“They must be police!” Maybrick gasped out, shaking with furious terror. “Filthy coppers, following us, they’re onto us—”
“London coppers do not have devices like this!”
“Then who are they?”
Lachley stared from Maybrick to the dead man and back, considered the box in his hand and the unconscious woman, stared at Maybrick again. Under other circumstances, the tableau they presented might have struck him as enormously funny: a naked man with blood in his hair, dripping water down his face and chest, a corpse in possession of a talking box, and a woman with bound hands lying sprawled across his work table. “I’ve no idea who they are,” Lachley said at last, pushing himself to his feet and fiddling with the box until the voices stopped. “But I intend to find out. Get dressed James, you’re bollock naked. And rinse the blood out of your hair before it dries to a clotted mess.”
The madman ran a hand through sticky, thinning hair and grimaced, then bent over the basin again and washed his balding head clean. He recovered the clothes he’d worn on the train down from Liverpool and dressed himself silently. The drug was beginning to take hold, thank God, leaving him calmer and quieter. Lachley searched the unconscious woman, finding even stranger things secreted about her person than he had on the man. He had no idea what to make of the tiny, lenslike device hidden in her bonnet, nor could he comprehend the other device, which emitted the dull red light he’d seen in the dark sewer. Footsteps roused him from his frowning reverie. Maybrick had come to stand behind him.