Chapter Twenty
It was all over just as quick as that.
For a moment, an unreal moment that seemed to stretch out for an eternity, the only sound Rynn could hear was Seamus’s labored
breathing—and the only thing she could see was the terrible scarlet spurt of blood. As a nurse, it was incumbent on her to
try to save a life—even the life of a man who might have been the death of them—but the ferocity of the attack left her with
no moral question to wrestle. She could only look, appalled, at the bloody pulp that had once been a man’s chest. There was
no doubt in her mind that Bingle was dead. No one could survive such injuries.
“Jesus, Seamus! And here was me thinking you were half dead!” Donal was on his feet, looming over Seamus and the man he’d
just killed. His tone was amazed, congratulatory, relieved. Clearly seeing a man slaughtered right in front of him didn’t
bother him at all.
“It’s not the first time I’ve had to kill a man when I was half dead.
” Seamus meant when he was in the war, Rynn knew.
Donal had told her about some of the surprise nighttime attacks they’d endured when the Huns had come pouring down on them in the trenches, about the vicious hand-to-hand combat with which they’d fought for their lives and the lives of their comrades, often when they were so sick and weak with dysentery or trench fever they could barely move.
This, she supposed, was the result of that.
She was still gaping at the gruesome sight in front of her when Seamus rolled off his victim, dropped the knife and collapsed
on his back on the floor nearby. Spatters of blood on his face were eclipsed by his bloody hands and the deep red splotches
of blood on his undershirt.
“Cor, my leg hurts! Feels like the skin’s gone and burst.”
Her nurse’s instincts caught by this appeal to them, Rynn’s attention shifted to his leg. The wound had, indeed, burst open
as a result of his exertions. The resulting purulent drainage was smelly and disgusting but was also a good thing because
it was getting the poison out. Shaky with shock but seeing no advantage in wallowing in her own feelings or the horror of
it, she got to her feet and went to do the next, practical thing: fetch the kettle and a basin so she could tend the wound.
It frightened her to realize that what was motivating her to move so quickly was the thought that she might not get another
chance. At any moment, the police might burst in, or a confederate of Bingle’s, or someone drawn by the sound of the struggle . . .
“Was the bastard alone?” Seamus asked Donal through clenched teeth.
“He was. I think he was. There wasn’t anyone with him when he stuck a gun in my back in the stairwell. He’d been watching
Rynn. He must have followed us from the park, then seen me again when I was paying the rent.” Donal crouched beside Bingle,
pressing a wad of discarded bandages to the man’s mutilated chest—the still gushing blood immediately turned the cloth bright
red—before grabbing the small rag rug from the floor beside the bed and pressing it down on top of the bandages. “He said
he was going to shout down at Mrs. Clark to send for the police. If he’d had somebody with him, there would have been no need.
He would have sent them.”
“Why are you doing that? He’s dead.” Nauseated by the gore, by the ripe smell of the eviscerated body, by the violence of the deed itself, Rynn set the basin of hot water on the floor beside Seamus and, with the bag holding the supplies from the apothecary’s shop in hand, sank down beside it.
If her voice was sharper than usual, well, she considered it a wonder that she could talk at all.
“If he bleeds out all over the floor, some of it might drip through to the room below.” Having snatched a blanket off the
bed, Donal hauled Bingle’s limp corpse up enough to wrap it around his head and torso, binding it tightly over the rug and
bandages. It was a relief, Rynn thought as Donal lowered him back to the floor, not to have to look any longer at the gaping
wounds—or the dead man’s staring eyes. “And we can’t leave all this blood. If anybody finds out what happened here . . .”
He broke off, but Rynn had no trouble filling in what he’d left unsaid: they would all, herself included, be implicated in
Bingle’s murder.
Her heart, which she only that second realized was thumping like she’d been running for hours, gave a mighty lurch.
“We can’t stay here any longer,” Seamus said, then groaned loudly as she pressed a steaming pad of hot-water-soaked bandages
down on his wound. “We need to get moving.”
“We do,” Donal agreed. “As soon as Rynn is done with your leg, we’ll go. I don’t know where that’ll be, precisely, but—”
“We can’t be leaving the body behind.” Seamus groaned again as Rynn replaced the pad with another steaming one. “Once they
find it, they’ll be coming after us with everything they have.”
“Can you walk a bit, do you think?” Donal asked Seamus as he wrapped another blanket around Bingle. “If you can, I can carry
the body out. If I put him over my shoulder, you can lean on my other side. Or you can lean on Rynn.”
“I can walk,” Seamus said. Donal gave him a doubtful look. Rynn, too, was skeptical. Panting and sweating, Seamus was more gray than white now, and his mouth was contorted with pain. As for his leg, she doubted that it could bear any weight at all.
“That’ll make a pretty picture, now won’t it?” Gathering her wits about her, Rynn forced herself to focus on the practicalities
of the situation even as she applied another steaming pad to the wound, to Seamus’s obvious discomfort. The discharge was
mostly blood now, which was a good thing. Her hands were shaking, which was not. “You with a dead man wrapped up like a mummy
over your shoulder, and another one half dead leaning on your arm? Are you thinking no one will notice? And even if we make
it outside, then what do you intend to do? Shall we all pile into a taxi? Or take a tram? I think that just might attract
the very attention we most want to avoid. And if we manage all that, where, pray, do you intend to go? I can’t take you home
with me. The house is busy. There’s nowhere I can hide you. My father-in-law is dead set against the rebellion and will summon
the police in a trice if any part of this comes to his attention. And Bingle was watching me, remember. Someone else will
come to take his place. They’ll be watching me, too.”
Realizing the truth of it even as she said it, the knowledge struck terror into her soul.
“Eh, you make a good point about Bingle. He’ll have had a shift, most likely. The shift will end, if it hasn’t already, and
he won’t be there to hand off the assignment to his replacement.” Donal’s expression was stark as he looked at Rynn. “They’ll
start to look for him. They might be looking for him now.”
For an appalled moment they stared at one another.
The icy calm that always seemed to claim her when confronted with the worst emergencies took possession of her mind, granting
her a clarity of vision that showed her a possible way out.
Rynn said, “I know what to do.”
Some twenty minutes later, Seamus’s leg was slathered in BIPP and bound up with clean bandages. He was fully dressed—with
a seam slit in his pants leg to accommodate the bulk of his bandaged thigh—propped in a sitting position in the bed, and armed
with a pistol. Bingle’s corpse had been wrapped in multiple blankets and shoved beneath the bed so that it would not be immediately
visible should anyone come bursting through the door. The worst of the blood had been cleaned up.
And with a solemn promise to Seamus to return as soon as possible, Rynn and Donal were on their way out of the lodging house.
The Great Eastern Hotel was respectable and well-appointed but lacked the glamor—and cost—of the Goring or Claridge’s. With
her face and hands washed, her hair tidied, her hat with its veil pulled forward to hide her face and her jacket buttoned
carefully over her dress, the bodice of which she had discovered to her horror was liberally splattered with Bingle’s blood,
Rynn attracted no more than a sideways glance or two from the businessmen who were the hotel’s primary clientele as she navigated
the reception rooms and rode the lift to the top floor. Maguire and his associates had taken rooms there while they were in
London, and she, fortunately, remembered his direction and the fact that he was slated to join Thomas and his party at White’s
that evening after attending a football match that seemed to be of great interest to every gentleman in London. While making
the arrangements with Thomas in her presence, Maguire had stated his intention to retire to his hotel room to change clothes
between events. As it was a little more than an hour before they were to meet, Rynn most fervently hoped that she would find
him in his room.
She was in luck. Maguire yanked the door open at her first tentative knock.
He was tousle haired and in his shirtsleeves, with black trousers and a black waistcoat rendering him almost fully dressed.
She appeared to have interrupted him in the process of tying his bow tie, because the black satin ends hung down on either side of his neck.
At the sight of her, his eyes widened with surprise, and no wonder. The gossip that would result if she was caught visiting
his hotel room didn’t bear thinking of. But she’d had no choice.
“What the devil are you doing here?” He glanced up and down the hall, which was empty, then stepped back and pulled her inside. It was an
ordinary hotel room, nothing fancy, she saw with a glance. The water he’d used for shaving was still in the basin with his
razor beside it. The smell of his shaving soap hung in the air. “The valet went to press my jacket and I’m expecting him to
return at any minute. You don’t want him to see you.”
No, she didn’t. She wanted to get the business over with and be gone as quickly as possible. The thought that Bingle might