Mr Davies?” Muriel said as she alighted from her carriage and saw the bushy-haired man emerge from the archway of William and Mary Yard.
He stopped and stared myopically around him, his hands clasping and unclasping.
“Mr Davies,” Muriel repeated. “It’s me, Miss Carew. Mr Hyll’s… assistant.”
Why had she said that? Despite her daydreams about acting as a fully-fledged investigator, surely the risks were too great. Henry was untrustworthy and he might become an unfamiliar brute at any moment. Then again, she reminded herself, wasn’t that true of most of the men she had encountered? It was difficult to stifle a nagging hope that Henry being so obviously compromised might afford her easier entry into a world in which a woman would ordinarily be shunned.
Mr Davies hurried towards her, smiling. “How d’you do, Miss Carew?” He snickered. “That’s rather a jolly rhyming greeting, isn’t it?”
“You seem in good spirits, Mr Davies.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” He gestured blindly to the office above the archway. “It seems Mr Hyll is on the case, tracking my wife like a bloodhound.” He frowned, his hand went to his mouth and he began gnawing a fingernail. “Do bloodhounds actually follow the scent of blood, Miss Carew?”
Muriel smiled. “I’m not a dog person, Mr Davies. Did Mr Hyll summon you here?”
“Indeed. You know, I’d half expected to hear nothing for days or weeks. This proves that he’s got the bit between his teeth. Which means he’s like a dog and a horse. And something else good at tracking, which remains always undeterred. What might that be?”
“A fox?”
Mr Davies considered this for several seconds. “Nasty creatures, foxes. Had one as a regular visitor to my back garden. Not a plant bulb left untouched, and rabbit carcasses left all over the place.”
Muriel turned to look above the archway. Henry was at the window, blurred by grime. She told herself that Edward Hyde wasn’t present, that he wasn’t staring down at her, that if she could see Henry then it really was him.
“Well,” she said hurriedly. “I’m glad that there seems to have been progress made. I’ll let you go on your way, Mr Davies.”
She watched as he bumbled into the street only to be narrowly avoided by a boy on a bicycle who veered aside and shouted. The near-miss went unnoticed by Mr Davies.
As Muriel opened the door and ascended the stairs, she tried not to think of foxes or the carcasses of rabbits.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Henry said as she entered the office. “I’m sorry I left you in such a hurry the other day. I’m quite myself now.”
It appeared true. Muriel saw none of the signs of distress he had displayed in Fitz’s studio, though his face was terribly pale. Perhaps this was a permanent marker of his unfortunate experiences.
“I tried to come yesterday,” she said. “You were out.”
In fact, she had visited William and Mary Yard three times, driving her brougham alone as Kenzie remained bedridden. On one occasion a stable groom had caught her attempting to trick the lock of Henry’s entrance door using two pins, a method that worked in novels but which was far more difficult in practice.
Henry bristled. “I was doing my job.”
He had transformed into Edward Hyde at dusk on Wednesday, so perhaps he truly had been Henry all day yesterday. However, the fact that there had been another transformation less than 24 hours after Edward Hyde’s appearance at the dockside was a cause for concern.
“You might have told me you were working on the investigation,” she said, all thoughts of danger overwhelmed by the promise of new clues. “I could have helped.”
Henry hesitated, as though weighing up the truth of this statement. Then he shrugged.
“Did you go to Crawley?” Muriel asked.
“I have determined that there is no photographic studio there, so I would have added nothing to my findings about Ruth Davies. My repeat interviews with my clients have proved more fruitful.”
“What have you learnt?”
“I visited several of them at their own homes, and you saw that Mr Davies has been here in person. Of course, in some cases it was necessary to talk up my progress, in order to avoid disappointment. I’m wily enough to—”
Again, the image of a prowling fox came to mind. Muriel interrupted Henry. “What did you learn?”
“That each of those portraits was discovered either in the missing person’s effects or in the house where they lived.”
“There’s nothing strange about that.”
“Let me finish. They were each discovered after the disappearance.”
Muriel chewed her lip. “That is more curious, I’ll admit.”
“Each image was taken recently,” Henry continued, “or, at least, three of my clients were able to confirm as much, using a little deductive work of their own. The presence in the image of a particular garment, for example, or the trimming of a moustache. None of the portraits was taken more than two weeks before the person in question went missing.”
“It’s strange that those closest to the missing people aren’t able to pinpoint the day on which their portrait was taken, though,” Muriel said.
Henry nodded enthusiastically. “That’s just it. It was Mr Davies who put the idea in my head, with his talk of his wife’s frequent brief disappearances, the fact that she’d been absent on previous occasions. Variations on that theme apply to all our missing persons. Lawrence Loughty, the banker, was often required to stay away from home overnight for business reasons. Allen Jackson lived in student halls but was often absent from those premises. I’d already determined that the barrister, Benjamin Hardy, had no family and no evidence of close friends.”
Muriel raised a hand to interrupt him. “Then you consider Benjamin Hardy to have gone missing in just the same way as those other people?”
“It seems entirely reasonable to reach that conclusion. If we were only able to investigate his case directly, perhaps we might determine that a recent portrait had been taken of him. What is unarguable is a detail stated in the newspaper reports: that Hardy went missing four days before his body was discovered. And it is his character that most interests me. His colleagues described him as reclusive and alluded to a melancholy temperament – he routinely took himself away to a property in Royal Tunbridge Wells, and yet I have uncovered no traces of his activities there, so one can only assume he remained indoors. The only aspect in which his profile is distinct from the others is that he was overtly an enemy of Simeon Courtenay.” He fell silent, considering this, then went on, “That leaves only Morris Pointer, who lived alone since the death of his wife a decade ago, and whose disappearance was noted by his sister on her weekly visit. I know of nobody who accompanied him on excursions away from his house.”
“You haven’t mentioned Private Whitlock.”
“He complicates the picture. By all accounts, he was vital and well-liked, and had no reason to seek to escape his life. He went missing while he was away from his barracks, carousing with a group of soldiers from his regiment.”
“That fact certainly provides a thread to follow,” Muriel said. “Where were these soldiers? Did you already speak to the men who were with him?”
Henry turned to the window, his hands thrust into his waistcoat pockets.
“I visited the barracks,” he said wistfully, “but they won’t talk.”
Muriel watched his shoulders slump. Tenderly, she said, “Dear Henry. You never were adept at conversation. You enjoy solving puzzles, don’t you, but the involvement of actual people is only a distraction.”
“That’s unfair. I’ve just told you the information I gleaned from my clients. I spoke to them, didn’t I?”
“Though of course they have vested interests in solving these cases, given that they initiated them in the first place.”
Henry’s tone grew more distant. “I’ve encountered this sort of stumbling block before, and it is Friday today, so perhaps the soldiers will leave barracks once again…” Absently, he took his watch from his pocket and his lips moved as he studied its face.
“Why are you counting?”
“I don’t believe I was.”
“This is about Edward Hyde. You plan to send him to speak to those soldiers. Are the timings of his appearances predictable?”
Henry’s cheeks reddened. “They’re not only predictable, they’re entirely controllable, Muriel.”
“Controllable?” she repeated in amazement. “That seems absurd. I was with you outside the photography studio on Wednesday. You staggered into a narrow side street. Then you turned into that beast.”
Henry swayed and grasped the back of his chair. “You saw the transformation?”
“I saw it.” She recalled Henry swigging from the potion, the appearance of intoxication, then Edward’s glee at having been freed. “Henry, you can’t expect me to believe he can truly assist you in your work. I’ve seen the look in his eyes – he’d rather assist in making someone disappear than aid in their recovery. He’d sooner kill a man than solve a murder. For all we know, he might have done so already.”
Henry froze. “What are you suggesting?”
It occurred to Muriel that Henry may have assumed she was referring to the death of her own father. That suspicion formed a barrier between them, and would have to be resolved by and by, no matter how much Muriel tried not to think of it.
“The barrister, Benjamin Hardy,” she said. “He was found at Simeon Courtenay’s home, and you were there.”
Henry shook his head.
“You’ve made perfectly clear that you have no knowledge what your alter ego gets up to,” Muriel went on. “You have only his assurances, which are patently worth nothing. Henry, speak plainly. Did Edward Hyde kill the barrister?”
“No,” Henry replied, entirely too quickly.
“What proof do you have?”
“Proving a negative is a near impossibility—”
“Then what evidence do you have that he didn’t commit this crime, or others like it?” Another possibility was becoming unignorable. She thought of the missing people in Henry’s case files, and the savaged body of Benjamin Hardy, and the staring, dead eyes of Vincent Whitlock. In a faint voice, she said, “All these disappearances… these people might easily have met their end at the hands of your friend Edward Hyde.”
“That’s impossible, Muriel.”
Surprising herself, she rushed at Henry, pushing him away from his chair and up against the window. Henry’s hands were still raised, now in a gesture of surrender. His limbs were as thin as a bird’s.
“Why is it impossible?” she demanded.
His eyes were watering. She willed him to answer her, and for the answer to be convincing.
When he didn’t speak, she pushed him hard in the chest, and he winced.
Muriel backed away, spun Henry’s chair around, and slumped heavily into it. She gazed up at her former fiancé, mourning the loss of the man she had known those ten years ago.
Henry cleared his throat. “Two days ago you described Edward as like a brother to me, which is apt. One might have suspicions about a member of one’s family, based on superficial evidence, but beneath that lies a different sort of understanding, based on intuition or simply an intense familiarity. My understanding of Edward is like that, Muriel. I know what he is capable of – I know who he is, at the root. I’d go further and say that my understanding of his nature is deeper than that of a brother’s understanding of his brother. You must remember that Edward and I were one, before I cut him free. Everything he is was once mine. Before my experiments I suffered anger, but I could never have killed, and I know that I could not have developed into somebody with that capability.”
“Isn’t everyone blind to their own true nature?”
“I promise you…” He paused. “No. I realise that my promises are worth very little. I’ll only say that I’m positive that Edward could not have done what you’re suggesting – killing the barrister, I mean – and that I’m confident that he is reconciled to the way things must be, and that he is my partner. I understand all of this must seem very strange to you, and that it opens old wounds. Furthermore, I would understand if you want nothing more to do with me. But I tell you that I cannot do what I do without Edward.”
Muriel concentrated on calming her breathing. “Explain why you checked your watch and counted under your breath.”
“Six hours, from the time he appears. That is what is available to Edward – or rather, that is the timescale in which he can be of use to me.” He laughed. “I almost said ‘to us’, but that would be presumptuous. I’ve enjoyed your company in recent days, Muriel, but I’ll understand if this is too much for you.”
She watched him closely, attempting to see a glimpse of Edward Hyde in his plain features. No, this was Henry, through and through.
Finally, she held out a hand. “I’m not willing to waste any more days as I did yesterday. If I’m to be a part of your work, will you provide me with a key to the office?”