The explosion jolted the very bedrock of his sanity.
Fury was an expanding fireball inside him, an anarchist’s bomb, a Fenian detonation that sent him plunging across the room, hands so violently unsteady he dropped the lantern with a crash of broken glass and spreading lamp oil. He searched places too small for a mouse to hide, but found no trace of her. A knife had been moved from his workbench and used by someone to cut through the ropes on her wrists, ropes he found abandoned on the floor. Someone must have followed him down, picked the lock while he was out.
Lachley swore savagely. He had been so careful, confound it, so bloody careful . . . Had someone recognized him, after all? Recognized the heavily moustachioed man in seedy clothes as the thin and seething boy he’d once been in these streets? Lachley had barely gone twenty when he’d last walked Wapping and Whitechapel, passing himself off as parlour mediumist Johnny Anubis. But who else could it have been, if not some god-cursed tea leaf who’d grass on his own loving wife, if a reward might be involved?
He halfway expected to find all of Scotland Yard crouched in the tunnel beyond the open door to Tibor, billycocks at the ready. What he found was a black expanse of dripping brick tunnel, silent and cold as a tomb, just as he’d left it. Lachley stood motionless, gazing at the ruin of his sanctuary, breathing hard and trying to think what he should do. Going home might be fatal. Whether an East Ender had recognized him as Jack the Ripper or the girl’s husband had trailed him down here, whoever had taken Ianira had discovered enough to hang Lachley from the nearest gallows. He had to get out of London. Before the police did trace him. Well, the gate into the future would open near dusk tomorrow evening, which meant he had to elude capture for only twenty-four hours.