Skeeter didn’t know what to say.
“I will see you at the Council meeting,” the Welshman told him quietly, then left him standing in the glare and noise of Commons, wondering why his eyes stung so harshly. “I’ll be there,” Skeeter swore to empty air.
How many more of his friends would simply vanish into thin air before this ugly business was done? What had Julius seen or overheard, to cause someone to snatch him, too? When Skeeter got his hands on whoever was responsible for this . . . That someone would learn what it meant to suffer the summary justice of a Yakka Mongol clansman. Meanwhile, he had another friend missing.
Skeeter had far too few friends to risk losing any more of them.
* * *
Margo craned forward, so excited and repelled at the same time, she felt queasy. Then she saw the face and gasped as she recognized him. “James Maybrick!” she cried. “It’s James Maybrick! The cotton merchant from Liverpool!”
“Shh!” The scholars motioned frantically for silence, trying to hear anything the murderer and his victim might say, even though everything was being recorded, including Polly Nichols’ final footfalls. Margo gulped back nausea, watched in rising horror as Maybrick escorted his victim down to the gate where he would strangle and butcher her. When he struck with his fist, Margo hid her face in her hands, unable to watch. The sounds were bad enough . . .
Then Conroy Melvyn burst out, “Who the bloody hell is that?”
Margo jerked her gaze up to the television screen . . . and found herself staring, right along with the rest of the shocked Ripper Watch Team. A man had crept up behind Jack the Ripper, who was still hacking away at his dead victim.