Beneath London (11 page)

“No, sir,” said St. Ives. “I know very little of so-called medical electricity, and what I do know, I don’t much like.”

“Nor do I. Kilner is an old friend, however. We were in school together. I last saw him a year ago when I was in London. He was busy fabricating goggles with chemically coated lenses much like this.”

“For what purpose?” St. Ives asked.

“His work at the hospital has led him into the study of the human aura – light energy, if you will. We all emit invisible light, strange as it sounds, and Walter Kilner was hard at work to develop a way to make that light visible and to determine what it portends – sickness or health, perhaps, or a disordered state of the nerves.”

“And you believe this to be a fragment of one of Kilner’s lenses?” St. Ives asked. “Surely you do not suspect him of the crime?”

“Yes to the first question and no to the second,” Pullman said. “It’s unthinkable that Walter John Kilner could have committed such a crime. I’d sooner suspect my own mother. I believe, however, that the murderer, or perhaps the murderer’s accomplice, possessed a pair of Walter Kilner’s aura goggles, so to call them, and that they were broken in the struggle. His work is very new, and such lenses must be tremendously rare. Why they were brought to Sarah Wright’s cottage I can’t say.”

“Yet another mystery,” Hasbro said. “Here’s something practical, although gruesome: if the villain wanted to keep the head fresh, Doctor, how would he go about it? Ice?”

“Ice or perhaps refined brandy in a large receptacle. Ice would make more sense, to be certain. The trick would be to keep the ice from melting – particularly difficult given yesterday’s fine weather. It could be done, however, if there were a sensible way to store it. If they knew in advance what they were after, it would have been simple to come prepared, ghastly as it sounds. But I’m weary of these speculations. I very much hope that this fiend is caught, gentlemen, and that I have nothing further to do with his depredations. You may keep that piece of lens if you fancy it, Professor. I have no use for it.”

“It’s not…
evidence
, then? Constable Brooke has no interest in it?”

“Constable Brooke was confounded by it. He’s a good man, as you know, but this sort of oddment is beyond his ken. Walter Kilner would be the man to ask if you happened to find yourself in Lambeth, but I’d lay odds on his being equally confounded.”

NINE

“
A
nother cup of tea?” Mother Laswell asked Alice.

“A half cup, perhaps,” Alice said. “Unless you find my curiosity offensive, Mother, I’d like to ask one last question about Clara.”

“I can’t imagine you offending anyone,” Mother Laswell said.

“She seems to have extraordinary abilities. I mean that in the old sense of the word, not merely rare or unusual – her seeing with her elbow, for instance.”

“Yes, and certainly she has – or had – an extramundane ability to communicate with her mother, although that is not uncommon in children. Her powers, I believe, are prodigious. She keeps them to herself, however, and I don’t press her. She came to Hereafter Farm a year after she was stricken with blindness, unable to bear living in the forest any longer. We had no idea that her presence here was anything other than temporary. I visited Sarah one afternoon, alone. Sarah asked me to give Clara a small owl, carved from chalk and painted, a mere trinket that had been purchased in a seaside shop in earlier, better days. When I returned to Hereafter, Clara met me at the stile on the meadow. She asked did I have it? I asked her what she meant, thinking that I did indeed have it, but that she could not possibly know. ‘The owl,’ she said. And so I gave it to her, and she went off quite joyfully.”

“You’re
certain
she could not have known?”

“She could not – not in the sense you mean. And yet she
did
know. That was the first of many such incidents. You’d be quite amazed.”

Through the window Alice saw a man appear in the Dutch door beside the mule; apparently he had come in through the front of the barn in the wagon. She recognized him just as Mother Laswell said, “It’s Bill,” and stood up out of her chair. Mother heaved a loud sigh and began to weep, perhaps with relief. “We’re all right now,” she said. “Bill’s home.”

Bill Kraken, betrothed to Mother Laswell and an old friend to the St. Ives family, was tall and lean, his skin worn like old leather, baked for years in the Australian sun on a sheep farm after he had been transported for smuggling, and hammered by being out in all weather during his time on the London streets selling pea-pods and sleeping rough. His hair seemed to be permanently laid over, as if there were a stiff wind blowing. He scratched the mule behind the ear and whispered something to it, and then he ducked through the rain and up onto the veranda, disappearing from view.

“I’ll just step into the kitchen and speak to Bill,” Alice said, moving toward the kitchen door. It would be better for her to bear the news in order to spare Mother Laswell, who was already in a sad taking. The boy who had been called a cauliflower head stood on a stool at the kitchen counter, expertly shelling walnuts on a stone slab, cracking them open with one whack of a hefty wooden rod and putting the perfect halves into a wide-mouthed, stoneware jar. The girls were nowhere to be seen.

The boy had apparently just said something to Kraken, who stood stock-still in his damp coat, his face both disturbed and baffled. “Is it true what the boy is going on about?” he asked Alice. “That’s why you’ve come along to the farm on such a day as this?”

“Yes, Bill,” she said.

“I know what’s what,” the boy said, breaking another walnut. He put the two halves into his mouth and chewed on them, holding the wooden rod up as if it were an illustration. “It’s Clara’s mum what’s dead, sir, like I said. I heard it from John Peters, who saw her with his own eyes this very morning, a-sitting there without a head at all. Someone had did for her.”

“Clap a stopper over it, Tommy,” Kraken told him. “Talk like that ain’t genteel.”

“It’s what I heard from John Peters, sir. It’s what he seen. It was him as told Constable Brooke.”

“And now you’ve told us, Tommy,” Alice said to the boy. “But Mr. Kraken is correct. Clara doesn’t want to hear any such coarse talk.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said.

“Then be off with you,” Kraken told him. “Take a heap of them nuts with you. Keep your gob stuffed with ’em till you learn how to speak like a Christian.”

“Yes, sir,” Tommy said, scooping up a handful from the open jar and shuffling out onto the veranda, where the girls were evidently playing.

Alice could hear a top strike the deck and then the clatter of pins being knocked down.

“Langdon and Hasbro have gone into the village to speak to Dr. Pullman,” she said.

Kraken nodded. “The Professor will see things right. But it’s too late for me to be of any use. There’s naught to do now that Sarah Wright’s dead. I shouldn’t have gone into Maidstone. I shouldn’t have gone off over a few sheep, ancient sheep, too – a fool’s errand. Look what come of it.”

“Nonsense, Bill,” Alice told him. “The crime quite likely occurred yesterday, in the middle of Boxley Woods, before you left for Maidstone. The lot of us were within half a mile of Sarah Wright’s cottage at the time. There’s nothing you nor anyone else could have done to prevent it.”

“Mayhaps,” he said. “Still and all…” He was silent for a moment and then said, “I’ll look in on Mother. She’ll have took it hard.”

Alice followed him into the parlor, wishing now that Langdon and Hasbro were still here, if only to lend a semblance of order to the chaos of murder and its aftermath.

Kraken put his arm around Mother Laswell’s shoulder, hugging her awkwardly. She clutched his hand and said, “I’m all right now you’ve come home, Bill.” Kraken sighed heavily, his sigh catching in his throat. Alice felt like an interloper, but reminded herself that her own emotions were trivial.

Needing very badly to be useful, she walked back into the kitchen and set about cracking walnuts, working proficiently and steadily, until the sound of a coach sent her to the window, relief flowing through her – Langdon and Hasbro, perhaps, returning more quickly than she could have hoped. But she was wrong. It was a black brougham with white flourishes painted on it and brass headlights, carrying two men, both of them wearing the uniform of the London Metropolitan Police.

One of the policemen was tall and dignified – an affection of dignity, perhaps – with a Roman nose, heavy eyebrows, and a wide mustache. The other, driving the horses, was heavy, short, and unfortunately ugly, his face having taken a beating on more than one occasion and his teeth snaggled. He had a snide, knowing look in his small, close-set eyes. His uniform fit him like a sausage casing and he wore a beard of sparse, straight bristles. The dark scowl on his face made him appear to be a hard man, but perhaps that wasn’t surprising, Alice thought, given his work.

“Bill!” Alice called, but he was already on his way, opening the door at the first knock and letting the men into the house, the shorter man carrying a leather valise.

“You must be Harriet Laswell, ma’am,” the taller of the two said to Alice. “Detective Shadwell of the Metropolitan Police and Sergeant Bingham, at your service.”

“
I
am Harriet Laswell, gentlemen,” Mother Laswell said, having come in from the parlor. “This is Alice St. Ives, our neighbor.”

“Ma’am,” Shadwell said, bowing in Alice’s direction and regarding her with particular attention.

Alice stood aside in order to allow Mother Laswell to pass. Then she moved back into the doorway. She was aware that Clara stood behind her, wanting to listen, perhaps, but not to be seen.

“We scarcely expected that the London police would take an interest in the case,” Mother Laswell said. “I
assume
you’ve come about the murder of Sarah Wright.”

“Yes, we have. London in fact takes a
very
deep interest in the woman’s murder, and in the wellbeing of her daughter, who lives here with you, if I’m not mistaken.”

“She does indeed, Detective. Have you consulted with Constable Brooke at all? We know very little of the circumstances of the crime.”

“Constable Brooke was very helpful in his small way, but I’m afraid that the implications in the case require the full attention of the Metropolitan Police. The local constabulary is at a sad loss to puzzle things out.”

“God help us,” Mother Laswell said. “Let me introduce Bill Kraken to you, Detective. Mr. Kraken and I are to be wed at Christmas. And I’ll point out that Alice’s husband is the illustrious Langdon St. Ives. Professor St. Ives is a highly regarded member of the Royal Society. You can speak freely in this company.”

“Indeed,” Detective Shadwell said, nodding at Bill Kraken and bowing to Alice again. “We won’t consume much of your time. If you could instruct the girl Clara to pack a bag while we talk, we’ll consume even less of it. We must return post haste to London with the girl in our custody.”

* * *

S
t. Ives and Hasbro traveled beneath swiftly moving clouds, the rain having diminished to a spewy irritation rather than a proper downpour. Hasbro turned up Farthing Lane to the icehouse at the end, a wooden structure with ‘Cromie’s Wenham Ice’ painted on the boards above a depiction of a sweating ice block clamped in a pair of tongs. A wagon stood outside the open door, where two men loaded blocks of ice onto the bed, one heaving the blocks and the other, aboard the wagon, tossing straw onto the ice and packing it in. St. Ives and Hasbro found Mr. Cromie, a hearty-looking old man, in his office, his foot in a pail of hot water.

“It’s the gout,” Cromie said to them. “The change of the weather does it. Every time. Sets it off like a squib. There’s nothing for it but a hot soak and the doing of as little as possible, a sport at which I excel. Only complication is that I can’t quit and rest.” He burst into laughter, a loud “Ha ha!”, the violence of it jolting his leg. He recoiled in pain and his face drained of color. “I’m a danger to myself, gentlemen,” he wheezed. “What can I help you with? Building an Eskimo hut, perhaps?”