Out of Time: . (Steamside Chroncles Book 1) Read online

  She had walked about thirty metres into the tunnel, shining the torch back and forth across the road before deciding to turn back and double-check, when she realised she was standing next to the door David had been so afraid of earlier. Kate looked around the door frame. Nothing unusual, just an access door for the workmen who worked on the electric systems that ran the length of the tunnel.

  Kate half-heartedly tried the door handle fully expecting it to be locked and was startled when the door opened inward with some force as though someone was pulling it open. Kate stumbled forward into the room managing somehow to keep her balance. She turned around and pointed the torch at the door.

  “Who's there?” she demanded. There was no answer. Kate stared at the doorway and the road outside. It seemed strange but she just couldn't put her finger on why. She aimed the torch at the frame of the door.

  Nothing

  Then it dawned on her that that was the problem. There was nothing at all. She should have seen the light from the torch on the wall. But she couldn't. There wasn't even a beam of light from the torch. Kate pointed the torch towards her face expecting to find the batteries had died but she could see that the torch was still on. She could see the light from the L.E.D.s but there was no beam of light coming from it.

  Kate pointed the torch at her hand but her hand remained in complete darkness. The torch was on but didn’t illuminate anything. She looked back towards the door expecting to see the light coming in from the tunnel.

  It didn’t.

  Kate looked up and through the doorway. She could see the traffic moving past and the opposite side of the tunnel. Something was very wrong. It was as if she was looking at a painting on the wall. A moving painting.

  “What the hell?” she breathed in a confused sigh. Kate turned around and again pointed the torch at where the far wall should have been, still nothing. The beam of light which should have been shining from the torch refused to go past the glass lens.

  Kate felt a shiver down her spine followed by a trickle of cold sweat. She turned around, but the doorway was gone. She quickly turned to her left, but with no point of reference instantly became disoriented.

  “Is someone taking the piss?” Kate said, raising her voice in a mixture of anger and fear.

  Silence.

  Her head started to pound. She started to fell dizzy and very warm.

  “OK. It's pitch black and I hit my head a couple of hours ago. No surprise I feel dizzy,” she said to herself in an attempt not to let the fear turn to panic. She became aware of how wet her shirt had become and pulled down the zip at the front of her body armour to let some cool air in.

  There was no cool air.

  “How can it be so warm in November?”

  The disorientation hit Kate hard. She began to gulp in air as the dizziness and heat became worse. She decided to walk to where she thought the door was, but her feet sluggishly refused to take her where she wanted to go. Her weight carried her upper body forward and with her feet slow to move she fell to the floor landing on her knees. Kate winced in pain as her right knee reminded her it had had enough for one day. She continued falling forward bracing her fall with her left hand and falling onto her torch with her right.

  “Shit. What the hell is going on?”

  Kate could no longer see the front of the torch. Was it on or not? She was now in total blackness.

  No, not total, there was a light. A tiny blue swirling, blinking light just in front of her, or it may have been several metres away, she couldn’t tell. It was spinning, faster and faster. Kate blinked as sweat rolled into her eyes. She looked again. There was more than just one blue light. There were hundreds, thousands of them spinning and swirling randomly like small insects on a summer’s day. They were coming towards her. She tried to move, but it now felt like her hands were glued to the floor as well as her feet. Kate looked down at her hands and saw the lights were underneath her. The dizziness was getting worse. Kate closed her eyes. She couldn’t breathe, her chest was tight. She thought she was going to be sick.

  Her head was throbbing with pain. She heard a sound. A humming, softly at first, then louder. Kate thought of the buzz of an electricity pylon in the rain. Her eyes darted around to see where to the sound was coming from but everything was becoming blurred.

  Kate began to feel the same as she had when she was fourteen and had drunk far too much Malibu and Coke. She remembered laying on her bed and the whole room starting to spin. But here all she could see were the blue circling lights and mist. The dizziness was getting worse. The noise was getting louder. She was going to be sick. Saliva filled her mouth and she started to heave. The ground under her hands felt cold and wet, just like grass. The air around her suddenly began to feel cold and damp and Kate thought she could see gravestones. Another forgotten memory flashed through Kate’s mind, this time of her grandparents.

  She remembered their open fire and the smell of burning coal and how she used to sit in front of it with her grandfather reading her stories. Kate looked up to find the blue mist had turned grey. A shadow moved, it looked like a man in a black coat but all Kate could think of was the pounding in her head and how cold she now felt. She groaned as she felt her stomach heave. Kate closed her eyes and as she passed out all she heard was the buzzing.

  Chapter Four

  Saturday 18th November 1882

  Thirty minutes previously, Dr Jacob McKinley had been in the newly refurbished Royal Strand Oculartorium, watching the opening night of George Coleman’s new production, 'Heir at Law'. Now, instead of looking at a twenty foot high glass screen on which black and white images had flickered, to the amazement of the audience, he was kneeling in a pool of drying blood next to the body of a woman whose last act, it seemed, had been to try and save the child in her care.

  “Looks like she had her throat ripped out by some sort of animal sir,” said the police constable standing at the door.

  Sir Edward Riordan was standing behind Jacob watching as he examined the body. His deep train of thought interrupted, he stopped stroking his luxuriant sideburns and looked at the Constable. “Wait outside, and talk to no-one,” he barked. As the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police he knew full well that any ill-informed gossip spreading through the streets of London could have a disastrous effect on the investigation. He looked down at the body of Margaret Shaw, it was soaked with blood from a gaping hole in her neck. The kidnapping of the son of a well-known Member of Parliament and the murder of his governess was a story the newspapers, and the Penny Dreadfuls in particular, would love to get their hands on. The resulting publicity from any such sensationalism, with no arrest imminent, was something he could do without.

  “Yes sir,” the uniformed officer replied before sullenly walking out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Not bitten. There are no bite marks,” said Jacob in an absent-minded way, “but certainly ripped out. The question is with, or by, what?” his New York accent still strong despite having lived in London for nearly a decade.

  Riordan looked at Jacob as he crouched over the body, “That is what I was hoping you were going to tell me,” he said, the antagonism clear in his voice. “I take it you see the similarities”

  Jacob tried to ignore the question, and the iciness in his brother-in-law’s voice. He leaned over the body and pushed the head to one side. It exposed a hole in the left side of the prone woman’s neck. Jacob pulled down one of two lenses to cover the left eyepiece of the surgical goggles he was wearing.

  “The wound is deep,” Jacob’s voice faltered. He stopped, cleared his throat and continued. “Judging by the amount of blood, I would say both the internal and external carotid arteries as well as the jugular vein have been severed,” he picked up the woman’s right hand and from the side of his goggles pulled down a lens which resembled a small microscope over his right eye. “There’s skin and blood under the fingernails,” said Jacob as he focused the lens. “She appears to have put up one heck of a
fight. She must have been an extremely brave woman.”

  Jacob stood up, his tall, powerful frame several inches taller than Sir Edward, and walked to the fireplace. Turning, he exchanged the microscope lens over his right eyepiece for a second lens covered in thin engravings. He then pulled a small spirit level attached to the top of the goggles by two thin brass arms, down between the eyepieces, level with his nose.

  “An autopsy on the body would have to be conducted to give you any exact results,” he said, scribbling notes into a leather bound notebook, “but I can tell you this; whoever’s responsible enjoyed his work.”

  “Why? What do your instruments tell you about the circumstances?”

  Jacob looked at the body again; he then turned his head to the left to look at the desk and ultimately the French doors beyond. The engravings on the lens indicated distance, height and width; the spirit level ensured the measurements were aligned. Jacob stopped writing in his notebook and flipped the spirit level back to its original position.

  “The struggle was in front of the desk. A single blow to the neck, but…”

  “But what?” asked Sir Edward, impatient for any kind of answer.

  “There was clearly only one blow. But whilst the implement was in the neck it appears as though the perpetrator has pushed a second time and twisted the implement before removing it and making his escape through the French doors.”

  Jacob removed his goggles, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands.

  “Have your investigations revealed anything yet?”

  “My investigations shall not be a matter for discussion with you,” Riordan almost spat the words out. “You are only here to assist these investigations because, unfortunately, you are the best at what you do. Personally, I would prefer an English Doctor, but there are none with your particular experience, even if they are, temperamentally at least, better suited to do the job.”

  Riordan picked his top hat up from the desk top.

  “The body will be removed immediately and taken to the mortuary at Shoreditch ready for the post-mortem tomorrow. By the police surgeon,” Riordan added.

  Jacob watched his brother-in-law walk through the door and sighed. Right from the start, Sir Edward Riordan had opposed the marriage of his sister, Alice to Jacob. Being a doctor with a small practice was bad enough but being an American with no social standing in London society was, as far as Sir Edward was concerned, simply unacceptable. Alice however, had set her heart on the marriage and, just as importantly, their parents had agreed. They had married seven years ago.

  Jacob walked to the French doors at the rear of the study. Riordan had paid only a fleeting attention to the damaged lock on the doors which led to the rear garden, concentrating instead on the trail of blood that led into gravelled area and then the lawn. Jacob knew that Riordan would always take the most obvious clue in any investigation. Riordan was convinced that, being soaked in blood from the murdered woman, the assailant would easily be found.

  Jacob was not so sure. He looked through the open door and into the dense fog which had descended over London earlier that evening. He couldn’t even see the wall which surrounded the garden and was only several feet away. The fog made the search for the assailant difficult enough but he also knew that the blood would quickly dry and the trail would end before long. Jacob added into the equation the fact that the attack had happened over an hour ago which brought him to the conclusion that an early arrest was unlikely.

  He walked back to the dead woman and covered her with a blanket. He then turned to the table and placed the goggles he had used to take measurements of the body into a leather case and fastened the strap. Rolling down his sleeves Jacob looked again at the French doors. There was something about them which just didn’t seem right.

  Grunting in annoyance, he pulled on his frock coat. He thought about Riordan’s question. Of course he had seen the similarities. Four years ago Alice had been murdered in circumstances so similar to this that Jacob’s blood ran cold. The police had concluded that Alice had confronted burglars who, in panic, had struck her down before getting away through the back garden. The only difference being, in this case a small child had been kidnapped and the safe appeared to be secure. Jacob had never been satisfied with the explanation and the culprits had never been apprehended. He picked up his top hat and the leather case from the top of the desk and tucked a thick mahogany cane under his arm. He walked past the body and opened the door into the hallway. The constable who had been unceremoniously told to leave earlier was standing outside. Checking to make sure his brother-in-law had left, Jacob looked at the constable and gestured to the inside of the room.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  The constable looked uneasily down the hallway toward the front door and then carefully regarded Jacob.

  “That was Margaret Shaw sir,” said the constable, confirming what Jacob already knew.

  Jacob nodded. Riordan had undoubtedly told the constable not to reveal anything to anyone, and especially not to him. The demand for the murderer to be caught would not only be coming from the public and press but also from Prime Minister Gladstone. If it went on any length of time Queen Victoria herself would probably be involved.

  “Did Lord Ashbury’s staff see or hear anything?” added Jacob, urging the constable to go further.

  “The nearest thing to a witness is the maid, Miss Alvey. She says she heard two men talking outside the house. Her room is at the back of the house. She says she was putting on her dressing gown when she heard a scream and the sound of breaking glass. She said she came down to see what was happening, and she was greeted by that horrible sight in there,” the constable shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “She raised the alarm and the house and grounds were searched, but the assailants had made their escape. Only then was it realised that young Master Ashbury was nowhere to be found.”

  “Has there been a ransom note yet?”

  “No, not yet sir. I overheard Sir Edward say to Lord Ashbury it was too early for a ransom note and that there would probably be one in the morning.”

  Jacob looked back into the room and closed the door before thanking the constable. He put his top hat on and walked out onto the street to get into his waiting hansom. The cold, foggy November night bit into his hands and he reached for his gloves, “To St. Giles Square please,” he said to the driver as he lifted a pair of plain-lensed goggles from a hook on the cab’s door and put them on to protect his eyes from the smoke and cinders that belched out from the numerous steam-carriages that had sprung up over the last few years.

  The cab made its way across Kensington Road and along Warwick Road before reaching the junction with the West of London and Westminster Cemetery. As the cab turned onto Richmond Road Jacob glanced out of the side window toward the cemetery.

  “Wait,” Jacob banged his cane against the roof of the cab.

  Jacob pulled the goggles over his head and wiped the steamed up window with his gloved hand. What was that? Jacob thought. He got out of the cab. “Wait here,” he said to the driver and began walking toward a silvery blue shimmering light just inside the cemetery walls. An iron railing surrounded the cemetery but a nearby gate was unlocked. Jacob walked through, across the wet grass, towards the light. As he approached the light he thought he could hear something buzzing. It sounds like a bee hive, thought Jacob. As he got closer the buzzing got louder.

  As Jacob walked cautiously between two mausoleums he saw a motionless body lying on the ground, when the sound, like the light, started to fade. Through the fog Jacob could see something different to the blue, misty light which had first caught his attention. It was moving. He thought he heard a person groaning and began to run.

  Jacob reached the prostrate body. He noted the light was coming from a short black tube but could not see a candle inside it. There was also a reflection of one of the street's gas lamps from the black vest the man was wearing. The vest had the word 'POLICE' on the back and the black tro
users had a large pocket on the leg. In the four years he had been working with Scotland Yard he had never seen any police constable dressed in this way.

  Jacob took hold of the man’s shoulders and rolled him onto his back. It was then Jacob realised, to his astonishment, that it was a woman. He gently shook her shoulders. “Hello, can you hear me?” he asked in a firm voice. There was no reply. Jacob placed the palm of his hand on the woman’s forehead. She was sweating but her skin was cold, almost icy, to the touch. “Driver. Driver some help here,” the urgency in Jacob's voice stirring the cab driver to jump off the hansom and run towards them. Jacob placed his index and middle finger onto the side of the woman's neck, next to her windpipe, “Your pulse is racing and you're soaking,” he said to himself, “and that’s a nasty bruise on your nose. What have you been doing to get into this state?”

  The cab driver reached them and Jacob looked up, “This woman has a fever. Bring the cab to the gate. We'll take her to my house. It's closer than the hospital or my surgery.” The driver disappeared into the fog. “Don’t worry,” said Jacob, unsure if the woman could hear him, “we’re going to take you to my house. You’ll be alright.”

  Jacob studied her clothing. Attached to her vest was, what appeared to be, a small, rectangular box. It had a small glass panel and numbers one to nine and then a nought. She was also wearing a belt with various items attached to it, one of them being a pair of handcuffs, but he had never seen handcuffs like them before. Jacob shook his head slowly in confusion.

  He heard the horse on the cobbled street and sat the unconscious woman up. The driver joined him and between them they managed to get the woman into the cab. The driver climbed up onto the rear of the cab and Jacob looked around. He could see no one else, either on the street or in the cemetery. Jacob’s eyes lingered towards the spot where he had found the woman. Both the blue light and buzzing sound were gone. He climbed into the cab and ordered the driver to his surgery.