The room spun as the implications of her babbling story sank in. She'd known exactly where to hide! Had known where to watch them kill Stride and Eddowes! Had known in advance! It wasn't possible, how could anyone know where he and Maybrick were going to be, when they hadn't known, themselves, where they would encounter the prostitutes? They hadn't even realized Catharine Eddowes had been released from Bishopsgate Police Station, not until they'd run across her on Duke Street. Yet others knew, she'd said, had put up cameras in advance, to photograph him and Maybrick... others who sat in a vault of some sort halfway across London...

John Lachley seized her chin, shaking her hard. "Explain! How did you know where I would be?"

She blinked slowly. "Everybody knows. Ripper's a famous case. Most famous murder mystery in the last two centuries... and I'm going to solve it, have solved it! When I go back to the station, to my own time, I'll be famous, and rich, I've got videotapes of Jack the Ripper... both of them... who'd have guessed it was two men?"

Lachley stood shaking. She was babbling, out of her head. Had to be...

"All those idiots," she was murmuring, "thinking it was Prince Eddy or his tutor, or that barrister who drowned himself or Sir William Gull. They've been arguing over who it was for the last hundred-fifty years... even thought it might've been some time traveller using the Britannia Gate..."

John Lachley stared at the raving woman, seriously considering whether she had taken leave of her senses or if he had taken leave of his. Time traveller? A century and a half, arguing over his identity? She wasn't a journalist, she was an escapee from a lunatic asylum somewhere on the fringes of London...

Then something she'd said hit home.

The gate! Ianira, the woman who had known so much about him, had babbled endlessly about a mysterious gate. Was she, too, some sort of traveller in time, who had come to hunt him? He reeled at the implications. His gaze rested on the heavy box he'd taken from her coat, with its trailing wires and tubes and cylinders hidden in her bonnet, and frowned. He picked it up, then shook the woman. "Look at this." Her eyelids fluttered for a moment before opening. "Tell me what this is."

"My camera. Digital videocamera, best in the business..."

Videocamera? Latin for I see?

"Show me how it operates!" He loosened the ropes on her wrists, braced her in a sitting position and leaned her against him. She fumbled the camera into her lap and fiddled with controls. "See? This is what I recorded tonight." She tried to hold the camera up, but couldn't lift her arms. He took it from her—and let out a yell. The strangely textured surface along one side was moving. Pictures flickered across it, in color, showing Maybrick bent over Catharine Eddowes, hacking her to pieces...

Dear God! How the devil could such a tiny little box have captured them in pictures like this, color pictures, moving pictures? He pressed the controls she had manipulated and the box whirred softly, the pictures flashing with such speed he couldn't follow the motion. People racing backwards, colors flashing and rippling across the surface, a blur of sight and confusion. When he fumbled at the controls again, hands shaking, the motion slowed abruptly. He found himself staring at a place straight out of nightmare. Vast open rooms, with whole buildings inside, hundreds of tiny people moving about the floor and climbing staircases made of metal, insanely colored lights glowing in strange shapes. "What is this place?" he demanded, voice shaking.

She blinked slowly and focused on the camera he held. "Shangri-La Station," she murmured. "The time terminal..."

Lachley drew a whole series of deep breaths, gulping down the damp air, gradually steadied his shaking nerves. "You," he said slowly, enunciating each word with care, "are from my future?"

"Had to come down time, through the gate, to catch the Ripper, to photograph him..."

He didn't really believe it, didn't want to believe it, such things were fantasy, the maunderings of popular authors like that Frenchman Jules Verne. Yet he was holding a camera that no craftsman in the British Empire could possibly have constructed, made of things Lachley had never seen or heard of, and the bitch was drugged, couldn't be lying, not with what he'd given her. Excitement stirred to life, with tantalizing glimpses of a world which could offer him more power than anything he'd dreamed possible. "Eddy," he whispered, "tell me about Eddy. Prince Albert Victor. When does he become king?"

"Poor Prince Eddy," she sighed, eyes closing again. "Only four more years... so young... 1892..."

Lachley began to tremble in a wild excitement. Four years? Eddy would be crowned king in only four more years? Dear God, what was going to happen, that would kill both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales? Bertie was healthy as an ox and Victoria, herself, likely to live for another decade. "What happens?" he demanded, breathless now, "What happens in 1892?"

"Influenza. Epidemic of '91-'92. Poor Eddy, he'd just been engaged to be married, named Duke of Clarence, whole life ahead of him, and he's killed by influenza. Victoria was heartbroken, his parents inconsolable..."

The room lurched under his feet, swaying and whirling in mad circles. Dead of influenza? Never crowned? It couldn't be, he'd worked too hard, invested everything, spent five weeks in hell, tracking down Eddy's God-cursed letters to protect him, to ensure the ascension to the throne. Had done murder after stinking murder to keep Eddy safe, so he could become king, to ensure himself the power Lachley craved, the safety of wealth and control over the political future of an empire...

And Eddy was to be killed by a stupid influenza epidemic?

Lachley began to laugh, the sound wild and high, echoing off the bricks of the vaulted ceiling. He gripped the impossible camera in both hands and laughed until the sound choked him, until he could gasp out, "How do you get back? To your own time?"

"Through the gate," his drugged victim answered in a sleepy, reasonable tone.

"Gate? What gate? Where?" He was still laughing, the sound of it edged with mania, a mind giving way under the stresses.

"The Britannia Gate. In Battersea, Spaldergate House. But it doesn't open for days, not until the second of October, only opens every eight days..." Her head was lolling. "Won't go through it, though, not 'til Mary Kelly's murdered on November ninth... I'll take my videotapes back, then, I'm sure to win the Kit Carson Prize..."

Another spate of laughter broke loose. Mary Kelly? She must be the bitch in Miller's Court. What the bloody hell did he care about a scheming little whore with a letter written by a dullard who wouldn't even survive to wear the crown? Oh, God, it was too funny, here he stood in a satanic sanctuary devoted to the accrual of political and psychic power, with a dead time traveller on the floor, a drugged maniac on his work bench, and a babbling journalist planning to photograph a murder he no longer had any earthly reason to commit, with a total of four whores dead and cut to pieces for no reason whatever, and the decaying head of an adolescent Nancy-boy glaring at him from across the room and laughing at his shattered dreams...

Only this woman had brought him a glimpse of something new, something which fired his imagination even more passionately than Eddy's prospects had done. A whole, immense new world to explore, in which to control little minds and live as a king, himself. He laughed again and stroked the woman's hair. Thoughts of Eddy fell away like flakes of rust from fine Damascus steel. Dominica, the self-important photojournalist, had done him a greater favor than she dreamed, tracking him through London's sewers.