemies called him weasel-faced. He wasn't weasel-faced, or even anything like it - just chronically insomniac, with far more worries than many other men of thirty-five. He wasn't devastatingly handsome, or elegant like Harker, or even dimpled and endearing and terribly capable like Donnelly. He had not the bearing of the gorgeous monster John Whittaker, who even now was stalking about the streets of London like Devlin's personal ghost come home to roost. "Whatever did you see in me...?" He whispered to the mirror, lost for a moment in his memories.

"What did you say, sir?" Freddie Lewis appeared in the doorway. "Were you talking to me?"

"Nothing, Constable. Just musing to myself." Devlin crossed to his desk and gazed pointedly into his empty mug. "Cup of tea wouldn't go astray."

"Right you are, guv. Oh, by the bye, there's a couple ladies here to see you."

Devlin experienced a flash of panic - perhaps someone had discovered him, and had come to lodge a complaint of public lewdness. Someone had seen Freddie Lewis in the Peacock Club, with his hand on Devlin's thigh, and wanted to set things right with the law. Or some blabbermouthed old biddy had spied on him in the lavatory, being soundly kissed by Reginald Harker...the one with the whip, Devlin thought, in a sudden fever. "Who are they, Constable?" He fought to make his voice sound normal.

"One of 'em is all got up in gentleman's togs and smoking a cigar - " Evidently Freddie found nothing odd in this, " - and the other one is Miss Phoebe Alcock."

"Phoebe Alcock?" Devlin checked his watch. "At this hour?"

She appeared in a cloud of costly perfume, decked out in what seemed to Devlin to be some sort of split skirt - a bicycling costume. Slightly behind her there came a tall young redhead, dressed like Lord Byron. "Miss Violet Pearson." Phoebe introduced her to Devlin and Freddie. "My most intimate friend." Miss Pearson stepped forward as if submitting herself to a duel, and shook Devlin's hand with a certain manly vigour. Just as quickly as Devlin had made this paragon's acquaintance, Phoebe was dismissing her: "Run along now, Violet, and play with Constable Lewis. I need to chat with this gorgeous boy - alone."

Freddie grudgingly offered Miss Pearson his arm, clearly resentful of being left out of the proceedings. "I'll give you a tour of the station," Freddie said, and darted a sharp look at Devlin, an expression of mingled hurt and contempt.

"Only approved areas, Constable. Stay out of the morgue." Devlin knew that Freddie's current level of pique might seduce him into showing their visitor rather more than was acceptable.

"Can I see your darbies?" Violet Pearson's voice floated up the stairwell, disappeared. Devlin waited until he was absolutely sure they had gone.

"Your intimate friend?"

Phoebe smiled, reached over and took a cigarette from the box on Devlin's desk. "The Queen herself has declared that such acts do not occur between women."

Devlin permitted himself a short, cynical laugh. "I knew a woman once in Stepney Green - made herself a fortune catering to both -"

Phoebe took his face between her palms, gazed at him. "Still not sleeping, I see." Before Devlin could make a suitable rejoinder, she said, "Elizabeth Hobbs."

"Where did you hear that name?" He spoke as quickly as he could, for his bottom lip had begun to quiver as if he were taken with a fever. His memories felt like body blows. Be objective, he told himself, it was just another case. He struggled to fall back on his training, cut himself off from the sensations that threatened to overwhelm him. He reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, mopped his sweating forehead.

"It was something Dad let drop one night, at the supper table."

Devlin stared at her, incredulous. "He let it drop? At supper?" The only thing Devlin could imagine Old Brassie dropping at supper was his fork, and that tragedy alone would be enough to precipitate an international incident.

"It's not the point, Inspector. I know all about Dennis Dalziel - I know that he was killed and set on fire in an alleyway. It's so hackneyed that it's practically a textbook case."

Devlin was thinking about the way the fat on Dalziel's body had bubbled greasily through the cracks in the blackened skin. It wasn't for nothing, he thought, that cannibals referred to human meat as long pig. He wondered if he were going to be sick. "I don't know where you got that information, Miss Alcock, but might I remind you that you are discussing official police business -"

"I know why you never married." Her gaze was clear, steady, and without compromise.

In that instant Devlin saw the end of everything: his career, his life, everything in ruins, and him wearing out the floor in a cell at Reading Gaol. He'd be condemned as a sodomite, subject to the harshest of penalties, because he was a copper, and corrupt, in open defiance of the Act....Devlin turned a horrified gaze on Phoebe Alcock, a gaze full of fear and patent misery.

"I have a proposition for you." She touched his arm, broke into a smile. "Oh, for God's sake, Inspector - don't look at me like that!"

Blackmail, Devlin thought - she's going to blackmail me. What resources had he, on a policeman's salary?

"I think this is something you will readily agree to, Inspector." She took his hands in hers and squeezed them gently. "If we can agree on terms, I think everything will work out to your benefit."

Devlin escorted Phoebe Alcock down to the main door, where they said their goodbyes. His mind was churning with the import of what had just passed between them: mainly he wondered if she would make good on her promises to him.

"Let's just keep it between us for now, Inspector." She smiled, stood on tiptoe and kissed him - passionately. It differed significantly from the kiss she had bestowed that night at the tea dance; Devlin felt the tip of her tongue teasing at his own, parting his lips. She released him after what felt like an eternity. "And here's Violet! Did you enjoy your tour, my dear?"

In the subsequent babble of female conversation, and before he fled headlong back up to his office, Devlin caught a glimpse of Freddie Lewis.

The constable looked as if Devlin had slapped him.

Six

Alone in the archives room, Freddie Lewis carefully reconsidered what he'd just seen pass between Phoebe Alcock and Devlin. Of course anyone would want to kiss Devlin, he reasoned, and even if Devlin was shockingly unaware of his own appeal, that made him no less attractive to others. What in God's name had Devlin been doing? The simplest explanation - that Devlin liked his bread buttered on either side or both - made absolutely no sense. Freddie knew there was no Mrs. Devlin - that there had never been a Mrs. Devlin, nor was there likely to be. He suspected, although he couldn't know for certain, that Devlin had at some time engaged in one or two brief affairs with men, of mild interest and short duration. He'd never seen Devlin with a woman - except Phoebe Alcock. And yet Devlin had spent much of his free time at the tea dance in the garden, drinking gin with Phoebe Alcock and doing God knew what. Maybe he'd wandered off with her and sampled the strings of her merkin. Maybe, Freddie reasoned, she'd sampled his - no, Devlin didn't own a merkin, nor had he ever worn one. Freddie knew this because he'd had the pleasure - here his face relaxed into a grin - of seeing the inspector mother-naked.

Beyond the table where he was working, something dropped. Freddie froze in place, his senses turned toward the direction of the sound. "Bugger," he murmured. "Losing me bloody mind, I am."

Then he heard it again: a discrete click, like roundshot being dispensed into a tin. The tiny hairs on the back of his neck rose, and he wondered if it would be cowardly for a constable of the Metropolitan Police to run screaming out the door. "Get a hold of yourself," he said. "Nobody in here but old Johnnie Melville."

"Where's Constable Lewis?" Devlin stopped at the desk on his way out, pulling on his gloves with half his mind elsewhere.

"I haven't seen him, guv." The sergeant applied himself studiously to the procedures manual lying open in front of him, affected an expression of great intelligence that sadly failed to convince even himself.

"How long have you been on duty here?" What the hell was Phoebe Alcock thinking? Devlin had passed from shock and fear to a state of patent anger.

"Half an hour, sir."

Devlin nodded. "I have pressing business to attend to - if you see him, tell him I'll be back later on." Devlin buttoned up his overcoat against the October chill. "And by the way, Sergeant - "

"Sir?"

"Your bloody book is upside down!"

John Donnelly kept an office of sorts, located in Kensington, but where exactly in Kensington, Devlin was not entirely sure, and so spent nearly an hour clopping about in a hansom cab with a not entirely helpful cabbie suggesting possible venues. Had Donnelly been a proper chemist, he would have perhaps taken the ground floor of a house and made it into a shop, but Donnelly wasn't now and never had been a proper chemist - just a bounder from an Essex family just recently out of the middle classes. Donnelly made great pretence about being forced out of school before he'd completed his training, but Devlin had done some checking and knew that Donnelly's downfall had been an overt and badly restrained hunger for cock in public places. He'd been caught fondling a fellow student on the Boat Train during summer holidays, in the years before the amendment to the Act, and so found himself on the wrong end of a public prosecution and summarily expelled without a word of warning. He'd managed to gather enough skills to set himself up as a sort of backroom chemist, but Devlin knew that Donnelly's sometimes lavish lifestyle and taste for gambling were largely funded by Reginald Harker.

Devlin wasn't worried about being seen, altogether, but concerned instead whether this latest enquiry of his would divulge too much of the case in hand. Of course, Devlin mused, given Harker's uncanny methods of gathering information, it was a fair bet that he had already deduced as much as Devlin himself knew, if not more. It was a difficult one to call, he thought, and he was grateful that he wasn't a betting man.

Donnelly's laboratory was housed in a respectable looking house with an unassuming brick front, and a brass plaque beside the door proclaiming that this was the office of Mr. John M. Donnelly, apothecary and chemist. The door opened on to a pleasant anteroom, comfortably furnished and boasting several large fern-like plants in pots. Devlin chose a chair nearest the window - the room was empty - and browsed through a months-old copy of The Strand that he'd found lying behind a flowerpot. After some moments a door opened, and Donnelly appeared, clad in a long white apron that was decorated with sundry bits of gore. "Inspector! What a surprise - please, do come in!"

"I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time?" Devlin wasn't sure where the blood and guts had come from, and he wasn't about to ask - it was not altogether impossible that Donnelly had been engaged in some dissection work for Harker, for reasons better left to the imagination.

"Not at all, not at all." Donnelly ushered Devlin into his consulting room, and went immediately to wash his hands at the basin, taking great care to scrub his fingers and his nails. The filthy apron, however, he chose to retain. "Now then, my dear fellow - what can I do for you?"

Devlin decided to dispense with preamble. "How long can a person be infected with syphilis before the, ah, final stages?"

Donnelly regarded Devlin with narrowed eyes. "That depends," he replied. "You might want to get undressed."

Was this a seduction ploy? Devlin wondered. "What for?" he asked, trying hard to keep a note of truculence out of his voice.

"Well, I'd very much like to examine you - to see how far the infection has already progressed. Reggie and I make an interest out of these sorts of cases. Just slip out of your clothes and get under the blanket - "

"Not me!" Devlin's head had begun to pound. "I ask merely out of professional interest."

Donnelly seemed relieved. "Well, of course - and I mean, you couldn't have caught it just from that one night at the Peacock Club."

"I see you've been talking to Harker."

"We occupy the same rooms, Inspector." Donnelly smiled coyly. "Pillow talk, you know. Post-coitus, the powers of conversation are rather heightened - "

"Alright, alright," Devlin conceded the point irritably. "But how long does it take?"

Donnelly blinked at him. "Harker was rather a quick starter when we first met, but I've managed to bring him along - "

Devlin swore savagely, a long stream of mostly gutter curses with invocations to the Deity sprinkled liberally throughout. The pounding in his head had settled itself firmly behind his eyeballs.

"After the secondary symptoms -" Donnelly at last recognised his task and launched into it with real enthusiasm, " - that is, after the, er, genital nodule disappears - well, the disease sometimes goes into a long latency period, without any ill effects."

Devlin sagged visibly. "Damn," he whispered.

Donnelly appeared not to have heard him. "Latency, in some cases, can last a lifetime - unless, of course, other organs are involved. Of course the worst is neurosyphilis, when the brain is involved. There are documented case histories of patients in lunatic asylums - "

"Lunacy?" Devlin looked as if he hadn't heard properly. "So it can cause lunacy."

"Yes - in the tertiary stages, of course - "

"Thank you, Mr. Donnelly." Devlin curtailed another lengthy discourse with this sharp rejoinder. "That will do nicely. Very helpful." He cast a parting glance at Donnelly's soiled apron. "When you see Mr. Harker, would you ask him to call on me, at the Yard? There are some aspects of the case I am very eager to discuss with him." Probably not those features which Harker expected, but nevertheless...

"I haven't seen him very much lately - he does pursue an after-hours existence these days. Of course he's always had an artistic bent. His grandmother was a Hungarian lacemaker, you know. Artistry is part of his essential nature, especially when you consider such a storied background."

Doubtless Harker was even then settled comfortably in a cafe somewhere, discussing such weighty philosophical tropes as Truth, Beauty, and Life with an audience of enraptured young catamites at his feet. Devlin turned to go.

"One more thing, Inspector - "

"Yes?"

"I understand that Harker has been pursuing a line of enquiry at the Peacock Club - did you chance to speak to him when you were there, the other night?"

Devlin considered his reply for about as long as it took him to blink. "Not really, Chemist. Mr. Harker and I share certain commonalties of thought in some areas, but to his core philosophies I'm afraid I can only give...lip service."

Seven

Harker was, predictably, in the bathtub when Devlin arrived, but this did not deter the solicitor from receiving him - indeed, Harker directed Devlin to take a seat upon the closed lid of the commode, the better to converse with him. Devlin wondered if it were not some misaligned attempt at seduction, considering the kiss that Harker had bestowed on him just the other night - the fact that Harker was necessarily naked was also a factor. Devlin did his utmost to focus his gaze elsewhere, but time and again his eyes were drawn to the solicitor's smooth, wet skin.

"I've come on business, Mr. Harker - official police matters, you might say." Devlin wriggled a little on the lid; the hard wooden circle was pressing into his buttocks and causing him discomfort. Add to that the fact of Harker's nakedness, so near, so tantalising...for a moment Devlin allowed himself to indulge in fantasy, and wondered whether it might be an error of judgement. He could think of no two men who were as unsuited to each other as himself and Harker - their differences of opinion as to procedure and method were the least of the stumbling blocks that each had placed in the other's path over the years of their long association. Devlin sighed. "Dennis Dalziel is dead." He felt it better to get it out in the open and not linger over it. A clean cut, and make it quick.

Harker's eyes widened for a moment. "Ah," he murmured, "that is unfortunate, Devlin."

"I only mention it, Mr. Harker, because it occurred to me that you and Mr. Dalziel had been keeping company of late."

Harker paused to dump a jug of water over his head, sputtered and gasped for some moments, and took the towel that Devlin passed him. "Oh no, Devlin, there your intuition has lead you wrong. I was not keeping company with Dalziel for any other purpose than my current line of inquiry."

"Then what were you doing in the Peacock Club?"

"Following my current line of inquiry!" Harker stood up abruptly, in a shower of droplets, and reached out a long arm for his bath sheet. Devlin tactfully looked away, occupied himself with examining the cracks in the ceiling. "Come along, Devlin!" Harker hovered impatiently in the doorway. "And let that water out, would you?"

Devlin accepted the cup of hot lemon and whisky that Harker passed to him, and sank into a chair beside the fire. His entire body ached, and, as usual, he hadn't been getting more than three hours of sleep at night. He wondered if he would ever sleep again. "What line of inquiry?" The hot drink warmed him through, and he felt a dangerous lassitude creeping upon him, relaxing all his limbs.

"You were at school with John Whittaker." Harker offered Devlin a cigar, lit it for him with a glowing splint from the fire.

"How d'you know that?"

Harker's features arranged themselves into an appropriately condescending expression. "Devlin."

"Yes, I was. That is to say, I knew him." Devlin waited to be struck by lightning, but some moments passed and his skin remained unsizzled.

"Your parents did without a very great deal in order to afford your tuition. They wanted to send you to a good school, give you the education they felt you deserved."

Devlin nodded. "Dad never made it past the ranks of your ordinary copper - a Bluebottle till the day he died."

Harker smiled faintly. "Then you have surpassed your family's expectations, Devlin!" He drew on his cigar. "How well did you know John Whittaker?"

Panic descended, smothering and absolute. "What do you mean?" He fancied that Harker could see right through his skin and deep into his bones, into the core and marrow of him. He could not confide in Harker; the truth was far too shattering for him to tell anyone-

"We have all, in our time, made errors in judgement, Devlin." Harker's hand reached out, closed around his wrist gently. "I would never condemn you for that."

Devlin forced himself to take a few deep breaths, attempted to calm his insides. "I first started at that particular school when I was fourteen. Of course, I was the new boy, and not especially liked by the others." Devlin offered Harker an embarrassed grin. "You can imagine. Well, John Whittaker was tall for his age, and big about the chest and arms. He kept an eye on me - "

"He appointed himself your ad hoc protector?"

Devlin blinked. "Er...yes, something like that, Mr. Harker." Ad hoc? "And he taught me how to fight back. I'd have never made it through if he hadn't come along."

Harker smiled thinly. "Ah yes, Devlin, I expect you would have. We all have our resources, you know." He roused himself, paced a few steps back and forth in front of the fire, and went to look out the window. "You know that John Whittaker is married."

Devlin's eyes were in danger of quitting his skull. "Married?"

"Oh yes." Harker puffed on his cigar. "Although the wife is quite mad, quite mad." He peered at Devlin. "You were in the Peacock Club."

"So?"

Harker let the window blind drop back into place. "Many aspects of this case are clear to me, Devlin - except one."

Devlin asked the obvious question.

"Why, Phoebe Alcock, of course." Harker sat down, cast a glance across at Devlin. "I am not at all certain how she figures in this equation."

"She's the Chief Commissioner's daughter." What the hell was Harker driving at?

"She came to see you at the Yard the other day. I know this because I happened to be there, talking with one of your colleagues about a case I currently have in hand."

"You...went to someone else?" In spite of himself, Devlin was hurt. "Why couldn't you come to me, for God's sake?"

Harker laughed. "Good God, Devlin, anyone would think you were jealous!" He leaned forward, hands on his knees. "Believe me, my dear fellow, I did not allow him the same considerations as I gave you that night at the Peacock Club!" Harker examined Devlin carefully. "I can deduce by your expression that my surmises are correct - and so you are jealous."

"I've never heard such rubbish in my life!"

"I wonder, Devlin, why you have never bothered to arrest me - considering that you are privy to the most sensitive of secrets."

Devlin stammered something about the privilege of long association, confessed to turning a blind eye, consideration for one's friends, surely Mr. Harker understood. "And anyway," he conceded, "if I had to arrest people for open defiance of the Act, half of bloody London would be rotting below stairs in Reading Gaol!"

He clutched his overcoat around him and tore off out the door, his insides seething with unspent rage. He heard a rattle on the stairs above him, and then Harker's voice, weighty with sarcasm.

"Mind how you go, Inspector!"

Devlin found his mind returning again and again to John Whittaker's supposed wife. Harker had not been forthcoming with his information, but that in itself was not surprising. Devlin had engaged in the exhausting task of badgering Harker for as long as he'd known him. Perhaps it wasn't just that, though - perhaps Harker was as much in the dark as Devlin himself, and feared to reveal his ignorance. It wouldn't be the first time that Harker had deliberately "forgotten" about him, out of sheer bloody-mindedness - here Devlin considered arresting Harker for obstruction - and it certainly wouldn't be the last. He considered going back to Fowler Street, but it was getting late, and he was cold and very hungry. If he went back to the Yard, there would likely be an inevitable interview with Old Brassie, who'd want to know why Devlin had made so little progress - this was an eventuality that Devlin wanted to delay for as long as possible. He would effectively inform Sir Neville when the time was right, when he'd gathered all the pertinent threads into his hand and had something to show for his efforts.

He stood for some long moments on Crutchley Road, and considered what his next move might be. It was getting on for dark, and the wind had freshened with an uncommon hostility, piercing Devlin's worn coat in several places. He shivered and tried to burrow further into his collar. He had no desire to go back to his empty rooms in the Brougham Road, but neither did he want to wander about the streets of London like a Romany discard. In the end, he settled on a meal, and found himself sitting in a restaurant near Covent Garden.

Most of the menu items would leave a considerable hole in his finances; when the waiter came and enquired as to his needs (with a wholly unnecessary haughtiness) Devlin ordered Welsh rabbit and a glass of beer. While he waited for his meal, his gaze strayed across the adjacent tables, which were mostly occupied by couples, or the odd well-bred family with their equally well-bred and well-behaved children. Devlin had always harboured a secret soft spot for the little ones, even though he had long ago accepted that he would have no issue of his own. Nearest his own table was a sumptuously appointed banquette, occupied by two men about his own age, obviously friends, and obviously engaged in comfortable and intimate conversation. As Devlin watched, the taller of the two reached out and covered the other man's hand with his own in a fleeting caress, whispered something that Devlin could not hear. The patent evidence of warmth and compassion was almost more than he could bear, and he was forced to turn his eyes away, pretend to study the pattern of the tablecloth.

Where was Freddie Lewis tonight? Devlin found his thoughts drifting to the young constable. For all their five years as working partners, Devlin often felt that he knew very little about Lewis, about his habits and the company he kept. He wondered if this reflected badly on him as a superior, this lack of interest in the well-being of his subordinates - no, that was far too pat a realisation. Freddie's life was his own, and what he did after hours was his own business.

Devlin was halfway through coffee and a Chelsea bun before he noticed the Bluebottle standing near the entrance. Instinctively he flagged the man, beckoned him over. "What is it, Constable...?"

"Higgins, sir. You'd best come with me right away, Inspector."

It was yet another murder, Devlin thought - had to be, on the face of it. Nothing else would turn his guts to water like the intuition that Whittaker had struck again. He'd had a fleeting idea that he might begin his search for Whittaker's insane wife, perhaps initiate a search of various lunatic asylums and workhouses, but it would have to wait. Perhaps he might put Freddie Lewis on this one - that sort of involvement would make Freddie feel better, even if it was merely a sop to Devlin's own shrieking conscience. He had some making up to do, he realised, and he had been rather too cavalier of late with Freddie's regard and his affection. He would give this case to Freddie, put him in charge of it, build up his confidence a bit.

He tossed some coins upon the table and, shrugging into his overcoat, followed the constable out into the night.

Eight

Freddie Lewis had decided to walk home, even though the wind was cold enough to cut the bollix out from under a brass monkey. He wanted the cold air, and even relished it, because it helped to clear his head and give his thoughts a more rational framework. He'd left Devlin's office tidier than it had been in a long time, and filed all the bits of stray paperwork that Devlin was wont to overlook. He'd even washed Devlin's teacup and cleaned the sticky rings from the top of the inspector's desk, and he'd considered whether he ought to take Devlin's other coat out for cleaning, but decided that might be going a bit too far.

He was nearly at the entrance to his street when he heard the cries, and turned instinctively to see what was the matter: an old man with severely bandy legs and the habitual demeanour of a beggar was being hounded by three other men, all of them young and obviously fit. "Oi!" Freddie started off towards them. "What's this, then?" They predictably scattered and ran, escaping down a narrow lane between two buildings, and it occurred to Freddie that something might be amiss when he realised that the crippled man was running with them.

He stopped, began to back away, and turned to make good his escape, but his way was barred by the crippled man, who had seemingly regained his health and was holding what looked to be a length of piping. Freddie reached to make the collar, but his wrists were grabbed and cinched behind him, tied with rope. The premonition of it rose like smoke behind his eyes, and he fought to stay upright on his feet, but they were too many and he was only one.

They swarmed to cover him, striking out with feet and fists, until he went down under a flurry of blows. He rolled from side to side, seeking escape from the endless assaults, but could make no headway. He tasted blood inside his mouth, and a wave of dizziness threatened him, then crested and washed over him, as everything went black.

"What do you make of it, sir?"

Devlin realised that if he'd got a fiver for every time someone had said that to him in recent days, he'd be set up for a holiday on the Continent. Devlin had never had a holiday, unless one counted the time he had accompanied his mother to the home of an aged aunt in Manchester, some years before, and Devlin was loath to count it, seeing as how he'd spent the entire time having his cheeks pinched and enduring remarks about the state of his bowels.

"He's not burned it this time." Devlin mused on this for a moment, bending low over the corpse. "Probably didn't want to start a conflagration." This last was significant in terms of location, for Whittaker had taken his latest victim on the doorstep of Scotland Yard - a brazen assault, to say the least, and one calculated to cause embarrassment. What intrigued Devlin, however, was the physiognomy of the victim: from a distance, he might pass for Freddie Lewis. "How long has he - it - been here?"

The constable consulted his notebook. "I came on duty around about half- seven, sir. It weren't here then. Me and Duffett - " The constable gestured at another of his ilk, standing off to the side and vomiting quietly onto his boots " - were walking the beat tonight, and we come out about eight and he was there."

Devlin asked the obvious question. "Where was Constable Lewis?"

"Sergeant Hubble said he left about half-six, sir. Said he was going home to get some supper."

Devlin turned this over in his mind, decided at last to leave Freddie out of it, at least for the moment. "Alright," he said, "Get it covered and get it to the morgue before you start a bloody riot." Already the curious had begun to gather round the steps, peering at the dead man with rather too much vicarious pleasure for Devlin's taste. "And get these people out of here!"

He heard the constables' cries of "Move along, there - move along, now!" only dimly, as he slumped against the railing and wondered what in hell he was supposed to do about it now. He could already vividly imagine what the papers would have to say about it - a murder directly on the doorstep of the Yard, and nothing done, no leads followed, no suspects arrested.

Devlin found Sir Neville Alcock still in his office, bent studiously over a file folder, his great girth supported against the edge of the desk. For some long moments, the Chief appeared not to see him, and so Devlin cleared his throat, rather more noisily than was necessary.

"You've been stood there for five minutes - you can manage to stand there for a few seconds more." Alcock didn't even raise his eyes from the folder, and Devlin took this as a very bad sign indeed. By the end of the interview, he supposed, he would most likely be directing omnibus traffic in the Piccadilly Circus.

"I expect you've seen it," Devlin began, once he had gained the older man's attention.

"Of course I've seen it," Alcock grunted. "I'd have to be blind not to have seen it!" He heaved his bulk up out of the chair and began a slow circuit around the office, his steps as ponderous as any circus elephant, and just as capable of devastation. He stopped before Devlin, and gazed for some moments into the inspector's tiepin. "But it's not your fault."

Too bloody generous, Devlin thought sourly, considering I was nowhere near.

"He means to send a message to us, this Whittaker. Means to take us down a notch, draw the ire of the public and the press, make fools of us." Alcock moved away, went to look out the window. "How long since you've been home, Devlin?"

Devlin's mouth opened and closed on nothing.

"How long since you've had a good night's sleep? Eh? Don't think I haven't noticed. Good night's sleep just the thing for you. Young chaps of your sort haven't got the stamina that we used to have. You need to get a good meal in you - "

This was something, Devlin thought, coming from a man who looked as if he routinely devoured a hog at each dinnertime.

" - a good meal, sir, and then a bloody good rogering!"

Devlin would have sagged, except such response would mean falling through the opened door. For a horrified few moments, he imagined that Sir Neville himself thought to provide if not the former, then at least the latter, and the images conjured by this speculation made Devlin slightly queasy.

"Go home, Devlin." Alcock turned his back, effectively dismissing him. "Get some sleep and come back here with some concrete ideas on how to catch this fellow Whittaker." He turned and bellowed at Devlin, in a voice loud enough to carry all the way to Essex, "And find yourself a woman!"

It wasn't that Devlin found himself a woman so much as a woman found him. He was awakened out of sleep by Mrs. Taylor, bending over him and rolling him to and fro, hissing in his ear that a gentleman was here to see him, and hadn't he get up and receive his visitor?

"For God's sake!" Devlin rolled over and opened one eye. "Who is it, at this time of night?"

"Don't take that tone with me!" Mrs. Taylor, ever resourceful, and quite used by now to dealing with the inspector's vicissitudes, wrung one of his ears until he yelped. "A young man, very handsome. You'd best see him."

"Go away," Devlin moaned. But he got up anyway, and shrugged into his dressing gown, the better to receive John Donnelly.

The chemist made no preamble: "Freddie Lewis is very badly hurt. I came here as soon as I found out." He reached out to steady Devlin, hold him upright. "You're shivering - here." Donnelly fetched a blanket from the sofa and wrapped it around Devlin, who felt as if he'd been drenched in icy water.

"What happened?" Devlin asked, and then, "What time is it?"

"Just past midnight. As far as we can tell, he was attacked on his way home, lured into a laneway."

"How did you find out?" He'd have been all alone, Devlin thought, and likely preoccupied with other matters, as Freddie often was. They might have done anything to him, and what could he have done to defend himself?

"Harker is also working toward a resolution of this case." Donnelly sloshed some brandy into a glass and handed it across to the inspector. "He asked that I relay the information to you."

"I should have known Harker would be involved!" Devlin gulped the brandy hastily, his mind already running ahead. "Where is Freddie? Is he in the hospital?"

"He's recuperating at a safe location - Harker thought it unwise to allow him to linger in a public hospital- "

"Harker! What right has Harker to decide - " Devlin tossed the blanket off his shoulders, went through to the bedroom and began dressing as hastily as his shivering would allow. "Fowler Street," he said, "Take me there."

Donnelly caught the inspector by the forearms, stilled his headlong flight. "He's not at Fowler Street."

"Then where the bloody hell have you - "

"Get into your coat and come with me." Donnelly gathered up Devlin's hat and gloves. "There's a cab at the door."

He had never felt so bad in his life - not even after his failed bid for entry into the Hell Fire Club. He was lying - insofar as he could tell - in a nice bed, very comfortable, but he felt as though someone had tried to turn him inside out. Thank God for Chemist Donnelly, who at least had offered something for the pain - something Freddie suspected was laudanum, but which at least eased the savage grip of his injuries. The only down side was that it tended to make him astonishingly sleepy, and to produce bizarre and varied dreams, not unlike the visions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whose work Freddie had a nodding acquaintance.

In his more lucid moments, he worried about Devlin, and whether Whittaker was even now stalking the inspector with an eye to murdering him, now that Freddie had been taken out of the way. Perhaps it had been Whittaker in the archives room that morning, and perhaps he had deliberately infiltrated the offices of the Yard to weaken their resolve, to torment them with lingering and unfounded suppositions. It seemed to Freddie that a criminal of Whittaker's sort would likely turn to intimidation as the means to his end, if he thought it would help his cause - and it wasn't beyond Whittaker's scope, Freddie thought, to initiate a campaign of harassment. Privately, he fingered these theories over in his mind, but he knew that he would never mention any of this to Devlin. Perhaps Devlin had already contemplated similar, and Freddie had a deathly fear of seeming stupid to the guv'nor - he already suspected that Devlin thought him a little dim. He didn't want to lower the inspector's opinion of him by offering theories that might ultimately prove disappointing.

"How much further?" Devlin bit hard on his lower lip, quashing an urge to pummel Donnelly with his fists. After all, it wasn't the chemist's fault that he was overwrought and tortured with worry.

"Not long now." Donnelly reached out and squeezed Devlin's hand in the darkness of the cab. "He is being well cared-for, Devlin. Ah, here we are."

The cabbie had stopped in front of a nondescript brownstone in Kensington, the sort of address usually occupied by the upper classes and those whose financial means did not outweigh their taste. Devlin disembarked and followed Donnelly into the house, stumbling on the steps in his haste, half blind and dizzy with fatigue. "Easy, Inspector." Donnelly wrapped an arm around his waist and ushered him into the foyer, where Violet Pearson, dressed in silk pajamas and a smoking jacket, in deference to the hour, met them. Her long red hair was unbound and flowed freely round her shoulders; she was, Devlin thought, an uncommonly handsome woman.

"Inspector Devlin!" She took Devlin's hands in hers and gave them a gentle squeeze. "You must be half out of your wits with worry! Right this way." She led him up a narrow staircase and along the upstairs hall, pausing outside one of the bedrooms. "Donnelly has administered laudanum for the pain, so Constable Lewis might well be sleeping."

Devlin reached for the doorknob, and his courage failed him, and with it, the last of his strength. He slid down the wall to end up in an awkward sitting position with his overcoat bunched around his knees. "Oh my God," he whispered, thankful that only Miss Pearson was present to see his complete mental breakdown. "How bad is it?"

She knelt before him, her hands on his knees. "It looks rather worse than it actually is - or so Mr. Donnelly tells me." She smoothed his cheek with the back of her knuckles and smiled. "You must take courage, Inspector! Constable Lewis needs your strength now." She helped him to his feet, leaned in and kissed his cheek. "Go in and satisfy yourself, Inspector, with the knowledge that your constable will indeed recover. Of that much I am certain."

Devlin waited till her footsteps had retreated down the stairs, before venturing into the bedroom. The lamp had been turned down to a mere flicker in the darkness, and Devlin was loath to tamper with it, for fear of waking Freddie. He drew near to the bed in which the young constable lay sleeping, reached out to touch one of Freddie's hands, cradling the limp fingers against his palm as he sank into a chair. He forced himself to look, to assess and catalogue the damage. Random bruising on the face, and a nasty cut above one eye that had swollen and puffed to astonishing proportions - Devlin sighed, drew the covers back from Freddie's naked torso. They had been at him with fists and feet – Devlin traced the map of bruises with his gaze, not daring to touch Freddie for fear of causing him more pain than had already been endured. He saw what looked like puncture marks from hobnailed boots along the young man's sides, and further down his thighs; it was clear that more than one man had provoked and sustained this. Devlin vowed that he would scour the bowels of London until he found them. Perhaps he wouldn't even allow them benefit of trial, he thought savagely, perhaps he'd kill them all himself, with just his bare hands and perhaps a pair of hobnailed boots....

"Sir."

"Shhh...don't try to talk." Devlin had sworn he would not weep, but his tears burned his face like vitriol. "I came as soon as I heard."

"I've been stupid, haven't I?" Freddie's grip tightened on Devlin's fingers. "Didn't keep my head down like you taught me - went charging in like a bloody maniac."

"Freddie...." Devlin pressed his lips to the young man's palm, the one place on his body that remained undamaged. "So help me God, I'll find them - I'll find them and I'll deal with them, supposing I swing for it!"

Freddie freed his hand, pressed his fingers against Devlin's mouth. "Hell Fire Club," he murmured, and then, "Kiss me."

"Oh no, Freddie, I'll hurt you."

"You'd never hurt me," Freddie said, and Devlin damned himself for a blackguard. He bent and pressed his opened mouth against Freddie's parted lips, unprepared for the young man's hungry assault or his own eager response. "Phoebe told me everything," Freddie murmured, sinking back against the pillows. A slight smile played about his lips, and Devlin fancied that the laudanum was claiming him again.

"Phoebe?"

"A woman on your arm is the best camouflage, sir. Even Mr. Harker thinks so."

Devlin snorted. "Mr. Harker! As if Mr. Harker would know a woman from his watch chain!"

But Freddie was already too far sunk in sleep to hear him, and finally, Devlin crept quietly from the room.

"Inspector Devlin - " Phoebe hugged him tightly, took both his hands in hers. "Violet has made tea - please come and sit with us."

Devlin perceived Donnelly sitting near the fire, devouring the largest Chelsea bun that Devlin had ever seen. At Devlin's approach, the chemist looked up and mumbled something through a mouthful of pastry, then buried his face in his teacup. "Thank you." Devlin took the cup and saucer, but declined a Chelsea bun - his stomach felt as if some Yorkshire codger had used it for a round of ferret-legging.

"Violet was telling me that Constable Lewis might do better if he stayed with us for the duration of his recovery." Phoebe glanced across at Violet, now semi-recumbent on a chaise longue and smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder. "This is a most discreet household - and Violet and I can provide for most of Constable Lewis' needs right here. With assistance from Mr. Donnelly, of course."

Intellectually, Devlin knew that she was right, but he feared to have Freddie languish under any protection but his own. "I expect you're right," he allowed reluctantly. He wondered how he might go about his daily duties, knowing that Freddie was the recuperative hostage of two tribades in a brownstone house in Kensington.

"We'll take good care of him," Violet interjected. "He will want for nothing - Phoebe and I will care for him as though he were a much-beloved brother." She smiled as Phoebe came to stand behind her, a hand upon the redhead's shoulder. "As far as this Whittaker is concerned, Freddie will appear to have vanished from the planet."

Devlin laid his teacup down. "It's not Freddie that he's interested in." He held his tired, aching head between his palms. "He's after me."

Donnelly started, his teacup clanking in the saucer. "Good heavens, whatever for? What have you done to him that he needs to seek this kind of vengeance?"

Devlin laughed mirthlessly. "A long and sordid tale, Mr. Donnelly."

Violet Pearson cast a curiously assessing gaze at him. "I expect Whittaker didn't take too kindly to your throwing him over, all those years ago."

Devlin would have reacted, except his nerves had long ago surrendered. "Who told you?" he asked, his fatigue lending a deceptive mildness to the query.

Violet shrugged, an elegant lifting of her slender shoulders under the smoking jacket. "We each have our histories, Inspector."

Devlin stood up to go. "Well, be that as it may, I do have a murderer to catch, and other business to attend to before this is all tied up." He laid the cup and saucer on a side table. "Ladies - thank you for the tea. Mr. Donnelly, your presence has been most helpful."

"Where are you going?" Phoebe started forward, tugging at his sleeve. "Surely you're not going out after this Whittaker again - at this hour?"

"Surely I am, Miss Alcock - and 'this Whittaker' as you are wont to call him, is not likely to wait upon my pleasure before he strikes again." Devlin shoved his hands into his gloves. "Trust me - I know him well enough to know he never hesitates."

"Inspector Devlin, if I may be so bold, you are exhausted, sir!" Violet Pearson rose from the chaise longue like a cat uncoiling itself, and shook her long hair out. "Why not stay here till the morning? We are only too happy to provide you with a bed."

"Because I must make my way to Fowler Street," Devlin replied. "It's time Mr. Harker and I joined forces, whether it's to our mutual benefit or not."

Donnelly roused himself. "Devlin, if you like, I can come with you - "

Devlin considered it for a moment, then waved it away. "No - but thank you. Perhaps you might remain to care for Freddie. I'm sure you can do the most good here, where you're needed." Besides which, he told himself, it was necessary that he speak to Harker alone, without Donnelly's mitigating influence.

"Sarah Whittaker." Devlin didn't bother to sit down, this not being a social call. Besides, he knew that if he sank into one of Harker's comfortable chairs, he would be asleep in moments.

...someone was drawing a blanket over him, and he fought it, clawing at the obstruction, seeking to remove it...he couldn't let them draw the sheet over his face, because he wasn't dead yet, and wouldn't be for a long time -

"Devlin, lie still." Harker's voice came to him in the half-light, warmer and more comforting than Devlin would ever have thought possible. "You would think I was trying to smother you." The solicitor drew the blankets round him, and turned to blow out the lamp. Devlin felt his body compress the mattress as Harker turned over and sighed.

"Doubtless you will ask about Sarah Whittaker."

"I was going to, yes." Devlin was floating in warmth, absolutely safe and comfortable. He must speak to Mrs. Taylor about getting a feather bed, he decided sleepily.

"John Whittaker's mad wife." Harker paused for so long that Devlin wondered if the solicitor had drifted into sleep, but Harker was merely yawning. "...in a lunatic asylum...easily located...."

Devlin asked the question he'd been waiting to ask all night. "Will you help me?" He could just make out Harker's features in the gloom, the pale glow of his face and his white nightshirt.

"Of course." Harker was lying on his side, facing Devlin, and he was smiling. "But sleep now, my dear Inspector - for I see you are desperately in need of it."

Without thinking - without even the primeval cushion of instinct to guide him - Devlin curled himself into Harker's arms, his head against the solicitor's shoulder. He felt Harker tighten the embrace around him, until he was drifting in the shared warmth of their twinned bodies, and he was nearly asleep when Harker lifted his chin and kissed his mouth.

He fell asleep to the motion of Harker's fingers in his hair.

Nine

The lunatic asylum at Bethlehem Hospital - more familiarly known as 'Bedlam' - never failed to depress Devlin to the uttermost. During the course of his duties as a constable and later, as a police inspector, he had often had cause to visit the hospital, and he always came away from these visits feeling rather more depressed than when he'd gone. There was just something about the dim, grey building and its dim, grey inhabitants that seemed to drain the life out of him, and instill in him a sense of overwhelming hopelessness.

He and Harker had arisen early this morning, breakfasted upon an excellent repast prepared by Mrs. Cadogan, and taken a cab to Bedlam, hoping to find Mrs. Sarah Whittaker, the wife of John Whittaker, and possibly the best witness they could have as to his whereabouts and his motives.

"Did you sleep well last night, Devlin?" Harker climbed into the cab briskly, tucked his long legs against the seat.

"Yes, in fact, I did." Devlin grinned. "You have a remarkable method, Mr. Harker, of lulling someone to sleep."

"Ah, Devlin - even the most austere of us is often prey to creature comforts." Harker snorted, privy to some joke that even now played itself about between his ears. "Donnelly has often urged me to take up some diverting personal habit."

"He didn't come home last night?" Devlin wondered if his presence had perhaps driven a wedge between Harker and the chemist.

"He sent word by messenger that he would remain with Constable Lewis - Miss Alcock and Miss Pearson were quite insistent that he accept their hospitality." Harker stiffened to attention. "Ah - we're here!" He leapt out of the cab with Devlin hard on his heels, and it wasn't until Devlin had ascended some several steps that he realised the cabbie was still waiting (with rather ill grace) for payment.

"Ah..." Devlin fumbled in his pockets, counted coins into his hand. "I think that should do it, cabbie. Thank you."

The man looked disdainfully at Devlin's offering, wondering why coppers were so bloody cheap and how come he hadn't got a tip? He ought to take his cab and go across the Channel to the Frogs - at least they knew how to express appreciation.

Devlin caught up with Harker just inside the door. The solicitor was leaning against the wall, feigning nonchalance, but Devlin could detect something rather uneasy in his air of studied carelessness, the way he flicked his walking stick rather nervously against first one shoulder, then the other. Nursing sisters hurried here and there, some balancing trays with medicines, and Devlin saw a burly orderly go by with what appeared to be an oversized leather dog collar. "I expect she's on the wards," Devlin said.

Harker, gazing steadily before him, saw nothing.

"Mr. Harker?" Devlin touched the solicitor's arm. "Are you alright?"

Harker seemed to pull himself back from some precipice, and straightened abruptly. "Devlin! What are we standing here for? We have work!"

Devlin followed as Harker led the way down the dimly lit corridor, always keeping to the side and a little behind the solicitor, in an effective shadowing position. Devlin had little experience in dealing directly with lunatics - thankfully, his scope had been confined to flying visits and note taking - and he wasn't sure how secure the locks and bars were in this place. He'd been here not five minutes and already his skin was beginning to crawl; another five and he'd run gibbering into the bright October morning. He wondered how Harker could stand it: quite apart from the stench (a cross between human feces and an open sore) and the noise (men and women crammed alike into overcrowded cells, some silent while others shrieked and howled) there was the general air of helpless desperation that seemed to corrode his soul.

Harker stopped in front of an iron door that was bolted and padlocked from the outside. "Do you see that woman?"

Devlin stood on tiptoe to peer over Harker's shoulder, saw the crouching figure of an elderly woman. Her iron-grey hair was matted with twigs and straw, and flowed unconfined over her narrow shoulders; her feet were bare, and for clothing she wore only a shredded linen shift. Her hands and face were filthy, the fingernails grown long and savage, and as she sat and watched them, she rocked back and forth on her haunches, peering at them mutely, a creature entirely untamed.

"Is it Sarah Whittaker?" Devlin asked - but this woman was old, and John Whittaker surely would have taken a woman of his own age, given his vanity for such things.

"No," Harker replied. "It is my mother."

Devlin waited while an attendant unlocked the complicated series of bolts that would admit them to Sarah Whittaker's cell. He was prepared to see just about anything - especially now, after Harker's shocking revelation. The door swung back and they stepped into an interior that was painted white, with a high window that admitted some small degree of light into the room. Someone had gone to the trouble of fixing curtains there, and Devlin could easily discern the care that had gone into creating the delicate embroidery and ruffled edges. Just underneath the window was a writing desk with a selection of pens, a blotter, and an ink bottle; the chair adjacent was draped with a scrap of discarded velvet - probably to hide its worn and battered appearance.

"Mr. Harker - " The woman on the bed rose gracefully and moved to where they were, reached to shake Harker's hand. "I am so grateful you have come. Your legal counsel was always most welcome to me in days gone by." She peered over Harker's shoulder at Devlin. "But who is this friend of yours?"

She was a small woman, neat and tidy, with blonde hair coiled at the back of her head. An apron, much smudged with various bright colours, protected her dark dress, and Devlin realised that she'd been painting, that there was an easel in the corner of the room with a half-completed figure on it. "Inspector Phillip Devlin, Scotland Yard, mu'um."

She squeezed his hand warmly. "I imagine you expected to find a howling madwoman, did you not, Inspector? But I am retained here for other reasons."

"Madam, you are most gracious in agreeing to this visit." Harker gestured that she should sit down. "Inspector Devlin and I are engaged in an investigation concerning your husband - "

"Ah. My husband." Her lips curved into a merry bow. "If he may be called so, for I have not seen him this five years." She nodded at Devlin, standing by the desk. "We were married for convenience, as I was carrying his child."

Devlin blinked. "What happened?" It was an awkward, unfortunate question, but it couldn't be helped.

"It was not meant to be, Inspector." She cast a glance towards her easel in the corner. "And it effectively erased all hope of future children from our marriage." She gazed at Harker. "John Whittaker is a madman, Mr. Harker - of that I have no doubt. I am not certain what has so disturbed his mind, but I hear talk that his brain is addled by disease." She smiled at Devlin. "Even in this place, we do receive some news."

"Forgive me, Madam - " Devlin felt compelled to interject. " - but you yourself, if I may say so, do not seem particularly mad."

Harker shot a look at the inspector. "She's not," he said. "And that's precisely why she's in here."

"My husband's family have great wealth, Inspector, and even greater influence. Whatever John wants, he tends to get. When I became...inconvenient...he decided to put me away - "

"That's barbaric!"

" - and so here I am. John, or some representative of his family, meets with the hospital administrator on a regular basis. The meetings are to ensure that I remain just where I am. He has corrupted or coerced all the higher members of the administrative staff, all with an eye to keeping me incarcerated here."

Devlin was sickened. If he'd had no better reason to pursue and catch Whittaker before this, he certainly did now. "That a woman such as yourself should be - "

"Then do your best to capture him, Inspector. And I might be free." She shrugged, and offered them a smile of resignation.

"In the past few days, John Whittaker has gone on a killing spree." Harker laid this information out before her with his usual precision and economy of words. "A police constable has been ambushed and badly beaten, and members of Scotland Yard have received veiled hints that there is worse to come. The most recent murder was done on the very steps of Scotland Yard!"

Mrs. Whittaker thought for a moment, gazed at first Harker and then Devlin. "It may be that his brain is entirely destroyed by whatever this disease is - but John was always shockingly unconventional in his behaviour. It has much to do with these friends of his."

Devlin snapped to attention. "What friends?"

"The Hell Fire Club, Inspector. Doubtless you've heard of them. Oh, many people in London nowadays think it died away at the end of the last century, but that is an erroneous assumption."

"Freddie - " Devlin's brain was working so furiously that it was painful. "Freddie said something to me about the Hell Fire Club - when I went to see him at Violet's - Miss Pearson's - house."

"The Hell Fire Club are a group of moneyed ruffians, Inspector, who cloak their true purpose in pageantry and silly ritual."

"I have heard," Harker said, "That they profess to worship Satan."

"They have no need to worship Satan, Mr. Harker, and if indeed that were true, it would be a far simpler explanation than any I could furnish. No - they delight in causing havoc in the lives of others, of destroying where they might. They often strike at those among society whom they deem 'unnatural'."

Devlin could not have been more shocked if she'd hauled out a pistol and shot him between the eyes. "Unnatural?" he whispered.

"Devlin." Harker gave him a significant look.

"Any deeds that John himself is not keen to furnish, he will have some members of that unholy brotherhood to assist him. He doesn't like to get his hands dirty, Mr. Harker."

Devlin wondered aloud if murder wasn't the dirtiest of all deeds.

"Quite so, Inspector." Sarah Whittaker laughed mirthlessly. "But for John and his close companions, murder is merely another facet of their ritual."

"I don't understand," Devlin confessed, as he hurtled back through London with Harker.

"What is it that you don't understand, Devlin?"

The inspector was silent - he had no right to ask, and it was none of his business in the first place.

"Doubtless you are referring to my mother."

Devlin conceded that yes, he was.

"Ah, Devlin...there you lead me into the realms of ancient family history."

The solicitor leaned slightly forward and gazed into the inspector's dark eyes. "Have you no family secrets that you wish to remain hidden?"

Devlin realised that, in all good conscience, he could not pursue it further.

"Your constable, young Lewis - was he ever a member of the Hell Fire Club?" Harker put this question to him quietly.

"I don't believe so," Devlin said, "And besides, Freddie is a police officer! He would never have anything to do with that gang of reprobates."

Harker snorted. "If you only knew, Devlin - if you only knew the names of all the politicians and policemen, men of the cloth and university dons. It is true that the Hell Fire Club was initially founded on the precipitous nature of the aristocratic classes - but it has grown beyond that, much beyond that." The solicitor reflected for a moment. "It is not beyond possibility that Constable Lewis at one time desired entree into this heinous association and was refused."

Devlin thought about this for a moment. "Mrs. Whittaker said that John and his cronies are wont to take their spite out on 'unnaturals'."

"Another reason why Freddie Lewis was not allowed in."

Devlin could make neither heads nor tails of it. "And yet Whittaker holds high rank in this secret brotherhood."

"But Whittaker isn't - "

A great silence yawned between them in the cab: Devlin had never seen Harker's pupils distend to that particular degree.

"Oh yes," Devlin affirmed. "Oh yes." He held Harker's gaze for some long moments, an unspoken pleading in his eyes. "I know of at least one other man that Whittaker has had intimate relations with."

"Good God, Devlin," Harker breathed. "Do you understand what we are up against?" He caught Devlin's wrist, squeezed it gently. "This is not merely some demented commission of his, undertaken in accordance with the preferred behaviour of this - this club of his. Devlin, this is personal!"

"It's me he's after, Mr. Harker." Devlin smiled thinly, his great strain evident upon his face. "It's me he's always been after. It's me he blames for everything."

The cab shuddered to a stop in front of Scotland Yard, and Devlin made as if to exit, was stayed by Harker's hand. "But he probably was infected by his contact with Elizabeth Hobbs!"

"Perhaps, Mr. Harker." Devlin stepped down from the cab, leaning into the darkness of its interior. "Or perhaps he never had sexual relations with Elizabeth Hobbs. It may be that the only reason Sarah Whittaker is unscathed is because their marriage was never consummated."

"The child - "

"A sovereign says she'd been in love with someone else." Devlin forced himself to smile, even though his face couldn't quite make that sort of movement. "Marriage of convenience is not exactly unknown, Mr. Harker. How many men of our persuasion enter into the marriage contract with some woman - some woman who is fully apprised of the situation, but who nonetheless desires it, for her own reasons?"

"Then she is complicitous."

Devlin shook his head. "Not knowingly. You saw her face when we laid the evidence before her - she was quite surprised by it. Oh, she knows that he's a blackguard, a common swindler and a liar. But she didn't count on murder."

Harker sighed. "Devlin, these are indeed murky waters." He grinned. "Will you have supper with me some evening this week?"

Devlin stepped back from the cab. "Only if you're paying."

"If Whittaker is not taken into custody very soon, Devlin, I fancy we shall all be paying."

Harker tapped his walking stick against the cab's interior, and drove away.

It was strange for Devlin that he was at his desk without Freddie Lewis hovering around. He hadn't realised how much he depended on Lewis until the young constable had been so brutally taken out of commission. Quite apart from the fact that he had to fetch his own tea (a task that Devlin loathed, because it took him past the ubiquitous clutch of sergeants lounging in the downstairs hallway) he missed Freddie's steadying presence. He made a mental note to call round at Violet Pearson's later that day, to check on Freddie's progress.

The only mail for him was a small white envelope stamped with a Kensington postmark, and no return address.

I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them -

Devlin snarled and hurled the letter into the rubbish bin, then clenched his hands around his teacup until his knuckles shone white underneath the skin. What whores had Whittaker ever killed, besides Elizabeth Hobbs, and that by vengeful intimidation? If he thought to copy Saucy Jack, then he was doing a bloody poor job of it, Devlin thought.

He turned from his contemplation as the door creaked open, and Phoebe Alcock peered inside. Today she was wearing a very handsome green walking dress, with a matching hat that brought out the lambent green accents in her warm hazel eyes. "Is this a bad time?"

Devlin felt some of his anger recede. "No, Phoebe, of course not - please, come in." He arranged a chair for her and waited while she sat down. "Let me get you some tea - "

"The tea can wait." Phoebe dimpled at him over the desk. "You and I have work to do, Inspector, and I've gotten Dad's express permission to steal you for an hour."

"Phoebe, I can't just up and leave - I've got work to do, and besides - "

She would not accept his refusal on any terms. She was on strict orders, she said, from Violet Pearson, to ensure that Devlin received his daily quota of fresh air. Devlin wondered peevishly if his daily quota included the oxygenic contents of the Bedlam Lunatic Asylum.

"Freddie is doing much better." Phoebe tightened her grip on his arm and smiled up at him. "Mr. Donnelly has been caring for him night and day - you'd think he was a doctor, the way he gets on about this or that medicine. Of course, he is absolutely relentless in his fussing and fretting, your young Constable. Keeps asking when he can go back on duty."

"I've had another letter from Whittaker." Devlin wondered if he should divulge the contents, and then remembered that this was the woman with whom he'd gotten roaring drunk at an innocuous tea dance. "Or rather, a repeat of the first letter: 'I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I get buckled.'" He tilted a glance at Phoebe. "I can't understand it. He's only ever murdered one whore - and that was Elizabeth Hobbs. This puerile (Devlin was understandably proud of his personal vocabulary at this point) attempt at mockery makes no sense that I can see."

"Well..." Phoebe thought for a moment. "I think you're coming at it from a strictly male point of view, Phillip."

Devlin wondered exactly when she'd decided to drop the 'Inspector.' "Oh?"

"A woman would immediately understand the reference, because she knows that the suspicion of improper behaviour at any level brings with it the label of 'whore.'" Phoebe steered him, by a pressure of her hand, into the park. "Someone who's had a dalliance, someone who has perhaps brought an intimate shame upon the aggressor."

"Not necessarily a woman, in that case," Devlin observed.

"Quite so." Phoebe drew him down onto a bench. "Now," she said, "When are you going to kiss me?"

Devlin blinked at her, suddenly embarrassed, as Phoebe drew his face to hers and kissed him gently, with an excess of tenderness, upon the mouth. In the midst of this caress, Devlin experienced the sort of bizarre epiphany that so often marked his habits, and sprang up off the bench as though an electrical wire had been surreptitiously applied to his hindquarters. "Whores!" he cried, seizing Phoebe's hands in his and drawing her into an ecstatic hug. "Whores, Miss Alcock! Whores of any stripe!"

A group of strollers walking en famille bent evil glances in Devlin's direction, and Phoebe felt compelled to clamp her palm over his mouth to prevent any further likewise eruptions. "A whore," she whispered quietly, "is not necessarily a woman."

He felt something loosening inside of him as the terrible tension began to dissipate. Here, then, was a thread upon which he might reasonably fasten his hopes. "Phoebe," he cried, "I adore you!"

"Then marry me."

Her gaze was solemn and steadfast; Devlin saw that she could not possibly be joking. All at once, the wan October sky seemed something other than banal, and long-forgotten debts came whistling on the winds. "Sorry?"

"Marry me, Inspector." She took his arm, drew him with her onto the path. "A marriage in name only, but sufficient to secure both our reputations."

She was a brave woman, and to even bring this issue to the fore was painful for her, Devlin realised. Still, he could not imagine going to Sir Neville and announcing that he wished for Phoebe's hand in marriage - Old Brassie would probably open up his massive jaws and swallow the inspector whole....

"Father has already given his consent, if that's what you're wondering about."

Devlin drew a hand over his face. "Phoebe, this is - that is to say - I'm flattered, of course - "

She pulled away from him, drifted over to a stand of trees, now gloriously in autumn colour. Her handkerchief was clutched in her hand, but she strenuously denied that she was crying. "Please - " she appealed to him, " - forget I ever mentioned it."

"Now see here - " Devlin turned her round to face him, smoothed her tears away with his fingers. "You're ruining your pretty face," he murmured. "I'm not saying 'no', Phoebe." To be certain, it was not something he had ever imagined, but now that the possibility had presented itself, he could discern several important benefits in it. "But I'm not saying yes just yet, either." He spread his overcoat on the grass below, and drew her down beside him. "Am I the first man you've asked?"

"Of course you are!" She scrubbed at her eyes angrily with the back of her hand. "As soon as I met you, at the tea dance - you see, it isn't easy for me - naturally the public penalties are not nearly as severe as for a man in similar circumstances -" She blew her nose loudly into her handkerchief. "Oh, God dammit anyway!"

Devlin offered her his handkerchief, waited while she dried her face. "Go on," he said.

"It's one thing for me to be seen about London with Violet, and quite another for the Chief Commissioner's daughter to be perceived as one half of a Boston marriage."

Devlin wondered whether this latter might be an American plot. One could never quite trust a people who had so vigorously thrown off the civilising influence of the British Empire. "I understand," he said. He didn't.

"As much as I might feign disinterest in the mores of society, Inspector, I am not that strongly cast." She glanced at him. "People talk."

Devlin sighed. He'd been doing a lot of that lately. "Phoebe..." How to best approach the subject without giving undue offence? Diplomacy had never been his strong suit. "I have always thought, because of my...inclinations...that I would never marry." He caught her crestfallen expression and hurried on. "However, what you say makes a good deal of sense." He smiled, reached out to caress her cheek with his fingers. "It would be in name only, Phoebe - quite apart from the required consummation to make it legal." He held her chin in his hand and looked her squarely in the eye. "Do you think you might countenance that?"

She sniffed. "Phillip, I've seen cock before."

Devlin suppressed a grin. "Seeing cock and, well...it's two different things, my dear."

"Have you?"

"Seen cock?" Devlin regarded her queerly. "Well, I see my own every day, you know." It occurred to him that this might not be what she'd meant.

"Have you ever been with a woman?" Phoebe's features resumed their habitually saucy expression. "Have you ever fucked a woman, Inspector?"

"I'm sure I could manage," he said stiffly. "And yes, for your information - although it's none of your damned business - I have."

"Gawking at the corset ads in the back of Pall Mall's while you're having a frig doesn't count." And she was on him, laughing as she tumbled him backwards on the ground.

Ten

By the time Devlin returned to the Yard, it was nearly two o'clock, and he handed Phoebe off reluctantly. He couldn't remember when he'd had the privilege of such good conversation, and indeed, their brief sojourn had been as enjoyable for him as he might have wished. "One thing at a time." He kissed her cheek around the corner from the Yard. "I'll need some space for this, Phoebe. You can't expect a bachelor of thirty-five to leap directly into wedded bliss without a warning - even if it is merely a marriage of convenience."

She opened her reticule and extracted a roll of banknotes, which she pressed into his hand. "What's this?" he asked.

"You'll need to buy a ring, when the time comes." She winked at him. "Nothing too flash, but nothing too tiny either."

Devlin pressed it back into her hand. "When the time comes," he said, "for me to put a ring upon your finger, I will buy it for you myself." He patted her cheek fondly. "Now run along." He waited till she had turned the corner, not wanting to ignite rumours by appearing so close to his workplace with Old Brassie's pretty daughter on his arm.

What in God's name had he just agreed to?

Devlin had often noticed in himself the distressing impulse, when alone, to putter - to dawdle about his rooms and tidy things that perhaps did not require tidying, in order that Mrs. Taylor not have further evidence for shrieking about the state of his rooms. He wished he were alone now, that he might putter away to his heart's content - instead of sitting at this dimly-lit card table and watching, in mesmerised awe, the motions of the other hands upon the green baize. He'd sat in comparative silence for some time now, watching hands and faces, inhaling the smoke from several expensive Cuban cigars, and being summarily prompted now and then by the sharp and none-too-gentlemanly elbow of Reginald Harker.

"I see, then, that's five and I'll take another." The man to Devlin's immediate right did some inexplicable thing with the cards, setting the other occupants of the table into subdued motion. Devlin wondered what the devil was occurring, for he had no clue how poker was played, nor had he ever had any inclination to learn. He considered gambling - especially gambling at cards - among the higher forms of vice, and wondered often when he had become so stringently moral. At the moment, he was trying to 'pass' for a seasoned card shark, without any measure of success. Only Reginald Harker's keen eyes and fine sense of timing prevented Devlin from exposing himself for what he really was. He wondered how fast he'd have to run, when these doughty punters figured out he was a copper.

Devlin recognised several important members of high society around the table. He reflected on what Sarah Whittaker had told him at Bedlam, that the influence of the Hell Fire Club reached even into the upper echelons of society. What would Lord and Lady Inkpen think, he mused, if they knew that their red-headed, boyish son was seated opposite Devlin at this very moment, sucking on a cigar (Devlin thought there might be some arcane symbolism in that, but he couldn't discern precisely what it might be) and shuffling cards as if he were a shiftless dock labourer on a Friday night. Their current company comprised that of several snotty ruffians, ne'er-do-wells who floated with ease between the high classes and the low, and who weren't above nicking a spot of crumpet from any of the assorted dollymops that roamed the East End. Devlin had seen their kind before, seen it most profoundly during Saucy Jack's late and unlamented reign of terror. Oh, they'd be quick enough to defend themselves with fancy words and accusations fit enough to drag a man into a duel, but Devlin saw them for what they were, and understood their nature.

The club - if it might be called such - was located underground, and could only be reached through a complicated series of tunnels and treacherous switchbacks. He'd disembarked from a cab above, accompanied by Harker, and within perhaps ten minutes he was standing in the main meeting hall. It looked like pictures Devlin had seen of flash gentlemen's clubs, all mahogany and baize, and carpets that seemed to grip your foot about the ankle. Devlin had never actually been a member of a gentlemen's club, not possessing any of the necessary prerequisites for entry, but he knew what he was looking at. This was the place where London's able boys came to rest their weary bones, when the Hunt and the Horn had lost their savour. He felt remotely nauseous. He was quite nervous, too, in the too-large set of evening clothes he'd borrowed from John Donnelly, the shoes that Harker had bestowed upon him. He'd found what looked to him like fingernails inside one of the pockets, but could not determine whether they belonged to Donnelly or Harker, or to one of their resurrected subjects. Perhaps Donnelly had found the clothes within the course of his midnight foraging - it wasn't beyond possibility for Donnelly and Harker to strip their corpses of the mortal shroud.

The cards were going round the table again, and Devlin felt Harker's elbow in his side, warning him to place his bet. He tried not to fumble the cards, aware of the eyes upon him, the unspoken expectation. "There we are!" He forced a note of cheerfulness into his voice. "I'll raise five."

Again, Harker's elbow in his ribs. Devlin grunted. The men were looking at him, and he saw or felt some frisson of disgust pass between the others. "I say, if you're going to be niggardly, you might as well not play at all." This from a vapid blond man, with the predatory sleekness of an eel.

"From the paucity of your own bet, I should think you'd keep quiet, Ronald." Harker smirked, eyelids at half-mast, and Devlin found himself admiring the silken ease with which the Resurrection Man allayed the unpleasantness of the discourse. "Unless, perhaps, your fortunes are not what they were?"

Bitchy, Devlin thought, relieved that he hadn't been the one to say it. If nothing else, he had to congratulate Harker on the relative size of his balls, not to mention his slick bravado. "Quite something about the hubbub in the East End," he said. He was aware that he was venturing into dangerous territory, but that the risk was necessary. Considering what Sarah Whittaker had told them, there was precious little time to waste.

"What about it?" The one called Ronald fleered at him, lips curled in disdain. What was it, Devlin wondered, about the upper classes, that they could so easily achieve that particular expression? Perhaps the projecting teeth...

"Well, from what I've heard, this fellow might be the Ripper." Devlin accepted a cigar from Harker, allowed the Resurrection Man to light it for him. The taste was rather stronger than he was used to, and for a moment the table and its occupants swam weirdly before his eyes, but he recovered his composure soon enough.

"So what if he is?" The redheaded son of Lord and Lady Inkpen tossed his chips upon the table, the very portrait of elegant aplomb. Devlin suddenly understood why everybody hated the upper classes - even young Inkpen had the very same projecting teeth as all the rest. "City needs to be cleaned up - who cares if he's topping a few old whores?"

Devlin felt his eyes bugging out, darted a savage glance at Harker. The Resurrection Man continued as he had done: cool and smooth as ice, utterly without regard. "Perhaps so," Devlin allowed, "but what if he's got his cap set for something bigger?"

The blond man snorted. "Like what?"

Devlin shrugged. "Could be anything. You never can tell what might happen."

A clock ticked in the silence, each stroke sounding like attenuated hammer blows. Devlin felt the keen tickle of sweat behind each ear, and his overwrought nerves were twanging savagely.

"Nothing going to happen." This from redheaded Inkpen. "As long as he confines his fun to the great unwashed, he can carry on, as far as I'm concerned." He glanced at his companions and laughed, eerily horsey in the dim light. "He knows what side his bread's buttered. He'll keep to the lower, and not bother with the upper."

Devlin felt his insides go very still, the room retreat from him: vague, unreal. He darted a glance at Harker, shuffling cards with the impunity of the intimately favoured. "Deal me out," he said. "Need to find the lavs." It was becoming a pattern with him, he thought, that all his most awkward encounters in life should necessitate a trip to the Seat of Ease. He was no more pleased when he found himself wandering throughout the cavernous interior of the club, turning down numerous blind hallways and coming hard against many dead ends. At one point, he had ascended a short flight of stairs and was making for a closed door, located at the terminus of the hallway, when certain exclamations of carnal excitement and various invocations of the Deity caused him to turn about. He found himself hopelessly lost, and had decided to relieve himself upon a nearby aspidistra, when he discerned that he was being followed.

Devlin crept behind a pillar, slowed his breathing to the point where it would be all but inaudible, and waited. The footsteps came nearer, echoing eerily in the stony spaces of the underground cavern. He heard the footsteps pause, could almost visualise the intellectual processes of their owner - when a man's head appeared, and then the rest of him, and Devlin leapt to collar his opponent neatly. "That'll be far enough, then!"

"I beg your pardon, sir! How dare you!" He struggled fitfully against Devlin's steely grip, his eyes darting wildly in his head, his lips drawn back over his projecting teeth (there it was again, Devlin thought) like a stallion scenting a mare.

"You were following me!" Devlin pressed the man against the pillar and gazed at him spitefully. "What d'you think you're doing, eh?"

"Lord Dalyrimple, sir - unhand me immediately!"

Devlin's fingers released their grip; Lord Dalyrimple tidied his clothing with an air of significant resentment, and regarded Devlin narrowly, as if the inspector were no more than a butterfly impaled upon a pin.

"Much better," Dalyrimple sniffed. "You might do better than to roam about the corridors yanking people by their clothing."

Devlin waited.

"Yes, well then - I heard you talking at the poker table. I was seated two tables over, with Lord Bastadge and the Duke of Boneasse. You're a bit of an inquisitor, aren't you?"

Devlin wondered how he'd come to be linked with the Spaniards all of a sudden, and that nastiness the Catholics did. "I don't understand."

"Mmmm, no vast surprise there." Dalyrimple raised one aristocratic eyebrow. "Cheapside?"

Devlin felt himself bristling, or perhaps it was Donnelly's purloined suit. "I beg your pardon!"

"You're a Yard man, aren't you?"

Devlin raised his eyebrow, but was unable to effectively mimic Dalyrimple's delirious sang froid. "And if I am?"

"Let me guess - Brixton. It would have to be Brixton, really...not quite low enough for Cheapside, but dear God where ever did you get that suit?"

"Keep your hands where I can see them!" Devlin snapped. "Unless you'd like to lose 'em."

"You might want to mind your tongue," Dalyrimple observed mildly. "Talking in the wrong places. You might miss it when it's gone."

Devlin thanked him for the warning.

"They all dance to Johnny's tune, nowadays," Dalyrimple shouted after him. "Johnny's got them doing what he wants - he'll make sure of it."

Devlin turned. "What the Devil are you talking about, man?"

"Johnny Whittaker - that's what you were asking about, isn't it?" Dalyrimple's smile was slick and oily, like his hair. "Johnny's got them all at his disposal, ready to carry out his every wish."

"Really."

"Some of us have debts, you know - a little too much money spilt about for comfort's sake. Whittaker has an open purse, and nothing buys loyalty like money." Dalyrimple inclined his head. "I'd stay clear if I were you." He laughed noiselessly. "I'd stay bloody well clear."

If he managed it just right, he could ease himself onto the floor and then -

Freddie Lewis stopped, his senses tuned to the approaching footsteps along the hallway. He shoved his legs into his trousers, and rammed his feet into his shoes.

"Constable Lewis!" Violet Pearson stared at him, outraged. "What in God's name are you doing?"

"You've been very good to me." Freddie treated her to his brightest smile. "But I'm afraid I can't be away from duty any longer."

"You'll do no such thing!" Violet caught the sleeve of his shirt and somehow got the unfastened cuff twisted round his wrist. "Get out of those things immediately and get into bed!"

"No, you mustn't - " Freddie wrenched the sleeve away, stumbling backwards in his weakened state and landing on the bed. "I simply must get dressed!"

Violet caught the front of his shirt in a violent grip, rather like an escapee from a Bluestocking home for wayward girls. "You cannot leave. I forbid it!"

"Inspector Devlin - "

"Inspector Devlin is a grown man - "

"Violet - Miss Pearson - please!" Freddie reclaimed ownership of his shirt, and righted himself, panting from the exertion. "Please. Inspector Devlin cannot proceed with this investigation alone."

"Mr. Donnelly said you were to take complete bed rest."

"Mr. Donnelly is an apothecary!"

Violet, seeing that he was not to be swayed, sighed and gave up the fight. "I'll have your things waiting at the bottom of the stairs." She swept out of the room in a cloud of offended feminine dignity, banging the door shut as she went.

He'd been watching the house for awhile now: Constable Freddie bloody Lewis under the tender ministrations of two middle-class Sapphists - it was simply too amusing. Freddie Lewis, Devlin's favoured mollycock, seemed to have regained his strength. It was a pity, he thought, that his associates had not finished the job.

You couldn't get good help these days.

Eleven

It was, Devlin had to admit, rather an unusual parcel to be landing on his desk at this hour of the morning, but then, nothing shocked him any more, or at least, nothing of this small magnitude. A dead cat ' a dead cat in a box ' well, that he could take in stride, having seen at least one or two dead cats before now. The cat wasn't the problem ' the problem was the note that had come along with the cat: My lads should have finished the job. Of course this was talking about the recent assault on Freddie Lewis, and this made Devlin's blood boil and froth like a pot of overheated coffee. Speaking of that, the beverages around these parts had been none too savoury, ever since Freddie's enforced absence. Whoever made the coffee down below must have boiled it up in the laundry kettle ' and the tea was wholly unworthy of any comment whatsoever. Devlin forced himself to swallow the last mouthful of his cold coffee and found himself wishing savagely that Freddie might return. At least then the quality of the refreshments would improve. He carefully avoided examining his feelings beyond that ' it wouldn't do for him to get all sympathetic and maudlin about Freddie, especially not now, and particularly not after the incident with the dead cat in the box. Curious means of getting a message through, Devlin thought, but Whittaker had never been one to take the median route towards anything. Straight through, and as flamboyant as possible ' that had always been his style.

My lads should have finished the job... Yes, too bloody right, Devlin thought, or perhaps my lads ought to finish you. The cat, of course, bothered him, because he was something of an animal fancier, and he couldnït imagine that Whittaker had picked the poor thing up out of the gutters after it was dead, so that meant that he'd killed it himself. It didn't bear thinking about. It was the sort of thing that Whittaker had always gone in for, even when he'd been a boy at school: pulling the wings off flies, decapitating ants, hounding field mice round and round the dormitory and then cornering them so he could chop their tails off.

This was entirely Whittaker's style ' here Devlin allowed himself a small grimace of remembrance ' to hurt, and keep on hurting, that was his belief, both creed and tenet.

When they were both boys at school, it had been the same: Whittaker dictated, and Devlin obeyed, at least in most things. He could at least say that he had never gone along with Whittaker's campaigns of torment against other boys, nor would he willingly participate in the kinds of gory experiments that Whittaker enjoyed. No, it was different than that: he was Whittaker's shadow, content to trail behind the older boy and feel protected in his presence. Devlin had never truly belonged at the exclusive boarding school, but being with Whittaker had helped to erase some of his awkwardness. Being with Whittaker was a sort of protection: as long as he and Johnny were together, then Devlin felt himself to be legitimate. He had gone far, he realised, to court Whittaker's regard and, having gained it, fought like mad to keep it, lest he fade again into invisibility.

But that was then, Devlin thought, and this is now. He no longer cared whether he had Whittaker's regard. He only wanted to track Whittaker down and take him in, and then see him swing for what he'd done.

Freddie had made his way immediately to the Yard ' really, there was no other place for him to go ' and enquired after Devlin, to see where he could be of best use. It wasn't that he was eager to be back at work ' his body felt like it belonged to someone else, and he'd merely borrowed it for a day or two ' but he knew that unless he intervened, Devlin would go after Whittaker all on his own, and get himself in trouble, and then Freddie would have to get him out of it. The very idea made Freddie feel inexpressibly weary. It meant that he would have to go chasing after Devlin, probably following him God-knows-where. Once Devlin got a thing into his head, it was difficult to dissuade him.

"He's not been here?" Freddie leaned on the desk for support, and hoped it didn't look this way. The desk sergeant applied himself fastidiously to his book, and pretended to look interested in what Freddie was saying. "At all?"

"He was here earlier ' he went out of here like the bells of Hell, with a dead cat under his arm." The sergeant sucked on his peppermint with a derisive noise. "Like I said ' he weren't asking after you, he said nothing about you. Out that door, dead cat. That's all I know."

Freddie sighed gently, twitched at his moustache with a fingertip. He turned round and retraced his steps, went upstairs to Devlin's office. The door opened on a musty interior, and no Devlin. The desk was covered in various bits of paper, and Devlin's empty teacup was glued to one corner by a sugary residue. The window blinds were drawn ' Freddie wondered when Devlin had last been in ' and Devlin's overshoes stood empty beside the umbrella stand, by the door. Freddie sat down in the chair and surveyed the office for a moment ' very nice. He'd like to have an office like this someday, although (here he smiled gently to himself) he could never be as good an inspector as his guv'nor. He could try, though, and he would do. He considered himself and Devlin as two of a kind, and that was good enough for him. He'd still got no closer to giving Devlin a bloody good tumble, but at least the inspector had kissed him, that night at Miss Pearson's house. Freddie remembered the kiss with a kind of hazy enjoyment, leaning back in Devlin's chair and running his fingers over Devlin's sticky desk.

There was a clattering on the stairs and Freddie sprang to his feet, immediately busied himself at the filing cabinet, and feigned great interest in an ancient article about sailing on the Thames ' why on earth did Devlin keep such things? He divined a presence in the doorway, but chose not to turn around just then, and strove to maintain his air of busyness, until he was addressed in dry and docile tones by one of the sergeants from down below.

"Yes?" Freddie turned slowly, taking full advantage of his natural grace (and also the remaining stiffness in his back and shoulders) to present an air of haughty disdain that would not have been out of place on a scion of the Hunt and Horn. It was a shame, therefore, that Freddie had been raised in Pimlico, and could not entertain even the faintest hope of social ascendancy.

But the visitor was no one worth posturing for ' Dennis Foster had been with the Force as long as anyone could remember, and had never attained a higher rank than his present one of sergeant. It was much bruited about that he was dim in his wits, and had only received his position through some outside influence, but Freddie could not be sure what that was. Several of the more waggish constables whispered that Foster was Old Brassie's son, begotten on the wrong side of the blanket, but Freddie couldn't honestly see Sir Neville completing the act of coitus with anyone. He was certain that Phoebe had been deposited with Sir Neville through the agency of fairies.

"Are you lookin' for his nibs?"

Freddie blinked at him.

"Devlin! Are you lookin' for Inspector Devlin?" Foster sighed: why in the name of God did they stick the pretty ones in with the inspectors? Clearly, the lad had not enough brains to blow his nose.

"Oh! Oh yes, I am, yes."

"You'll not find him here. Morris said you were askin' after him."

Freddie drew a blank. "Who's Morris?"

"At the desk?"

Freddie glanced behind him at Devlin's sticky desk, with its surfeit of papers and its empty, bewildered tea cup, and wondered what he was supposed to be looking for. "Sorry?"

"Christ!" The expletive exploded out of Foster with the same force required, in another man, to expel a particularly recalcitrant bowel movement. "Morris is the sergeant at the desk! Were you dropped on your head, or what?"

"Well, I have had a bit of a knocking about," Freddie conceded cheerfully.

"Look ' Old Brassie told me to tell you that Devlin is gone after Whittaker. I don't know who Whittaker is, or where he come from, or if his mother's givin' a bit of a knees-up at the Pig and Spout. All I know is that Devlin is gone looking for Whittaker." Foster exhaled, letting all the air out of himself, and disappeared down a stairwell, still muttering.

Freddie Lewis crossed to Devlin's tiny window and gazed out of it for a moment, enraptured with the view: a brick wall, and a pair of nesting pigeons whose effluent had painted the scenery in multicoloured strands of slimy matter. Freddie was the sort of man in whom the intellectual dawn is very slow to break, but whose light is staggering to behold. When the light broke, Freddie jolted away from the window as though he'd been shot at, turned, and sailed down the same stairs as the deflated Foster.

Outside, on the pavements, he paused to reflect while adjusting his gloves. Devlin had obviously got it into his head that Whittaker could be found and neatly captured by merely his own efforts ' a dangerous assumption, Freddie knew, especially given what Whittaker's bludgers had done to him. Of course this plan of Devlin's ' if indeed he had a plan ' was completely mad, for how could Devlin know where Whittaker was? Perhaps he'd had communication from Whittaker ' perhaps that's what the dead cat was all about. Freddie could just imagine how cheerfully that parcel had been received. So now Devlin had another reason to want his vengeance, and, given the inspector's penchant for impetuous single- mindedness, he could have scoured the length and breadth of London by now.

The idea didn't cheer Freddie one little bit.

The dead cat had not been received in anything resembling good cheer. Devlin remarked on it to himself now, as he sat screened behind the black sides of a maria, waiting outside a gentlemen's club in Piccadilly. The October chill had seeped into his bones until he felt deadened, cold and stiff, and still there was no movement in or out of the door. He cursed gently, and without any real feeling, as yet another dubious-looking specimen loitered on the pavement, blocking his view of the doorway, but he could have no real hope that Whittaker would even be here. He was going on gut instinct alone, and a sixth sense that told him

Whittaker had been here, might be here again soon. It wasn't so much that Whittaker was a dangerous killer who must be caught ' no, it went far beyond that now ' it was that Whittaker had dared to strike at someone close to Devlin, and for that offence if no other, he would swing.

Devlin had, for all intents and purposes, cast aside the trappings of a Yard man. He could not consider doing this while dressed in his habitual dark suit and woollen overcoat, and so he was wearing a selection of ragged clothes that had been handed off to him by Reginald Harker. 'I keep these things for... situations," Harker had told him, although Devlin had no idea what that meant, and decided not to ask. He figured it probably had something to do with Harker's passion for grave robbing, and, come to think of it, the clothing did retain a rather fusty odour. It would have to do, because Devlin had no time for niceties. He'd been haunting molly houses and gentlemen's clubs (as well as the dangerous places near the docks) for days now, hoping that Whittaker would come looking for another victim. So far, the killer had been irritatingly cautious about his movements.

Devlin slipped out of the maria and moved into the shadows, eminently grateful that darkness came early at this time of year. He stuck his gloveless hands into his pockets and adopted a rolling sort of stroll, such as a drunken seaman might display, and ambled his way along the pavement to the club. He braced his back against the wall and slowly slid down it, to sit with his ragged coat puddled around his knees; the gin bottle was in his pocket, at the ready, and he pulled it out, took what passed for a long drink, the liquor barely touching his lips. He would need all his senses for this. No sense in being on the point of collaring Whittaker and then mucking it up. Devlin smiled grimly to himself, wondered where Freddie Lewis was, and hoped that the young constable was safely resting at the home of Violet Pearson in Kensington. No need to bring Freddie into this ' best leave him and everyone out of it ' and Devlin was acting on his own recognizance now, no longer affiliated with any law except himself.

Two men staggered out, leaning on each other for support, and began to laugh hilariously at some private joke. Devlin rolled onto one hip and regarded them blearily, rubbed a dirty hand across his unshaven face. Strangers, no one he knew, and certainly not Whittaker, who'd be gorgeous even if he rolled himself through the sewers of London. Whittaker had always been like a set of silver buttons: shining and perfect, immune to threat of tarnish. "Spare us a drink?" The taller of the two wandered over to Devlin and stood swaying over him for a moment; in the cold October damp, his breath steamed out of his mouth and nose and seemed to condense into the air.

"Piss off," Devlin growled, clutching his bottle to him. He didn't want trouble ' if they insisted, he'd give them the bloody bottle and be done of it. To make a scene now would invariably expose his position, and then any hope of subterfuge would have flown out the metaphorical window.

"Only wanted a tipple, guv'nor!" The man rejoined his companion, and Devlin sighed with relief, sagged back against the wall. Long moments passed, and in the lengthening shadows, a man brushed past him: elegant, well dressed in evening clothes with hat and stick. The hem of his overcoat brushed one of Devlin's shabby knees, and as he went by, the man said, "Good evening, Phillip."

Devlin sat bolt upright, his gaze burning into the man's retreating back. He couldn't be certain that he had heard aright; perhaps the man had merely said 'good evening, fellow' or something of that like. There was no real proof that he had called Devlin by name, addressed him familiarly, as though they were friends or something more....

By the time Devlin had rounded the corner, the man had disappeared. Devlin thought this was uncommonly like the stories in the pulpy magazines, with their tales of near misses and ships passing in the night and whatnot. He searched the faces of the crowds anxiously, scanning their eyes and their expressions for any hint or recognition, but found nothing. He retired to the maria and made his reluctant way back to his lodgings.

Devlin had bathed and shaved himself, and was just sitting down to one of Mrs. Taylor's astonishing meals when the downstairs bell rang. He cursed quietly, and cut into the Yorkshire pudding with more than his usual alacrity. He was chewing when Mrs. Taylor ushered Freddie Lewis in, both of them deferential. On Lewis it seemed natural, but on Mrs. Taylor it had an unfortunate effect, like a tugboat struggling to seem dainty. Lewis stood with his hat brim clenched between his fingers, but Devlin was in no mood for niceties. He pointed the handle of his knife at the constable: "Sit."

Freddie pulled out a chair hastily and slid into it, hands clasped in his lap. His hat had rolled under the table, but he dared not dive down to rescue it ' Devlin would probably murder him while he was down there.

"Sir, I can explain ' "

"You're out of bed."Devlin glanced up as Mrs. Taylor appeared with a second supper, which she placed in front of Freddie Lewis; her smile hovered somewhere between matronly and salacious, a combination which made Devlin acutely uncomfortable.

"Sir, I felt that ' "

"Out of bed, barely healed, and I bet you've been trailing all over London after me, haven't you?"

"Foster said you'd gone after Whittaker yourself ' "

Devlin snorted as well as he was able through a mouthful of beef. "Foster is a drunken sot who couldn't find his arse with two hands and gaslight."

"I followed you to Piccadilly." This was true: Freddie had secreted himself around the corner and kept Devlin in his view the whole time. "You'd do the same for me, sir, I know you would. I couldn't let you just walk in there, in to God knows what, without anyone to back you up, see." This tumbled out in a rush, followed by a moment of acute silence, during which Freddie delved into his plate with gusto.

"Constable ' Freddie." Devlin laid his fork down and gazed at his subordinate. His stomach knotted itself into a curious, gruff tenderness, which he could not deny. The bruises on Freddie's face had faded to dappled yellow and purple, and the swelling had gone down, so that Freddie looked like someone had decided to paint his features in with watercolour and hadn't finished the job. "You're still not recovered. You should be in bed! And besides, I can't have you running after me ' it's not your task to take care of me. I'm supposed to do that for myself. "He bit down hard on his lip. "How are you feeling?"

Freddie smiled. "Another day in that house with those women and I'd have lost my mind."

Devlin chuckled. "Bit much, aren't they?"

Freddie tilted his head, regarded Devlin quietly. "Is it true that you're going to marry Phoebe Alcock?"

Devlin laid down his fork. "No, Freddie...no, I'm not. "How to phrase it so it made sense? But Devlin saw that he didn't have to, for Freddie was nodding as if he understood. Devlin couldn't discern the precise level of Freddie's understanding - it might be that Freddie was as much in the dark as ever, given the convoluted path his thought processes usually took. Devlin wisely left matters where they were, for he wasn't sure when or if he'd come to the decision to nullify his not-quite engagement with Phoebe. Perhaps, he reasoned, he'd begun to understand himself and his own nature, and no longer had any desire to hide from himself. Or maybe last night's supper had made him apoplectic - either way, he was content to let his digestion lie as it was at present, seeing as how Freddie himself was satisfied with his response. Freddie was tucking into Mrs. Taylor's supper with a great deal more relish than was strictly necessary, but Devlin supposed that the poor lad had been subjected to barley water and great lashings of oatmeal during his convalescence, and little else.

Devlin was early at his desk the next morning, a cold and foul morning with a heavy, drenching mist and a chill in the air that went straight to the bone. He'd barely hung his coat before Barnicott appeared, his red hair somehow managing to stand nearly straight up on his head, giving the impression of mind-shattering fear - Devlin supposed it was the humidity. "Sir Neville wants to see you, sir - said it was urgent. He's in his office waiting for you."

Devlin waited till Barnicott had vanished, before folding gracefully forward and slamming his forehead into the hard wooden surface of his desk. Damn, damn and double damn again - what was it this time? Perhaps Old Brassie had heard about Phoebe's overtures, and decided to put his oar in. Devlin had visions of being frog-marched down the aisle of the church, with Old Brassie's hand at his collar and a phalanx of constables making sure he didn't try a runner. Or perhaps Old Brassie desired Devlin's attendance at another of his wife's infernal tea dances. Whatever it was, it could not possibly be pleasant.

It wasn't. Sir Neville Alcock had a terrible cold, and that, combined with his effusively running nose, gave him the look of a frustrated Brahma bull in heat. His eyes were red about their rims, deceptively weepy-looking, and his lips were similarly wet. He was in a bad temper, too, barging around his desk, swinging his stomach in front of him, and pausing now and then to cough resoundingly and spit a slimy organic substance into his handkerchief. It made Devlin queasy.

"I've been looking for you, Devlin." Sir Neville sank his fleshy bottom into the chair cushions and regarded Devlin as he might a mound of horse turds. "I've been hearing things."

"Things?"

"What's this I hear about you taking a constable and a maria and going after Whittaker yourself - in disguise and plainclothes, no less."

Devlin allowed that, as a detective, he always worked in plainclothes - but as soon as the statement was out of his mouth, he wondered whether this was precisely what Sir Neville meant.

"Skulking about the streets like a common thief! Lying in wait for him, although I'm certain you got nothing for your troubles."

"I need - we need - to bring Whittaker in before he kills again." Devlin considered the bald fact, wondered if Whittaker had killed today, or if he would kill tomorrow. There was a certain sordid inevitability about it that left him chilled throughout. Or maybe that was the weather.

"I know that!" Sir Neville barked - a noise that degenerated into a coughing fit that lasted several long minutes, and whose end product was the unfortunate spitting of still more mucus into Sir Neville's already burgeoning handkerchief. "But I can't have my detectives going off on their own, it's not right. You might get yourself into a pack of trouble, and then the Force is all over the newspapers, being laughed at."

Devlin couldn't imagine anyone in their right mind laughing at Sir Neville - at least not to his face, but he didn't say anything.

"You seem dead set on getting this Whittaker, as if he'd done you some kind of a personal injury. I know about Elizabeth Hobbs - I remember the case - but I can't for the life of me understand why in the world you're so obsessed - "

Here Devlin felt it necessary to defend himself. "Sir, with all due respect - "

"Shut it!"

Devlin obediently shut it.

"I've been hearing talk, Devlin - that you and this Whittaker have some kind of a history." Sir Neville peered at him, his blubbery lips quivering. "It's no accident that Freddie Lewis was beaten, to my mind."

"I had nothing to do with that - sir. Constable Lewis is a very good friend, I would - "

"What I'm saying to you, Devlin, is this: at all times, a police detective must be above suspicion. He must be circumspect, without a stain on his past. These things come back to haunt a man." Sir Neville grunted, not unlike a pig nosing about for truffles. "I know."

Devlin stared at the toes of his shoes. Now all the old ghosts were coming home to roost, descending on him like a murder of crows. He still felt incredible guilt over the attack on Freddie, and counted himself at least partly responsible - but he couldn't say anything of this sort to Sir Neville, because he knew that to do so would immediately lay all his proclivities bare. How much easier if a man could be himself, if he were permitted to live as he chose, under the aegis of society.

"You are hereby suspended, with pay, for an indefinite period."

This slammed into Devlin like a series of body blows, rendering him effectively speechless, as silent as one of Harker's purloined corpses.

"I cannot have you going off on your own because you've got some score to settle with this Whittaker." Sir Neville produced another handkerchief, sneezed voraciously and inspected the nasal effluvium that this action had created. Devlin felt as though he were being dismissed, and indeed, he had been.

He was packing up his meagre belongings when Freddie came in, bearing mugs of tea and his assortment of facial bruises, all of which were fading nicely. This did nothing to assuage Devlin's guilt, but Freddie's surprise momentarily overrode him. "What the devil...?"

"Suspended indefinitely," Devlin said. He declined to add 'with pay' because Freddie might hit him up for a loan - Freddie was bad for that.

"Has he gone mad?" Freddie put the mugs down, moved to inspect the contents of the box. "You've took down all your pictures - where's your fern?"

Devlin laughed humourlessly. "I tossed it out the bloody window." He had, and he had enjoyed watching it plummet to the alleyway below and smash, a devastated green smear.

"What are you going to do now?"

"What I've been doing all along - my job." Devlin took his still-wet overcoat from the peg and slipped into it. The damp wool hung heavily from his shoulders like a shroud, nearly dragging him to his knees. He felt suddenly old and tired.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Freddie came round the desk, stood in front of him, blocking Devlin's escape. "It's my fault, isn't it? I got beat up by Whittaker's bludgers and now you got to pay for it."

"Freddie..." Devlin sighed through a sudden sharp pain in his heart. "None of this is your fault."

"I'm going with you."

For once, Devlin made the first move: he cupped Freddie's face between his palms, his thumb brushing the younger man's bottom lip. "You are most certainly not. I won't allow it. You've got a future here, Freddie."

"What about you? Who are you going to get to help you? I know you won't let this alone - you'll be out there after him."

Devlin dropped his arms to his sides. "I haven't thought that far ahead. I might enlist Mr. Harker's help, I don't know."

The younger man's face fell. "Mr. Harker... you'd choose Mr. Harker instead of me?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Freddie!" Devlin felt all the tension in his body gather itself into a knot, just behind his solar plexus. He lunged forward and kissed the constable - a hard, brutal kiss that communicated nothing but frustration. "Come and see me later on, alright?"

He didn't wait to hear Freddie's reply, but in his haste left everything behind: his pictures, his books, and his shattered, murdered fern.

He waited until he had hailed a cab and climbed inside before he allowed the reaction to play itself across his flesh. By the time he reached his lodgings, he was weeping bitterly.

Twelve

Devlin accepted the glass of brandy that Freddie had poured, and waited while the constable sat down beside him on the sofa. He wondered if he looked as poorly as he felt: certainly the events of this afternoon had already taken their toll. He now doubted, more than ever, whether he would be able to catch the cold-blooded scoundrel that was John Whittaker, now that the resources of the Yard were no longer at his disposal. "I suppose Dubworth will be assigned to it," Devlin said, gazing into the amber liquid. The glass felt warm in his hand, as though the brandy still held within it the fire from which it had been forged. "He'll make a bloody mess of it - you see if I'm not right."

"How are you?" Freddie spoke softly, leaning towards him. All day he'd been wondering what to say to his guv'nor when he arrived at Devlin's lodgings. He hoped he had the words in him to say what he wanted to say.

"Bloody wonderful, Freddie - what d'you think?" Devlin regretted this almost instantly: it wasn't Freddie's fault that he'd made such a bollix of everything. "Sorry," he murmured. "I'm not myself."

"Yes, you are." Freddie gazed at him with a peculiar intensity that Devlin found unsettling - was there a spot of something on his face? Perhaps his shirt was unbuttoned rather more than was socially proper. "Even if you're not on active duty, you're still yourself." He leaned back, frankly assessing the man in front of him. "You never deviate."

Devlin was astonished that Freddie knew a word like 'deviate'. "Thank you."

"You know who you are, Phillip. That's a lot more than most men can say."

Devlin felt hot colour rise into his cheeks - it couldn't be a blush, he was far too old for blushing. "You're quite full of flattery tonight, Freddie. And I've noticed a new familiarity in your speech. Maybe you ought to get knocked on the head more often - "

Whatever else Devlin had been going to say was lost for all time as Freddie leaned in and kissed him. Devlin struggled with the brandy, his body coursing towards his constable with the ferocity of the tide; he reached around Freddie and laid the glass on the floor without disengaging from the kiss. His skin was on fire, his pulse throbbing to the tips of his fingers - these fingers that now roamed unashamedly over the young constable's broad back. Freddie's hands reached round to clasp his backside, pull him hard against the younger man in a possessive gesture. Devlin watched, as from a great distance, as Freddie ripped his shirttails out of his trousers, and unbuttoned him completely.

"I can't wait - I won't wait - this is bloody long enough." Freddie's mouth was at his throat, the tip of his tongue flickering against Devlin's skin, while Freddie's busy hands caressed him to a throbbing hardness.

The bed came up to meet him, and he had no idea how he'd got there, only that it was soft and warm, and everything would be alright because Freddie was with him now. He turned his face for Freddie's kiss and felt the heat of his desire, transmitted so ably to him in the skin of another. He opened his arms and felt his bones compressed under Freddie's weight, the delicious press and crush of skin on skin. "You love me," he whispered wonderingly, his fingers tracing his constable's face gently. "You love me."

He knew that things had suddenly, irrevocably changed between them.

Devlin was lying on his stomach with Freddie Lewis beside him, and Freddie was running his fingers up and down the furrow of Devlin's spine, pausing now and then at the curve of his back. It was late afternoon, nearly dark, and Devlin felt absolutely boneless, his skin a container for heat. He turned his head and looked at Freddie, saw the smile that curved the constable's mouth. "Freddie," he said lazily, for this was as much energy as he could muster, "you're making me sleepy."

"Let's go for a walk."

Devlin raised an eyebrow. "A walk," he repeated. The sheets were an erotic ruin, and the quilt was somewhere on the floor. His drawers - well, best leave that one where it was, Devlin thought. He hadn't seen his drawers for some hours now.

"I love walking at this time of day."

"Aren't you afraid? After what's happened, I mean - " He sighed. Freddie was young, and the young never worried about anything at all. "A short walk."

Freddie moved, quick as a mongoose, and rolled Devlin onto his back, pinned him against the bed. "Then we can come back here again." His hands slid down Devlin's sides, caressing, until the detective hissed through his teeth. He wondered where his rational, logical side had gone, that a mere touch from Freddie could so unhinge his faculties.

"It's gotten away from me, you know." Devlin breathed in the cold air with something like gratitude.

"What's that?"

"This whole case - Whittaker - everything."

Freddie looked at him queerly. "I don't believe you."

Devlin laughed. "I figured I'd have him in custody by now - long before now, actually. I figured I could collar him quick as a thought."

"He's very slippery, like an eel." Freddie, having uttered this pearl of wisdom, looked appropriately blank, but Devlin knew that blankness was part and parcel of Freddie's habitual expression and was therefore not alarmed by it. They had strolled some distance from Devlin's lodgings, talking companionably, with the sensual comfort of this afternoon's pleasures still warm between them. It did not seem strange to Devlin that they should walk arm-in-arm, for he perceived other men in similar states, all around them. Besides, it felt good to be in close contact with Freddie: he felt he at least had an ally in the midst of all this sordid business.

At length they wandered into a well-lit public house, and, disposing themselves around a table, proceeded to warm themselves before the fire. The place was empty save for a group of men in dark topcoats, conversing earnestly at a corner table.

"If I catch him, I'll have something to show Old Brassie." Devlin took a long draught of his beer and gazed at Freddie over the tabletop. "But now I wonder if I'll ever catch him."

Freddie nodded sagely, having nothing to say. He turned to the man standing before him - the man who had not been there a moment ago. Freddie felt suddenly both hot and cold at once, wondering if they had been observed and listened to, and his gaze was irresistibly drawn to the man, who smiled at him as one might smile indulgently at a wayward child. This man was tall, and exceedingly well made, with dark blond hair and eyes the colour of a storm-lashed sea. His suit was of the finest dark stuff, exquisitely tailored, and his rings and cuff buttons were gold. He was, Freddie thought, an astonishingly gorgeous monster.

"Hello, Phillip."

Devlin froze inside, raised his head slowly, and he and the stranger locked glances like two strange tomcats meeting in an alleyway. He felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck come up, and all at once he was besieged by memories of John Whittaker...

It will only hurt the first time...then we'll fit each other...Phillip, are you listening? Don't cry - you mustn't cry like that. I'm sorry about the blood, you know, but that's the way it is...Phillip, are you listening to me?

Devlin reached into his pocket for the darbies that were no longer there. Whittaker turned as quick as lightning and vanished, the door banging shut behind him. Devlin stood so quickly that he nearly overturned the table, and the landlord of the place came scuttling over, brandishing a slop pail and a filthy rag. "Freddie, stay here." Devlin tossed some coins upon the table and headed for the entrance, his mind whirling: Whittaker, here and now, ready and seemingly willing to be taken, and perhaps he'd had enough of killing now, and wanted to be taken in...perhaps he was ready for an end to it, and an end was just what Devlin thought to give him, as swiftly as possible.

The October darkness had fallen as quickly as ever, compounded now by a dense, thick fog and the rising damps from the Thames. Devlin squinted, peering into the night, listening carefully for any sign that would show the direction: footsteps, the tapping of a stick on the pavement, a cough or a rustle of clothing.

Nothing.

He slipped one hand into his pocket and went carefully round the side of the building, where it abutted with another of its like and formed a sheltered passageway, dark and narrow. "Whittaker!" His voice fell damply around his ears, deadened by the fog. "Give it up and come out."

"Phillip?" Freddie Lewis stood framed between the buildings, peering at Devlin queerly, as if his guv'nor had just materialised out of the mists. "What're you doing in there?"

They rose, roaring as one voice, the men in dark topcoats, and pushed past Freddie Lewis to swarm all over Devlin like a monstrous and demonic horde. The hand that had been in his pocket came out again, brandishing a knife: as sharp as a surgeon's lance, and with a retractable blade, it was his favourite weapon.

Freddie was roaring, laying about him with a certain dogged willingness; Devlin saw nothing except the flashing of his own blade, heard nothing except grunts and swearing all around him. One of them - huge, dark, monstrous - came at him, waving his enormous fists like cudgels, and Devlin drove the blade hard into his solar plexus, dropping him like a slaughtered bull. Another appeared, brandishing a length of pipe and screaming like a berserker. He was stopped - quite suddenly, and probably for good - by Freddie's stunning blow to the back of his head. Of course, Devlin thought, panting furiously from the unaccustomed exertion, Freddie had retained his constable's stick, and was using it now to good effect.

As quickly as it had begun, it stopped. Their attackers scattered, disappearing into the darkness. The one that Devlin had stabbed lay very still beside the one whose head Freddie had so obligingly bashed in; Devlin had no doubt that they both were dead. He pocketed his knife with shaking hands, and tried to mop his forehead with his handkerchief.

This was bad - this was very, very bad. There would be an investigation, Devlin knew, especially if their assailants had been, as he suspected, Whittaker's friends and members of the Hell Fire Club. The Yard couldn't possibly turn a blind eye, especially if Devlin had just murdered several members of the upper class... He sat down heavily, suddenly very sick to his stomach. The warm feelings of satisfaction and contentment vanished, leaving a howling emptiness inside. Devlin turned his head and retched quietly, each spasm seeming to tear something out of him that he wasn't yet willing to part with.

"We have got to go." Freddie crouched on his heels and spoke quietly, urgently. "We can't stay here - they'll waste no time in alerting the Force." He helped Devlin to his feet. "Come on - we have to go."

"Where?" Devlin struggled against Freddie, then subsided and allowed himself to be led away. "Where can we go that's safe? Of course Whittaker has been watching my rooms - of course we were followed here. Where can we go, Freddie?"

He dimly perceived Freddie hailing a cab that had stood at the corner; everything was beginning to blur around its edges, and the city seemed strange to him, as if he'd not seen it before. He glanced up at the driver as he got into the cab, his mind remarking that the driver seemed familiar, but perhaps that was only Devlin's addled mind. He didn't know any cabbies personally - he hardly ever used the things, not if he could walk or take out one of the marias and a driver. But the cab was taking an unfamiliar route, and when Devlin darted a glance at Freddie, he saw that the younger man was slouching in his seat and gazing before him with an air of wariness and wily calculation that Devlin had never seen before. "Freddie?"

"It's for your own good."

Devlin moved, intending to leap from the cab, and was quickly restrained by hands that felt so very hard and pitiless - the same hands that had caressed him, only hours before. The horrible realisation clanged inside his skull like the tolling of a bell, and he watched in helpless horror as the darkened city slid quickly past them, taking him to God knows where.

Thirteen

The cab ride eventually gave way to a train station - a station that wasn't within the boundaries of London proper, and which Devlin did not recognise. He wondered what Freddie was playing at, and if he was in the pay of Whittaker - it would be so easy, Devlin realised, for Whittaker to corrupt someone like Freddie, someone so innocent and untouched. Almost as soon as he'd had this thought, he dismissed it - perhaps Freddie had only been toying with him, all this time, and wasn't as innocent as Devlin had supposed. His demeanour during the long cab ride had been strange, to say the least, for he was more than a little silent and morose, the complete opposite of the young man with whom Devlin had shared a bed earlier that day. Devlin thought dully that Freddie perhaps intended to hand him over to Whittaker, and he wondered why he wasn't trying harder to escape. He merely felt tired, and his hand ached where he had driven it and his blade into the bowels of Whittaker's henchman; he was hungry and immeasurably weary, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep and never wake again.

He got down from the cab, and looked about him, measuring the ache in his body against the possibility of escape. The railway platform was deserted, and Devlin wondered if he might make it through to the other side and then onto the tracks, before Freddie caught up with him. The cabbie pulled his vehicle close against the station and got down from his perch behind; he paused to tie the reins, and patted the horse's neck amiably, murmuring some comforting phrase meant only for animal ears. Devlin was cold, shivering in the dampness, and his throat felt as though he'd been screaming for a month: sore and gritty, and entirely too warm. The station was blurred and strange, as the passing streets had been, and he found himself looking for individual particles of moisture in the fog.

"This way." Freddie took his arm in an iron-hard grip and propelled him into the station, while the cabbie followed, tall and dark and silent as a monolith. Devlin had the odd idea that there was no actual man inside the cabbie's clothes, but a block of stone that had somehow become animated and rumbled after them like a colossus. This seemed so funny to him that he began to laugh, and laughed until tears ran freely down his cheeks, while Freddie and the cabbie took his elbows and between them, propelled him onto the train and into a private, first-class compartment that had obviously been reserved for this purpose.

"Here - " The cabbie reached into an overhead bin and pulled out a thick woollen blanket, handed it to Freddie, whose face had assumed its normal expression of dim-witted vivacity. "Get this around him - he's chilled to the bone, poor thing."

Devlin found Freddie's face very close to his own, and he stared, fascinated, at the gold flecks in Freddie's brown eyes. He felt that the flecks spelled out some secret message that would free him if only he could decipher it. Freddie's bottom lip was trembling, and Devlin noticed that the constable was shivering as badly as himself - why had the cabbie not given Freddie a blanket? And why had the cabbie left his cab behind them at the station? "Your cab."

"Quiet." Freddie pressed him back against the seat, with an expression of implied violence. "Just shut it." The train lurched forward, forcing itself through the fog, as the cabbie pulled down the privacy blinds, enclosing them completely. He reached into a Gladstone bag and brought out a flask, handed this across to Freddie. "Phillip - have a little drink. It will help you get warm."

Across from them, the cabbie was doing some peculiar business with his face - strictly speaking, he was peeling off various features and placing them into his pockets, as if skinning himself. Devlin stared at him, wondering if this was some trick of the light, but at last the cabbie finished, rubbed a handkerchief over his face, and emerged as Reginald Harker.

"So you're in it, too," Devlin said bitterly. He wanted to turn his face to the window and weep - with weariness, with regret - but he would remain steadfast. He would go out of life like a man, not sniveling on his knees like a baby.

The door to their compartment opened, and the figure of John Donnelly momentarily blocked out the light from the passage. Donnelly was carrying a gun, which Devlin could see was cocked and ready. He wondered how Donnelly would possibly mask the noise of the weapon's discharge, but figured that they would wait until the train passed over the points, and shoot him then. In such close quarters, Donnelly could hardly miss.

"I've checked all up and down. Nothing much - two women travelling together, and a nurse with a child near the back." The apothecary nodded to Devlin and sat down beside Harker. "Did you see anyone?"

The solicitor shook his head. "No - all the usual precautions - I made sure of it."

Donnelly moved to the opposite side of the compartment, took a seat beside Devlin and pocketed his revolver. "You've cocked that," Devlin said dryly, "I hope you don't shoot your bollix off."

Donnelly touched his face, a curiously gentle gesture, and peered into his eyes. His fingers pulled down the lower lids, raised the upper, and then palpated the glands in Devlin's neck. "Not influenza, thank God," he said. "Probably a bad cold. Few days bed rest should help."

"Get your hands off me!" Devlin pushed at him, but all his strength seemed to have drained away. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but his throat hurt and his eyelids were burning hot. He coughed, discharging a globule of mucus that would have made Old Brassie proud, except that it splattered on the floor, somewhere near Harker's feet. The solicitor regarded this with a raised eyebrow, but said nothing. Donnelly reached into a pocket and extracted first a length of string, then a pencil, and what looked to Devlin like part of a finger, neatly severed at the joint. At last he produced a thermometer, which he pushed into Devlin's mouth. The instrument tasted like pocket lint, tobacco, and rotting flesh.

Freddie was asleep, his head lolling onto Harker's shoulder. "What's he got to do with it?" Devlin asked, speaking with difficulty around the thermometer.

Harker glanced at the blond head, smiled gently. "He is your greatest ally, Devlin - and perhaps your dearest friend."

"Friend!" Devlin sputtered, nearly choking on the thermometer.

"Sh." Donnelly repositioned the instrument, gestured at his watch. "Just a little while longer."

"Freddie Lewis probably saved your life." Harker leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees, his hands dangling. This position caused Freddie's head to drop forward, so that he appeared to be looking for some lost item between Harker's buttocks. "You were quite correct, Devlin - Whittaker has been watching you for some time now. Indeed, I have been following my own line of investigation, and I determined that John Whittaker has kept you under close scrutiny these many weeks." Harker paused as Freddie awoke and righted himself, smiling idiotically. "He saw you go out this afternoon with Constable Lewis - doubtless he followed you along whatever route your walk accomplished, and lay in wait for you."

Devlin glanced at Freddie. "You knew this?" He spat out the thermometer.

Freddie had the good grace to look ashamed of himself. "Mr. Harker came to see me whilst I was convalescing in Kensington. He said we'd to be careful about Whittaker - make sure he kept away from you."

"But at the same time, I had Constable Lewis contact Whittaker - without your knowledge, of course, because that would have jeopardised my entire plan."

"Of course," Devlin said sourly.

"Mr. Harker said for me to go see Whittaker - I'd no trouble finding him. He were with all the other toffs in the Strand one night."

"I instructed Freddie to make overtures to Whittaker, offer tidbits of information on your whereabouts and the progress of your investigation."

Harker smirked as Devlin's face turned an alarming shade of purple. "False information, Inspector Devlin - you need not concern yourself on that point. False - but with enough truth that Whittaker would think it worth his while."

"We knew that he was following you, all along - that's what we wanted," Freddie said.

"So as to control him, Inspector - control and hopefully contain him." Harker sat back, seeming to lose himself in contemplation of the window shade. "I only regret that your efforts in this case led to your dismissal - but perhaps it's better this way."

Devlin coughed, but into his handkerchief this time. "What d'you mean?"

"We are luring Whittaker away from London." Harker pierced him with a keen glance. "Luring him out into the open, like a wild animal, so that we may hunt more freely." The solicitor laughed mirthlessly. "One is so confined by the city."

"You're mad." Devlin glanced from Harker to Donnelly - Freddie had fallen asleep - and back again. "Do you think he can be so easily led?"

"Oh yes," Harker said quietly. "For he is, at this moment, on this very train."

Devlin wasn't precisely sure where they were, except that Harker had taken him to the country, some miles outside of London, and lodged all four of them at an inn on the borders of Surrey. Harker had exchanged his cabbie costume for that of an itinerant peddler, whilst Donnelly was disguised as - of all things - a surgeon. Devlin fervently hoped that the apothecary wouldn't kill anyone in the process of carrying out his deception.

Freddie and Devlin shared a room, as did Harker and Donnelly, but Devlin felt himself to be so ill, and in such a state of shock, that he could not possibly attempt any kind of physical closeness with Freddie, or even sustain a conversation. He sat on the bed while Freddie filled the bathtub in the other room - thank God for modern conveniences, Devlin thought - and then obediently got in. The hot water quickly lulled him into a state of insensibility, and before he knew better, he was lying in bed, dressed in a clean nightshirt, with Freddie by his side.

Despite his illness, Devlin found that sleep eluded him, and his mind chased itself round and round in circles, seeking answers where there were none to be found. He lay still, listening to Freddie's sleeping breath beside him, and the sound of Harker's and Donnelly's voices from the room next door, murmuring in quiet conversation. He watched the shadows lengthen through the curtains, and the rise of moonlight that blanketed the bed. He drifted into uneasy dreams, seeing John Whittaker in every corner of the room, and jolted back into wakefulness, his heart pounding and sweat seeping into the sheets. At length he fell asleep, and dreamed that a madman was on a great wooden sailing ship, with Donnelly and Harker, chasing him and Freddie around belowdecks with a cat o' nine tails. The ship changed course, and sailed off the edge of the world, and Devlin tried to shout and warn them, but he could only utter a frustrating series of squeaks and grunts. He tried to cover himself with the sails, to escape the knowledge of the inevitable, but the water rushed in through a hole in the side of the ship, and he had nothing in which to catch it. He woke up shouting, and was comforted by Freddie, who fetched him a hot toddy and sent him back to sleep again.

There were no more dreams.

Devlin slept till quite late in the morning, and by the time he finally awoke, Freddie had dressed and gone down to breakfast, and he was alone. He awoke slowly, conscious of the pain in his swollen throat, and the hacking cough that racked him. He felt feverish and dizzy, and he sat up slowly, resting for a moment on the side of the bed before attempting to stand.

The day was quite beautiful, one of those cool, crisp days that are only ever possible in autumn, with a sky of soaring blue overhead. Devlin wished he were here in happier circumstances, so that he might enjoy the bounty of the weather - what would it be like to spend a day shooting in this country? Devlin had never actually killed a bird in his life, having never had the stomach for it, or the necessary cruelty, but he felt that recent events had hardened him throughout. He hoped he would have a chance to pursue Whittaker over the entire countryside, and lodge a bullet in him, just as he would do with a fox or a hare. He hoped Whittaker was running away when that happened - Devlin liked the idea of shooting his old nemesis in the back.

He looked up as the door opened, and Harker appeared, wearing a sombre expression and an even more sombre dark suit, with lines of fatigue around his eyes, and his complexion unnaturally pale. The solicitor wordlessly passed Devlin a telegram, waited while the inspector read it. "What the devil...?"

"Sarah Whittaker hanged herself last night, in her cell in Bedlam."

Devlin had never considered himself a fanciful man, but now, sequestered with Harker and the others in the country, he began to imagine all sorts of things that would previously have never entered his consciousness. The knowledge that Sarah Whittaker had taken her own life - or had it taken from her - gnawed at his mind. Even given that she was still (as far as Devlin knew) married to John Whittaker, there was nothing in her personality to suggest a tendency towards melancholy. None of it made sense, and he wanted desperately to return to London, to the scene of the supposed suicide, and examine every inch of Sarah's quarters to try and determine the truth. He was doing absolutely no good here, trapped in a bucolic countryside setting with Harker and John Donnelly, and a nervous and over-solicitous Freddie Lewis hovering at his elbow every five minutes and plying him with tea and scones. Devlin had consumed enough tea in the past twenty-four hours to float an armada, not to mention the increasingly-annoying attentions of the pseudo-medico Donnelly. "It's a sore throat, dammit!" He waved Donnelly and his thermometer away with an irritated gesture. "Just a cold - probably caught it from Old Brassie the other day."

The papers from London - thoughtfully provided by Harker - brought no fit news for Devlin's ailing state, either. Daily the headlines screamed that there had been another murder, that corpses were found floating in the Thames, lying in the streets, dangling from the chandeliers at the dancing halls. It amazed Devlin that Whittaker could manage to exact such a monstrous toll, being so far from the alleged scene of the crime. As far as the scions of journalism knew, the Metropolitan Police were doing nothing to curtail this horrendous string of offences. This latter gave Devlin a kind of grim satisfaction: now that he'd been removed from the case, Old Brassie and all the other high hats in the Force were falling on their collective faces.

"Oh, Inspector, I feel certain that we are on his track now." Harker folded himself into the chair next to Devlin, with the graceful motion of an attenuated umbrella. Today the solicitor was dressed in dark grey - a sombre choice, given current happenings in London - but his strange green eyes held their usual expression of cool self-interest.

"Do you?" Devlin's throat was aching, and his eyelids felt hot and weighted with fever. He'd just been on the verge of drifting off.

"Perhaps it is my intuition." Harker flicked a glance at him, a curious half- smile that appeared and vanished, quick as a thought.

"Well, what the devil are we waiting for, then?" Devlin moved to rise, was stayed by the pressure of Harker's hand.

"All in good time, Inspector." Harker discovered a loose thread hanging from his sleeve, and spent some long moments manipulating it furiously. Devlin found himself increasingly irritated with the solicitor's evasions, and wondered whether his initial surmises had been correct. Perhaps Harker had lured him here for reasons of his own. Perhaps he and Donnelly had made arrangements to dissect him, after they'd done away with him, and add their findings to whatever dubious research that Harker was currently involved in.

"I have been examining this Whittaker's movements - he was indeed on the train with us, and he is here, just nearby."

Devlin coughed noisily, dislodging what felt like part of his right lung. "Post handbills, then," he hissed, "and tell him to show himself so I can arrest him."

"No need to post handbills, my dear fellow." Harker smiled insinuatingly, clasped his hands around his knees. "He sticks closer than a brother."

The idea of Reginald Harker quoting Scripture gave Devlin serious pause - hadn't someone said that even the Devil could quote Scripture to his advantage? "What d'you mean, he's close? Close to what?"

"Close to us."

The walls seemed to bend and bulge curiously, and Devlin passed a hand over his eyes until the fit had passed. He couldn't imagine what Harker meant: even given that the country house was large (supposedly it belonged to some friend of Harker's, although he wouldn't say who) Devlin could hardly fail to discern Whittaker's presence in the hallways. "Where?"

"He got off the train at the same stop as we did, and took rooms in an inn called The Checkers, about a mile down the road. I have gone there several times, on some pretext or other, and twice now I have sent John."

Devlin was dumbfounded. He knew that Harker liked to play detective, but he hadn't factored this sort of cool subversion into the solicitor's character. "You said he took rooms - not just one room."

"Ah - he is there with his sister."

"His sister?" Devlin didn't remember a sister, but that wasn't surprising, seeing as how he'd been determined to block out any memory of John Whittaker from his mind. If Whittaker had a sister, this was news; if he had a sister who was clearly in collusion with him, then the case before them was considerably enriched. "What sister?"

But Harker only gave him an enigmatic smile.

Fourteen

Devlin hadn't wanted to make so bold a move as lying in wait for Whittaker at The Checkers, but he told himself that, since he could find no better method of capture, it was just as well to follow Harker's advice, and see what came of it. The worst that could happen was that Whittaker would divine their presence and take himself away, leaving them empty-handed.

Devlin had allowed John Donnelly to bundle him in a heavy overcoat and a knitted muffler, against the late October chill. The fields around the country house were white with frost, and there was a scent of snow in the air. The cold lay upon Devlin's chest like lead, and he coughed uncontrollably in the carriage, raising concerned looks from both Donnelly and Freddie. Harker, for his part, was too sunk in his own reflections to pay much attention to the beleagured police inspector, and Devlin wondered what was going on in Harker's head.

"Are we there yet?" Freddie Lewis sat with his buttocks barely touching the edge of the seat, and his gloved hands wrung themselves together. "When are we going to be there?"

Everyone ignored him. The silence inside the carriage grew, punctured only by the sound of the horse's hooves on the road. Someone's stomach growled, and Devlin found himself wishing mightily for a cigarette, but Donnelly had forbidden it, on the condition of Devlin's lungs. Devlin wondered peevishly just when John Donnelly had received his doctoral certificate - it seemed the apothecary was giving himself unwarranted airs, but Devlin supposed that his dubious medical attention was better than none, especially at a time like this.

Harker had assumed the poise of a predatory animal, sitting pressed against the cold wall of the carriage, gloved hands clasped together in his lap, and his eyes hooded and watchful. Devlin still didn't entirely trust him: it wasn't beyond Harker's scope to be somehow involved with Whittaker, especially if there was benefit in it. Devlin imagined that Harker would sacrifice even his acolyte Donnelly, if it meant an advance in his own position.

"How do you know he'll be there?" Devlin raised his face from the muffler and directed his question at Harker. "It's not like he's expecting us, is it?"

"Harker thinks he has devised a means by which Whittaker can be made to show himself." Donnelly nodded his agreement, as if he had been the instigator of this great and noble scheme.

"Oh, has he?" Devlin cursed quietly. "What did you do," he asked Harker, "send him a telegram?"

Harker turned his head slowly, his eyes slow to focus, as though he had just then been lost in some unfathomable inner contemplation. "Why yes...that's precisely what I did, Inspector."

"You did." Devlin tried to laugh, but incited another coughing fit. "And I suppose you requested the presence of his sister, too?"

"I have laid an amiable trap. Whittaker will step into it because he will be unable to resist."

"And he's just going to overlook the fact that you have lent me your abilities - put it down to a brain fever or something?"

But Harker was no longer listening, and after a moment the carriage ground to a halt in front of The Checkers. "We're here."

The interior of the inn was overheated, and, wrapped in his woollen overcoat and Donnelly's great muffler, Devlin began to sweat - he sweat as a pudding sweats, when placed into a bag and secreted within the same pot as a boiled dinner. His perspiration ran off the tips of his fingers and into the recesses of his gloves, and crawled a slow and agonising pathway down his spine. He glanced around the room, taking careful note of the several quiet patrons disposed around the tables, and John Whittaker, seated near the back, and with him a woman dressed in gentlemen's attire, smoking a cigar.

Violet Pearson.

Devlin swayed, and clutched at Freddie Lewis who, in the interests of verisimilitude, had shaved off his moustache and slicked his curly blond hair back over his head. The effect was not unlike a squeezed ferret being forced headfirst through a length of piping. Freddie was dressed as a gardener-cum-jack of all trades, and someone (probably Harker, knowing his penchant for dressing games) had smudged coal dust on several strategic places around Freddie's face and head. He looked for all the world like a Northern miner just home from the shafts and headed for a bit of a knees-up at the local pub.

"What the devil...?" Devlin blinked through the haze of smoking candles, not trusting to his vision, which had in all probability been irreparably warped by Donnelly's viscous potions. "What's she got to do with it, Harker?" He seized a fold of the solicitor's coat between his gloved and sweating fingers.

"She is his sister." Harker flicked a glance at him. "But," he said airily, "I am satisfied that she is not complicitous in this affair."

"Really." Devlin felt sweat running down inside his pant legs, collecting in his shoes, and he wanted nothing more at that moment than to bash Harker a good one in the mouth. But that would bring Donnelly down on him, and he'd heard that the apothecary had played a rather savage brand of cricket at school, so perhaps that wasn't a good idea. Besides which, it wouldn't do to incite a round of bloodshed at The Checkers - the clean up alone would be murderous.

Whittaker was just as Devlin remembered: elegant, gorgeous, polished. He'd always felt inferior to Whittaker's brand of self-assured confidence, as though his background could never measure up. Whittaker's father had been a Member of Parliament, whereas Devlin's was a Bluebottle till the end of his days. Whittaker's mother kept an impeccable household, with dozens of servants, while Devlin's mother took in laundry to supplement the family income. It was too cruel an irony that Devlin should be here now, sweating in his borrowed clothes, standing beside the notorious Resurrection Men, and with a witless young constable who resembled a compressed weasel.

"He's over there - do you take our friends to the back room, John, before we're all of us discovered." Harker adjusted his tie and started forward, while Devlin struggled futilely in the apothecary's grip. No darbies in his pocket, and he'd been long since relieved of his warrant card, but by God, he'd lay hands on Whittaker tonight and collar him for good and proper.

"Harker has arranged this meeting - it's necessary to get Whittaker away from here and into some place more...secluded." Donnelly wrestled a breathless Devlin into a chair and loosened his muffler. "If we pounce on him here, the whole thing is finished."

"You're a bloody piece of work!" Devlin spat some woollen threads onto the table, cast the muffler away from him with an expression of distaste. "I suppose you cooked this up between the two of you, eh? Is that it? Cut Devlin out all together, let Harker ponce on in and take the credit."

Freddie bit into a particularly stubborn hangnail with perhaps more force than was necessary. "What does that mean," he asked, "ponce?"

Devlin ignored him. "What's he going to do? Lure Whittaker out onto the lawn and beat him with a rake?"

Donnelly caught Devlin's wrist in a powerful grip. The apothecary's brown eyes were cold and uncompromising. "He is going to lure him back to the house."

The tiny hairs on Devlin's forearms stood to sharp attention. He stared at Donnelly, open-mouthed, while Freddie gnawed his fingernails in contented silence. "The house," he said finally.

"This was his intention all along." Donnelly released him, sat back as a waiter appeared, bearing hot drinks for them on a tray. Devlin sniffed the cup, detected an aroma of rum and spices, and wondered if Donnelly and Harker had planned this aspect of it, as well. It certainly wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, given the means by which Harker had lured both Devlin and Whittaker here. Obviously the solicitor had depths that his bloodless exterior had never even hinted at.

"So what are we supposed to do in the mean time? Perhaps he might need reinforcements." Perhaps he might need his arse kicked for presuming to interfere in official police business.

"It's best if we wait here."

Devlin sniffed, in a manner intended to convey his irritation. "No doubt."

Harker had nearly worn out the carpet in front of the fireplace, and his ceaseless pacing was making Devlin dizzy. He was already quite nauseous, courtesy of his drink at The Checkers, and any moment he felt he might be compelled to hurl the contents of his stomach onto the hearth rug. His fever had reasserted itself, and he felt flushed and peevish; he kept falling into a fitful sleep, only to be awakened by Donnelly's grunts of exclamation. "What are we waiting for?" Devlin asked. His voice sounded thick and choked with mucus, and his skull was pounding rhythmically. "It's obvious he's given you the slip."

Harker whirled around, suddenly furious. "I will not accept that!" he roared. He subsided into silence, assumed a pose before the mantelpiece, one hand upon his hip and the other pressed against his forehead.

The outer door clanged shut, and footsteps sounded in the corridor. Harker lunged, but Devlin was quicker, and yanked the door open.

"I couldn't - I couldn't persuade him." Violet Pearson stood there, elegant and beautiful in her evening clothes. "I did everything you told me." She glanced at Harker, lounging near the fire. "It was like he knew something. I couldn't make him come here. I'm sorry."

Freddie took her arm and drew her near the fire, poured a glass of brandy. "It's not your fault," he said. The firelight played off the dirty smudges on his face.

"This throws difficulty into the whole arrangement," Harker sniffed. "Now I shall have to start all over again."

"No." Devlin felt the time had come to assert himself. "You'll do nothing of the sort. In the morning, I am going back to London, and I am going to demand that Sir Neville Alcock reinstate me, and then I am going to track Whittaker to his lair and I am going to arrest him." He sounded far more confident than he felt, but at least it was a start. Now to get the case back on track, back within the aegis of the Force, and get some work done.

Characteristically, Devlin went charging back to London, with Freddie at his side and a supply of fresh handkerchiefs in his pocket. Donnelly and Harker had elected to stay in the country for a few more days, as it was coming on for the weekend, and Harker felt that, as he put it, 'a respite from our onerous labours' was in order. Devlin had never in his life seen Harker perform anything like onerous labour, but he wisely held his tongue. Donnelly had given him a supply of the same viscous substance which he had previously poured down Devlin's throat, but Devlin tossed it out the window of the train as soon as they pulled away from the station.

"You could have stayed - spent some time in the country, enjoyed yourself." Devlin peered at Freddie. The young constable had been curiously quiet all morning, and Devlin wondered what was bothering him. "I'm sure Harker wouldn't have minded."

"I should be with you, sir - Phillip. And I'm still on duty." Freddie gazed out the window at the passing countryside. "I had to send a telegram saying I was sick - Old Brassie doesn't know I came away with you. He thinks you're at home with your feet up."

For the first time Devlin realised the depth of the sacrifice that Freddie had made - the depth of all the sacrifices that the constable had been making, ever since this sordid business began. He felt acutely ashamed of himself, that he had never thought to offer one word of gratitude - surely the constable deserved better. "Thank you." It felt awkward, and Devlin wasn't sure he could get the words out his mouth, or perhaps it was Donnelly's vile muffler. "You've been - " He sighed, huffed his breath out between his teeth. "See here, Freddie, I mean, you've been absolutely top hole about this, right from the start." He stole a glance at Freddie: the constable's cheeks were flushed with pleasure. "I feel badly that I've put you in such danger." It was true: ever since Freddie had been set upon by Whittaker's bludgers, Devlin had impressed upon himself how vital it was that Freddie stay out of the line of fire, that Freddie was his subordinate while he, Devlin, was the man in charge - or at least, had been the man in charge. Until Old Brassie gave him the heave-ho.

"I'd go anywhere with you." Freddie raised his head, tears glistening on his lashes. "You know that. I'd cut off my right arm if you had want of it."

"You're left-handed," Devlin observed. "It would hardly be such an entire handicap." He smiled. "You're a good 'un, Freddie." The effect of all this affection was making him slightly nauseous; it wasn't like Devlin to say the things that he was feeling, even if the situation seemed to demand it. He had always believed that actions spoke much more forcefully than words - but he thought that perhaps others might like to hear him cast about a few platitudes now and then.

"What do you think he's going to say?" Freddie fished out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

"Old Brassie?" Devlin permitted himself a humourless chuckle. "He'll probably clap me in irons - or he would do, if he could."

Sir Neville Alcock didn't necessarily need to clap Devlin in irons: as soon as the train pulled in to Waterloo, Devlin understood the true length and breadth of his difficulties. "See this?" Freddie came towards him, bearing a newspaper. "Your picture's on here!"

"Bugger." Devlin caught Freddie's arm and pulled them both back against the wall. "Let me see that."

Oh yes, there it all was, in plain black for all to see: Inspector Phillip Devlin, lately of Her Majesty's Metropolitan Police Force, wanted on the charge of attempted murder, two young gentlemen (Devlin snorted) found gravely injured in a laneway during a fracas.... Devlin tossed the newspaper away from him and tried to think. The morning sunlight was streaming past the rising mist, casting long shadows on the platform, lighting up the window glass and the brass door fittings, and glistening in Freddie's blond hair. Devlin envisioned his future as a series of doors, all shut upon him, leaving him in blackness and privation.

"What are you going to do?"

Freddie's voice snapped him back to reality. "You go to work, Freddie."

"What are you going to do?"

Bloody good question, Devlin thought, considering the pickle he was in at the moment. "Stay away until you hear from me," he said at last. "Don't come to my rooms unless you know absolutely that you've not been followed."

"But - "

"Freddie, I'm a wanted man. If this gets processed through the courts, I'll swing for it." Devlin had witnessed many a hanging in his time; he wondered grimly if he would now witness his own. He turned to go, before Freddie could protest.

His arm was caught and held. "I'm going with you. Wherever you're going, I'm going too."

Devlin sighed. "I appreciate your loyalty, Freddie, but right now isn't the time."

"It's got nothing to do with loyalty!" Freddie hissed. "Dammit, Phillip, I love you. And I know you and Mr. Harker and the rest all think I'm as thick as pudding - "

"No one said anything about pudding!" This was getting him nowhere – it was all fine and good to argue with Freddie, but to argue with him in the broad light of day in Waterloo station was quite another, especially as things stood now. "Alright," he said wearily. "Alright. But you do exactly as I say."

Devlin kept an alternate set of lodgings for those times when his work required anonymity. He would have never thought that he'd be now using those rooms as a hiding place. Still, the situation seemed to demand that he divest himself of anything that might reveal his identity - the time would come for him to reappear, but it was not now, not yet.

He dispatched his instructions quickly, waited till Freddie had vanished...

...and then he bought a ticket and boarded the train, back to Surrey and Mr. Reginald Harker.

So...Inspector Devlin wasn't staying in London, as he'd led his pretty young beloved to believe...well, that was certainly interesting, because it created all sorts of other possibilities, many of which were too delicious to contemplate. The very idea made him tremble. He would have to tell Violet - he had only Violet to confide in, now that Sarah was gone, poor Sarah. Of course he'd only meant to frighten her, but she would struggle and tighten the rope around her own neck, the silly blower. She was better off out of it, truth be told, because now there were no distractions...now he could concentrate on doing away with Devlin, as had always been his intention, and then him and Violet could go away somewhere, and live together quietly, and be happy. He knew how to make his dear sister happy.

John Whittaker got on the train.

Fifteen

Devlin was just unlucky enough to catch Harker and Donnelly in medias res or ad hoc or whatever that Latin phrase was.... Devlin hadn't got much Latin at school, despite the best efforts of his praeceptors...in flagrante delicto - that was it! At any rate, they were both in bed, in a singular state of undress, and as far as Devlin could tell, Donnelly had got quite busy on top of Harker.

"Inspector!" Harker started up with a force of strength that Devlin would have hardly credited; his intensive search for various items of his clothing was also impressively energetic. "We had no idea - "

Devlin felt an odd satisfaction at the blush on Harker's thin cheeks, but he suspected that Donnelly was rather less than thrilled at his sudden reappearance. "I'll just wait in the sitting room, shall I? Until you both have...er...composed yourselves." He followed the winding series of passageways back to the front of the house, and was helping himself liberally to the brandy when it occurred to him that Freddie had probably already gone to Devlin's usual lodgings in London and was waiting for him there. Damn...it would take a lot of explaining to make Freddie understand, not least because of Freddie's particular mental deficit. Devlin stroked his unshaven face and wondered if he oughtn't send a telegram, but immediately dismissed it: too risky, and there was always the possibility that Freddie was being not only watched but followed. It was impossible to tell, now, who was in the clear in this matter - even someone as naive and gormless as Freddie could easily be perverted into alternative loyalties, and Devlin's long experience told him that anyone, regardless of piety or station, had his price and could be bought.

"Mr. Harker didn't say you'd come back."

Devlin started violently, cursed himself for being so sunk in his own thoughts. "Miss Pearson - or should I say, Miss Whittaker?" He laughed bitterly, recognised the entire premise for the savage end-game that it was, and resigned himself to whatever might follow after. "Johnny never told me that he had a sister - I suppose it never came up. Not like other things came up. But I guess you know that, and all...my history with your brother, the whole sordid bit."

"I'm not intending on blackmail, Inspector, if that's what you think." She moved to the decanter and poured herself a hefty portion of the brandy, drank it off without even blinking. "I want an end to all this, just like you."

Devlin reached for the decanter and lit a cigarette, John Donnelly be damned. "I've figured out most of it," he said, "but one thing still isn't clear to me...even after all this time."

"Yes?"

"What part are you playing in it? I mean, what's your role?" Devlin offered her a cigarette, which she accepted and lit for herself. "I can understand the posture of the doting sister, keeping a hand in with the poor, misunderstood and wayward brother - next you'll tell me it was your mother's deathbed wish or your dead old Papa's bequest - but how much did he have to pay you?" Devlin waited. "To do poor Sarah, I mean."

Perhaps it was his awful, chesty cold, but her hand had smacked into his face and rebounded to her side before Devlin could even think of uttering 'Jack Robinson.' A warm, stinging flush spread along his cheek, darting pain into the socket of his eye. "Slapping a man when he's not looking," he muttered, rather shamefaced, "not exactly cricket, is it?"

But Violet was weeping. "Sarah was my friend!" She scrubbed at her tears angrily, ashamed that Devlin had seen her momentary weakness. "We were at school together...we'd made plans with each other, you see. Only Johnny had to put his oar in - "

Devlin made no effort to hide his confusion. "What d'you mean?"

"Oh...coming round her house of an evening, bringing flowers or chocolate, all the sorts of things that men do. She could hardly refuse him - and I resigned myself to it, because I thought that she'd be well cared- for." She cast a defiant look at Devlin. "It's not like you might think - you and Mr. Harker and the rest. Sarah and I were like sisters! There was a bond between us."

"She wasn't pregnant when...." Devlin let it drop: no sense in digging up old bones. He'd leave grave robbing to the likes of Harker and Donnelly who were now both clothed, after a fashion, and both bearing glasses of brandy. Harker was smiling, but Devlin thought he could detect an undercurrent of hostility in Donnelly's smile. Well, it couldn't be helped - and he'd no time to consider the social niceties when Whittaker was stalking around Surrey with the bit between his teeth.

"Forgive our inattention, Inspector." Harker inserted himself into a chair and stretched out with every evidence of both leisure and enjoyment, and treated both Devlin and Violet Pearson to a particularly bloodless smile. "We were...engaged."

"I just want this to be over with." Devlin felt suddenly old and tired, and leaned against the mantelpiece. His reflection gazed back at him implacably: a man of middle age with circles underneath his eyes and two bright spots of fever burning in his cheeks. "As soon as possible. So I can get back to London and clear my name and get on with things. I've no taste for buggering around - " Perhaps the wrong choice of words, he reflected, but he'd worry about his social gaffes later on.

The front door clanged, the bell perhaps manipulated unduly by the shivering October wind. Harker's head swivelled, as though mounted on gimbals, and Devlin saw him exchange a look with Donnelly: secretive, furtive, altogether culpable. "Ah," he said, "I see."

The footsteps entered the front hall, and paused just there, in the foyer...a sudden, unexpected foray into the kitchen and the butler's pantry, then a shift, a forward impetus, moving irresistibly now, drawn towards them as though fastened by a length of thread. There were footsteps overhead, as well, more rapid now, and the sound of someone descending the stairs.

He had not changed, Devlin thought, in all the years...the passage of time had left no mark on him, no spoor that he could recognise. Except – and here he paused - the eyes were wrong, not keen and sharp with intellect, but dulled by pain and opiates and something else, something akin to madness. He was, of course, impeccably attired, in shades of grey and deepest black, a silk muffler about his throat and fine gloves upon his hands - camouflage, to hide the devastation that the disease must have surely wrought by now....

"John." The utterance caught Devlin by surprise and rasped itself against the insides of his throat, hurting him. The room was floating oddly about him, textures of things all wrong, the light was bending, quick and agile, and the beating of his heart was out of rhythm. "John Whittaker."

The monster laughed - a gentle laugh, full of the most horrible loathing. "You shouldn't run about like you have done, Phillip. It weakens the body, so much haste."

Devlin slipped a hand into his pocket, felt about the lining of his coat with icy fingers. It would only take one, he thought - but he could be wrong, because the room was weird and tilting now, and things were sliding past him. The footsteps were back, above his head and all around him, and he could see the danger now, the danger in the revolver held in John Whittaker's gloved hand. He had to watch the hand, watch it move, see the fingers clasp and reach -

The shot rang out, and he was deafened by it, sickened by the stink of cordite and the writhing, slippery motion of the body as it fell face-down on the carpet. The blood was coming out and pooling all around the head, and he could see the jagged hole the shot had made - and he could see Violet Pearson in the passageway, her right hand white-knuckled on a revolver, a curl of smoke dying slowly in the stillness of the air. He saw all these things - saw them and noted them, before the darkness swirled up to meet him and he fell down into it, a blessed relief.

Epilogue

"Freddie, you don't have to keep bringing me things - I'm hardly on my deathbed." Devlin glanced up at the tall young constable hovering by his bedside. "The doctor says it's just pneumonia, and I shall be fine as soon as ever." He coughed, a terrible racking noise, and Freddie Lewis moved to prop him up.

"I'm not going away. You can bloody rattle on as long as you like and call me everything - but I'm staying here to see to you." Freddie positioned the tea tray over Devlin's knees, and poured a cup of the steaming brew. "Anyway, I've got good news that will make you happy." He withdrew a folded newspaper, handed it to Devlin. "Front page, three columns."

YARD MAN CLEARED OF CHARGES: SIR NEVILLE ALCOCK TO RETIRE AT MONTH'S END.

Devlin grunted. "About bloody time." He slurped his tea, oblivious to social conventions. "And what did they say about...?"

"John Whittaker's case has been...indefinitely suspended." Freddie twitched his moustache with a finger. "Violet will be very grateful."

"She was terrified of an open scandal." Devlin shook his head sadly. "Poor girl - having to serve justice on your own flesh and blood that way...it can't have been easy for her." He had seldom seen anyone as steadfast as Violet - widow of Captain Edgar Pearson, formerly of Her Majesty's 95th

Foot, brother of John Whittaker. "They will be very happy in Boston, she and Phoebe." "Boston?" Freddie was surprised. "Are they going to America?"

Devlin sighed. "Boston is normally located in America, yes." He smiled. "And what better place to have a 'Boston marriage'?"

Freddie was quiet for a moment as he sipped his tea. "Is that what we've got?" he asked, "A Boston marriage?"

"Gentlemen don't make Boston marriages," Devlin said - in a tone that would have done justice to Reginald Harker. "But I'll be here, Freddie - if you'll have me."

And 'here' was, truth be told, much better than Devlin's old lodgings, or Freddie's rooms, because 'here' was a very nice flat near the Yard, with large windows overlooking the street and a fine tobacconist's around the corner, and plenty of good brandy and their fire. It was understood, of course, that Inspector Devlin and Constable Lewis merely shared rooms in the interests of economy, and because they were both bachelors - and wasn't it a shame that the Inspector had been all set to marry Phoebe Alcock, and then she ran away to Boston with some red-haired woman who was probably an actress, or at any rate, not a very nice woman, certainly not the kind of woman who is ever received in polite society....

Such a shame, really.

The End