Mary Kelly.
She stopped outside the front door to her dosshouse, pushed the creaking door in and staggered clumsily inside.
More footsteps, quick, light, pattering down the rat run. Liam saw a long, thin shadow dancing along the wet brick opposite, then a man came into view. Tall and slim, a top hat cast a shadow across his face. He was wearing a thick cloak, but Liam managed to catch a glimpse of a leather surgeon’s bag under one arm. He quickly stole across the courtyard, and caught the front door to Mary’s dosshouse with the toe of his boot before it slammed shut.
The man wrestled the door open and Liam heard a muttered exclamation from the hallway inside. The man pushed his way in and the door shut behind him. A moment later there was life in the room to the left of the front door. A gentle orange bloom appeared behind the tatty net curtain. Liam saw foggy movement going on inside: shadows cast up the walls, across the low ceiling.
‘Jay-zus, this is it,’ whispered Liam. ‘That poor lady’s going to die in a minute. Not just die, Bob, but die horribly!’
‘Affirmative.’
A gnawing sensation had been eating at Liam for the last few hours. That there must be some other way to put history right. ‘Ahh, this feels all wrong, so it does.’
‘We must not intervene,’ cautioned Bob.
Liam ground his teeth. His mind was replaying those two horrific photographs that Maddy had presented him with earlier, but now colouring in the black and white with vivid reds and intestinal purples. But then… wasn’t something else meant to happen? Wasn’t Becks somewhere close by? Perhaps mere seconds away from altering this scene somehow? Saving Mary Kelly? Killing this evil, psychopathic predator.
Where the hell is she?
‘Ah Jay-zus! I can’t do this. I can’t just let that poor lady get carved up right in front of my eyes.’
He’d started to get to his feet when a shrill scream came from behind the fogged window. He saw a lurch of movement obscured by the net curtain and the scream was cut off. A shadow sliding across the ceiling, a sudden jerking movement, then another, and another, and another.
Liam felt the acid burn of bile in his throat, his stomach rejecting food.
Ah Jay-zus, I’m letting this all happen!
He heard a soft keening moan from inside the room.
‘Oh God, she’s still alive!’
Enough.
He got to his feet.
‘Liam!’ growled Bob, reaching out for him.
‘Stuff this, I can’t just watch!’ He ducked out from under the low slate lean-to and darted across the small courtyard, the shotgun in his hands and ready to use.
And it was then, just then, that he noticed a figure to his right, striding quickly down the rat run towards him.
Both Liam and the other figure stopped. The figure wore a dress and a bonnet. Her face, what he could see of it, was so very familiar.
‘Becks? Jay-zus! Is that you?’
Chapter 71
12.37 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel, London
Faith’s mind was all of a sudden inundated with too many simultaneous decision loops running, each one of them furiously demanding all of her processor time.
Even only as a silhouette she instantly recognized the young man standing in front of her.
[Target acquired: Liam O’Connor]
Not only that, the target was a mere ten yards away AND in a dead end from which he had no hope of escaping her. Command imperatives screamed inside her head to step forward quickly and get on with the job. One of her fists balled and flexed, keen to get on with the task of killing him. But her eyes darted to the door that led to Mary’s room. The very room Faith had been sharing with Mary Kelly… her friend… for days now.
Her… friend… yes. And her ‘ friend ’ had screamed just moments ago.
Her friend needed help.
Now.
Even now might just be a second too late to save her.
‘Becks?’ whispered the young man. ‘We have to help her!’
Faith realized that he’d misidentified her. He thought he was addressing the child support unit. It was a mistake she could take advantage of right now: draw closer to him while he still thought she was the other unit, perhaps close enough that she could quickly strike with a jab to his fragile neck before he could react and try using that gun he was holding.
But…
But…
Another desperate, dying gurgle from within the room.
But her friend needed help. Now.
‘Jesus! Becks! C’mon… gimme a hand here!’
One imperative won out over the other.
Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’
No sooner had she taken three steps forward when she sensed movement to her left. A dark blur. Something large and fast looming towards her. She turned to face the threat and was halfway towards adopting a defensive combat stance when every process in her mind, every spinning loop of code, every circuit running hot and over-clocked, every data bus clogged with shuttling bytes like a highway jammed with rush-hour traffic… all of it came to a shuddering, grinding halt, as if an iron bar had been shoved through the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel.
Several thousand volts locked her body rigid.
Her grey eyes fixed on Liam’s for a moment before she keeled over, stiff as a board as the taser bolt, fired into her waist, rendered every muscle in her body as rigid as granite. She landed on the ground like a felled tree. And Liam, close enough to see her face clearly, took a backward step.
‘Jay-zus! It’s not Becks!’ Liam turned to Bob. ‘It’s one of them!’
‘Correct.’
He heard movement behind the window. The Ripper was busy.
‘All right, she’s down! Now let’s go and catch that murdering — ’
‘No!’ Bob reached out for Liam’s arm.
Liam backed away, stepping up against the window. He turned to look over his shoulder — and got a second’s glimpse through a ragged gap in the net curtains of a scene lit by a single oil lamp inside. A scene of ghastly crimson spattered across exposed ghost-white flesh.
My God…
Bob stepped forward and grasped his arm.
‘Let me go, goddammit!’
‘Negative.’ Bob pulled Liam back towards the unconscious body of the unit. ‘Both mission parameters have been satisfied. We have what we came for. We must let this happen.’
‘The man’s an animal! No, worse than that! A monster… a… a…’ Liam realized he was crying; there was a vague acknowledgement that his cheeks were damp with tears for — how crazy’s this? — a complete stranger. A woman he’d glimpsed for less than ten seconds. A poor wretch immortalized in the black and white grains of a scene-of-crime photograph. Forever frozen in her own timeless horror.
Bob gently eased him back from the front door. ‘We must let him go. The killer must escape and must not be discovered or identified.’ His voice managed to soften from its usual Dobermann growl to something resembling empathy. Understanding even.
‘I am sorry. We have to let him go, Liam. And we have to let Mary Kelly die in that room.’
Otherwise stupid, powerful men in the future will blow each other to pieces, right? And not just themselves, but women, children… even innocent young librarians. Why? Because their ideologies don’t agree. Like children who can’t agree on which toys to have at playtime and decide instead to set a match to the lot of them.
Children. No better than children.
He let Bob pull the shotgun out of his hands. The support unit stooped down, picked up the unconscious body of their pursuer of the last few months, their assassin, and hefted her over one shoulder as if she was a pillowcase stuffed with charity shop seconds.
Liam was also dimly aware of the weight of one of Bob’s arms around his shoulders. Not exactly a hug. But the clumsy, heavy-engineering approximation of one.