He was close. She could feel it, knew that he was, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. She walked calmly forward, her anger dissipating, her fear gone. It was as if she were empty. Shapes loomed up out of the dimness, cases and bags and baskets.
At the rear of the coach she drew the latch and slid the door open onto the rear platform, the roaring of the tracks loud in her ears, and she stepped nimbly over the railing and across, over the couplings, to the next platform. And in the rush of wind and amid the crackle of skirts she drew back the door of the last carriage. It was the Royal Mail coach. The lock had been ripped right out of its casing.
The wind from the open door threw up a million pieces of torn paper and they drifted in a slow descent of confetti inside the dimness. The bags had been shredded. She dragged the door shut with a clang, the bits of paper swirling.
Then through the weird snow she saw him. Walter. Hunched in the far corner, face turned away. His shirt had been ripped off so that the shoulder blades in his back stood sharply and the knuckles of his spine almost glowed in the dimness. He was barefoot, too. She could hear an eerie clicking sound, like knives clattering in a drawer. She moved the revolver behind her back.
“Walter,” she said calmly. “It’s cold back here. Aren’t you cold?”
He went still at her voice. But he didn’t turn his smooth and hairless head. His ears stuck out like dials. The papers were still spiraling around her. The litch was bent over something, she saw now, and as she neared she glimpsed a pair of shabby brown shoes, one unlaced, and a pair of hairy ankles sticking out of them. The mail clerk.
She tried to keep the anger from her voice. “Oh, Walter. Oh, this is most inappropriate,” she said.
He shifted then, he crept across the body, deeper into the shadows. He raised his face, his mouth smeared with blood, blood all down his hairless pale chest, like a great red stain. His long teeth were clicking. His eyes, she saw, were completely black, as if he were still drugged on the opium.
“Jacob knows about the boy,” said Walter softly.
Margaret paused.
His voice sounded like a rope drawn over stone. “He’s coming, yes, he’s coming closer now.” He bared his teeth in what might have been a smile, or maybe just a reflex. “Oh I remember you, Mrs. Harrogate. Jacob used to talk about you. You and your precious Mr. Coulton.”
She stopped, her heart in her throat. She started to shake her head. He seemed so collected, so much in his own mind. It was chilling. The revolver was still behind her back, low, and with her thumb now she very carefully cocked the hammer.
“Jacob Marber isn’t coming,” she said firmly. “That’s the poppy talking. He left you, Walter. Left you in that awful city, alone. I found you, I was the one who found you. Not Jacob. Now, stop this nonsense and come with me. Let me help you.”
He tilted his head then, as if thinking about it. But there was nothing human in the gesture. His hands when he lifted them from the floor left twin dark handprints of blood.
“My Jacob—” he said slowly.
“Has forgotten you.”
The litch crept a little bit closer, the muscles in his legs coiling taut. “Oh, Mrs. Harrogate,” he whispered, tapping the side of his head. “But I can hear him. He’s already here.”
For a long moment neither moved. Margaret watched his eyes. The train rattled and shook.
And then he leaped, right at her, his bloodied mouth wide, his long teeth glinting, and in the same instant Margaret Harrogate lifted the gun and fired.
* * *
Brynt was trying not to throw up.
She was huddled on the rear platform of the Royal Mail coach, her tattooed arms entwined in the railing, the wind roaring around her. There were steps on either side, closed off with a tasseled rope, and a strong door at her back. Marlowe, she thought. You’re here for Marlowe. Get moving.
She kept telling herself that, over and over, as if it might help. But she didn’t move. She was clinging to the very back of the train, watching the tracks scroll out behind her. She hated fast-moving things. Horses. Passenger liners. But being perched in the open platform at the back of a speeding train was maybe worst of all.
She’d picked up her voluminous skirts and ran for all she was worth down onto the tracks when she saw the conductors and engineer swinging back up into the stopped train, the sun at her back, her shadow long before her, and she’d just reached the step of the last car and heaved her great bulk up when the brakes groaned and the train started rolling again, gathering speed. She gripped the railing, gasping. She was sure someone must have seen her. But the train didn’t slow, no porter came running back to shout up at her, and they were away.
Thing of it was, she’d seen that man, the shadow man, burst into smoke as the locomotive thundered through him. The engineer had seen it too, had braked hard and gone hunting under the wheels for the bits of him. She’d watched him walk the length of the train, swipe his cap from his head, squat, peer under each car. He’d found nothing, neither he nor the conductors, no part of the man. She’d watched this and thought about the smoke curling the length of the locomotive and its coal car and then vanishing. Whatever else, it wasn’t suicide. That man—monster, whatever he was—somehow had got on board the train. Which meant Marlowe must be on it too.
Such had been her thinking, at least, as she lay in the long grass watching. But now, as she clung to the rear step of the postal coach, her thick braid battering away in the rush, her face screwed up in a grimace, it seemed near madness. Men didn’t just explode into clouds of smoke. Circus ladies didn’t go leaping up onto moving trains.
That was when she heard a muffled thump, as if something heavy had been thrown against the inside of the mail coach. She went very still. Then it came again, more violently. There was the clear unmistakable sound of a struggle inside. Brynt pressed her ear up against the locked door. Nothing.
And then something punched the wood siding of the car near her head, sounding like an angry wasp, leaving a small black hole. A bullet.
“Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. Swaying from side to side, scrabbling away. And then a single clear thought formed in her head:
Go.
And Brynt checked her grip, glared up at the lip of the roof, and started to climb.
* * *
Alice shoved the rattling carriage door wide, pushed Marlowe through, out of the wind, then reached a hand back for Charlie Ovid. She couldn’t see Jacob Marber yet.
They didn’t stop. It was a carriage holding several more private compartments and they ran past all of them, stumbling from side to side as the train rattled on, the occupants turning one by one to stare in surprise as they passed. Alice kept glancing fearfully back. At the rear of the car she opened the door, stepped into the same familiar platform, the roar and clatter of wind and ties, and she lifted Marlowe across and then climbed over the railing and jumped across too. The next carriage was a third-class carriage, crowded, noisy, with wooden seats arranged in rows. The air was thick with pipe smoke and the creaking of newspapers and women in shawls shouting across the aisle at each other. Alice and the boys were all three disheveled now, wild-looking, with their heads bared. She took out her gun, not caring, and then she heard a quiet descend and she looked up. Row upon row of faces, pale, were staring at her. She hurried the two boys down the aisle, toward the back, ignoring the forward-facing passengers. Her forearms were sluggish and throbbing from the climb, and she was out of breath. She saw some of those she’d seen on the London platform, the two widows in black with their tight bitter faces, the man with the birdcage staring as they passed.
They were three rows from the rear when the door in front of them opened and Coulton came through. He’d lost his bowler hat and his ruddy face was flushed and his eyes were dark.
“You left us, you son of a bitch,” she said. And shoved him hard in the chest.
He peered past her at the two kids. “You’re all okay?”