The two men stared at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking. They had met through a similar situation twenty-two years before, when Kane had been a young man of twenty-three, still grieving from the loss of his brothers and mother, and bitter by what he’d seen as rejection by his father. He had been wild in those days and dissolute, spending his inheritance on wine, women and song. Ralph’s sister had been a music-hall actress and Kane had taken up with her. Lily had come to live with him at the rooms he rented, and when one day a few weeks later her brother had turned up on the doorstep demanding to know his intentions, he’d laughed in Ralph’s face. The subsequent fight had put him in hospital for forty-eight hours, and when he had returned to the rooms it had been to a scene of unspeakable horror. Lily had been brutally murdered, and the police – who were still hunting for Ralph with regard to the attack on Kane – had decided Ralph was guilty when they’d cornered him a little while later.
Kane had gone to visit Ralph in prison to tell Lily’s brother he would personally see to it that he hanged for the crime. Instead he’d left convinced of the man’s innocence. Lily had been raped before being bludgeoned to death, and whatever else Ralph was, he wasn’t a pervert. Moreover, as Kane had talked with him, he’d understood that Ralph’s attack on himself had been the desire of a brother to rescue a beloved sister from what he saw as an immoral life which would lead to ruin.
He had contacted various acquaintances of Ralph – most of whom lived outside the confines of the law – and paid them handsomely to prove Lily’s brother innocent and bring the real perpetrator to justice. He had also hired top lawyers to fight Ralph’s case, and all against the background of the police being convinced they had got their man. Kane had got to know Ralph well over the subsequent weeks, and the two men had become friends, something which had surprised both of them. Kane learned that Ralph had virtually brought Lily up when their parents had died of the fever when Lily was ten years old, and although Ralph didn’t deny being a member of the criminal fraternity, he’d sacrificed much to enable his sister to become a respectable woman, only to have Lily herself rebel against his constrictions when she was old enough to leave home.
The horror of what he’d witnessed in the rooms when he’d returned from the infirmary, the vision of which would be with him to his dying day and which haunted his dreams, and not least his part in encouraging Lily to defy her brother, was a turning-point in Kane’s life. He fought hard for Ralph – the first time he had fought for anything – with a tenaciousness of which he wouldn’t have thought himself capable. He was still fighting when the case came to court and, in spite of the lawyers, Ralph was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. It was at the ninety-ninth hour before the execution that the hundreds of pounds he’d spent buying information brought results. Lily’s real murderer – an ‘admirer’ of hers from the music halls – was arrested after Kane provided sufficient proof to have the man questioned. He had confessed soon afterwards as though pleased to relieve himself of the secret he’d been hiding. He had apparently followed Lily home from the music hall and when she’d fought him he’d raped and killed her.
Kane’s inheritance was severely depleted by the time Ralph was released, and when he announced his intention to try his luck abroad – having bought a piece of land in the west of America, which was gold country, with the last of his wealth – Ralph pleaded to accompany him. Two hard years followed, years in which Kane often thought he’d die destitute in the dust of foreign soil, but then they hit the seam which lifted him out of the dirt and on to a ship bound for England as a relatively wealthy man once more. And this time he was a man, not a spoiled youth in search of aimless pleasure.
Looking at Ralph now, Kane said quietly, ‘Make enquiries, but discreetly. Any leads, no matter how small, follow. Money’s not a consideration. She might have gone away for a few days with one of the Hooray-Henrys who’ve got more money than sense, but I doubt it. Cat’s not that sort of woman. I don’t like this, Ralph. I don’t like it at all. She left Sophy saying she was going straight to the theatre and then she vanished. Check all the hospitals and the morgues, every one. No stone unturned, all right?’
Ralph nodded. He was fully aware that it wasn’t just demons from the past prompting Kane’s fear. He had been in the company of this man for more than two decades and he had never seen a woman affect him like Sophy Shawe had. On the day of her marriage to that wastrel Toby Shawe, Kane had got blind drunk and remained so for twenty-four hours. He’d never spoken about how he felt about her, but Ralph knew. And what might have happened to this friend of Sophy’s could so easily happen to any of the actresses.
Ralph’s grisly tour of London’s hospitals and morgues over the next forty-eight hours brought the result Kane had been dreading. A woman’s body had been discovered dumped in a filthy alley deep in the heart of the East End’s dockland. It was an area rife with brothels and slum tenements, where disease and death haunted young and old alike, and it wasn’t uncommon for bodies to be pulled from the water or found in the gutters and back alleys. This one was slightly unusual in that it was naked and devoid of any means of identification.