Margo said cheerfully, “I’ll worry about blisters on my heels after I’ve got ’em.”
The driver was shaking his head, mystified, as he drove off. Malcolm set out briskly, feeling some affinity for the tail end of a freight train as they whipped through the streets in pursuit. Lachley, far ahead, was moving rapidly. Both Margo and Dr. Feroz had difficulty keeping up. Their fashionably tight skirts and heeled shoes forced them to trot along with mincing little steps.
“Where the devil is he heading?” Inspector Melvyn wondered aloud as they moved steadily eastward, angling down toward the river. “It’s the wrong night for another Ripper strike.”
“Maybe he’s hunting for Mary Kelly?” Margo suggested.
“Without Maybrick? Deuced unlikely, I should think. He kills to a pattern.”
“Perhaps,” Shahdi Feroz mused, “he works alone to locate the women, then strikes with Maybrick as his weapon?”
Margo put in suddenly, “Maybe the Whitehall torso is one of his victims? Somebody he meets tonight? The torso will be discovered just two days from now, after all.”
“Another of these unfortunates in possession of his letters?” Inspector Melvyn frowned. “Blast, I wish we knew what these letters were!”
“You said a mouthful,” Margo muttered, struggling to keep up.
As they trailed their double quarry steadily eastward, into increasingly poorer districts, Malcolm’s misgivings increased just as steadily. They were dressed to the nines, all of them, and Lachley was leading them straight toward the East End, where gentlemen in fancy dress coats and ladies in silk evening gowns would stand out like beacon fires, inviting attack by footpads. Lachley took them down Drury Lane, echoing another night’s anxious search, when they’d trailed Benny Catlin with bloodhounds. Tonight, at least, Catlin was in plain sight. They emerged, as they had that previous night, onto the Strand. Lachley headed down through Fleet Street, moving briskly.