Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Bonus Chapter: Garrick - Part Two

'You should have seen her, mate, legs up to her bloody ears, proper grade A meat, if you know what I mean. And that rack!'

Reggie whistled as he stood in front of the mirror, smoothing Brylcreem through his dirty-blonde hair, desperately trying to smooth out the curls that invariably tried to take over his head. It was always a losing battle, him and his hair. And he spent bloody ages doing it too, combing it through over and over until there was probably more Brylcreem than there was hair.

He'd been chatting ten to the dozen ever since I'd arrived at his place, first moaning that I was late – you're always fucking late, you'll be late for your bloody funeral, you will – and then going on and on about this girl he'd met the night before, while spending forever sorting out his hair in front of the mirror.

With Reggie, every girl he met had legs up to their ears and great tits. In fact, I'd not heard him once talk about a girl who didn't have them and if you believed him, then you'd start to think that London was overrun with a race of really, tall women with breasts bigger than footballs. Oh, and they all fancied the pants off Reggie, of course. To be fair, he was a bit of a hit with the ladies, but they weren't all Amazonian princesses and his nasty streak meant that none of them ever hung around for very long. I'd had to tell him to lay off a fair few times, something that never went down well, but Reggie was old school and his views on women were inbred in him when he'd been growing up, watching his dad knock his mum around and thinking that was just the norm. The strange thing was he told me one night, after he'd had his fill of beer, that he'd hated his dad for what he used to do to his mum, and yet, when push came to shove, Reggie could be a right chip off the old block when he wanted to be.

'Are you even listening to me?' His reflection scowled at me from the glass as he stopped, mid-comb.

'What? Yeah, course I am.' I closed the newspaper on my lap which I hadn't even been reading anyway and looked impatiently at my watch again, my foot tapping against the floor.

'What's the matter with you? You got somewhere better to be?' He turned and brandished the comb at my watch, probably having noticed that I'd been checking it practically every five minutes.

The truth was, I did.

I wanted to be out there, looking for the mysterious Doctor. I was almost ashamed to even admit it to myself and couldn't explain why I hadn't been able to get him out of my head since that first meeting, but he was there nevertheless, infesting every thought, every feeling. I couldn't tell Reggie, of course. For a start, I'd have to explain just where I'd met this man, and that would mean revealing my secret missions to the library and secondly, losing my head over a guy wouldn't exactly go down too well. Not that it was even like that, mind you, but there had just been something about Benjamin Garrick that had captivated me, stirred something within me that had made me feel alive for the first time in bloody ages and I knew I had to try and find a way to see him again.

The only problem was London. How the Hell did you find someone in a city this big?

I'd asked around, mentioned the name to a few people that I thought would know of a well-spoken Doctor hanging around the East End – because, let's face it, a man like that should have stuck out like a sore thumb around here – but the tentative search had come up with nothing. Not one sighting. Not one whisper. Nothing at all. It was as if he didn't exist. Like he was a ghost.

'I'm just fed up of waiting here for you to comb your hair for the hundredth time,' I grumbled. 'Hurry up, for fucks sake. The night will be over before we've even left the house at this rate.'