Communion Town (21 page)

Peregrine fell silent for a minute. I heard a droplet hit the floor beneath dangling fingertips.

‘I remember one of the earliest tutorials we had with him,’ he went on. ‘Lazarus had written an essay proposing an entirely new interpretation of one of Professor Weill’s own classic investigations: the case of the Nine Surgeons, if memory serves. The essay was a remarkable piece of work for an undergraduate, bold and original, and, as he read it aloud before the attentively bowed cranium of our tutor, Lazarus trembled with delight at the unfurling of his analytical faculties, at the excitement of elucidating through sheer deductive prowess aspects of the case which even the great detective himself had not previously understood.

‘Unfortunately, the argument was flawed. It was a small oversight, but crucial: if you recall, the Nine Surgeons affair involved a number of deadly weapons, and Lazarus’s interpretation was founded on a failure to distinguish between the types of wound that may be inflicted by a duelling rapier, a
tachi
sword and a cavalry sabre.’

Inspector Nimrod, standing back in the shadows of the study, muttered a heartfelt oath.

‘When Lazarus’s essay had reached its ringing conclusion, Professor Weill pointed out this simple error and methodically dismantled the entire deductive edifice constructed upon it. Lazarus received the lesson badly. I believed at the time that it took him an entire term to shake off his mortification.’

Peregrine, who was now squatting very close to the object of his inspection, looked up at me.

‘It appears, however, that he may have nursed the resentment for longer.’

He indicated the three dissimilar sword-hilts protruding from the chest of the corpse of Hyperion Weill, their steel blades crossed at the point where they emerged through the back of the chair.

‘These are, I notice, the very implements which formed the crux of Lazarus’s early academic misstep. Our killer entered Professor Weill’s study and perhaps engaged him in conversation. Then he snatched the first of these weapons from where it hung on the wall among the mementos of the professor’s long career – note the three sword-shaped patches of unfaded wallpaper – and, with it, struck the first blow. The others followed, rapier and
tachi
, as if in excess of revenge for that distant humbling. As if to impart his own lesson in the varieties of possible harm.’

Peregrine looked into his old tutor’s face, which was not peaceful.

‘We begin to perceive the contours of a dreadful logic. Those who have thwarted Lazarus Glass would do well to beware tonight.’

The gothic apartment blocks of Juno Square showed a handful of lit windows, but the streets were empty as we followed Inspector Nimrod through Belltown. Few had business in the university district at this time of night. Black reflections slicked ahead of us in the pavements and great weeping globes clung about the head of each lamp post.

Of those who had studied the arts of detection under Hyperion Weill, the most promising of all had been Electra Cavendish-Peake. She was a few years older than Peregrine and Lazarus, and the two friends had in their early days regarded her with envy and awe. She appeared far closer to the mastery they desired, with her sharp scholarly manners and hermetic turn of mind, her knowledge of esoteric casebooks and the furthest reaches of ratiocinatory theory, and the chilly style in which, while still a graduate student, she had solved the case of the Liars’ League: it had been as if she fixed that conspiracy in a block of ice which, with one smart tap of the intellect, she shattered, breaching all its secrets.

But she had shown small inclination to pursue the life of investigative adventure which beckoned. She preferred more regular habits, haunting the reading rooms of the university and city libraries, spending part of each afternoon at her club, and dining each evening at the same bistro, alone, with a book of abstruse criminology propped open before her. She devoted herself to research and correspondence, very occasionally publishing a monograph putting forward some revision to the fundamental theoretical postulates of detection, or an article resolving beyond question a cold case which had stumped the best minds of a century ago. The previous year, when after months of inquiry Peregrine had been all but ready to admit defeat in the matter of the Doubting Child, Electra had provided the key to the problem in a two-minute telephone conversation.

Peregrine had recounted this much by the time we arrived at a restaurant with a handwritten menu tacked inside its grubby window. A pair of police uniforms moved aside to admit us, and we found ourselves among a jumble of tables on which suppers lay half-finished. Wine from overturned carafes had stained the checked tablecloths deep red. In the far corner of the room, the body of Electra Cavendish-Peake leant across the table at which she had begun, but not concluded, her last meal.

‘Cassandra,’ said Peregrine, ‘perhaps you would care to reconstruct what has taken place?’

I nodded, and for some minutes I studied the scene in silence. At last I straightened and exhaled.

‘The sequence of events is apparent,’ I said. ‘Dr Cavendish-Peake was dining by herself, as we know was her practice. Her demise was sudden and dramatic. The restaurant was full and the other diners vacated the room rapidly, as we can see from these overturned chairs. Coats hang abandoned on the hooks beside the exit.

‘How did she die? The puncture mark near the victim’s mouth, and the colour and contortion of the face, give evidence enough of the cause. But if we wish for more, we have it. Note, first, the book which lies closed on her left hand, as if she wishes even now to keep her place: a new academic hardback from Bloodstone Press. Looking closer, we can identify it as a recently issued collection of essays by various contributors, offering new interpretations of the case of the Double Sun – a case in which, as it happens, Dr Cavendish-Peake herself played a part some dozen years ago. In solving it, by the way, she sank a blackmail operation as profitable as it was cruel, and behind which the influence of Lazarus Glass was, if not demonstrable, perceptible.’

Peregrine lowered his head a few affirmative degrees.

‘Beside the book lies a padded envelope addressed to Dr Cavendish-Peake. We can hypothesise that, having received the package earlier in the day, she in all probability delayed opening it and examining the book until she was sitting at the table. Perhaps she was not paying attention as she opened the seal since, for a theoretician of her distinction, deliveries from academic publishers were surely a common occurrence. Closer examination, however, reveals that this was no gift sent in hopes of a favourable review. Peering into the book’s interior where it is held open by her stiffened hand, we notice that a cuboid section has been excised from the central pages with a razor or sharp knife, creating a hollow cell within. When she opened the book, she released what had been imprisoned in this space.’

‘Fiendish,’ said Inspector Nimrod to himself.

‘It sprang at her face, inflicting the injury we see here. She would have begun to feel the effects of the venom at once, and, given her quick perceptions and full acquaintance with the relevant arachnological data, she must have understood the severity of her situation. But she remained alert, and, observing that the instrument of her decease was now scuttling across the floor towards the restaurant’s panicking patrons, she picked up a piece of cutlery and flung it with the necessary force and accuracy to impale the creature that we see here.’

I indicated the point, some distance away, where a pale brown tropical spider the size of my hand was fixed to the floorboards by a obliquely angled steel fork.

‘Alongside her more sedentary accomplishments she was always superb with a throwing-knife,’ said Peregrine.

‘
Phoneutria mortifera
,’ I said. ‘Commonly known as the poison pen spider. Its neurotoxin takes effect with atrocious speed and potency. She would have known that her own case was hopeless, and that protecting the other diners was to be her final action.’

‘This is sound work, Cassandra.’

‘But incomplete. I see what has happened but I cannot tell why.’

‘True. And there I must assist you, because to uncover the
why
of this scene we must plunge further into those lost times when Electra, like Lazarus and myself, was a precocious neophyte.’

He plunged his hands into his raincoat pockets and contemplated the disarrayed restaurant as he spoke.

‘I have indicated that the nature of Electra’s gifts led her into the abstract and obscure reaches of our discipline. What you must also know is how profoundly Lazarus Glass, at that moment in his development as a young investigator, was influenced by her, this exceptional deductive intellect whom he saw as being always one step ahead on the path to mastery.

‘He would follow her from lecture hall to library, clutching the work of whichever theorist he had discovered most recently, pouring out his latest ideas, always wanting an argument – wanting, too, new ways to gain the advantage in his rivalry with me. Electra, for her part, found in Lazarus a keen interlocutor, and soon realised that while he shared her taste for arcana, in his case this mingled with an impatient pragmatism. He loved strange notions not for themselves but for what they might enable him to accomplish.’

Electra Cavendish-Peake had been developing an unusual theory of detection, Peregrine explained. Instead of the standard casebooks, she was spending days and nights in neglected reading rooms deep in the library, surrounded by heavy, crumbling volumes: Anacratus, Raymond Lully, Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Döhl, Robert Fludd. It was clear to Lazarus that she was pursuing some curious line of research, but he had to importune her for some time before she consented to share her ideas; perhaps she intuited, even then, that not she but Lazarus was the person to bring her theory to fruition. She told him that she was exploring what had once been known as the Art of Memory.

At that time, Lazarus had no more than a layman’s understanding of the principles of
memoria artificialis
: the secret, well known to the ancients, that the human memory could be understood as a physical place, a spatial structure. The long-ago practitioners of the Art had discovered that it was possible to build, in the mind, houses of memory – temples and palaces of memory.

So, for instance, Electra explained, she had already succeeded in constructing a complete mental replica of the Green Stairs townhouse where she had spent her early childhood, recreated in such detail that, although the original building had been destroyed in a fire a decade ago, she could now close her eyes and walk its rooms and corridors just as if she were there once more: and inside her memory house she could store what she wished to remember. She had framed a certain afternoon on the riverbank seven summers past, and hung it in the hallway to be admired whenever she liked. In the garden behind this house of the mind, she had laid out in formal flowerbeds her plans for her career, some of them strong and bright, others no more than frail shoots. Before the sitting-room fireplace lay a Turkish carpet whose pattern she knew by heart, and into its symmetrical figures she had encoded the names of all her personal and professional acquaintances, so that, as she traced the relationships between them, their faces winked up at her from the nodes and buds of the design. And in the glass-fronted bookcases of her father’s study she had arranged every book she had read in her time at the university. She demonstrated this to Lazarus, reeling off the authors’ names alphabetically, then the titles in reverse alphabetical order. She pulled down one or two volumes and read from their opening pages as fluently as if she actually held them in her hands.

Which was a nice trick, said Lazarus, and useful enough as a tool for the busy scholar. But he failed to see how any of this was likely to advance the science of detection. He was missing the point, Electra replied; and, with that, he found he had to persuade her all over again to take him into her confidence. She had no patience with those who did not keep up. She refused to discuss the matter further until he had, at the very least, ameliorated his ignorance of mnemotechnics by reading the essential modern treatises by Yates, Hawksquill and Carruthers.

When he had done so, she relented. To convey to him what she had in mind, she read aloud the passage from the
Confessions
in which Augustine speaks of the ‘spacious palaces of memory where countless images are hoarded, brought in from all the diverse objects perceived by the senses’, and adds: ‘There too are hidden the altered images we create in our minds by enlarging or diminishing or otherwise transforming the things we perceive.’

That was the crux of it, Electra said: altered images. It was true that, with long and gruelling study, a practitioner of the Art could learn to retrieve all the lost junk and treasure hidden away in the attics of the mind, and to arrange everything in order: each image in its place, tidy and accessible. But it was also true that surprising things could happen in memory houses. To embody ideas in such a fashion was to imbue them with unpredictable life. They might move around when you were not there; they might change and grow in ways you had not expected.

She had noticed this already in her own small experiment. Further down the garden of her memory house, beyond the formal beds of ambition, she had one day been taken aback to discover another bed, in which grew a thorny tangle of grudges and resentments which she had not intended to plant. On closer examination she had been still more startled to recognise the forgotten wrongs that some of the older plants represented.