Communion Town (22 page)

Later, too, when she looked at the Turkish rug in which she had patterned the network of her acquaintances, she found that the curls and interleavings suggested unexpected links between them. Guided by these hints, further investigation had revealed that, yes, those graduate students were working together on a furtive conference paper which came close to impinging on Electra’s own research; that, yes, those two members of the Senior Common Room enjoyed a relationship which was not purely professional. She had not been conscious of these useful facts until her memory house had brought them to her attention.

Such discoveries were mere toys, of course, and nothing that would rebuild the foundations of detection. But the larger possibility she had glimpsed held precisely such a promise. Consider the nature of detection, she said to Lazarus, this art to which we have dedicated ourselves. Is it not also an art of memory, in which we must retain every insignificant detail which might prove to be the key to a case? And does our discipline not have a special affinity with the ancient practice of the memory house, for where does the detective live, if not in a
memory city
, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and symbols? Does she not, in her mind, walk the streets at all times, in search of the meanings concealed there?

Lazarus saw what Electra was driving at, now, and he realised immediately that although it would require phenomenal work to accomplish, the rewards could be commensurate. If a detective could build, in his mind, a memory city which replicated the real city in every detail, then every mystery contained in that city would lie open to him: he would have mastered his discipline with a perfection otherwise unthinkable.

They talked through the night, growing bright-eyed as they developed the theme. Supposing it were possible, using the techniques of
memoria artificialis
, to construct an entire memory city, how would such a system of investigation work? The detective would become a perpetual flâneur within his own mind, forever wandering the pavements of memory to read the symbols and to encounter the shifting images through which the city would give up its secrets. To walk endlessly in imaginary streets would be a price to pay, no doubt, but in return one would gain powers of deduction nothing short of uncanny. Such a detective would foresee crimes before they took place, and would know criminals’ motives and hiding places before they knew themselves.

As the discussion became more excited, even fanciful, Lazarus kept one thought to himself. It was this: he was already some way towards the creation of the hallucinatory city that Electra posited. For all the hours he laboured over his books, Lazarus spent still more time walking the city, learning the mazes of its alleyways and slums, for he had always known that this was the only book that mattered to him. When he won fame, it would be for his readings of blood on brick, not ink on paper. He told himself that, in a way, the idea had belonged to him long before Electra had come to it. With her ancient codices and hermetic schemata, she had merely given him the tools to make it possible.

‘For Electra,’ Peregrine said, ‘that night of feverish student talk was the apex of the project. She delved some way further into her inquiry, but before long her rationalism prevailed. She concluded that the obstacles were too enormous and the rewards too uncertain to make the idea worth pursuing, and she diverted her energies to more productive lines of research. When she mentioned this to Lazarus, he agreed, and assured her that he, too, had dropped the notion of the memory city.

‘Years later, I learned that he had been lying.’

Steady drizzle fell as we left Belltown and hastened across the Old Quarter, trailing Inspector Nimrod through Twistgate to emerge into the stately public spaces of the Esplanade. In front of us, the facades of the Autumn Palace seemed to hang weightless, picked out by the floodlights. As we crossed the Parade we passed only a few night-owls on their way for a late stroll down the Mile, towards the cafés of Impasto Street or across the river to visit the headier attractions of Serelight.

Before us, overlooked by the Palace, lay the metro plaza. By day it would have been filled with stopping and starting trams, travellers embarking and disembarking, tourists poring over maps and locals pressing irritably through the crowd, but tonight the plaza was deserted except for a single tram, standing empty with its doors open and its interior lights making it a jointed yellow prism in the dark. And gathered around it, the familiar array: the saloon cars stopped at slewed angles, the slow-pulsing beacons, the bobbing torch beams, the reflective tape, the conferrals, the faces mingling nausea and boredom, the uniforms.

We approached the tram, and Inspector Nimrod paused to collect himself. Then, motioning his subordinates aside, he showed us the remains of Brutus Thorne, and the manner of the third murder.

‘One headache is where we’re going to place the scene of the crime,’ said the inspector. His laugh was a single thump on a rusty drum. He kept his eyes averted from what lay between the tracks at the rear of the tram. Peregrine, by contrast, was all attention: a critic formulating his first response to a challenging new piece.

At last he turned away.

‘Brutus was a fearless comrade,’ he said. ‘No two investigators could have differed further in style and temperament than Peregrine Fetch and Brutus Thorne; but many times we reached the same ends by discrepant means.’

Peregrine’s voice was steady, his face calm and unlined. I could not exactly name my thoughts as I observed this. I admired my mentor’s power to remain detached in the face of horrors, but as he confronted the grisly decease of an old friend for the third time in a single night, his composure untroubled, I experienced a fleeting chill.

Brutus Thorne had not subscribed to the principles of pure reason to which Peregrine was committed. He was a detective in another tradition. While Peregrine preferred to solve his clients’ puzzles through mentation alone, and took the deepest satisfaction in those cases which he was able to conclude without once rising from the Chesterfield in his consulting rooms, for Brutus the tools of investigation were muscle and grit. He got results by using his ears in the dive bars of the Liberties, and his fists in the alleyways outside; by means of coffee-fuelled stakeouts and rooftop chases. Peregrine, an expert at impersonation, could mingle in disguise with the city’s criminal element and never be detected, but Brutus Thorne needed no disguise at all, because he lived there.

In spite of their differing approaches to their work, the paths of the two men had crossed frequently in their shared campaign against the villainies of Lazarus Glass. Peregrine, for instance, had once devoted five months of archival research to the case of the Ship in the Mirror, and had been on the cusp of a solution when he read in the newspaper that Brutus Thorne had broken the case with a single well-placed hidden microphone. On the other hand, Brutus had once worked himself into the ground over the affair of the Green December, shaking down informants, tailing suspects and running phone-taps, only to discover that Peregrine Fetch had, weeks earlier, foreseen the whole sequence of events, and had simply been waiting for the would-be kidnappers to incriminate themselves before he informed the police of their intentions and whereabouts. And then again, the case of the Demolitionist’s Song would have remained a mystery to this day had Peregrine and Brutus not joined forces to expose the conspiracy. Thanks to Lazarus Glass, the felonious genius of the city, the rival detectives had become allies over the years.

‘What we do know,’ the inspector said, ‘is that Brutus Thorne was last seen alive in Shambles Heath, in the vicinity of Meaney’s. That’s one of the low drinking dens he was known to frequent, Ms Byrd.’

I had picked up several useful leads in Meaney’s myself, in the past, but I just smiled.

‘Witnesses confirm that when Thorne left this establishment he was deep in conversation with an unidentified companion, and that both individuals were seen to proceed in the direction of the Shambles Heath metropolitan tram station.’

That had been the last sighting of Brutus Thorne alive, the inspector told us. But there was no lack of testimony about what followed. The reports formed a long curving trail across the city, southwards from Shambles Heath through Serelight and into Glory Part, then across the Part bridge, up through Lawntown and Communion Town into the Esplanade: all the way along the line of the metro that this tram had travelled tonight.

At Shambles Heath station a person or persons unknown had lured Brutus Thorne into proximity with a particular tramcar. He would have had no time to offer resistance as a pair of self-locking cuffs were slapped around his ankles. The assault had been diligently prepared. Six-foot lengths of steel chain ran from the cuffs to the rear of the tram, where they had been attached in advance. The timing was precise. It was all too easy to imagine: as Thorne realises his predicament, he grabs for his assailant, tussles and perhaps lands a blow or two, but the villain struggles free and melts away, work done. Before the detective can call out, the tram begins to move and his feet are wrenched from under him. He scrabbles on the tarmac to regain his footing, but as the vehicle accelerates he is dragged along behind it, like … like …

The inspector stopped, lost for words.

‘Like the fallen Hector,’ suggested Peregrine.

‘Like Hippolytus behind his chariot,’ I offered.

‘Like a sack of bloody potatoes,’ said the inspector. ‘Those things get up to fifty miles an hour, apparently, and it hauled him halfway round the city before winding up here. I don’t want to think about that. We’ve got the driver over there: says he saw nothing and heard nothing. Had his paper spread out on the control panel all the way from Shambles to the Palace, and he wants to know how much compensation he’s due for the distress. But I’m not bothered about him. It’s this anonymous companion from Meaney’s I want – and I can guess who you’re going to tell me it was.’

Peregrine was kneeling close to the tram, touching the metal lumps where the chains had been welded to the undercarriage.

‘Yes, inspector, no doubt you can,’ he said as he got up. ‘But the question, as always, is
why
. Why would Lazarus Glass choose this end, of all ends, for Brutus Thorne?’

I looked at the tram, still lit yellow in the failing darkness. It was newer and sleeker than the ungainly, graffiti-covered carriages which clattered around most lines of the metro.

‘One thought occurs,’ I said. ‘The metro route that the inspector has described, the curve that links Shambles Heath with the Old Quarter, terminating here at the Palace, is the most recently built line in the city. But, if I remember accurately, this is not the first time that it has been associated with criminal activity.’

‘Correct and to the point, Cassandra,’ said Peregrine. ‘Once more we must unearth the past to make sense of the fate that has befallen our comrades tonight – and now I must tell you about the last time I encountered Lazarus Glass face to face.

‘Six years ago,’ he continued, ‘the planned construction of the new metropolitan tramline had just been announced. Several organisations were in competition for the lucrative right to build it, and after negotiations the contract was awarded to an obscure group called the Lys Consortium. However, there were grounds to suspect that it had defeated its competitors through bribery, intimidation and violence, and soon Brutus and I found ourselves in a familiar contest, each of us working separately to uncover this wrongdoing.

‘It did not take me long to establish that the Consortium was a front, and that somewhere behind it stood Lazarus Glass. But it was less easy to gather enough evidence to expose the misdeeds which had won the contract, and I set to work, spurred by the knowledge that Brutus would be doing all that he could, in his own way, to get there first. There was scant hope of demonstrating the complicity of Lazarus, who was as hedged and invulnerable as he always is in his schemes; but as I worked on the case I grew increasingly troubled by another question. The mystery, I felt, was not how Lazarus had won the corrupt contract, but why he should wish to do so. Certainly there was crude profit in it, but less than he might have gained through a thousand other illicit enterprises. No: I realised, as I analysed his plot, that the metro line held some other significance for him.

‘It was at this point that I received an unexpected visitor in my consulting rooms.

‘In person, of course, Lazarus Glass does not look like a devil. The air did not boil as he entered the room and the mirror did not crack. He looked underfed, or unconcerned with his body’s needs. Since our student days he had lost his hair and grown a full beard, giving him a sober Aeschylean appearance. He wore a dark suit and tie. The only other change was in his eyes, which were as piercing as ever, but now there was a strange duality in his gaze: even as he studied me, he gave an impression of blindness, as if what he saw was not what lay in front of him.

‘“Peregrine,” he said. “You will forgive my calling on you without prior arrangement, under the circumstances. We need not waste time discussing all that has taken place since we last met in person – not when we have been continually in conversation through the medium of the city itself.”

‘“The medium of your crimes,” I said sadly. “I wish it might have been otherwise, Lazarus.”

‘An expression of scorn crossed his face.

‘“It will convenience you to know,” he said, “that you may abandon your investigations into the matter of the Lys Consortium and the new metropolitan line. The thuggery of your associate Brutus Thorne has prevailed over your methodological elegancy, and he has beaten you to the proof. The Consortium will now fail, a scandal will ensue, and in due course another company instead will profit from the construction of the new line, while my name will, naturally, at no stage be mentioned in connection with the affair. At the proper time I will requite Thorne amply for the damage he has inflicted on my interests. Your own efforts in this case, meanwhile, have been wasted.”