Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [182]
Madame started up at the sight of me. “Madame Fraser! Oh, I am so sorry! I did not mean to leave you waiting, but I have had…” she hesitated, looking for some delicate expression “…some distressing news.”
“I’d say so,” I said. “What’s this about a Fiend?”
“You heard?” She was already pale; now her complexion went a few shades whiter, and she wrung her hands. “What will he say? He will be furious!” she moaned.
“Who?” I asked. “Jamie, or the Fiend?”
“Your husband,” she said. She looked about the parlor, distracted. “When he hears that his wife has been so shamefully neglected, mistaken for a fille de joie and exposed to—to—”
“I really don’t think he’ll mind,” I said. “But I would like to hear about the Fiend.”
“You would?” Bruno’s heavy eyebrows rose. He was a big man, with sloping shoulders and long arms that made him look rather like a gorilla; a resemblance enhanced by a low brow and a receding chin. He looked eminently suited to the role of bouncer in a brothel.
“Well,” he hesitated, glancing at Madame Jeanne for guidance, but the proprietor caught sight of the small enameled clock on the mantelpiece and jumped to her feet with an exclamation of shock.
“Crottin!” she exclaimed. “I must go!” And with no more than a perfunctory wave in my direction, she sped from the room, leaving Bruno and me looking after her in surprise.
“Oh,” he said, recovering himself. “That’s right, it was coming at ten o’clock.” It was a quarter-past ten, by the enamel clock. Whatever “it” was, I hoped it would wait.
“Fiend,” I prompted.
Like most people, Bruno was only too willing to reveal all the gory details, once past a pro forma demur for the sake of social delicacy.
The Edinburgh Fiend was—as I had deduced from the conversation thus far—a murderer. Like an early-day Jack the Ripper, he specialized in women of easy virtue, whom he killed with blows from a heavy-bladed instrument. In some cases, the bodies had been dismembered or otherwise “interfered with,” as Bruno said, in lowered voice.
The killings—eight in all—had occurred at intervals over the last two years. With one exception, the women had been killed in their own rooms; most lived alone—two had been killed in brothels. Hence Madame’s agitation, I supposed.
“What was the exception?” I asked.
Bruno crossed himself. “A nun,” he whispered, the words evidently still a shock to him. “A French Sister of Mercy.”
The Sister, coming ashore at Edinburgh with a group of nuns bound for London, had been abducted from the docks, without any of her companions noticing her absence in the confusion. By the time she was discovered in one of Edinburgh’s wynds, after nightfall, it was far too late.
“Raped?” I asked, with clinical interest.
Bruno eyed me with considerable suspicion.
“I do not know,” he said formally. He rose heavily to his feet, his simian shoulders drooping with fatigue. I supposed he had been on duty all night; it must be his bedtime now. “If you will excuse me, Madame,” he said, with remote formality, and went out.
I sat back on the small velvet sofa, feeling mildly dazed. Somehow I hadn’t realized that quite so much went on in brothels in the daytime.
There was a sudden loud hammering at the door. It didn’t sound like knocking, but as though someone really were using a metal-headed hammer to demand admittance. I got to my feet to answer the summons, but without further warning, the door burst open, and a slender imperious figure strode into the room, speaking French in an accent so pronounced and an attitude so furious that I could not follow it all.
“Are you looking for Madame Jeanne?” I managed to put in, seizing a small pause when he stopped to draw breath for more invective. The visitor was a young man of about thirty, slightly built and strikingly handsome, with thick black hair and brows. He glared at me under these, and as he got