Communion Town (20 page)

The mussels were large, green-tinged and watery, and contained minuscule specks of sand that squeaked against the teeth. Dawn picked them off her lip and arranged them along the edge of the plate. At the next table, two girls were unwrapping something that lay between them like a human hand, damp, white and curled. It belonged in the sea. The head was decorated with fleshy whiskers. Its mouth worked weakly. One of the girls turned it over and bit into its pallid belly. Her teeth seemed to sink in easily: translucent skin stretched and separated. Her chin shining, she swallowed, and passed it to her companion.

To escape was the hardest thing in the world, Andie said. It had taken her a long time to realise no one was going to help her. She didn’t think it had made her less trusting, but it had made her a lot stronger. She had always known that he had a troubled past, but she had thought that investigating his history would mean she was too suspicious. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Dawn wondered if she should reach across the table, but her fingers were covered in grease.

She wasn’t working the next day, and they both slept late. They were not long up – Andie leaning against the kitchen counter with her coffee, Dawn sitting at the table getting ready to correct a stack of exercise books – when Charles appeared at the apartment.

He was dressed in the same clothes as yesterday. He carried himself like someone who knew the place well and had every right to be here. In the entrance hall behind him, three other young men waited, one sprawling on the sofa with his legs stretched out, the others shuffling their feet. Dawn couldn’t imagine how he had found out the address. But before she could find the right words to challenge him, he walked straight past her into the apartment, bowing in a small parody of civility.

As he entered the kitchen Andie gave him an uncomplicated grin, and waved hello. She didn’t seem surprised. He had apparently forgetten that Dawn was here. He took hold of Andie’s hand, his eyes flickering around her face, and said something. Dawn hesitated, and then explained to Andie’s look of eager inquiry that Charles and his friends had invited her to go with them to the feast at the seafront. Charles nodded in satisfaction, pulled over Dawn’s chair and sat down. He folded his arms, looked up at Andie, and said something else. It was a special honour for her to be asked, he was saying, a special chance. Usually, no one from outside the city. But he would take her.

He settled back to watch her make up her mind.

Andie heard the voices; they didn’t so much wake her as call her attention to the fact that she was awake. She felt fresh and clear-headed, as though she’d been asleep a long time, a sleep she had needed. The window was uncurtained and a searing placard of light hung awry on the opposite wall.

The voices were just outside the room. One of them, a man’s, deep and lazy, spoke with a heavy emphasis, just a few words at a time. By the sound of it he wanted something and was not going to leave until it was given. Dawn was responding, rebuffing his demands, it sounded like, in a placatory tone. Andie couldn’t really tell what it was about: they were speaking the local language. Well, it was nothing to do with her.

The door of her bedroom was half-open, and it seemed to her that the apartment door must be open too, with the speakers standing on either side of the threshold: she could picture them standing like that, Dawn perhaps even blocking his way in. If she got out of bed and put her head out into the corridor, she’d see. But she only pushed herself further up in the bed, and listened.

She didn’t know how to interpret the tones of voices here. She hated this city that made her seem so stupid. Last night had been a complete waste of time. She didn’t know why she’d gone. Once it was over, she’d felt like an idiot for leaving Dawn, and all the more so because when she finally managed to get away she’d lost her bearings in the stupid city and had ended up walking around by herself until late, wandering long stone lanes for what seemed like forever. Finally she’d recognised Dawn’s building. She’d tried not to make any noise when she came in.

The night felt, now, like a story she had heard, not a place she had been for herself. Everything about it was unconvincing. Charles had seemed nice enough, but as soon as they got down to the waterfront he’d dived, shouting, into a squad of his mates. The whole promenade had been filled with men sitting at the trestle tables, sharing bottles of wine and eating grilled fish off paper plates, or standing around in gangs which continually broke up and reformed in laughing discord. The sun had set half an hour before. Heat had gusted from the bonfires. What had she been expecting? To talk to new people, to hear some singing and maybe do some dancing. But none of them had seemed to want to talk to her or even look at her. In a funny way, she’d had the feeling they hadn’t noticed she was there, even as they crowded around with excited chatter and much impatient gesturing. The city’s words had cloyed the air, thick and meaningless, and no one had seemed willing to switch to a language she could understand. They hadn’t offered her anything to eat.

Her bitterness began to drain away. She was bored thinking about their boring festival. There was nothing to look at in this room except the sun on the wall. It was like those times when she was six or seven years old and had stayed at home pretending to be more sick than she really was, for which her reward was a day that was genuinely endless, not in length but in breadth, in which she lay in her bedroom, not reading or sleeping or really doing anything, with afternoon light dusting through the blinds and the bedroom door and window half-open so the strange sounds of daytime were removed from her not by barriers, only by distance.

She couldn’t tell, now, why she’d stayed out as long as she had. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just left as soon as she realised that it wasn’t going to be a normal party at all but some weird old tradition. At a distance, she had spotted a few red-faced women watching her with disapproval, but the men had led her through the crowd and into the empty middle of the semicircle of tables.

They had drawn back and left her standing there in the centre of the space. The faces at the tables had turned towards her, and it had struck her as funny that all of them were looking away from the sea: it had been as if she was standing on a stage with the city as a backdrop behind her. The streets had been vacant, their brick mouths lamplit. Then something had changed in the men’s faces and she had seen the figure walking towards her.

As she listened to the voices in the hall, she saw how things might have been if only she had behaved differently from the moment she had arrived here. She saw herself going to a language school or, better, learning in private from Dawn, or by herself from a book, learning another language properly for the first time, not to please anyone or to persuade them of anything, not even because she needed to, but just learning to speak the language. Just staying and not telling anyone, and perhaps, in good time, disclosing her new knowledge to her friends. Why shouldn’t she?

The man who had appeared from inside the city, limping towards her where she stood on the promenade, had been very old: one of those frail, shrivelled old men you could easily mistake for an old lady, with the face so hollow and small and the sparse white hairs curling from the chin. He had pitched sideways every now and then as he came towards her. She had seen worms of yellow matter in the corners of his eyes, and caught a smell of sickness. But it was important to be nice to elderly gentlemen, and she was good at it, so she had greeted him with a friendly smile and got ready to offer him her arm if he needed it. He must have come for the festival too. Touchingly, he had decorated his coat with a rather bedraggled carnation.

She had been about to offer to help him to a seat, but he had gripped her hand with fingers which were narrow and knobbled as twigs but stronger than they appeared, and would not let her move. She hadn’t liked the intensity with which the clouded eyes looked up into her face. The men at the tables had watched as she had tried to draw away, but the old man had leant on her arm, threatening to fall, and tightened his grip so that, although he weighed very little, she couldn’t bring herself to shake him off. Craning up towards her ear, he had begun to speak.

The strange thing was that, now, she could remember nothing at all about what he had said. At the time, she was sure, she had understood him – had even felt a swell of relief that someone was making the effort – but now it was gone, the old man’s story, whatever he had wanted to tell her. She only remembered that it had made her very uncomfortable and that she had known that she did not want to hear it. The ruined eyes had been fixed on her so hungrily. Lifted by a wave of nausea, she had tugged her arm from his clinging grip, and, before he could get out more than a few words, she had left.

A ripple of outrage or disappointment had followed her from the trestle tables, but she hadn’t cared. All right, yes, she had thought furiously, as she hastened away from the waterfront without looking back: yes, I’ve embarrassed myself again, I’ve come blundering in and shown myself up at your stupid festival that I don’t see the point of, I’ve probably let everyone down and I don’t even know how. Let me get away.

She felt tired. She wondered why she presented herself the way she did, why she could only wheedle her petulant demands of the world instead of being brave and humble and simple as she knew she could be. Why were all her actions forgeries and all her words lies, when the last thing she really was, was a liar? The one thing she wanted was to be honest with people. Why had she made such a fool of herself to Dawn with every single thing she had done and said? Dawn, who was never unbalanced, who had everything she needed and who never flailed around like a stupid marionette. Andie had tried her best, but there was a law that said wherever inside yourself you place what matters most, that’s where you will fail. The voices came down the corridor into the room but they told her nothing and she was not trying to listen.

That evening, when Dawn arrived home from her afternoon’s work at the school, Andie mentioned that her train left in forty-five minutes’ time and it had been so kind of Dawn to have her to stay. Dawn wanted to ask what about the plan of staying for the rest of the month, but she could find no tactful way to do so when apparently it had been forgotten. As Andie collected up her things she chattered brightly about the next city she was going to see, sharing highlights from the guidebook.

Dawn walked with her towards the station, but only part of the way. Possibly she had eaten a bad mussel the other night, and she had certainly swallowed several bits of grit: all through today she’d thought she could feel tremblings of food poisoning, and she wanted to go back to her apartment and address them in private.

They paused on the promenade before separating. The remains of the feast had been cleared away, and an older woman was sluicing down the flagstones with a bucket.

Andie shifted her feet, her legs braced against the weight of her rucksack. She looked down at the pavement and across at the sky which was growing deeper over the sea. Fine strands of hair at her temples were filled with the light. She said she would see Dawn back home. They should stay in touch. Dawn agreed, her attention drifting into the silver floss. Andie was saying something else, her voice low, and too late Dawn realised that she had not been listening. Andie’s face was fretful as she waited for a reply.

‘All right,’ Dawn said, and she imagined that the pieces of grit were fragments of a precious material, specks of pearl. ‘I’ll let him know.’

The Significant City of Lazarus Glass

Exquisite enigmas, mysteries sinister and bizarre: for Peregrine Fetch these were at once a vocation and the keenest happiness in life. As an archive of the gruesome and the perplexing his casebook is without peer and yet, even there, the details of his final adventure must strike the interpreter as anomalous. It may be that we have yet to grasp the whole pattern of the crimes. Which of us can hope to explain the events of the night on which the most gifted investigator of our time met his match? Peregrine Fetch was the man who solved the Theft of the Paper Orchid, and who exposed the trickeries at work in the affair of the Nightmare Gallery; it was he who brought to its denoument the sanguinary chronicle of the Revenge of the Trelawneys, and who won the horrified applause of every citizen by unravelling the case of the Riddle in Brass. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation whose narrative it is my task now to set down, I count myself privileged to have been his assistant, his apprentice and his friend.

In the small hours of one night in March last year, I was at work in the consulting rooms where, by day, Peregrine Fetch received his clients, heard their tales and meditated on their problems. I myself often puzzled late over the files of our ongoing investigations, doing my best to follow my mentor’s ratiocinatory principles as far as they could lead – far enough, perhaps, to tease out whichever snarl of human evil lay before me on the desk. When on occasion I accomplished some small success in this regard, Peregrine’s features would crinkle and his grey eyes would release the spark of warmth which at other times they hid so well.

All night I had worked alone amid columns of case notes, kept company by the raindrops that flung themselves at the windows, but now I heard hurried footsteps in the street below. Moments later I was joined by Inspector Nimrod of the City Watch.

The Inspector’s greeting was gruff as usual, but he was evidently in a state of some agitation, short of breath and sweating in spite of the cold. Beads of moisture clung to his leather car-jacket. He looked around the clutter of the office.

‘Dr Fetch not here? You don’t know his whereabouts?’

He swallowed, the point of his throat leaping.

‘Then I fear the worst.’

Having witnessed several investigations in which the constabulary, reaching the limit of their own wit, had begged Peregrine’s assistance, I had learnt to set but modest store by Inspector Nimrod’s deductions. But there was a grim note in his voice tonight which I did not find easy to dismiss.

‘What do you mean, inspector?’

‘I’ve never known a night like it,’ he said. ‘It’s beyond me, I don’t mind telling you, Ms Byrd. I thought I was losing my marbles back there and I’m still not sure I was wrong. Bleeding Lord, if they’ve got him too …’

But before he could continue, a soft voice wished us good morning and we turned to see, standing in the doorway, the slight figure of Peregrine Fetch. The inspector sagged with relief. Peregrine’s hair, I noted, was disordered and dirtied, his left cheekbone and right knuckles sticky with fresh blood, and the sleeve of his raincoat torn, but he met us with a half-smile.

‘They used to say that, in the city, as many deaths await you as there are windows open above your head.’ His diction was light and precise. ‘I can fairly claim that since you saw me last I have tried the truth of that proposition.’

‘You were attacked?’

‘Yes,’ he said, sounding as if he had not quite thought of it in those terms. ‘Certainly, I have been attacked.’

I began to ask him what had happened, but he raised a punctilious finger.

‘Never fear: in due course I will unfold this further. But first, perhaps, the inspector has his own story to tell?’

Nimrod, who had been listening open-mouthed, found his tongue.

‘I wish it wasn’t so,’ he said, and drew a deep breath. ‘But yes. I’m certain of that, if of nothing else I’ve seen.’

It had been a punishing night for the inspector. He had been called from his bed to the scene of a murder. This in itself was not so unusual an occurrence; but no sooner had he laid eyes on the corpse than news arrived of another killing, a second ugly spectacle which he had barely surveyed when he was summoned away to the aftermath of yet a third homicide. Three murders. Death, it appeared to Nimrod, was opening its grisly blooms across the city as if its season had arrived. There was nothing in their manner or location to link the killings, but when he realised what they did have in common, the inspector, gripped by fresh dread, had turned on his heel and made all haste to the consulting rooms of Peregrine Fetch.

‘The victims,’ said the inspector, ‘were all –’

‘Please,’ said Peregrine. ‘Allow me. They were all of my profession. The murdered individuals were my fellow private consulting detectives.’

He said three names: the names of the three foremost investigators in the city, besides Peregrine himself. He gave Nimrod an inquiring look; the inspector’s shake of the head was a gesture not of negation but of bafflement.

‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘Hyperion Weill, Electra Cavendish-Peake, Brutus Thorne. Three of the leading private detectives in the city have been murdered tonight. How did you know?’

Without removing his raincoat, Peregrine dropped on to the Chesterfield and stretched out full length, adopting the position in which, motionless, with eyes closed, ankles crossed and fingers laced on his sternum, he had solved many of his more arduous cases.

‘It is as I anticipated,’ he said. ‘To begin with: you are both familiar, of course, with the name of Lazarus Glass.’

We were. For anyone concerned with the city’s criminal element, Lazarus Glass moved in the mind like a shadow, never quite absent. Such was his reputation that he seemed not so much a man as a fable, a splendid monster: his infinite hunger for malfeasance, his genius for cruelty, his mastery of disguise and misdirection, the patience with which he executed his stratagems, all of these were recounted in whispers by common criminals and ordinary policemen alike – and they spoke, too, of the man’s consuming hatred for his enemy, the detective who so often stood in his way, Peregrine Fetch.

No street or house was safe from Lazarus Glass, and not one citizen, bad or good, rich or poor. His tendrils linked the city’s lowest robbery with its most grandiose jewel theft or political assassination. His name seldom appeared in the news, his face never, but Peregrine had many times assured me that Glass, through his manifold indirections, was behind the greater portion of the crimes it had fallen to my mentor to combat. And however often Peregrine thwarted the particular villainies which betrayed the presence of that hand on the strings, he had never come close to apprehending the puppeteer.

Never, until now. Lying on the sofa Peregrine resembled a recumbent statue on the tomb of a crusader. Without opening his eyes, he explained that, after months and years of hunting, of feint and counterfeint and invisible chessplay, he had at last found a route into the maze of defences with which Lazarus Glass surrounded himself, and had taken up the chase. He could not have hoped to succeed alone: he had joined forces with three other investigators, the bravest and most brilliant of the profession. Together they had closed the net around Glass by slow degrees, and tonight they had been on the point of drawing it fast. But the man was tenfold a devil when cornered, and it was no surprise that, in spite of all their precautions, he had struck against his pursuers with a violence testified by the sickly shade of the inspector’s face.

‘You’re telling me it’s Glass,’ said Nimrod. ‘In a single night he’s wiped out three of the best private detectives in the city, and come close as dammit to doing the same to you too?’

‘This would appear to be the reasonable inference,’ said Peregrine. Only the soft voice showed that he was not asleep. ‘Nor is there reason to suppose that the attempt is at an end, given that I remain –’ he opened one eye ‘– active.’

‘Then there’s no time to waste. I’m placing you under police protection. We call for reinforcements.’

Peregrine sprang to his feet in a single movement.

‘By no means, inspector. Do you think it is beyond the powers of Lazarus Glass to infiltrate the ranks of the law? Tonight I trust three people only and they are in this room. We will do well to move fast and inform no one of our plans. Cassandra, I must ask you to come with me. Nowhere is safe for any of us with Lazarus Glass so close behind, and I feel I may have need of your help in this affair.’

I rose.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘three murders have been committed tonight. Our place is at the scenes of the crimes: there, if anywhere, we will find clues to the intention of our adversary.’

‘It’s against my better judgement,’ said Nimrod, shaking his head in acquiesence.

‘Think how many of our shared triumphs have been accomplished in just such a mode, inspector, and lead on.’

As we were leaving the consulting rooms, Peregrine moved to the mantelpiece and opened the old cigar box that stood there. Inside it, I knew, was a revolver. He stored it in the box as a matter of habit, keeping it cleaned and loaded but never taking it with him on investigations. I had never known him to use it, nor any other weapon. He kept the gun accessible, I believed, as a daily reminder that he had no need of it – that he chose to face the dangers of the city armed with reason alone. Now his hand lingered over the box, but he did not touch the weapon. Instead he closed the lid and turned to me. He seemed to search for words.

‘When I am gone, Cassandra, it will be for you to carry on my work,’ he said. ‘We have a number of intriguing investigations in progress.’

He was looking at me strangely.

‘It would be a matter for regret, for instance, if the case of the Apples of Madness were not brought to a satisfactory conclusion, or the affair of the Chanting Leopard.’

‘But you’ll solve those cases yourself, Dr Fetch,’ I said, faltering. ‘You’ll outwit Lazarus Glass, I’m sure of it.’

‘Well, perhaps I shall, at that,’ he said. ‘It is in any case a nice knot, this business with poor Lazarus, not without certain points of interest.’

As I followed him down the staircase to the street, he added:

‘We were friends, once, long ago, Lazarus and I.’

In Professor Hyperion Weill’s study, the gloom was relieved only by the glow from a tasselled lampshade which hung, askew, next to what was left of the wingback chair in which the professor had been seated in his final moments. Bookshelves lined the walls, the floor was thick with rugs, and around us crowded keepsakes enough to fill a museum of criminology: pistols, blowpipes, jezail rifles and blackened daggers, chinoiserie caskets, bottles of chemicals, specimen jars in which pale forms floated, a human skull wearing a tiara of paste diamonds. The inspector assured us that nothing had been moved since the discovery of the scene by a porter investigating reports of an isolated nocturnal shriek.

The curtains were open, and through the windows I made out the branches of oak trees printed black against the night sky. Hyperion Weill had been a tall old man, and his arms and legs, broomstick-thin inside their sheaths of tweed, overhung the sides of the chair. The book lying open in his lap was glistening and darkly sodden. Evidently, no attempt had been made to free the corpse from the position in which it had been left.

I felt a shiver of outrage at this ugly end to so honourable a career. Hyperion Weill had been peerless among the investigators of his generation, but in due course he had retired from full-time detection to take up a post as Professor of Ratiocination at the university. That should have meant well-deserved years of reflection, writing and passing on the fruits of his experience to the respectful young – not this night of butchery.

Peregrine gazed at the scene for a long time, his features neutral.

‘Perhaps I should not have drawn him back into active investigation. But he knew our enemy well. He shaped both of us, Lazarus and me. We were so determined to impress him.’

As he scrutinised the object comprised of the remains of the professor and those of his favourite chair, Peregrine spoke in an undertone. Many years ago, he explained, he and Glass had studied together under the tuition of Hyperion Weill.

Callow as they had been in those days, young Peregrine Fetch and young Lazarus Glass were each intent, already, on surpassing even their teacher and becoming the single greatest detective the city had ever seen. In talent and ambition there had been little to distinguish the two youths, and for a time they had been as close as only devoted rivals can be. Only later had Lazarus chosen a different path.