A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Thirteen: Amateur Detectives

Where did you start looking for a woman who had disappeared from the scene of her own murder? 

It was a paradox that Elliott had been struggling with for days. There was a corpse in the mortuary. She had been sketched and photographed, and presumably examined by the coroner. Any day now, perhaps, she would be buried.

And she looked exactly like the beautiful woman whose eyes had met Elliott's when he'd thrown back the curtains of the main recital room. The woman who had smiled and touched a finger to her lips and disappeared before he could question her.

But it wasn't her. It was some kind of copy. He didn't understand how it had been made, or why it was necessary, but he knew he needed to find the real woman. He had never felt such an affinity with anyone.

It wasn't that he thought he'd met her before, in some forgotten moment, or even some other life. He just knew that, from the one glance they'd shared, he had understood everything about her. And she had felt the same – he knew it. He had seen her look of shock melt into a smile, as though she'd just been met by an old friend.

But why had she run? Well, she was in danger, clearly – why else would you fake your own death? But why hadn't she trusted him to help her? If she had understood him in that moment as completely as he'd understood her, she would have known there was no need to run.

Still, the frustration was doing him some good. It hadn't occurred to him to despair after that, even though, in many respects, his predicament was actually worse. Now he was in love with a woman he had only seen once, who he had no idea how to find, and who, by all the evidence – except the evidence of his own eyes – seemed to be dead.

And yet he was finally certain of something. He finally knew what he was supposed to do. Three days after the murder, he even made himself walk out of the music rooms and into the heaving crowds of Broad Street, with no more than a twinge of anxiety and a half hour or so of sweaty palms.

He tried to remember the last time he had been outside – apart from the night he had darted wildly after the girl – but this just brought back memories of soirees and dinner parties and grand reception rooms. He supposed it was encouraging to think that none of the pedestrians on Broad Street were going to judge him by his skill with a fork, or his after-dinner conversation. No-one was going to ask him what he thought of the new Reform Bill, or the operettas of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

And so, feeling a little bit braver, he shuffled into Turl Street – with his hat standing in for the security of a ceiling – trying to re-find the last place he'd seen her.

Of course, it had been close to one in the morning when she had darted through these streets – and she'd been wearing a grey dress and keeping to the shadows – so it was unlikely that anyone would have seen her. And what could he say when he asked them? That he was looking for the dead girl? The one they'd all seen in the papers? The one whose murder was currently being investigated by the city police?

As it happened, this line of enquiry yielded surprisingly good results, but not for an hour or two.

He found himself in the covered market – which, at least, was covered, even though it was squirmingly close, and packed solid with human beings. 

Elliott asked for the man who guarded the market at night, only to be told that there wasn't one. But there was a superintendent who locked the gates after six, and sometimes wandered back to check that all was well on his way home from the pub. One trader even described him as 'an agitated little bugger who hardly sleeps', and said he wouldn't have been surprised to see him slinking around the aisles of the market at night.