The Detective and the Devil (35 page)

And what would Prospero make of this?

He did not know when Shakespeare wrote his play. But he imagined it might have been from the same glittering decades that had witnessed the life of John Dee. Had Shakespeare met Dee? Was
Prospero a homage to a Mortlake reality?

And what on earth could be called ‘reality’ in a world where this story could unfold?

The library of an Elizabethan magus, hidden on a lump of rock in the South Atlantic, on an island nobody even considered. A forgotten magic.

His mind had been prepared for what Mina Baxter had told him. It had been softened to these mysteries by the puzzles he had already seen these past four years. It was as if John Dee himself had
appeared to him, the old wizard of Mortlake, the natural philosopher who wanted to be something more, who wanted to consort with the celestial. The man who did not drown his books.

But this was not the story he had voyaged here to tell. This was a tale of Ratcliffe Highway murders and slaughtered Company treasurers. On the face of it, a simple murder mystery. One for which
he had still not been able to locate a motive.

Mina Baxter had finished her tale – or rather, she had stopped it, and was looking at him expectantly. He had expected a confession. It was not apparently forthcoming.

‘But none of this really happened like that, did it?’ he said. Mina frowned. ‘This is the story you made up. The
Opera
contained the essential secret, did it not?
Dee’s secret. The way to become one with God. The route to eternal life. Your name is Koeman, not Baxter. You are more than two hundred years old. Your husband Jacobus – what happened
to him? An accident? Does the potion not work in such cases?’

She opened her mouth, and closed it again. She looked almost amused. Then she turned and picked up a small wooden box, and walked over to him. She put it on his lap, and stood over him.

‘I think, sir, that you are labouring under a misapprehension,’ she said.

He turned the key on the box, and its lid popped open. He gazed at the lump of gold within. He took it out. It was about the size of a duck egg, but had none of an egg’s graceful design.
It would have been ugly if its warm yellow gleam did not speak so immediately of wealth and artifice, of immense mirrored rooms and imperial crowns and clustered burial chambers. Of a world built
upon its unreactive beauty.

Gold. Enough gold to buy a ship, probably. Held in his hand.

She may have lost consciousness for a while, but it was nearly impossible to tell in this dark cave with only the ocean to speak to her. She had little sense of how long
she’d been there. But after an unknown time, she heard a different sound, other than the ocean’s breath and her own.

Another breath. Somewhere out there in the darkness, a ragged breath, and the sound of something scratching on the wall. The click of boot nails on rock. And then the sense that whatever was
making the noise had emerged into the same cavern as her.

A sniffing sound.

A grunt that could perhaps be a growl.

She took a chance, then.

‘Fernando?’

She had not used the name before. She remembered it only from what Seale had told her. But the name brought another grunt, and the shuffling started again. And the sniffing. And it came
closer.

‘Fernando? I am here.’

The agony in her shoulder was so enormous that the terror she felt was a little thing, a side-issue, one to be barely concerned about. Even when the creature in the dark –
Fernando,
please, let it be Fernando
– leaned in to her and sniffed and then ran one dry finger over her skin, her terror remained less than her pain.

‘Fernando, I need to get out of here. My shoulder is injured.’

Another grunt, and then the thing spoke.

‘
He killed me
,’ it said.

‘But you are alive. Can you help me?’

‘
Alive. Yes. Always alive. Always
.’

She felt its hand sense its way along the line of the rope to where the knots where. Then the feeling of the hand went away, and within seconds the hard coldness of a knife was slicing through
the rope. The support for her shoulder fell away suddenly, and she cried out, and the creature in the dark moaned.

‘He went down the other tunnel,’ she said. ‘Not the one we came down.’

Fernando’s remaining hand took hers, and he pulled her to her feet. Then he held her hand.

‘Don’t let go,’ he said. ‘I know the way, even in darkness.’

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘Make a big noise,’ he said.

‘You made this?’ he asked her, holding the gold in his hand. It was heavy and it was cold.

‘Of course I didn’t make it. I am not God.’

‘Then where does it come from?’

‘It comes from the same place all gold comes from.’ And she looked around her. ‘It comes from the rock within the Earth. She hides it as best she can, but some of us may find
it, if we have the tools to look.’

‘There is gold in this rock?’

‘There is. A good deal of it. But it is almost impossible to extract using traditional means. Gold runs through the veins of the Earth, but in most places the veins are so thin as to be
unreachable. Therein, and therein alone, lies the alchemy, constable. A process Geber discovered in Persia, a thousand years ago, transported to this island.’

‘And what does this process involve?’

‘Constable, have you not been paying attention? It is my secret. It is the secret that keeps me alive and this place – this island – protected. I have memorised Geber’s
process, and I will not pass it on.’

‘But you have no children,’ said Horton. ‘The sequence will end with you.’

‘Aye,’ said Mina, flatly. ‘That it will.’

‘So it ends here?’

‘That is my wish, yes.’

‘And what do you plan to do?’

She looked up at the ceiling, and smiled. An oddly young smile, as if she were remembering a pleasant childhood dream.

‘I will leave this island,’ she said, still looking up. ‘I will fly away.’

‘The Company may not permit it.’

She looked at him then, the warm smile replaced with something firmer, and he saw the steel in her.

‘I have my own means of transport.’

‘Miss Baxter, your secret here on St Helena has come at a price. The price of a number of lives. I believe those lives were taken by the man who now watches over you, here on the island.
This Edgar Burroughs.’

‘Ah yes. Edgar.’

Something about the way she said the name arrested him.

‘What is your relationship with Burroughs?’

She turned away.

‘He represents my employer.’

It was only a half-answer, but she gave him no time to ponder it.

‘Were they poisoned, these people in England?’ she asked.

‘I believe so.’

‘There is a . . . substance that is part of the
Opera
process. Its Latin name would be something like
Aqua interitus
– the water of destruction.’

‘If I am correct, a French chemist has isolated it. He calls it hydro-cyanic acid.’

‘I have not kept up with such developments.’

‘It smells of almonds, I take it? And must be preserved in cold conditions?’

‘It does smell of almonds. Yes. And we make it and store it deep in the caverns underground, where a chamber is kept cold for the purpose. Some have died over the years, if they have not
been careful.’

‘Edgar Burroughs left London soon after the last killings. And he lived on an estate with an icehouse. I believe he killed people with this poison, and masked his involvement. But he also
marked the bodies with a sigil.’

‘A sigil?’

‘Yes. John Dee’s Monad.’

She spun round, and seemed inexplicably angry and upset.

‘What are you saying?’

‘That Burroughs killed people to keep your secret, on behalf of the Company.’

‘That is . . . no. That is impossible.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because she is my mother,’ said Burroughs, stepping into the library. ‘And does a mother not defend her son?’

The ogre carried her along a tunnel in the dark. Abigail had no conception as to how he knew his way. He carried no lamp. But his steps were sure, and when her head faintly
grazed a rock and she cried out the ogre stopped.

‘Sorry! Sorry!’ it breathed – he
breathed,
his
name is Fernando
– he breathed, and she felt the stump of his wrist touch her face. ‘Did I hurt
you?’

‘No, Fernando, no. I thought I would hurt my head. On the wall.’

‘Ah.’ He began walking again, more slowly this time.

The pain in her shoulder had turned into an ugly ache with the occasional pierce of a knife under her skin, and she thought of childbirth again. Why so many thoughts of that? Was that pain
really worse than this?

Eventually, the tunnel began to rise, and soon they reached some wooden steps, ones she thought she recognised from when Burroughs had brought her down here. Fernando carried her up the
steps.

‘Down. Must put you down for a moment.’

‘All right.’

He placed her gently on the step, but even that soft change in movement caused her to cry out.

‘Sorry! Sorry!’

He moved in the dark, and she heard the sound of iron on wood, the grating of some internal mechanism, and the door she could not see opened wide and the warm St Helena air blew through it. She
saw stars and the glint of a near-full moon.

‘Pick you up. Last time.’

‘Yes.’

She gritted her teeth and he put his arms around her and lifted, ever so gently, but the pain was so enormous that she shrieked. He didn’t say anything. He began to run, out through the
door and into the night.

Once more, she was running across St Helena, carried this time not by a horse but by an ogre, a relic of some past whose existence she could not account for. He ran for several minutes, until
they came to a barn which sat next to a house. She could see lights in the house. Was Charles inside?

Fernando opened the barn door, and carried her in. He placed her down gently against a pile of some stiff fibrous material. She whimpered gently, but then managed to move herself into a position
where her shoulder became acutely uncomfortable rather than agonising. Fernando moved away, then returned with a lit oil lamp. She saw his face emerge from the gloom, a sad gargoyle walking out of
her childhood nightmares to save her from the present.

‘I will go now.’

‘You are leaving me?’

‘Someone will come for you.’

‘Charles? Where is Charles?’

‘There will be a bang. Soon.’

He placed the oil lamp down beside her, and she sat in a warm sphere of light. He stood at its edge.

‘Fernando. What are you?’

His ugly face turned into the dark.

‘I am a coward.’

He walked away.

‘You should know, Horton, that your wife is in considerable pain,’ said Burroughs. He carried no weapon, not even a sword, and Horton considered rushing at him, but
Burroughs looked at him and said: ‘Do as you are told and I may tell you where she is.’

Burroughs walked over to his mother and hugged her. Mina Baxter’s eyes widened in surprise and her arms stiffened at her shoulders. Burroughs placed his nose into the side of her neck and
inhaled deeply, then let her go.

‘You smell like a dried-out tree stump,’ he said, stepping away. Then he turned and sat in the chair opposite Horton.

‘So,’ said Burroughs. ‘Waterman-Constable Charles Horton. I have waited a good while to speak to you. We were sorely interrupted by my mother’s beast when we first
met.’

‘My wife is safe?’

‘She is, within constrained limits. She has a badly injured shoulder, and is in great quantities of pain. She wept when I carried her, and begged for her life. We talked of the cosmos. She
has no access to food or water where I have left her, but I’m sure she can survive a day or two, though in considerable distress, certainly. Her prospects rest entirely on this
conversation.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I shall answer a question with a question. What do you know?’

‘I know that somebody – probably you – has killed the most recent assistant treasurers to St Helena. The last two men to be killed were called Suttle and Campbell, and I
believe you killed them, probably with poison derived from whatever process is being used to take gold from the rocks of this island, a process this woman here has only just told me of. You then
took them to the icehouse in the grounds of Robert Burroughs, alderman of the City of London and Proprietor of the East India Company. Robert Burroughs is, I believe, a relative of
yours.’

‘He is. My father was his brother. He died soon after we returned to England, and I was made a ward of my uncle.’

‘So, I assume these former assistant treasurers were killed to keep St Helena’s secret, though the circumstances were somewhat different to the earlier murders. Captain Thomas
Jenkins was the first man you killed, some fifteen years ago; he was with a whore, and was a noted attendant at London’s gaming tables. I assume he endangered the Company’s secret in
some way, and had to be got rid of. His killer left a strange mark on a dead whore – a mark I believe to be the Monad of John Dee.’

‘Good, yes. Very good.’

‘Two years later, Captain Robert Fox was pulled dead from the Thames. He was the subject of some scandal involving impropriety with small boys. And thus, he must have presented a problem
for those keeping all this secret.’

‘Yes. Fox was an inveterate interferer with small boys. He was no loss.’

‘But there was no Monad on his body.’

‘Well, there might have been, of course. The river could have washed it away. But no, I had moved on from such arcane plodding by then. I was growing up. John Dee’s cosmology held no
more appeal for me.’

‘And yet, you returned to the Monads.’

‘We shall come to that. Pray continue, Constable Horton.’

‘Nothing happened for more than a decade. But Benjamin Johnson discovered St Helena’s secret. He told his wife, and his wife began to send blackmail letters to Captain Suttle, a man
she had known previously. Suttle spoke about this to the Company, and it was agreed he too was a great risk to the secret. By extension, the other surviving assistant treasurer, Captain Campbell,
was a risk. They needed to be got rid of. So did the Johnsons.’