Red, White and Blue (Book Two of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty Four: Elisabetta

Oxford, 1880:

Four years passed. The rumours of baby-killing and virgin-biting gradually subsided, until Jack came to be seen as just another of Oxford's charming eccentrics. Even Sam abandoned his suspicions enough to let him train the new police recruits in hand-to-hand fighting.

God, that was brilliant. It had been years since he'd last punched somebody in the face. Of course, he had to rein-in his enthusiasm, in case he inadvertently punched too hard and was never asked back again. It was a bit like it had been seeing Ellini in Paris – after an absence of four years – and pretending he wasn't out of his mind with excitement, in case she took fright and ran away.

With Ellini, he had no idea how he'd done it, but, with the police training, it was manageable. Perhaps some of the fire had gone out of his belly, but it wasn't actually that much fun anymore, punching clueless young men in the face. Of course, as soon as they began to learn, it became a bit more enjoyable. By the time they started using their own initiative and trying to mob him in front of the police station, he could almost have believed that he was happy.

Almost, but not quite. No matter how hard he tried to drown them out with drugs and alcohol and feverish activity, the moments of sobriety came creeping back to remind him how alone he was.

For starters, there were the hallucinations. Because his brain wasn't used to all these chemicals – and still less was it used to being idle – dead men would sometimes appear to him on the pavements. Garrett would trudge up Cornmarket Street, all covered in mud, his neck twisted at an odd angle. Joel and Alim would glare out from shop windows and remind him, if only with a look, that he had killed them – that, if he had been a bit quicker, a bit smarter, if he had been able to sleep the night before the massacre, they might be alive instead of him.

His favourite hallucination wasn't even a dead person, but he still got a wrenching, fluttering, hot sensation in his stomach whenever she appeared. He supposed it was no wonder. Because Robin was dead – and because he didn't know where she was, or who was looking after her – he couldn't shake the feeling that she appeared to him like this when she was in trouble.

He would see her standing in the street, dressed just like another pedestrian – and perhaps she was just another pedestrian, perhaps he had simply pasted Ellini's face and figure onto an innocent bystander – but this didn't stop him from going up to her, abandoning all pretence at sanity, and saying, "What is it? Where are you? Do you need me?"

And when she just looked at him silently for a moment and then drifted off, Jack would grit his teeth and mutter that he hadn't wanted to talk to her anyway.

"This is my damp, murky, boring city," he grumbled, as she melted back into the crowd. "If you want to avoid me, all you have to do is be absolutely anywhere else."

Still, it wasn't all bad, living here. His theoretical take-over of the city was coming on by leaps and bounds – as Sergei found out when he looked into Jack's room on the fourth anniversary of his arrival in Oxford.

He usually stayed away from Jack's rooms, as part of his cheerful determination not to discover anything unsavoury about the people he lived with. But today he paused in the doorway on his way to the jigsaw room and gave a low whistle, as though deeply impressed.

Jack supposed the sheer scale of the mess was impressive, if you had a taste for that kind of thing. Pieces of paper were everywhere – some stuck to the walls, others accumulating gently in the corner like snow-drifts – some covered with scribbles, and others with sketches. Some were just sheets of numbers, sloping down the page, and following a mysterious pattern of their own. There were architectural drawings, technical schematics, maps with pins stuck into them at points which would have seemed completely random to the uninitiated. Sometimes they seemed completely random to Jack, but there was a pattern in there somewhere, and he generally only had to wait until he'd sobered up to remember it.