A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(62)
“So we are looking for a Svengali?” Memsa’b hazarded.
“One who is also some manner of magician,” Watson reminded her, and frowned. “To return to the narrative, none of the cabmen remembered driving away with a girl and a young man, so he would have had to walk or come by private coach.”
“You said Sherlock has some notion—one that does not correspond to the girls’ fate as soulless husks,” Nan prompted him.
“Well . . . that is not entirely true. Sherlock’s theory actually might explain their condition,” Watson admitted. “He mentioned something called zombies. Haitian sorcerers are supposed to create them out of the dead. Of course, Sherlock scorns the notion that they are actually reanimated corpses. Holmes posits that those sorcerers actually poison their prey ahead of time and ‘resurrect’ the corpse after it’s buried. Their behavior, which he believes is caused by severe brain damage due to the poison, is alleged to be very like that of the girls we have in custody—nearly mindless, they will do exactly what they are told to do until they are told to stop. They can’t perform complicated tasks, but simple ones, like plowing, fetching water and wood, simple cleaning tasks, they can. And whether Holmes is wrong and the sorcerer actually makes a corpse rise, or whether he is right and the sorcerer administers a drug that essentially wipes the mind blank—perhaps even stops the heart for a time—the process would give us something that is virtually identical to these girls.” He put his plate aside and drank the last of his tea. “To be honest . . . I think he might be on to something.”
“But why would someone in London go about abducting girls, turning them into these creatures, then turn them loose again?” Sarah demanded. “I can see many reasons, most of them heinous, for the first two—but why set them free to wander the streets? And if an immoral and unscrupulous person had such creatures at his mercy, why were they not interfered with in any other way?”
“Well, that’s the sticking point,” Watson admitted. “And if the intention was to have helpless women that would satisfy one’s carnal desires, poor Cynthia is a terrible selection for that purpose. She is . . . exceedingly plain.”
“Perhaps she was the only one he could separate from the herd,” Nan pointed out. “And where I come from, it isn’t a woman’s face that men care about when they intend pleasuring themselves. I’ve often heard them tell each other Don’ matter if she looks loik a monkey. Jest put a bag over ’er ’ead.”
Sahib and Memsa’b were used to Nan’s occasionally earthy and utterly honest pronouncements, but Selim coughed, Mary blushed, and Watson grew quite red in the face. Nevertheless he acknowledged the truth of her words. “Fair enough, Nan—but Sarah is right. Remember that neither girl was outraged, and the first one was quite a pretty young woman.”
“And at some point his power over them faded, and he needed to restrain them conventionally before he rendered them into what they became,” Mary reminded him.
“Ah, yes, that’s correct,” John agreed. “Both had ligature marks on their wrists and ankles, and the signs that they had been forcefully gagged.”
“So at the moment, it looks as if the same man took them both,” Sahib concluded.
“Exactly. And since he did nothing physical to them that we could discover, one can only conclude that either he is performing some sort of occult or chemical experiments on them, or—” John paused. “Well, I am at a loss for the or. Sherlock is going to explore the zombie theory; he’s looking for young men—since the last person Cynthia was seen with was a young man—who have recently been to Haiti, Jamaica, or the Bahamian Islands. He is also making enquiries about mesmerists, but that will be a great deal more difficult to track down. We, of course, will explore the theory that they have had some sort of dreadful encounter with the occult.”
“If this man has his own carriage . . . it would have made the first abduction that much easier, not to mention the second,” Nan mused.
Sarah’s expression darkened. “You do realize that these two girls may only be the ones we found, don’t you?” she asked. “He could have abducted more—girls vanish from the streets of London every day, and in places like West Ham and Battersea the police assume they have run off with lovers—and in worse places, the police don’t look hard for them at all.”
Mary nodded. “He could still have other girls—or he could have told them to walk into the Thames.”
“He deserves the death of a thousand cuts,” Selim said, a growl in his voice. “Whoever he is, even if he were my brother. I would deliver him to his destiny with my own hand.”
“We have to catch him first,” Sarah reminded him.
“We have to prove it’s a him, first,” Nan pointed out. “Cabmen were only asked about a young man with a girl. They weren’t asked about a woman with a girl. And Cynthia wouldn’t have many qualms about going off with a woman who struck up a friendship with her, especially if she’d been subjected to snubs all day by her cousin and her cousin’s friends.”
“By Jove . . . you’re right about that,” John Watson said, looking stricken. “That never occurred to me.”
All four of the women exchanged a telling look. I’ll bet Sherlock has already thought of that, Nan thought to herself. I don’t think he will ever underestimate a woman. Not these days, anyway.