City of Shadows

Chapter 61

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

At about 11 p.m. the night before, they’d heard the first wagonloads of Metropolitan Police arriving to try and restore some order. The rioting increased in intensity and they heard a volley of shots being fired in the early hours of the morning. As the first touch of dawn began to lighten the night sky, the angry mob had finally melted away.

Now, in the cool steel-grey light of the morning after, with a light drizzle spitting fat drops of rain on to the cobbles, it looked like a war had been fought across Farringdon Street.

‘Hoy! Mr O’Connor, Dr Anwar!’ It was Delbert Hook and his assistant, Bertie. They emerged from the warren of archways and passageways to join them, standing just outside their side door, beneath the looming iron arches of Holborn Viaduct.

‘Spent the blimmin’ night, me an’ Bertie, guarding our front entrance and praying we wasn’t about to be cleared out and robbed blind.’ He shook his head and tutted. ‘Blasted anarchists, some of them even ’ad a go at our doors with ’ammers an’ the like.’

He finally noticed Maddy and Sal; his scowl washed away and was replaced with a greasy charm. ‘And who are these delightful young ladies?’

‘Friends of ours. This is Maddy Carter.’

Delbert reached for her offered hand. She’d expected it to be shaken; instead, he stooped and kissed her knuckles. ‘ Enchante! ’ he said with cavalier flamboyance. ‘That’s French, that is, love.’

‘Right,’ she said, doing her best to smile. ‘Yeah, I sort of figured that. Hello.’

‘And this is Saleena Vikram.’

Sal stuck her hand out and chuckled at Delbert’s theatrical gesture. ‘Your moustache tickles!’ She giggled as he kissed the back of her hand.

He stood up, straightened his rumpled waistcoat. ‘Are you ladies ’ere to help with Dr Anwar’s experiments?’

Maddy looked to Liam for the answer. He’d mentioned that he’d spun Delbert Hook a vague cover story to do with science and experiments. She wasn’t so sure she liked the idea of being seen as some sort of mere lab assistant to Rashim, though; just because she was female she had to be the gopher not the brains?

Typically sexist.

She sighed. ‘We’re here to help him out, I guess. And you… you must be our landlord, Mr Hook? Liam’s told me a little bit about you.’

‘Mr Delbert Hook at your service, ma’am. Although you can also call me Del if you so wish. Self-made businessman. Importer and exporter of the finest goods in the world. You name it, and I can probably get ’old of it. And if I can’t, I’ll know someone who can. And this tall drink of milk standing behind me is Bertie.’

The young man offered a limp, pen-pusher’s hand to the girls. ‘Herbert actually. I do his accounts for him.’

Delbert looked out. Shopkeepers were already trying to restore some semblance of order to the street, brushing up piles of debris, the shards of glass, damaged, soiled goods looted from their stores and discarded in the dirt of the road. ‘Shocking business this is. We’ve ’ad this going on in the East End of London for the last four nights in a row now. First time it’s spread here to Holborn, though. Never thought it would come this way.’

‘I was reading about it in yesterday’s paper,’ said Maddy. ‘This has something to do with those murders in Whitechapel, doesn’t it?’

Delbert sucked on his teeth. ‘Any excuse for these yobbos to make a ruckus and take all they want, as far as I can see.’

‘They’re anarchists,’ said Herbert. ‘Workers, the common man. And they have good reason to be angry, Del. It’s an unjust country. The rich get richer and the poor starve. Those murders…’ Herbert paused and stroked his thin, pencil-line moustache. ‘That was just the tinderbox to the fire. There were riots brewing anyway, but that lady, Miss Mary Kelly, she’s an inspiration to the poor, isn’t she? An inspiration to the oppressed proletariat.’

‘Proletariat?’ Delbert turned round slowly and looked up at his assistant. ‘Listen to yer and yer poncey posh-boy talk. Since when did you swallow a whole blimmin’ dictionary?’

‘I read a lot, Del. When I’m not keeping your business running for you, or humping boxes around for you, I actually read. You should give it a try.’

‘You think this is going to get worse?’ Maddy directed her question at the young man.

Herbert nodded, his eyes wide, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. ‘Oh yes, Miss Carter, I think this’ll get a great deal worse.’

They let Delbert and Herbert get back to patching up the damage to the front doors to their business and decided to take a walk down Farringdon Street. Then along Blackfriars Passage, all the way down to the River Thames. Across the city’s skyline, beyond London Bridge, they could see smudges of smoke rising up to the overcast sky. Hundreds of smouldering fires from the riots last night. It seemed the unrest had spread out of the East End in all directions — south over the river to Newington, into the City of London. And, if the view hadn’t been obscured by the tall quayside warehouses along the river’s edge, Maddy suspected they’d see more hairline columns of smoke to the north of them.

‘It’s a real mess.’ Sal pulled a lace veil aside so Maddy could see her eyes more clearly. ‘Maybe we can go back now?’ Sal chose to wear a broad-brimmed ‘ladies’ touring hat’ with dark lace trim that dangled over the edge and hid most of her face. She felt a little better that way. It was the combination of having darker skin in a city where there appeared to be virtually no black or Asian people — that and wearing clothes that she felt looked like pantomime costumes. Walking the streets by gaslight was one thing, but by broad daylight she felt too many eyes lingering curiously on her.

‘Yeah, let’s go back.’ Maddy nodded. ‘We need to decide what we’re going to do next.’

Half an hour later they were back inside the dungeon, top hats, bowlers and bonnets dangling from their coat rack.

‘All right, here’s the thing, guys… it’s a change. And, by the looks of it, it’s clearly going to run and run and develop into a huge one.’

Sal cleared a space on the wooden crate they were using as a table and placed a pot of freshly brewed tea on it. She dealt out a mismatched collection of chipped teacups and enamel mugs.

‘So?’ Liam nudged her. ‘Your suggestion is?’

‘So — ’ the rocking-chair creaked as Maddy worked it gently backwards and forwards — ‘this is a test case for our new role, our new function. Time’s been changed, right? So we’re going to take a look forward and see what this contamination gives us. I suggest we go as far forward as we can ideally, get a look at the year 2070 and see if this Pandora thing is still going to happen to us.’

‘You know going forward is very energy-intensive, Maddy,’ said Rashim. ‘I’m not sure how much forward displacement-reach I can coax out of this current set-up.’

‘Well, let’s find out. I mean… look, we don’t exactly have to send Liam and Bob forward all the way to 2070. What if we just open a pinhole camera and take a look-see? Zero-mass, less energy, that’s how it works, isn’t it? Just get a pinhole image. I mean, a picture tells us a thousand words, or something like that.’

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes… yes, of course. Let me get some calculations together.’ He got up and went over to their networked computers, now all linked up, a chorus of CPU fans whirring and hard drives clicking contentedly. ‘SpongeBubba!’

‘Hey, skippa!’ the lab unit squawked, emerging from a dark corner.

‘Come over here, you and I have some work to do!’

‘Yes, skippa!’ it bleated, irritatingly happy to be of service.

‘Retrieve my energy-conversion templates from Exodus.’

‘Yes, skippa!’ It waddled over to join Rashim at the computer table and together they started a hushed discussion of numbers.

‘So then,’ started Liam, ‘we investigate whether this Jack the Ripper contamination needs to be corrected first before we do anything else?’

‘That’s right. That’s how we’re going to operate. From now on we watch and wait for contamination events and when one comes along, the procedure should be that we take a look at what future we get from it. If it’s a good one,’ Maddy said, shrugging, ‘we just let it happen. If it’s bad news then we do like we used to and go fix it.’

‘But… let’s say the future is good,’ said Liam, ‘no Pandora, no virus that wipes out all of humanity; you’re saying if we get that future… we should do absolutely nothing?’

‘Yup. That’s what I’m saying.’

‘I’m going to say it… because I’m sure I’m not the only one here thinking it,’ said Sal.

‘Thinking what?’

‘Well… doesn’t it strike you as unlikely that this Kelly woman could overpower a serial killer like the Ripper?’

Maddy tapped her chin thoughtfully. ‘Not really. She seems a fiery character from what the papers are saying. She’s got a real potty mouth on her too.’

‘No, that’s not what I’m getting at. This is wrong history now, Maddy. We’re in a contamination.’

‘I know that. Somehow Liam and Rashim changed something small that led on to something else, that led on to something else, like dominoes, that somehow resulted in a situation where Kelly had a chance to fight back. Who knows? Liam buying a chest of drawers from one trader instead of another might just have caused the same man to have to make a journey to pick up another chest of drawers that somehow impacted on the plans of the Ripper causing him to mess up somehow?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s impossible to determine for sure.’

‘Or maybe we aren’t alone back here.’

‘Becks!’ said Liam. ‘Maybe she made it back alive!’

‘Crud…’ Maddy stared at them both. ‘Maybe she did.’

‘And maybe it was Becks who killed this Cathcart,’ said Sal.

‘In which case we also have to go back to the night of that murder, then, and see if it is her.’

‘Becks wouldn’t kill someone like that,’ said Liam. ‘Not without having a good reason. It’s an unnecessary change to history. She knows not to do that.’

‘Unless she’s not right in the head, Liam. Maybe that upload wasn’t stable. Maybe there’s stuff going wrong in her head.’

‘Ah Jay-zus, that’s just great! The last thing we need — a wonky support unit going around killing bad guys.’

‘OK, look… it just means we have a bit more work to do here. Right.’ Maddy stopped rocking her chair and sat forward. ‘This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take a look at the future. If there’s now no Pandora event thanks to this contamination, if mankind appears to be going merrily along and not wiping itself out with a killer gooey virus, then we’ve got a winning contamination. But… we still go back to the night that Mary Kelly should’ve been murdered. We know precisely when and where to go, since the papers have given us nothing but the details of that night for the last month. If it is Becks who did it, or is involved somehow, we grab her.’

‘But if it is Becks who, say, killed Cathcart… we need to let her do that first, right?’ said Sal.

‘Yes, of course. We let her do her thing, then we grab her. On the other hand, if the future is still Pandora, then I suggest we grab her before she can mess with the sequence of events.’

‘And Miss Kelly dies,’ said Liam.

‘Yes.’ Maddy shook her hands subconsciously — Lady Macbeth shaking blood from her fingers. ‘Yes… I’m afraid so.’

Liam pulled a face. ‘That feels a bit like we’re taking advantage of things, so it does.’

‘So?’ She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Sue me.’

Liam looked uncertain. ‘We’re meddling.’

‘Christ, Liam, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last six months for Waldstein — meddling. Worse than that, we were meddling without even really understanding why!’

‘But that last woman, that Mary Kelly lady,’ said Liam. ‘Surely there’s a way we could try and save her?’

‘We could do. We could try and save every one of the Ripper’s victims, Liam. Sheeeez, we could go wandering through time saving everyone who didn’t deserve to die. But we don’t have an infinite supply of energy, and we can’t survive an infinite amount of time travel. So we have to be tactical about this, we have to be smart… surgical.’

She reached over and poured some tea into her mug. ‘Here’s a change someone else has made. Let’s sort of audition it. We’re gonna see if it’s a good ’un. And if not, we’ll fix it like a decent, responsible little team of TimeRiders.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘Other than that, we sit tight. We watch. That’s our job. And maybe we even enjoy Victorian London. Maybe even get out and live a little.’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded slowly. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

Maddy turned to Bob. ‘That OK with your programming, you big lump?’

‘I concur with your assessment. The logic is sound.’

‘So, if Rashim can get our displacement machine to do it, I say we first get a look at a time and place we’re all very familiar with. Something we can compare directly to.’

‘2001?’

‘Yup. The eleventh of September 2001. New York. We know very well how it’s supposed to look, so that’ll be a perfect place to check first to see if this contamination had had knock-on effects, or self-corrected between now and 2001. You up for that, Liam?’

‘Aye.’ His face lifted. ‘Aye, of course!’

‘And then, after that, we’ll try and get a glimpse at 2070, if we can do it. Sound like a plan?’

The others nodded. ‘Plan.’

‘Good. Now… who’s for a nice cup of tea?’