Mind of a Killer by Simon Beaufort

Author:Simon Beaufort [Simon Beaufort]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The next morning saw Lonsdale emerge from his bed stiff, bruised, and dull-witted from lack of sleep. Ignoring the maids’ horror at the filthy bathwater and ruined clothes, he snatched a hard-boiled egg from the kitchen table and ate it as he walked to Northumberland Street for another day in the archive. Tired and sore he might be, but there was no time for lounging at home.

‘Hulda tells me you’re going back to Bermondsey this evening,’ said Milner that afternoon. Aware that Lonsdale had not left the basement since he had arrived, he had come to bring him a cake baked by Cook’s mother. Hulda had stayed for most of the morning, then had left at Stead’s request to produce a story about the eruption of Mount Etna. She had asked how he was, awkwardly and formally, then had busied herself without another word.

‘We’re going to see Greaves’s widow,’ said Lonsdale, barely looking up to acknowledge Milner’s kind thought.

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ asked Milner soberly. ‘Hulda says you were almost killed there yesterday. Moreover, the killer’s still free, and he may try again.’

Lonsdale disagreed. ‘We fought because I was trying to lay hold of him. It was a chance encounter, and not one that will be repeated.

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Milner quietly. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that, with the entire police force looking for Iverson, he hasn’t been caught? And isn’t it peculiar that you and Hulda are the only ones bothered about linking these odd deaths? And didn’t Superintendent Ramsey tell the coroner, the police surgeon and Inspector Peters not to bother about Walker and Greaves?’

Lonsdale looked up at him, feeling his eyes gritty from tiredness and dust. ‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me.’

‘That Iverson – said to be insane by some – might not be mad at all, but following orders from a senior officer.’

Lonsdale frowned. ‘You think someone in authority is involved in a business that involves Greaves being poisoned, Cath’s cut throat, mysterious meetings, and missing cerebra?’

Milner shrugged. ‘I cannot answer, but the whole affair is very odd.’

Lonsdale continued to stare at him. ‘What made you come up with this? You said not long ago that it was not going to be important. Now you say there’s a conspiracy.’

Milner was sombre. ‘You’ve been down here all day, so you haven’t seen the latest reports from the news services. There was a report from the Exchange Telegraph that caught my attention. Here.’

Harry Cannon, aged fourteen, mysteriously disappeared in the fog last night. While walking along the river to his home in Limehouse, accompanied by his brother and sister, he sat down near the Shadwell Dock Stairs, promising to catch up with them. He was last seen speaking to a man described as being short, strongly built, with thin hair and a long, uneven beard. A search has been made along the river, but nothing has been seen or heard of him.

‘Your workhouse lad described a man like that waiting in the background while his friends were enticed away,’ said Milner when Lonsdale had finished.

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