The Detective and the Devil (19 page)

Abigail’s delight at that filled the room, and Horton could see she had to prevent herself hugging the old bull in the wheeled chair. He rather thought the old bull would not have
particularly minded.

‘Constable, good day,’ Banks said to Horton, and the servant wheeled him from the room. He said nothing to Markland.

As they left the house, a servant ran out into the street and handed Horton a note. He opened it and read.

‘Tell Harriott I will attend him and thyself tonight in Wapping. Say nothing to that Shadwell idiot. Sir Jos—’

He folded the paper and handed it to Abigail.

‘ To reiterate his invitation to make use of his library,’ he said to Markland, who grinned.

‘I do believe the old goat has designs on your wife,’ he said, oddly happy again after his difficult afternoon.

It had turned into a good night for secrets: the heavy warm air of the day was settling itself onto Wapping, the pressure almost palpable, squeezing in the shouts and laughter
and shrieks of an ordinary East End twilight. Horton left Abigail and Rat in the apartment, checked the doors were locked, spoke to Cripps and another lad out in the street and warned them to be
particularly watchful. He didn’t know the source of this odd skittishness. The heavy air, perhaps, and the lingering ever-present danger to Abigail.

As he stepped out into Wapping Street, he looked to his right and to his left. Was that street woman watching him? Had that dock worker come out in suspiciously clean clothes? Was that shop
clerk looking away somewhat too purposefully?

Yes. He decided that the man – he might have been a shop clerk or an office clerk – was doing just that. He caught a flash of face, that was all, and now the clerk was strolling away
towards Wapping Pier Head and St Katharine’s. Did he recognise him? Was it perhaps the clerk who had been sitting at Johnson’s desk when he’d visited East India House? Horton took
a step or two to follow, and for a while his plans for the evening took him in the same direction as the clerk. The River Police Office was in the same direction as the man was heading. Outside the
Office, Horton stopped and waited and watched.

The clerk continued to walk away from him, never looking back, if indeed he was ever in Wapping with malicious intent. He watched the man’s back disappear into the crowds. The late spring
sun sent shafts of light along the river and the brick walls of the Dock and its associated buildings, but they brought no illumination. Only confusion and that deep, enduring anxiety.

Three old men were waiting for him upstairs in the Office. Three ancient minds perusing imminent death, stocked with memories fraying at the edges. John Harriott, looking even older, was in his
chair behind his desk, a slab of the river visible behind his head. Sir Joseph Banks was in his wheeled chair behind the fire, and Horton found himself wondering how Banks would have got up the
stairs. Was he winched from outside?

And in the chair on the other side of the fire, an unexpected face, but one who had always been there whenever Horton’s strange life intersected with the Royal Society: Aaron Graham, the
senior magistrate from Bow Street, dressed as was his habit in some finery. It had been a year since Horton had last seen him, and though the clothes were just as expensive, the skin beneath them
was terribly diminished.

Graham was the only one to stand when Horton stepped into the room, and tottered over to him like Beau Brummel’s skeleton.

‘Constable,’ he said, and Horton was touched by the old man’s unaffected pleasure. ‘A delight to see you again.’

‘Mr Graham. Mr Harriott. Sir Joseph.’

‘Sit down, Horton,’ said Banks, comfortable in charge even though they were in another man’s office. Harriott said nothing. A chair had been left for Horton. He sat in it, and
looked at the three men: Graham and Sir Joseph lit by an oil lamp, Harriott by the dying light from the river.

‘Horton, you are a man I can trust,’ said Sir Joseph.

Was this a question? Or a statement? It was something of both. But was he indeed to be trusted, this Nore mutineer? Did Sir Joseph know of that part of his past? Horton looked at Graham, who
smiled weakly but somehow reassuringly.

‘I believe so, Sir Joseph.’

‘Because what I am here to speak to you about is known by not half a dozen men in the world outside this room. You have perceived some of it, I think. Graham has told me of your
involvement in recent matters. The Ratcliffe Highway murders. The
Solander
incident. Even, I am told, last year’s affair with the woman from New South Wales, which I am to understand
involved my librarian. All these incidents have involved the Royal Society in some way.’

‘The Highway murders, sir? I was told that important men had an interest in them and in their conclusion. I was not informed that you were one of them.’

Sir Joseph looked at Graham and Harriott. Both men seemed suddenly uncomfortable, and Horton detected a strain of guilt in the room. He knew he had been used, of course. The extent to which
those who had used him were aware of the reasons – that had remained obscure. He found himself staring at Harriott and for the first time in their association, the magistrate was unable to
meet his eye.

Sir Joseph, having not apparently noticed the discomfiture of the magistrates, continued regardless.

‘Horton, you are a constable. It is a lowly position; before this evening, I do believe I have never spoken to one such as you. You should not expect to always have been taken into
confidences of greater men with wider horizons. That is the simple truth.’

Horton nodded to acknowledge this.

‘And yet, here we are. Three men of some social standing narrating secrets to a mere waterman-constable. A man of little rank with a murky past.’

At least his question had been answered. Sir Joseph knew all about his personal history.

‘This has come about because of your remarkable gifts, constable. I do believe that you might be able to solve a mystery which has occupied the finest minds this country has produced for
over a century. I think the time is right to ask you to look at it. And I think it may have a great deal to do with the case you are currently investigating.’

Sir Joseph leaned his enormous body forward, and his mechanical chair creaked loudly.

‘A fine word,
investigating
. We are similar, you and I. We pursue knowledge. We unpick secrets. We classify and we contain. The natural philosopher and the . . . the . . .
detective
. Yes. A fine coinage, I think. Detective Horton. It has a ring to it, does it not?’

Sir Joseph smiled, and though the smile was warm and in some ways delightful, it also contained teeth. The great man sat back in his chair.

‘Know this, then, Detective Horton: the Royal Society has for one hundred and fifty years concerned itself with investigation and observation of the natural world. Our transactions have
catalogued a world of wonders, from the nutrition of plants to the construction of palaces. Like my predecessors, I believe in evidence and I believe in proof. The proof of mine own eyes, and the
proof of eyes other than mine which are to be trusted.’

The smile again.

‘In this, we are the same, detective.’

Aaron Graham coughed, an ugly little rattle that sounded like death clearing its throat.

‘When my Society began its work, the world contained much mystery,’ continued Sir Joseph. ‘When Robert Hooke produced his
Micrografia
, he drew things he saw through
microscopes of his own design, and the world saw the monstrous and beautiful appearances of even the most ordinary flea through Hooke’s perceptions. It was as if there were another world all
around us, could we but see it. But there remain mysteries, Horton. Inexplicable matters, beyond understanding. Plants that grow at breakneck speeds, and seem to possess consciousness. Women who
can bend other wills to their own. All of these things you have had some dealing with.’

Horton thought:
plants?

‘
Some people call these things
magic
. I say any reality we do not yet understand will appear to be magical.’

Sir Joseph’s enormous face flickered in the light from the oil lamp. He stared into the shadows at the corners of the room. As if he were confessing to a crowd that had hidden itself away.
A man at the end of his road, making sense of things.

‘Which brings me to St Helena.’

Harriott sighed, another rattling old sound of ominous import.

‘St Helena is, as you know, a possession of the East India Company,’ Sir Joseph continued. ‘I have fought with all my might for years to extract the island from the
Company’s clutches, and yet the Company will not let it go. Many find this odd. St Helena does not pay its way. It is barely more than a staging post for ships returning from the East Indies
and New South Wales. A rock holding a few planters, a good many slaves and whores, and no visible means of support. So why does the Company protect it so?’

Harriott, noticed Horton, had leaned forward in his chair. His face looked more animated than the constable had seen it in months. He was learning things, too.

‘At the end of the seventeenth century, shortly after the foundation of our Society, we despatched a promising young man to St Helena to make improvements to our star charts, and to track
a transit of Mercury across the sun. His name was Edmond Halley. His achievements were extraordinary, and my own life was linked to his, even though he died long before I was born. He predicted the
transit of Venus in 1769, which was the cause of my own first voyage to observe it. To Otaheite.’

Harriott stared at Sir Joseph but Graham, Horton noted, was staring intently at
him
, as if to verify that he were following all this. If he were seeing how these events connected to
each other; young Halley sailing south a century and a half ago, young Banks following him a century later, and now this room tonight, full of stories and secrets.

‘Halley’s trip was a success, but he came back with an odd story. He wrote a letter to a benefactor, in which he claimed there was something unique about St Helena. He had noticed
– through
observation
, mind – that compass needles on the island deviated significantly from the North.’

‘As they do in most places,’ Horton said.

‘Indeed they do. But Halley had started mapping magnetic variation, Horton. He had developed a theory that turned out to be entirely true – that one might draw lines between areas of
similar magnetic variation, and that these lines would be constant. Some years after he travelled to St Helena, he produced a chart of these lines, which we now call
Halleian
lines.’

Horton knew the phrase, from his own knowledge of navigation. He had even seen Halley’s map.

‘I know of this chart, Sir Joseph.’

‘Good. Then you know of the line of zero variation that passes, like a great curve, through the Atlantic.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know that St Helena sits upon this line.’

‘Yes. I understand your point now, Sir Joseph. Compass needles on St Helena should point directly at magnetic north, as there is no variation.’

‘Indeed. And yet they do not. Sail a mile away from the island, and they do. But on the island itself, they vary by as much as ten degrees. Halley could find no reason for this. Nor, thus
far, can we. But that is not the end of it, Horton. In the very same letter in which he first wrote these observations down, Halley also mentioned an encounter which is just as
inexplicable.’

Sir Joseph looked back into the shadows, as if young Halley might be found there, scribbling his discovery.

‘Halley met a man on St Helena; he described him as an ugly fellow, whom Halley took for a Portuguese. This man had neither nose nor ears, and one of his hands was entirely missing. He did
not speak any English, but they managed to communicate in Dutch. The stranger claimed to have knowledge of the island before the arrival of the Dutch or the English, and when Halley asked when he
had come to the island, the Portuguese said he had arrived there in 1516. A hundred and fifty years before Halley had met him.’

At this point, Horton expected Harriott, or at least Graham, to interject. A 150-year-old man on a distant island? Neither man said anything, and this disturbed Horton as much as the strange
stories Sir Joseph was recounting.

‘When Halley returned to England, he looked into the history of St Helena,’ continued Sir Joseph. ‘He discovered the tale of a Portuguese nobleman who had led a group of
renegades during that country’s wars in Goa. As punishment for his crimes, this man – his name was Fernando Lopez – had his right hand and the thumb of his left cut off, along
with his nose and ears. Lopez later stowed away on a ship returning to Portugal, but asked to be let off at St Helena, which was then deserted. It was said he was left there with only a cockerel
for company, and for years he was seen there by visiting Portuguese ships. How many years, we cannot say. This, Halley believed, was the creature he met on St Helena.’

Horton had no conception of what this could mean. Nothing Sir Joseph was saying made any sense to him at all. He looked at Harriott, but the old man was staring out of his riverside window. He
tried Graham, who caught his eyes, and nodded. It was an awful thing, that nod. It seemed to say
I believe all this to be true.
And yet, how could it be?

A silence. A question was expected of him.

‘And what does this . . . this
story
have to do with John Dee?’

‘Ah. A good question, constable. One worthy of Detective Horton.’

Banks smiled. He seemed to be rather enjoying himself.

‘What do you know of Dr John Dee, constable?’

The question did nothing to dilute Horton’s confusion.

‘Only what my wife told me from a guide book to Surrey.’

‘Well, I will tell you this. He was a highly original thinker, a disciplined mathematician and geometer. He lectured on Euclid, and when he wrote about such matters he was as fine a mind
as this country has produced. But then he began to be interested in other matters – matters of a more
celestial
kind, shall we say. He developed an extraordinarily detailed
cosmological picture on the shaky edifice of Renaissance science – I cannot make head nor tail of it myself, it seems stuffed to the gunwales with arcane hogwash and esoterica. But there are
some members of the Society who believed he was on to something; that he had stumbled across some great truth about the inner workings of our Reality. I do believe Dee made discoveries which remain
hidden; discoveries which, if they came to light, might help to explain some of the strange things you and I have encountered together these past few years.’