Garrett Investigates Read Online Free PDF

must not have scrubbed his voice sufficiently, because Garrett gave him a soft, ironical smile. “I’m sure Alexandria Victoria will be comforted by your approval.”
    Cuan touched the brim of his hat and wondered if he dared to kiss her. She was too old for him, and an adventuress, and rumor would have it that her lips were not innocent of men’s kisses—and that one of those men was the son of the woman he had just obliquely maligned.
    He looked away. “It’s been forty years since Spring-Heeled Jack was last in London. Forty years exactly?”
    “Near enough,” she answered. “When last he appeared, he terrorized women from ’37 to 1840 and was never captured. He was described as thin, tall, clad in white oilcloth and a flowing cape, with a pointed beard and pop-eyes. His claws were made of iron, and were freezing cold to the touch. He scampered over rooftops and leaped hedgerows and walls with mighty bounds. This time he seems more violent, however—then he only murdered a few of his victims. The rest were groped, clawed, or interfered with—but again, in the intervening years he’s learned to use a knife, and that seems to increase his lethality.”
    When she spoke, she was as cold-blooded as any copper. Cuan felt as if he should withdraw, find it unseemly. Bitner no doubt would. Instead, it made him easier with her.
    When she spoke so, she was just a colleague.
    She continued, “He vanished after something very like this—the Crown’s Own blanketed the city, interrupting his every attack. Eventually, he must have given up, his purpose—whatever it might have been—thwarted.”
    “So what gave him the idea for the knife, if he only used claws before?”
    She shook her head. “It would be natural to blame this on a copy-cat.”
    “But you don’t think it is?” He leaned forward on his seat to push aside the curtains and peer out the window. Nothing lay beyond except the city, the press of its streets, and the gloaming. A woman in a ragged dress caught his eye and swung her hips. Cuan bit his lip on a sigh. Even if she knew someone was hunting her, there wasn’t much she could do if she were going to earn a few pennies for her liquor and her bed.
    Here at the edge of Whitechapel, theirs was the only carriage in sight. Not even hansom cabs found commerce here.
    “I tested the scrapings,” Garrett said. “They weren’t from anything human.”
    Cuan let the curtain fall. “Did you say ‘interfered with’?”
    “Raped,” she amended dryly.
    “No sign of that this time. He’s taking the direct route.”
    It fell like a stone into still water between them, Cuan struck dumb while his mind ticked over the implications. Garrett stared back. “DS,” she said, finally, “I do believe you’re right. Do you wish me to inform your supervisor as well as my own?”
    “DI Bitner? Yes, if you know what’s going on.”
    She reached up to rap on the carriage roof. “I think we can manage that.” She handed Cuan the amulet before leaning out the window to confer briefly with the coachman. By the time she sat down again, Cuan had finished lighting the lantern that would allow them to see each other though the last light faded from the sky. “I think he’s using the—the life force, the generative force—of his female victims to stay manifested in London. I think he needs that anchor, or he falls back into whatever hell he came from. And the Queen’s reign is his gateway. Then, she was young, new to the throne. Now she’s recently widowed. A woman in transition. He connects himself to the Queen’s life-giving energy the same way you sorted the sand from the glass.”
    “Because all women share a symbolic continuity,” Cuan said. “Just like all bits of quartz.”
    Garrett nodded. “Just like all men.”
    Cuan glanced down at the amulet, expecting only more lazy spinning, and had to look back twice to confirm what his eyes registered.
    The needle of light pointed west, shivering like a bird dog