The Detective and the Devil (2 page)

He slipped away and further into the house on his own, following staircases and corridors into smaller and smaller rooms. Somewhere inside here was Dee’s private room, his
interna
bibliotheca
, where he communed with angels and kept his most precious books: Agrippa’s
De occulta philosophica,
the
Mystica theologica
of Dionysius the Areopagite, the
manuscripts of Ramon Llull.

He found it eventually, tucked away in the eaves of the steep roof. Its small window looked out onto the dark river, and its interior had been partly denuded. There was no sign of any demonic
apparatus; Dee had, presumably, packed this up and taken it to Poland with him. But there were books and manuscripts, dozens more of them. Jacobus placed his candle on a pile of volumes and settled
down to hunt, the noise of the men downstairs fading away as his concentration deepened onto the task at hand. The whole night – the whole year – came down to this moment. If he
didn’t find it, the scheme of the merchants would fail. Not to mention his own still-secret adaptation of said scheme.

But he found it. It wasn’t hidden. The merchant’s spies had suggested that Dee might not have known what he had in this particular manuscript, and it was indeed given no special
status, nor was it locked away – though it was in this internal room, so Dee had presumably been trying to study it. It was bound in the scrappy pages of some other manuscript; some of the
more hysterical sources Jacobus had consulted had said it was bound in human skin. He smiled at the workaday reality. It was slim in comparison to the hefty tomes that surrounded him in the little
room. He flicked to the title page, and read it in the flickering candlelight. The strange swirling script he found inside was as he expected it. He checked a few more pages.

The manuscript was there, and then it wasn’t, because it had a new home now, deep inside a hidden pocket of his coat. He stood, and went back downstairs. The work was almost done. The
boxes of books they had taken from Dee’s library were carried out into the garden and down to the towpath, where they were loaded onto the barge.

‘Now, fellows – enjoy yourselves,’ he said, passing around their money and a few bottles of very, very strong wine he’d had ready and waiting. He went out into the
garden, where the lighterman was preparing to sail the barge back downstream on the tide, out into the Estuary, where the Amsterdam merchants waited for him on their ship.

‘Change of plan,’ he said to the lighterman. He had dropped the English theatrical airs in favour of Dutch practical. ‘There’s more work to be done here. I’ll
follow you in a few hours. Wait for me at Deptford.’

The lighterman muttered but he was being paid to do as he was told. Jacobus untied the ropes, and the barge moved out into the stream. He watched it go before walking back along the towpath to
find the second barge tied up. It had slipped a little upstream, out of sight.

He climbed in, and Mina was there with her delicious lips and her wicked chuckle, to kiss him and fondle him and congratulate him.

A vast whoop of male laughter accompanied a sudden sound of breaking glass as one of the windows of John Dee’s house burst outwards. Someone had thrown a chair through it from within.
Books followed the chair into the garden, and someone lit a fire as the barge pulled away into the stream. In only minutes Dee’s house was flickering with the flames from the garden as a pile
of books made their own inferno.

‘You have it, Jacobus?’ Mina said.

‘I have it, beloved,’ Jacobus replied.

Six months from that night, with the island falling away to starboard, Charles Horton would remember the Drury Lane Theatre, and he would mark it as the starting point. Enter
the constable, stage left.

He would recall the noisy crowd, the slow staccato of pips being spat at his shoulders from someone behind, the musky smell of the oil lamps and candles which hung precariously in the
chandeliers.

He would remember the astonishing quiet that descended as the delicious verses unwrapped themselves, the shrill mob surprised to find itself distracted. There was a wizard in the building, and
he weaved a powerful spell of another’s devising.

The wizard’s name was Edmund Kean, a young man of wide repute, his famous face tonight transformed through greasepaint enchantment into that of an ancient sage. The latest star of the
Covent Garden stage, a study in controlled intensity, his robes flowing around him in richly coloured waves, as if possessed of their own character and desires.

The part he played was of a second wizard, and so strong was the magic that this other wizard seemed to occupy the young bones and muscles and face of Kean; an older wizard, the Duke of Milan,
full of his own mysterious motivation.

Prospero’s words were not his own, and they were not Kean’s. The man whose spell this was seemed to hover in the air, the puller of the strings, the play’s very own Ariel.

It was Charles Horton’s first Shakespeare.

He was mesmerised; in truth, he had been transported from the play’s opening, as a storm rang through the theatre, loud enough to wake the magistrates of Bow Street, sending the King of
Naples into the depths. Outside, the whores of Drury Lane played their own parts in their own play, their audience of men clutching pennies, snatched-at by their lusts. But here inside, there was
magic afoot, savage and potent and dangerous.

From his position up in the gallery, high above the stage, Horton saw the crowd in the pit, all of them standing and watching in silence. All their petty hooliganisms had been forgotten. The
Drury Lane mob was notorious, but tonight the mob was tamed. It watched Kean conjure his sea-sorrow and Ariel flame amazement, flying in on unseen mechanisms, at times invisible to every eyeball,
at others heard only in the groans of the shipwrecked.

Prospero removed his cloak from his shoulders and laid it down, emphasising its circular shape with his staff. When it settled flat upon the stage it was as round as a hole looking down through
the earth and out to the other side. It was something alive, quivering with the stars and planets and comets which decorated it.

From up where he sat, high in the gods, Horton looked down into the wizard’s black hole and imagined shapes moved within it, as if a portal to some other London had been opened, a London
where the crackles of fairy magic were commonplace.

Or perhaps that was
this
London, and another London where no stench of magic remained was looking curiously from within, back to this dreamland in which Horton now found himself.

Music filled the vaulted air of the theatre, played on instruments hidden who-knew-where, and his wife Abigail’s hand squeezed in his, gripped as it had been gripped since the opening
storm. Her fingers pulsed to the rhythm of the word-music.

Masks were removed, identities were revealed, love was pledged. Horton felt the terrified awe of the boatswain,
all clapped under hatches
, his wrecked ship restored by unknown
capacities. Towards Caliban he felt first horror, then disgust, then a deep and senseless pity.

And Ariel – well, Ariel he thought he understood. An instrument of greater men, trapped by obligation and unseen chains of secret knowledge he was powerless to reveal.

Yes, he thought he understood that pretty well.

The play unwound itself from the magic to return to the every day. Even Prospero noticed the sea-change.

The strange business of the stage began to give way to London’s grubby, incessant masque. Horton could no longer ignore the fact that the Earl of – had failed to return to his box
for the second part of the play, leaving the young woman who was most definitely not his wife to weep into her fan. He saw money changing hands between two men below him, and saw the handing over
of an object wrapped in ticking. He could no longer ignore the woman next to him, who smelt like a wet dog and fervently whispered
The Emperor! The Emperor!
every few minutes. He would
speak to her when the play ended. If she spoke of Bonaparte, he would have to haul her to Bow Street on a charge of sedition.

And he saw the boy. He emerged at the end of the row of seats, a familiar face from Wapping. What was he doing here? Horton heard the mutterings and curses of his fellow audience members, a
general mild disturbance that ended with the dog-smelling woman cursing, foully, and he felt a hand on his shoulder and warm desperate breath in his ear.

‘Mr Horton, you are wanted in Wapping.’

Horton was angry beyond reckoning. But he saw it in the boy’s face, terror dancing in the light from the candles which must, surely, soon burn this theatre down again.

‘What is it?’

‘There’s been more killin’s on the Highway, sir! The Monster’s returned!’

The words accompanied the expiry of
The Tempest
. Prospero’s magic portal closed up as Kean lifted his cloak from the stage for the last time. The theatre was once again a
building, prone to fire, filled with the great and the grimy. Charles Horton was himself again, a River Police constable and a careful student of the mechanisms of murder.

He looked at the boy, and wondered if he would ever escape himself.

The streets outside the theatre were frantic with carriages stuck horse-to-rear along Drury Lane, but it was only a short walk down to the river. A wherry would get them to
Wapping quickly enough, and if what the boy had told them at the theatre was true, speed was essential. The boy himself had disappeared into London’s shadows, as boys of his type were wont to
do.

Rennie’s Strand Bridge, all grey granite columns and austere arches, obstructed the view of the river as Mr and Mrs Horton walked down the hill. They took a wherry from the stairs in front
of Somerset House, two insignificant insects climbing aboard a leaf.

‘Can it be possible, Charles?’ Abigail said, as the waterman steered them downstream through the shouting vessels. ‘Has the same killer returned to the Highway?’

‘A coincidence, surely,’ he replied.

‘But such a terrible one.’

They followed the current towards the old Bridge, shooting through its starlings like thousands before them, the wherry shuddering under the strain of the rushing river. Horton instructed the
waterman to leave him at the Hermitage stairs, then to take Abigail further around the Wapping bend to the stairs just past Gun Dock. He fed coins into the waterman’s outstretched palm, the
money which had been squirrelled away to buy the two of them some supper at a tavern to finish off their theatrical evening. But that evening had been dislocated by whatever had taken place up
above the river, up on the Highway. Whatever magic there had been in Drury Lane had been replaced by something altogether darker and older.

He climbed out and watched the wherry pull away into the stream, his eyes fixed on Abigail as she was taken by the unseen force of the river. He felt suddenly and deeply alone. A single actor in
a Gothic drama. Not even an original production; a new version of an old story. Perhaps even a sequel.

He turned and walked past the Brewhouse and then the western edge of the London Dock. Rennie’s stone, again, though this time arranged into walls behind which loomed the spars of
ships.

On the Highway there was some of the bustle and excitement they had encountered on Drury Lane. He saw a crowd straining to watch, clustered outside a single house. There were flickering lamps
lining the crowded pavements, throwing uncertain light onto the shops and taverns and houses that gazed at each other with East End defiance.

The house was number 37. It was not quite four years since the last slaughter on the Ratcliffe Highway. Indeed, the house at number 37 was so close to that other house, and so similar to it,
that Horton had imagined that it was perhaps the very same house; that the frenzy which had slaughtered Timothy Marr, his wife, his shop boy and his tiny baby had returned to coat the same walls
with new blood.

This house was part of the same recent development, so it looked identical. The crowd outside looked the same, too: the same curious terror, the same sharp elbows, the same mutterings. The same
hunger to get inside and feast on charnel views.

Many of the neighbouring houses had been converted into shops, though these were shuttered. One of them made its business audible enough – from inside, he could hear the squawks and
screeches of various animals. A menagerie, presumably, selling pets to lonely sailors on their return home, the creatures within stirred by the crowd outside.

The front door to the little house was closed, guarded by two uniformed constables. Horton did not recognise either of them, and presumed they were from Shadwell. This suggested that he would
not be welcome within. The Highway was, by custom, under the purview of the Shadwell magistrates. He was a constable of the River Police and had no immediate jurisdiction here. Such matters
occupied lawyers and magistrates. They did not occupy Charles Horton overmuch. Besides, he had his own history here. His own reckoning to face.

He had stood on this street more than three years ago, outside a similarly closed house with a crowd outside. Then, the country had known little of the Ratcliffe Highway, and what it had known
it had tended not to like. When the horrors of Timothy Marr’s house had been revealed, the panic had washed all the way to Scotland. London had birthed a Monster.