Tom All-Alone's (26 page)

Her eyes were huge now in the half-light. Huge with fear and pleading.

‘Men as high as him are hard to bring low,' said Charles. ‘But if I can make him pay, I will, I promise you that. Lizzie was my friend too. I'm going to miss her.'

There must have been something in his eyes at this, because the girl looked at him for a moment, then nodded and took a step back. Charles turned to go, but she wasn't finished. Not quite.

‘One more thing. It ain't just what 'appened to Liz. One of the pimps was found in the street wiv 'is throat cut after a
run-in
wiv Cremorne, if that really is 'is name. 'E ain't 'ad no trouble since – everyone's too scared. So if it's 'im you're getting tangled up wiv, then watch yer back.'

Charles held up his bandaged hand. ‘I know. To my cost. But it's not me you should be concerning yourself about.'

He slid a coin into her hand. It was gold, and he saw her eyes widen.

‘Think again about that holiday, will you? And you know where to find me if – well, if you need to.'

Back out on the street Charles took a deep breath and let it out in raw gasps. There was a pain in his chest like a dead weight. He knew – anyone in the police knew – that there were literally thousands of young girls being prostituted in London every night, as often as not by their own families, and in their own homes. And most of what Sir Julius Cremorne was doing was – in the strict sense of the term – perfectly legal, since the age of consent in 1850 was twelve, not sixteen, and as Maddox had
already observed, the girls were doing it, most of them, of their own free will. All the same, even to someone as case-hardened as Charles, there was something particularly perverted, something pitilessly brutal, about a man who set his sights on children as young as six. And who did so in a way that could terrify even such a girl as this. Charles couldn't imagine what Cremorne must have done to her, and yet he knew that her word alone was nowhere near enough to bring a viable case against the man, and that none of it – yet – explained Tulkinghorn, or Boscawen, or Abigail Cass. But there
was
a link, somewhere, of that he was quite sure. He had only to find the flaw in the fabric, the treacherous loose thread, and wind it slowly backwards to its grim and hidden source.

So now perhaps you understand why, when we saw him at Jo's funeral, there was a new hardness in his face that we have not seen before. And why, as even Bucket has now perceived, a flint and arid rage has settled on his soul.

And now we watch as he is taken up the stairs and through the Bow Street station-house, Wheeler at his side and a constable at his heels, and it is obvious that this seething anger has not abated one jot. But once at the front desk, the sergeant seems rather more concerned to be ordering Bucket a carriage than finding the key to the cuffs on Charles' wrists.

‘You there,' the sergeant calls to Percy Walsh, who is nervously avoiding Charles' eye and making it quite obvious thereby, to anyone who cares to look, that the two of them have met before. ‘Get your sorry arse outside and hail a hansom. Inspector Bucket has another appointment in Belgravia, and he won't want to be kept waiting.'

Wheeler grins as Walsh slopes unwillingly out into the
freezing air. The weather has turned cold again, and the evening clouds are heavy and yellowish with unfallen snow.

‘Poor old Walsh. He's spent half his shift the last couple of days out in the street looking for cabs. Seems to me Bucket might just as well move in with bloody Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet
, if he's going to spend so much time there—'

The rather premature end to this sentence can be accounted for by the sudden appearance of one of the persons referred to in it; in fact, the aforesaid Bucket rather prides himself on his ability to appear and disappear at will, in an almost supernatural manner. It may, indeed, be at the root of his otherwise unaccountable ability to know facts to which he has no right, and no other conceivable access. Wheeler's face is red to the ears with embarrassment, but Bucket affects not to notice, merely scouts about in his plethora of pockets for the key to the handcuffs. But when Charles turns to the desk sergeant to retrieve his coat and gun, he finds the latter, at least, is not forthcoming. Seeing the look on his face, Bucket takes him quietly aside.

‘I've been mulling over what you said earlier, my lad. On the subject of bullets and such like, and whether or not the shot was fired up close. My interest has been piqued, that's the truth of it, and when a man in my line of business finds himself in such a position, it's as well for him to follow his nose, that's
my
view. And seeing as that's the case, I would like, with your agreement, to undertake a few little experiments of my own.'

There is a moment's hesitation on Charles' part, but Bucket reads the thought in his usual unerring and unsettling fashion. ‘Don't you be afraid that this might turn back upon you. It's all right as far as you're concerned. It ain't your gun I'm interested in, insofar as it belongs to
you
. Only as a comparison, if you take my meaning. I promise you, as a man and as a Detective, that
you shall have the gun back in your hands tomorrow, and no more said about it. Now that seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me, in the interests of justice and the solving of a crime. Don't you see?'

What Charles sees, like so many before him, is that Bucket has inveigled him into an impossible position. He's on the point of saying as much when a movement by the door catches his eye and he looks up to see two other officers bringing in the trooper, just as he himself was brought in only a few short hours before. He's about to start forward when Bucket takes him by the arm and whispers softly in his ear.

‘Now, my lad.' he says. ‘Just you be remembering your promise, and don't be doing anything rash.'

‘But—'

‘Like I said, you will have to trust me. I know what I'm doing, whether you believe that or not. So you pretend not to have seen the trooper there and come quietly along with me to the back door, there's a good lad. And remember – as I said to you before, things may not always be as they first appear.'

Left to himself on the back steps, Charles reflects on those last words and on the number of times in the last few days he's heard – or read – something similar. As a proposition, the idea that appearances can be deceptive is hardly radical, so why does it strike him so forcibly now? Why is he so convinced, suddenly, that there's something he's missing? That for all his scientific theory and practical experience there's a connection somewhere that he's overlooked? But as we already know, he thinks better when he's walking, so it's no surprise to see him turn up his collar and head purposefully down towards the Strand. It's such a short step to Buckingham Street that he has little time to collect his thoughts, which are at best rather
ragged after so little sleep. So much so that it's only the swift intervention of two passers-by that saves him from being knocked down, as a large carriage careers to a halt outside the grand stucco-fronted townhouse that hosts one of London's most exclusive gambling clubs. Charles is about to thank the two men who stepped forward to help him – one of them with a high forehead and slightly wild dark hair under his tall silk hat, the other plumper, bookish-looking, with small
metal-rimmed
glasses – when he realizes he's seen the carriage before. It's the one he saw in Lincoln's Inn Fields – the one that bears the arms of the black swan. He watches as a man comes out of the club and stands for a moment, gathering his cloak about him. It's the man with the scarred hand – the same man Jacky Jackson described drinking and gambling with Cremorne at the Argyll Rooms, the same man Charles might have seen that day nearly two weeks ago, going into Tulkinghorn's house, had he been looking – or lucky. But if chance deserted him then, it's on his side this time, for the man is suddenly seized with a dry hacking cough that forces him to stop under the gaslights at the door, and when he puts his hand to his mouth you can see the red scar as clearly as if it were broad day. But in the time it takes Charles to register this – to make the link, and realize what it means – the man has moved quickly down the steps and into his carriage, and the coachman is spurring the horses away. Charles looks back at the building. He knows the place well enough to be sure he will gain neither entry nor assistance there, but there is a source of information this man cannot conceal – one that, on the contrary, he is flaunting even now for all to see. Because even though the carriage has already turned into the Strand, Charles looked at it more closely this time, and has seen something he did not notice before. The arms on the panelled door bear a
small but unmistakable badge on the canton of the shield. And while he may not know the name of the man whose equipage this is, he knows exactly what is signified by such a
sinister hand appaumy Gules.
It's the red hand of Ulster. The man is a baronet.

A
baronet.

And while the ‘Sir' of a baronet may look the same, and sound the same, as the ‘Sir' of a knight, they are as dissimilar, as species, as a mythical unicorn and a Common Eland. Indeed, why else should Bucket keep repeating the
Baronet
in Sir Leicester's name, if not to emphasize the immeasurable distance between that great county family and those who may use the same designation before their name but can lay claim to neither the same ancestral lands nor the same ancient lineage? And what was it Mrs O'Driscoll overheard Abigail Cass say? That a girl had been cruelly used, and cruelly wronged, and ‘all the noble rank and money in London would not be enough to conceal it'. Now as Charles is well aware, a mere baronet does not – on the most scrupulous technicality – actually qualify for the ranks of the nobility, but a woman like Abigail Cass is unlikely to have known that. What she
would
most definitely have known, on the other hand, is that despite the enormous fortune amassed by the Cremornes – rumoured to exceed even the Dedlocks' – there is an invisible but adamantine barrier impeding Sir Julius that not even an alliance with an earl will ever entirely do away: unlike Sir Leicester, who owes the title before his name to nothing more than accident of birth, Sir Julius has earned his money in trade, and achieved his knighthood by dint of his own toil.

Charles is furious with himself for not realizing it before, but he sees it all too clearly now: the man Abigail Cass was talking about can't have been Cremorne at all, but
someone else entirely
. Someone, it now seems clear, who not only knows Cremorne,
but in all probability has the same tastes as Cremorne, the same secrets as Cremorne, and the same reasons as Cremorne to have those secrets silenced and suppressed. And who better to do so than that dusty old mausoleum of all that is treacherous and compromising, Edward Tulkinghorn? Did Abigail Cass discover what they were so concerned to conceal and threaten to expose them? Was
that
why she had to die? And who are ‘they' anyway? Charles remembers – not before time – those four men he glimpsed in Tulkinghorn's ante-chamber, and realizes with a jolt that it is quite possible Cremorne was among them. One of them certainly fitted the description Jacky Jackson gave of the stiff old man with grey hair seen in Sir Julius' company at the Argyll Rooms. So does the same dark conspiracy envelop them all? And if that's the case, who else is involved, and how long has it been going on? A host of questions suddenly, but for a man like Charles, it may not be as difficult as it first appears to start unearthing some answers.

He covers the last few yards to Buckingham Street at a run, leaving his two Good Samaritans looking down the road after him, denouncing his discourtesy and wondering at such an uncommon incident. But both of them being writers of some note, as well as friends, I would not be at all surprised to find one of them making good literary use of it one day or another.

Back at the house, Charles clatters up the stairs three at a time and nearly collides with Molly, who is scrubbing the first-floor landing. Up in the attic he spends half an hour ransacking the crates for his long-lost scrapbook of English heraldry, which he does indeed manage to find, but which turns out not to contain anything even remotely resembling the black swan adorned with the red hand. Which is infuriating, but not, thankfully, the only way of getting at what he needs. He could wait until
morning and go to the British Library and pore over learned tomes for hours, or he could take a short cut. The latter will undoubtedly be quicker, and will furnish him besides, with intelligence no library could ever provide, but is he prepared to take such an enormous risk?

On his way back downstairs, Charles stops at Maddox's door, and gently pushes it open. The old man is asleep in his chair by the fire, his mouth slightly open, and the coals burnt low. Charles hesitates, wondering whether to wake him and tell him what he's discovered, and what he plans to do now, but he remembers what Stornaway once said about how fast his uncle's grasp of the world plunges as the day declines, and decides he might be doing more harm than good. There'll be another opportunity, he tells himself. I can talk to him tomorrow.

T
he room is darkened and still. A thin sliver of moonlight slices between the shutters from the street outside, and zigzags crookedly down the
columbarium
of iron boxes marshalled like a silent legion of the dead behind the empty chair where their master once sat enthroned. He is as silent now as they are, encased in his own dark box downstairs, awaiting the moment when he too will be allotted a narrow niche that bears his name. This room was never much given to receiving company, and seems to have lapsed with relief back into its familiar emptiness. There is no sign, now, of the dozens of uninvited feet that have trod these floors these last few days, sifting every locked drawer, and staring, many of them, up at the ominous ceiling, with its prophetic pointing Allegory, who gazes down as blindly now as he did before, at the mahogany desk and the stiff-backed chair. There is still a bottle of wine and a glass upon the table, and still the two silver candlesticks at either end. But there is a stain on the ground before the table now that was not there when last we visited this place. It's not so very large, that stain, nor so very dark, but it's curiously compulsive, and once noticed you cannot seem to escape it, and find it lurking at the corner of your eye, wherever you look about the room. Many a housemaid will try to get that stain out, and many a housekeeper berate them for incompetence, but soap and
scouring will neither rid nor blanch it, and in the years to come that fact alone will endow this room with a fearful fascination for all who come here – a fascination that swells into shivering frisson when they raise their eyes to the ceiling and contemplate Allegory, pointing down now with a terrible accuracy at the very spot on the floor where Tulkinghorn lay, all those dark hours alone, face down and bleeding, with a bullet in his heart.

Time passes. The blade of light creeps, inch by inch, across the floor, turning the flecks of floating dust to diamond in its cold brightness.

And then – what's that?

A noise. Too muffled by stone and brick and wooden doors to hear distinctly. Is it merely the breathing of the old house, or has someone penetrated its closed and curtained seclusion and found a way within, despite the heavy bar now nailed across the high front door? Yes, yes – look there, on the stairs – the ghost of candlelight grows and takes shape, and wild shadows shudder up the wall. But as the unknown man emerges on to the landing and stands for a moment before the door, shading his candle against his palm, we can see that the hand that holds it is bound about by bandage. And who, indeed, but Charles Maddox would have the impudence to intrude on a house of mourning – for surely these walls must lament their master's untimely passing, even if no living soul ever will.

If he hesitates as he stands there, it's only because the candle is guttering badly in the draught, and he's concerned not to advertise his presence to anyone watching from outside. He crosses quickly and noiselessly to the window and pulls the shutter close, then moves to the desk and tries the drawer – the drawer he's seen Tulkinghorn open so often, but always, in the past, with a key. But Bucket has been here before him, and
this time the drawer slides open and the ring of keys he's seeking lies revealed. And next to it, that small obsidian paperweight that Charles once coveted so much. He should have expected to see it there, but it seems to snare his attention all the same. After a moment he reaches out to touch it, and finds to his astonishment that the stone is warm, even in the chill of that cold room – as if its master's grasping fingers cannot quite relinquish it, and have left what heat they ever had, locked inside this hoarded trophy. A voice in Charles' head tells him to take it – tells him to slip it into his pocket, unnoticed – tells him that no one will ever know, and that whoever it is who will now take possession of Tulkinghorn's many treasures, he could not possibly appreciate this obscure object of desire more than Charles does. Is he tempted? Of course, but it is the ring of keys that his fingers close upon. Then he turns to the racks of boxes behind him, and takes the little set of worn library steps in his free hand. We can already see, just as he soon does, that some of these boxes are no longer quite as dusty as they were when Charles first came here, even if others are slumbering still under years of neglect. The next thing he finds – and it's with a surge of quick elation – is that the boxes are marked not only with the names of Tulkinghorn's clients, but with a small etching of their armorial bearings. A weakness this, perhaps, in the old lawyer's otherwise impregnable facade, a hint of vainglory, of overweaning professional pride that has now met with all too vertiginous a fall. Resisting the urge to go immediate swan-hunting, Charles turns first to the Cremorne coffer and spends ten fruitless minutes flicking through wills and title deeds and dull affidavits. Little of it is recent, and none of it is even remotely personal in nature, but on second thoughts that is not so very odd, given Tulkinghorn's almost preternatural concern for caution and
circumspection: Cremorne is the only name Charles has ever been given, so if any one box here has had its compromising contents removed elsewhere, it is surely this one. Though he cannot fail to notice, in passing, that the box on the shelf below dedicated to Dedlocks dead and present has also been emptied of most of what it must once have contained. But that he suspects is the inspector's handiwork, not the lawyer's. He slides the Cremorne box back into its place and begins his search for the black swan. And now even the alphabet proves to be on his side: no Vavasour or Smithson this, but filed neatly under ‘G' a mere two shelves further down. The box has the thinnest film of dust, and no recent fingerprints, so it seems Bucket's incursions have not stretched this far, though it appears very possible that Tulkinghorn himself was busy about this box in recent days.

Charles pulls the box out and takes it to the table. Then he sits down at the desk, and opens the lid, holding the candle so close to the sheaves of dry paper that they seem to uncurl and stretch in the heat of the flame.

He's so absorbed in trying to make sense of this correspondence, so intent on discovering the crime – for crime there
must
be – that lies concealed behind the bland legal language, that he is not as alert as he should be to the creak of the boards – not as suspicious as experience should have taught him of the elaborate oriental screen so carefully and so conveniently positioned. But what he does not hear, he soon senses in another way. Faint at first, but unmistakable. Just as it was once before, in this very room. The aroma of the finest Turkish tobacco.

He raises his head and sees at once a figure in the shadows in the far corner. How long he has been there, Charles does not know. Pure instinct tells him it's Cremorne, but he sees
almost at once, even in the half-light, that this figure is surely too slight, too short. But if not Cremorne, then—?

The floor creaks again as the silhouetted shape moves closer, but when he emerges at the edge of the circle of light cast by the candle, Charles almost laughs out loud with the absurdity of his own fears. The man in the shadows is barely a man at all – so small, in fact, that his black coat skims its tattered hem along the floor. The assailant his mind manufactured in the darkness is no more fearsome in reality than Tulkinghorn's groom. The strange-looking lad with the queer yellow eyes. The rush of relief is just giving way to mystification about what on earth he's doing here – now, in this room, in the middle of the night – when the boy puts his fingers to his mouth and Charles sees what is in them.

A cigarette.

It's not merely that the boy is smoking in the house that shocks him, though it does, no question. In fact, it's not so much
what
he's doing, but what he's doing it
with
. Charles' upper-class contemporaries may be partial to cigars, but the working man of 1850 smokes only a pipe – indeed it'll be at least another four or five years before English soldiers in the Crimea are introduced to cigarettes by their Turkish comrades. And even if there are fine hand-rolled versions available in London this very November evening, it is only from one very expensive and exclusive shop in Bond Street (though the name above the door would probably be familiar to you). That this lad – this not-much-more-than stable boy paid no more than ten shillings a week – should be smoking one, and smoking it in so casual, so pointedly nonchalant a fashion is utterly unaccountable. Or at least at first. Because the cigarette is not the only thing he's holding. As he moves slowly forward and into the light, Charles sees what was invisible at first, and is
even now partly concealed by the folds of the coat. In his left hand, catching in the candle flame, is the glint and glitter of a long ebony-handled blade.

It takes a fraction of a moment for Charles to realize he's been wrong all along – not just wrong but hopelessly, disastrously wrong. The long dark coat Jo saw on the killer of Abigail Cass – the same long dark coat worn by the man Lizzie Miller was with the night she died. The smell of a gentleman's tobacco that made Charles think it was indeed a gentleman Mrs O'Driscoll overheard. The voice that whispered in his own ear as a knife sliced into his flesh.

‘So it was you,' he says slowly, getting to his feet. ‘You killed them all. Cass, Boscawen, Lizzie Miller. And it was you who attacked me in the City Road.'

The lad smiles, a curious off-centre smile that does not reach his eyes. The more Charles looks at them, the more saurian they appear. Who is this parody of a child, who commits such appalling murders with such frozen proficiency?

‘Worked it out, 'ave yer? Took you long enough.'

His voice is of a piece with all the rest – high-pitched, nasal, whining. Easy to mock were it not for the knife in his hand, and the pictures in Charles' head.

‘Think you're so clever, with all yer fancy
methods
– you 'aven't got a bloody clue. I'd been following yer for days before that, but someone like me, we're beneath the notice of the likes of you. I could have 'ad you there and then if I chose' – he draws the knife across his own throat in an arc so perfect, a gesture so practised, as to be almost beautiful – ‘but that weren't what I was being paid for. Not then.'

‘Whereas now?'

‘Ah, well now it's different.
Then
you was just making a nuisance of yerself.
Now
you
know
. Or soon will, unless someone
puts a stop to you.' He smiles, and turns the knife so it catches the light. ‘Guess that'd be me then.'

They stand facing each other, little more than a yard apart now, both knowing that the first move will in all probability be decisive. Charles has the advantage of height and size, but he has no illusions – and, more importantly, no
gun
. It's not the first occasion he's had cause to rail at Bucket, but never before with such a perilously good reason. His fingers tighten imperceptibly around the candlestick. It's the only other weapon at his disposal, but it will give him one chance, and one alone, and like as not he'll destroy the only evidence he's ever likely to get in the process – evidence he hasn't even got to the bottom of yet – evidence that's cost him so much time and pain to find, and for which others have paid an even higher price. But what other choice does he have?

A second later – and without ever taking his eyes from his opponent's gaze – he drops the candle into the box of paper and the parched leaves leap up like bushfire. Before the boy can move or react, Charles flings the blazing box in his direction and dashes for the door, to a howl of burning curses. He's halfway down the stairs before he hears footsteps start after him on the floor above and realizes that even if he makes it back through the kitchens and into the courtyard he'll be tracked down long before he can scale the six-foot fence. But even as that thought takes shape his fingers stub blindly against a crack in the plaster. No – not a crack – Tulkinghorn tolerated no such faults in this flawless house – it's the edge of a door, the hidden entrance to the hidden gallery, the frame so perfectly crafted as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Charles turns and fumbles up and down the jamb until he hears a soft click and the door swings heavily open. It's as black as death at the top of the stairs, but he knows from experience that it will be lighter lower down. And there is a full moon.

He pulls the door closed behind him and takes the stone steps as fast as he dares, the sound of his own blood beating in his chest and a new ache in his mutilated hand, as if by some sort of sympathetic magic it can sense the presence of its old aggressor. At the bottom of the stairs he stops, listening, hoping that he hasn't shut himself into a trap of his own making. But silence reigns still above. He makes his way – slower now, in all this priceless clutter – to the galleried room, hoping frantically that his memory holds true and he can remember how to find the mirrored alcove. The busts and marbles stare at him from their blind stone eyes as he turns the corner and a dim and distorted version of himself looms momentarily from the glass. He seizes a statuette from the nearest shelf and slides into the narrow space behind the god of panic and irrational terror, aware, in a small and remote part of his brain, of the aptness of that irony, and filing it away to entertain Maddox with over the drawing-room fire. If he ever makes it that far.

A heartbeat, two, three. Charles is still holding his breath, his ears straining against the fizzing silence, and after what seems an age there's the dull distant thud of a door somewhere closing. I'm not sure how long he leaves it after that. Perhaps five minutes, perhaps a lot more, but eventually even Charles decides it must be safe to emerge. But as he moves quickly back around the gallery he catches sight of a light beneath him in the darkness, and pauses, his heart drilling again in his chest, until he realizes that it's only the candle in the niche by the Egyptian sarcophagus, burning still in the room below. Despite himself, despite the danger, he cannot resist the urge to look down again at the unravellable mystery of that majestic piece of stone, knowing that this will no doubt be the last time he will ever see it, and wondering in passing where all these astounding artefacts will end up now.