Margaret fixed the old man with a calm eye. She said, “I need to know the whereabouts of a young woman I left in your care. It was years ago, after that bad business with Berghast’s infant. You will remember her, I think. Susan Crowley.”
Ratcliffe Fang’s expression didn’t change, but she sensed his surprise. “You told me never to tell no one about her,” he said. “Not even yourself. You made me swear to it.”
She nodded. “And now I must ask you to break that promise.”
“Ah.”
“Is she still alive?”
Ratcliffe Fang peered into the fire. “She’s alive,” he said, reluctant. “Works as a seamstress, in Whitechapel. I can’t tell you more.”
“You must. There will be hundreds of such women.”
Ratcliffe Fang narrowed his eyes. “It’s not like you, Margaret, to come here like this.”
“Then you know it must be important. Susan Crowley was in possession of something most rare, something I cannot proceed without. A tool, you might say, left in her care. I am certain Jacob Marber will be searching for her also.”
Ratcliffe Fang’s bulging eyes lit up in sudden understanding. “That’s why Jake Marber’s in Limehouse,” he whispered. “She’s got what can kill him, an he knows it.”
“Indeed, Mr. Fang. And I must take it from her first.”
Ten minutes later, she left Ratcliffe Fang’s rooms, satisfied. An address was folded up in the wrist of her glove. Cold fog seeped in through her shawl. Her bull’s-eye lantern was tightly shuttered so that its beam turned this way and that, shining off the slimy bricks of the tenements. She adjusted her veil. She’d been surprised at how Fang had aged; but then, she supposed, she too was no longer young. She walked deeper into the alley, holding her petticoats out of the muck with one hand, keeping close to the walls.
Whitechapel, she knew, was not far.
But she’d not gone twenty paces when something materialized in the dark fog ahead, at a dead man’s corner. A silhouetted shape, lurking in the mist.
She opened her lantern and held it high but it was no good, the fog had thickened, and she could see only the drifts of fog turning and shifting in front of her.
“Who are you?” she called. “Give me passage. I’ll not ask twice.”
She heard the figure’s boots scrape on the cobblestones, coming closer. Carefully, slowly, Margaret reached into her handbag for her small pistol.
It wasn’t there.
She cursed and gripped the lantern and prepared to swing it hard at whatever cutthroat approached. The stones underfoot gleamed in the weak light.
“You’re looking for this, I guess,” came the voice.
Margaret stared.
And then the figure emerged out of the fog in an oilskin coat, hat drawn low over her killer’s eyes, holding in her open palm the little silver-plated pistol. Margaret shook her head in anger. It was Alice Quicke.
“What?” said the detective. “You thought I wouldn’t follow?”
“I’d have thought,” said Margaret, taking back her weapon, “you’d have more sense.”
Miss Quicke gave her a quick sly grin from under her hat.
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
* * *
Whitechapel was darker, more crowded. Hansoms creaked past like apparitions, drunken men weaved and hollered, swarms of pale children in rags crowded under the weak gaslights while their mothers, exhausted, stood in the doorways with their petticoats showing. Margaret went carefully, following Mr. Fang’s direction. If it was the fog or Miss Quicke’s dangerous look she didn’t know, but they wandered unaccosted and unharmed. But the lanes were crooked and the muck soft underfoot, the puddles reeking, and they had often to duck past shreds of rags and linen strung up on lines in the miserable courts and alleys. Margaret felt better for Miss Quicke’s company, grateful even, and when she realized this she was surprised, and made no further complaint.
At last they came to an unmarked door, dripping, slick with mold. It was the third doorway in, on the second alley up from the Black Fox drinking house. Margaret knocked, stepped back.
The door opened a crack. Eyes peered suspiciously out.
“Miss Crowley?” said Margaret matter-of-factly.
“What is it you want?”
Margaret removed her veil. “You will not remember me, but I am a friend of Mr. Fang’s. I’d hoped we might speak. I have news about the child.”
She seemed to know at once who was meant. “Where is he?”