The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (8 page)

A railway engine with a single carriage had drawn up one side of the platform. A porter straining at a luggage cart piled to overflowing trundled toward him. A large ginger man in a black bowler idled on a bench, twirling a pocket watch by its chain. Close by, another large man in a long coat and a matching black bowler hunkered behind his newspaper.

As Conan Doyle sidestepped the luggage cart, Miss Leckie began to turn his way. She would see him at any moment. He had lost the element of surprise. He began to raise his hat, a smile beaming on his face. And then she turned to face him full on, her eyes met his, and he stumbled to a halt.

It was not Jean Leckie. The young woman was a total stranger.

At that moment a train whistle shrieked and the parked railway engine jetted a swirling cloud of steam across the platform. As it engulfed him, Waterloo Station vanished. Suddenly, a powerful hand gripped his right arm. Another gripped his left. To his shock and surprise, Arthur Conan Doyle, a large, athletic man, was lifted off his feet and whisked sideways across the platform, the toes of his shoes scuffing the concrete. The side of a railway carriage appeared. A door opened and he was hurled inside and bounced into a seat with the bowler-hatted bullies dropping heavily on either side of him.

“What the devil! What is the meaning? Who are you people?”

Perched on the seat opposite was a small man with a head the shape of a blown-glass bulb. He was entirely bald on top, apart from a single pomaded forelock, which curled upon his brow like a question mark.

The carriage jerked as the railway engine began to move, accelerating out of the station, iron wheels squealing for traction on the rails. It traveled several hundred feet before an unseen railway switch was thrown and the train swerved off the main track and plunged into the black maw of a tunnel. Out the carriage windows, the perpetual night of the Underground network hurtled darkly past.

“Who—?”

“You may call me Cypher,” the little man interrupted before Conan Doyle could spit out his question.

“Cypher?” Conan Doyle grunted. “You must have had very imaginative parents.”

The diminutive figure smiled indulgently. “Not my real name, obviously. And given your intellect, Doctor Doyle, you have probably already surmised that you have been duped for a reason. I know that you and your friend Oscar Wilde were present at the scene of Lord Howell’s assassination last night.”

Conan Doyle shifted in his seat. Was the man trying to somehow entrap him into confessing something?

“I was there at the request of the Yard. Despite that fact, my friend and I were warned in no uncertain terms by the commissioner of police himself to have no further involvement in the case. The fact that you have snatched me, tells me you are not the police. Then who, indeed, are you?”

Conan Doyle eyed the little man up and down. He was short: under five feet, so that the tips of his polished shoes swung free of the carriage floor, like a child’s. However, the finely made suit, immaculately tailored down to the last stitch, and the fastidiousness of his dress, complete with boutonniere and round, gold-rimmed spectacles that sparkled in the electric carriage light, suggested a man of power and influence.

“Someone from the government, I presume. A spy master?”

“Not a bad guess, as I would expect from the author of Sherlock Holmes. I confess, I am an enthusiast of your clever fictions but that does not appertain to this—”

“Kidnapping?” Conan Doyle interrupted.

“Summons,” the man who called himself Cypher corrected. “I represent a higher authority. One greater than the government, comprised as it is of grubby politicians who are merely temporary holders of office.”

“Who, then, God?” Conan Doyle challenged, his sense of outrage recovering after the shock of being shanghaied in the middle of Waterloo Station.

Cypher’s small face attempted to mold itself into something approaching a smile; he flashed a collection of tiny, peg-like teeth, aiming at geniality, but managing instead to convey the menacing look of a playground Napoleon.

“God
and
country,” he answered cryptically. “As you shall soon see.”

The brakes squealed on. The train shuddered as it decelerated and drew up at an Underground station, where it trembled like a whippet straining at its lead, anxious to be released. By the sparkle of electric lamps, Conan Doyle read the name spelled out on the porcelain tiles: O
RPHEUS
S
TREET
S
TATION
.

The ginger behemoth flung open the door and stepped out, holding the door. Cypher slid from the bench onto his feet. “Come along, Doctor Doyle. And no heroics, please. I do not wish for an unfortunate accident.”

Conan Doyle had been planning a dozen such scenarios in his head. His hands were balled into fists, and he had already decided he would punch the larger of the two thugs first; but at Cypher’s words, his fists unclenched. They stepped out onto the deserted platform. He casually eyed the steps leading up into the station, wondering whether to run for it, but up close he saw to his surprise that the steps ascended a mere five feet before abutting a wall. The remainder of the staircase was a painting, like cheap scenery from a theatrical production. And then he realized the stunning implication: the entire station was a ruse.

Cypher caught the bafflement on Conan Doyle’s face and smiled. “Quite right, Doctor Doyle, there is no
Orpheus Street
in London and no station. A personal joke of mine.” He stepped to the wall and depressed a blank white tile in the middle of the O in Orpheus. It sank beneath his gloved fingers. A sound followed—the clunk of a mechanism releasing—and then a section of wall cracked open and swung inward: a secret door leading to a lighted tunnel. At the end, a staircase.

Cypher sent the ginger mauler ahead and fixed Conan Doyle with an unequivocal look. “If you would follow, please.”

At the end of the tunnel they reached a wrought-iron staircase and rang the metal steps with their feet as they climbed two stories to a stout wooden door reinforced with metal straps and heavy iron rivets. It looked like the door to a castle, so Conan Doyle was surprised when it opened and they stepped into a sumptuous room with wallpapered walls, and high ceilings with chandeliers and elaborate plaster cornices.

Cypher nodded for his hulking minotaurs to take a seat on a fussy floral sofa and eyed Conan Doyle coldly. “Everything you have seen and everything you are about to see or hear is a state secret. You will say nothing of this to a living soul. Do you understand?”

The fineness of the room and the cryptic warning kicked over the hornet’s nest of speculation in Conan Doyle’s mind and set it abuzz. He was finally beginning to suspect where he was. “Y-yes, of course,” he stammered.

Cypher flayed him with a final, scorching look. “You would do well to remember that.” He stepped to a second door and Conan Doyle followed. The interior door was painted gleaming white with elaborate gilt door handles. Cypher rapped at it with his tiny knuckles and bewigged servants in royal-blue satin uniforms and knee breeches immediately swept the door open.

“Leave your coat and hat,” Cypher commanded. A servant stepped behind Conan Doyle and slipped the wool overcoat from his broad shoulders while the other took his hat and gloves.

“Follow me closely.”

Conan Doyle shadowed Cypher along a long plush-carpeted corridor. His attention was drawn by the many fine paintings in enormous gilt frames that hung on either side. Most were portraits of English kings and queens stretching back centuries. He longed to stop and study them, but the little man was setting a cracking pace and he hurried to keep up. Abruptly, they turned sharp right into a large room with vaulted ceilings bedecked with plaster frieze works. Dazzled by the opulence of scarlet walls and glittering gilt, his eyes roved wildly, until his focus was drawn, by deliberate intent of the architect, to the far end of the room. Beneath a proscenium arch, a dais of three steps ascended to a throne. Seated upon the throne, still wearing her familiar dress of mourning black and white lace headdress, was a figure whose face was struck into every coin of the realm.

Victoria Regina.

Pike-wielding beefeaters hovered in every corner of the room, while red-tunicked soldiers of the queen’s life guard stood at attention on either side of the throne, cutlasses drawn and held ready. Cypher stopped fifteen feet shy of the throne, bowed his head, and uttered in a reverential voice, “Majesty.”

Conan Doyle echoed the salutation and by pure reflex fell to one knee and bowed deeply.

“Your zeal is noted, Doctor Doyle,” Victoria answered in a quavering, old ladie’s voice, “but men have not bowed from the knee since Elizabeth’s time.”

Feeling foolish, Conan Doyle rose and bowed again, this time from the waist. When he finally summoned the courage to stand tall and raise his head, he was shocked by Victoria’s appearance. It had been ten years since the death of Prince Albert. In deep mourning, Victoria had withdrawn from public life and soon became a mystery to her own subjects. People whispered that she had secretly died and that the news was being suppressed to delay the succession of her dissolute son, Edward, Prince of Wales. Other scuttlebutt was far more vicious—the aging queen was stricken with disease: consumption, heart failure, even syphilis (contracted from Albert).

As a trained physician, Conan Doyle could not fail to notice the ailing condition of the seventy-eight-year-old monarch. She had lost weight, he could tell from previously taken photographs, but she retained the pudding-in-a-sock physique. She slumped upon the throne. Her face was waxy and pallid. Her glassy brown eyes protruded like a spaniel’s. Her chest rose and fell unevenly—he could hear the leather-bellows wheeze of her respiration. And when she spoke, Victoria’s voice was faltering and distant, as though it had traveled a wearisome journey from her lips to his ears. In point of fact, she was barely audible.

“Doctor Doyle, your Sherlock Holmes stories have been a great source of diversion to us during our retreat from the world.” She raised a hand in a series of palsied jerks and let it drop heavily in her lap. “Now it is our hope that a mind as ingenious as yours might be employed to save your queen, your country, and the great Empire we represent.”

“Indeed, your highness, it is an honor to be asked,” Conan Doyle answered, and bowed again, quite unnecessarily.

“The queen’s representative, Mister Cypher, will describe in detail the task you are asked to perform. But
we
wanted to meet you personally, so that you do not labor under any suspicion of this being the highest possible service you could render to the nation.”

Throughout her speech, Conan Doyle leaned forward, straining to hear. He threw a worried frown at Cypher. “Her Majesty’s voice is very faint,” he whispered out the side of his mouth. “Might I approach the throne?”

“You may, but at the risk of being skewered on a pike staff,” Cypher replied beneath his breath.

“But I am not quite certain what is being asked of me,” Conan Doyle whispered to Cypher. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Simply say ‘yes’ and bow,” Cypher replied. “Your acquiescence to a royal request is a foregone conclusion. Say ‘yes,’ bow to Her Majesty, and then we shall back away before we turn and leave the royal presence.”

*   *   *

“Do you know what the French term, coup d’
é
tat means, Doctor Doyle?”

They were back on the private underground train, the bowler-hatted bruisers squeezed tight on either side of the Scottish author. This time the train was rumbling in the reverse direction, toward Waterloo Station.

“A coup d’
é
tat? Yes, I believe so. It is a kind of palace revolution, is it not?”

Cypher’s face soured, as if the words left a vile taste upon his tongue. “You have no doubt read in the newspapers of the assassination attempts made upon Her Majesty?”

“Of course.”

“There have been eight ‘official’ attempts. All were the handiwork of lunatics or disaffected outcasts from society. They were not ruthlessly planned, but rather the slapdash bumblings of delusional cretins discharging pistols at the royal carriage and such—more public nuisance than serious assassination attempt. However, there have been four attempts that you have not read about—because I forbade the newspapers from publishing them.” Cypher’s demeanor grew grim. “And because those four attempts were very nearly successful. By contrast these outrages were masterminded by organized groups: Fenians, anarchists, and in two cases by agents we believe are homegrown.”

“What do you mean by
homegrown
?”

“Britain is one of the few European countries never to have suffered a revolution. But now I fear there is a threat to the monarchy from within. Of late there have been a number of carefully targeted assassinations. Lord Howell was the fourth victim.” Cypher saw the question poised on Conan Doyle’s lips and preempted it. “Yes, the other three were officially described as
accidents
. We believe some shadowy group is planning the equivalent of a palace coup. As a smoke screen, they are stirring up agitators—anarchists, Fenians—to commit random acts of terror. Meanwhile key members of the government and aristocracy are being eliminated. I fear these actions will culminate in a palace coup where Victoria will be murdered and a new government will sweep to power, most likely under the pretense of protecting a nation about to descend into chaos.”

“But what of the Prince of Wales? If the queen were to be murdered, would he not accede to the throne?”

At mention of the heir presumptive, Cypher’s mouth puckered in a moue of disgust. “There are those who would seek to delay the Prince of Wales’ accession for as long as possible. I am one of them. Albert Edward is a frivolous gallivanter who does not possess the temperament required of a monarch. Still, as you say, he is the rightful heir to the throne. And so, as an insurance policy, I have dispatched him on a diplomatic mission to Europe. He should be in Prague about now.”

“Out of harm’s reach?”