The Kingdom of Bones (8 page)

Turner-Smith bypassed the public bar for the more respectable saloon, where the drink came from another side of the same counter, but the extra penny bought a better class of room with upholstered seating, mahogany paneling, and waiter service. He settled alone in a three-sided booth, ordered a glass of Madeira wine, and paid for it when it came.

He said to the waiter, “I shall be joined by a gentleman, name of Sayers. He’ll be coming over from the playhouse. Make sure he can find me when he gets here, will you?”

The waiter dipped his head and went away. Turner-Smith laid his stick across the seats beside him, stretched out his bad leg, and settled back to wait. Behind him in the next booth was a party of commercial travelers; he eavesdropped on their conversation for a while, but soon felt his attention start to wander.

Children of the poor. They were everywhere. He’d been met by a crowd of them begging outside the railway station, and seen them scatter at the approach of a special constable. It was as if the growth of cities was like a gaseous reaction; for a certain volume of prosperity, an even greater volume of poverty was produced. The result was great public works and proud civic buildings and range upon range of desperate hovels, all standing as one under the same dirty sky.

After a while, he took out his watch and checked it. Sayers had undertaken to meet him during the play’s second act. He’d addressed his note to the owner of the
Purple Diamond
company, but it was this Sayers who’d responded. More than half an hour had passed since then.

Someone was standing over him. He looked up as the waiter spoke. “The gentleman is here now, sir,” the waiter said, and moved aside for his visitor.

“I’m Tom Sayers,” the man said, and took a seat on the opposite side of the booth. The waiter hovered for a moment, but the newcomer shook his head.

When the waiter had moved away, the man faced Turner-Smith and said, “What can I do for you, Superintendent?”

“I’d been hoping to speak to Mister Whitlock himself.”

“I’m Edmund Whitlock’s acting manager. I handle all the company’s practical affairs. If I can’t help you with it, then it probably can’t be done.”

Turner-Smith considered the man before him for a moment, and then decided that he could speak as one gentleman to another. They were more likely to have interests in common than in conflict.

“Take a look at this, please, Sayers,” he said, and placed before him one of the pasted-up sheets that suggested a link between paupers mutilated without apparent motive and the stage company’s progress around the country.

The other man read for a while, and then glanced up.

“Some of our less notable receptions.”

“The dates, Mister Sayers. Look at the dates.”

He read on for a while. Then he sat back in the attitude of a man conceding an argument that had already been won. “This is very revealing,” he said.

And Turner-Smith, who for the past minute had been given the opportunity for a closer study of his visitor, said, “Are you by any chance wearing greasepaint, Mister Sayers?”

The man threw the paper onto the table between them.

“Ah,” he said. “There you have me.”

Under the table, Turner-Smith reached out for his sword stick. He took care not to signal his intention. “Yet you are not listed on the playbills among the actors,” he said.

“Very true.” The man smiled. “I can see that you are too good a detective for me, Superintendent.”

A few moments later, the man rose from the booth and walked out of the saloon. The four commercial travelers in the next booth were laughing so hard at a story that none of them noticed his departure. One took a draft from his mug and leaned back in his seat, only to splutter it out all over the table.

His fellows were slow to catch on. Their humor ebbed, where his had vanished in a flash.

“What the devil?” he said. “Something pronged me!” And he turned in his seat to find out what it was.

All clustered for a closer look at his discovery. An inch of pointed blade protruded from the horsehair back of the bench on which he’d been sitting. “Lor’, Jack,” said the one with the walrus mustache. “They’ve sat you in one of them iron maiden thingies.”

“Iron maiden be buggered,” said the wounded one, and stood up to look over into the next booth.

There sat the white-haired, stern-looking man who’d come limping in on a stick about three-quarters of an hour before. His back was to them, his head bowed.

The stick was in two pieces now. The hollow shaft lay across the table by his emptied glass. The other, the blade and handle part, had been thrust through his chest and had him pinned in place like a bug.

James Caspar was across the alleyway and in through the stage door in no more than a dozen strides. The Silent Man pulled the door shut behind him and then followed along a snaking route through the backstage areas toward the wings. As he walked, Caspar shed his jacket, his cravat, and his collar. He let them fall and the Silent Man collected all of them in his wake. Out came the cuff links, his sleeves shaken loose. Up five steps and through a door, and ahead of them the fly ropes and the lights of the stage. He put his hand in his hair and tousled it, as befitted a man who’d been unjustly condemned at the end of the first act and was now being returned to life and honor, thanks to the remarkable insight and unstinting efforts of a sixty-year-old detective with rouged cheeks and a corset.

Out on stage, Whitlock had already spoken Caspar’s cue. It came at the end of an entire page of speech, delivered to a grieving Louise and building to a rip-roaring climax that usually brought the house to its feet as the lover she’d thought hanged was restored to her with a flourish.

Seeing no sign of Caspar, the Low Comedian had drawn breath for an ad lib to cover a stage wait. Before he could deliver it, Caspar sprang into view, not so much entering from the wings as being ejected from them. He flung down the hooded cloak of the mysterious beggar who had been seen outside the window in the middle of the second act—all part of the detective’s brilliant plan to fool the true culprit into revealing himself—and threw out his arms to receive Louise. She ran to him and hit him like a train, and as the audience cheered their embrace, Whitlock quietly moved upstage of the pair ready for his next revelation.

At the back of the auditorium, Sayers had returned to the spot where he’d been standing earlier. As those around him whooped and whistled, Sayers nursed a heart like a heavy stone. The reason for this was a short conversation that he’d had with Louise in the brief interval between the play’s two acts.

It had gone like this:

Tom!

What is it?

I need to ask you something.

Anything.

Do you think James—Mister Caspar—likes me at all?

A silence.

Tom?

But everybody likes you, Louise.

Later, when the evening’s entertainment was over and the players were all leaving the theater, they were confronted by a considerable police presence around the public house next door. Two wagons were drawn up on the street and a large number of uniformed men had surrounded the building and were turning onlookers away. Lanterns had been set for extra light, and sheets and a stretcher were being taken inside. A man from the
Salford Chronicle
was talking to people on the pavement, trying to separate fact from fiction and getting some of the most enthusiastic accounts from those who had been nowhere near the events. It was a fight over a woman; it was the work of a gang over from Regent Road; two people were dead; three people were dead; everyone in the pub had been massacred. A drunk had run amuck with a knife. Sailors had fought with locals. It was the so-called Buffalo Bill’s Gang, local scuttlers stirred to a violent frenzy by their unreasoning passion for the penny-dreadful magazines.

Sayers made it his business to get the women away as quickly as possible.

Caspar was nowhere to be seen.

ELEVEN

B
efore he went for his train, Sebastian Becker went to church. It was his first visit for some time. The doors were unlocked but there was barely any light in the dawn sky outside, and it seemed he would have the place to himself for a while. When he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the fall of the iron latch echoed like a gunshot all the way up to the vaulted roof.

Perhaps this was a mistake. One look at his surroundings and again he felt some of the deep spiritual terror that he’d known as a small child, making its mark that he knew would never be fully erased. The Catholic Church, the same the world over. Whether it was a cathedral in Cologne or a mission in California, in their essence they never varied. Candles and gilt, darkness and mystery.

And suffering. Always suffering. In every image, in every hymn, and in every prayer; and it was always inflicted by a God who spoke in Latin, and borne by a Christ who resembled no Jew that Sebastian had ever met. As if the real Christ had been insufficient for the Church’s purposes, so they’d manufactured their own.

He knelt briefly in the aisle, and crossed himself. It took no effort to remember the procedure. He wanted to ignore it, but could not see how. The training ran too deep and he knew that he would freeze, unable to continue until the omission had been corrected.

Once that was over, he took a seat at the front of the church. Where the congregation sat, right in the front row. There were oil lamps around the high altar that had been burning all through the night. Behind the altar, in an ornate frame, towered some magnificent Renaissance painting that he could barely see. Before this shone a cross; in gold or brass, from here it was impossible to tell. He stared at it almost in defiance; refusing to pray, refusing even to admit the possibility of prayer.

So why was he here?

Last night’s news had shaken him. Turner-Smith not just dead, but murdered. Sebastian’s insides churned like a bag of snakes when he tried to come to terms with it. He should have been the one to pursue the information. Then Turner-Smith would be alive. But then Sebastian might well have suffered his superior’s fate in his place. Unless, by conducting himself differently, he reached a different outcome.

But perhaps his mentor had died because he had made some discovery that would prove vital to the investigation. In which case, his achievement and his sacrifice were bound together. For Sebastian to have replaced him and survived would be to negate both. While to make the same discovery and die in his place…well, in considering that one, Sebastian found proof that he did not have the makings of a saint.

There would be a funeral. A police funeral, with full honors. The streets of the town would be taken over for the procession, and people would turn out because all those black-plumed horses and men in uniform would be something to see. But Sebastian could never picture a funeral without thinking of the white coffin of his sister, small enough for one undertaker’s man to carry in his arms.

He’d been a few days short of his ninth birthday, and death had meant little to him then. Grief, though…that had been everywhere he turned, terrifying and oppressive. The house draped in black, the downstairs rooms crowded with somber people. He hardly dared speak. Even the appearance of his living self seemed to be taken as an affront, and so he kept out of his mother’s way as much as possible.

He’d dared to wonder if, given time, this turn of events might mean that he’d receive a fuller share of her affections. But as his ninth birthday came and went without notice, and the birthday after that, each overshadowed by the grimmer anniversary that preceded it, he grew to realize that not only was his dead sibling still loved, but loved more than he.

Why had his mother felt the need to write that letter to Turner-Smith? Did it indicate a concern that she’d never otherwise let him see? The experience of a lifetime suggested not. It was merely her way to place her mark on his affairs. She’d always responded to any of his plans or proposals by pointing out their potential for failure. She considered herself entitled to her opinion.

“Praying’s a skill like any other, Sebastian,” said a voice behind him. Sebastian looked back and saw Father Alexander, parish priest for the past eighteen years, in the aisle and moving toward him. He must have been elsewhere in the church, and had come in through one of the side doors. “I can’t say I’ve seen you practice it much, lately.”

Sebastian said, “Turner-Smith was murdered last night.”

“Turner-Smith?”

“My superintendent.”

“God have mercy on his soul. How did it happen?”

“The circumstances are unclear. I am to go there with what I know, and if there is an arrest to be made, I shall make it. If there is a God, may he guide my hand.”

The priest’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “
If,
Sebastian?”

Sebastian rose to his feet.

“Another time, Father,” he said.

TWELVE

A
lthough it stood on a street in where there were a number of lodging houses, Mrs. Mack put up no board or sign, nor did she advertise. A theatrical landlady had no use for business from the public, who might expect to keep normal people’s hours. Theatricals and other stage people came home late at night, and many would sleep until midmorning. They’d expect supper at some unsocial time and then an hour or two of society after that. Their talk was of a world known only to their profession. And even now, in the minds of many theirs was not a respectable life.

Constantly on the move, they made few friends in the places they visited. Their only unguarded contact was with each other. Stage folk were like one great, fluid family, and in that family it was often the theatrical landlady who took the mother’s role: offering shelter and a welcome, keeping a special lookout for the young, and demanding moral standards from all who came under their roof. The most roaring reprobate of the saloon-bar lock-in would be as meek as a good son in his landlady’s presence.

Mrs. Mack was one of the legends. There was a Mr. Mack, but there is not much to be said about him.

It was after ten on the Saturday morning when Tom Sayers woke. He was usually one of life’s early risers, but the previous night he had been unable to sleep. Borrowing a latchkey from the kitchen, he had taken himself out for a moonlit walk. He was not a man who feared assault at any hour, and by then it was so late that even coshers and mashers would have crawled off to bed. He got as far as the wide river that divided the two boroughs—slow-moving, sparkling, dirty and dark as oil. He had walked with his mind in disorder, and returned with it feeling no more settled.

Lily’s words still rang in his mind. She seemed to be saying that there was no such thing as happiness, per se. It was more a matter of working out what will make you happy, and knowing you’re on your way to it. Always believing that it’s the destination, when in fact it’s the journey.

So, where was he going? Most men of his age had begun to establish themselves in one way or another. Wives, children, some steady form of income. But not Tom Sayers. Sayers performed all the functions of a businessman but he lived the life of a gypsy, always on the move, accumulating little. He had some savings and paid rent on a small house in Brixton that was his home for their London dates, but nothing of any more substance than that.

He’d begun to consider the idea that he might get himself off the road, perhaps set himself up as a personal manager to a select list of clients, dealing exclusively with their affairs. He could picture himself with a small office in Covent Garden, framed playbills in the waiting room and a clerk for the correspondence. One or two performers outside the company had expressed a wish that he might take on such a role, on occasions when he’d helped them out with some personal difficulty. However, when he allowed himself to imagine what form such a new life might take, there was only one client who ever featured in the scene with any consistency.

Louise. At times like this, he ached at the very thought of her. In his mind, he would relive the moment when she’d fallen into his arms. He’d take those few seconds of confusion and tease them out into an entire marriage of their souls that was timeless, graceful, and slow. James Caspar made no appearance in this world of his imagination. Sayers had cut him from the script.

The day would surely come when the
Purple Diamond
tour would have to end, if only because there would be no one left in England who had not seen it. When the end arrived, it was hard to say what might happen; whether Whitlock would pay out money for another play and raise a new company out of the old, or return to good old Shakespeare
(but not his Romeo again, please God, not his Romeo),
or buy himself that cottage down in Kent to see out his time in some more sedate manner.

One way or another, there would be upheaval. With any luck, Caspar would go his own way. And that, Sayers felt, would be the time to broach the subject of offering his personal service to Louise. Anything sooner would not be appropriate.

He’d spent another fitful hour or two lying in his bed and staring at the moonlight through the curtains, until finally sleep had taken pity and claimed him.

His was one of the attic rooms, three flights up with a part-sloping ceiling and a hook on the roof beam to hang his shaving mirror. His window was really a skylight. Between the washstand and his cabin trunk there was little room to spare.

He threw back the covers and sat on the side of the bed. He put his face in his hands and tried to massage it into something that might resemble a man awake. As he was doing this, there was a discreet tap at his door.

Very discreet. Almost womanly.

Panic began to stir in Tom Sayers’ breast. Whatever this was, he was unprepared. He slept in his underwear, and his underwear was a testament to the longevity of unbleached wool and his skills with a darning needle.

“Yes?” he said.

It was a man’s voice that answered. “Mister Sayers?” But it was not a voice that he recognized.

“Who is it?” he said, reaching for the trousers that he’d hung by their braces on the end of his bed.

Instead of a reply, his door burst open. Two policemen were across the room and onto him before he could respond. They seized his arms and held him fast while another, this one with a sergeant’s stripes, came in close behind them with handcuffs at the ready. They hauled him to his feet; and when he began to struggle, they turned him and ran him back to pin him against the wall. The impact drove the breath from his body and gave them a few moments of dominance.

Last into the room came a dark-eyed man of around thirty. He glanced around as the handcuffs were being placed over Sayers’ wrists and screwed down, the uniformed men containing his struggles and ignoring his protests.

“Watch those hands,” the younger man warned. “He was a prizefighter, once.”

Clearly, the situation was of this man’s making. Not in a uniform himself, he commanded those who were. Sayers managed a look at him over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Sir!” he said. “This is outrageous!”

The plainclothesman did not respond immediately. When the sergeant was done with the cuffs, he said, “Search his possessions.” Only then did he stand before Sayers and weigh him up from one end to the other, before looking him in the eye.

“You dare speak to me of outrage?” he said calmly. “Please do not test me so, Mister Sayers. I have a certain pride in my professional restraint. I would not wish to lose that over someone like you.”

Sayers doubled his fists and thrust the handcuffs in the air. “Explain yourself,” he said, “and then explain this!”

“I am Detective Inspector Sebastian Becker,” the plainclothesman said. “And you know why I am here. Pretend ignorance if that is your only defense. It will not save you from the hangman’s rope.”

“Sir…” said the sergeant, and all turned to look. Becker’s threat of the hangman had only served to bewilder Sayers even more. He felt like an actor who’d walked through the wrong stage door into the midst of another company’s drama. As he craned to see what new disclosure was to be sprung upon him, he became aware that there were more policemen on the landing outside his room.

With some difficulty, the sergeant had opened up his cabin trunk. As always, it stood on its end, so that it could be opened as a traveling wardrobe. One side contained shallow drawers and compartments. The other was a hanging space for suits of clothes and linen. These had been torn from their hangers and lay crammed into the bottom of the trunk, while the space set aside for them was filled with something else.

In a private exhibition of curiosities in London, Sayers had once been shown an anatomical model in wax; it was of a woman, cut from clavicle to pubis, her belly a removable lid that revealed the gestating fetus within. Perfectly formed, but imperfectly understood, the unborn was depicted as a tightly packed homunculus of adult proportions.

It was in similar manner that the slaughtered body of fifteen-year-old Arthur Steffens had been folded and crushed, upside down, into the confines of Tom Sayers’ trunk.

Sebastian Becker crouched by the inverted cadaver and looked it all over with care. He touched nothing until he came to the head and then, with great delicacy and some distaste, he knelt and reached in and teased something from the boy’s partly open jaws. It was a piece of paper, screwed up into a ball and stuffed into the young man’s mouth. The body had been dead for long enough to grow rigid, and Becker took some time to extract the paper without tearing it.

Sayers felt his legs giving way. The policemen holding him on either side sensed him going, and pulled him back to his feet. His mind had turned blank. He was so distressed at this discovery of the young boy’s situation that, for a moment, he had ceased to question his own.

Becker opened up the crumpled sheet and smoothed it out. Still down on one knee, he laid the unfolded paper on the floor and contemplated it for some time.

Then he said, “The last time I saw this, it was in the hand of Superintendent Turner-Smith.” He looked up.

Sayers could offer him nothing.

“Don’t play the innocent, Sayers,” the detective said, rising. “Clive Turner-Smith is the name of the man you murdered last night. That would have been just before you came back here and did for his informant.” He looked to the men holding Sayers. “Get him dressed,” he said. “And nobody touch the boy. I’ll call for the police surgeon.”

They let Sayers struggle into his trousers and boots. They refused to take off the handcuffs and so his shirt, coat, and waistcoat had to be slung over his shoulders. In this humiliating state of disarray, he was bundled from his room and out onto the landing. He attempted at least to tuck his shirttails into his trousers, but was only able to make half a job of it.

The building was full of policemen. He couldn’t count them. He could see more outside, through the windows. It wasn’t difficult to imagine an entire hostile army of them, with Sayers himself at the center of their inward-facing circle. As they marched him down the stairs, men on each landing held the other guests back and obliged them to stay in their rooms. Once Sayers had gone by the guests were allowed out, and on each level they gathered at the balustrades to look down the stairwell and watch him go.

Down in the hallway stood Edmund Whitlock. For once the old tragedian was stricken by genuine emotion; his eyes were watery and red, and his hand trembled as he folded and refolded a handkerchief to dab them with.

As they went by him Becker said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mister Whitlock.”

Whitlock seemed not to hear the detective. He was looking past him, and at Sayers.

“Oh, Tom,” he said, helplessly. “What have you done? I feel only a great sadness for you.”

“I have done nothing,” Sayers began to protest, but a shove in his back propelled him onward.

Out on the street, the police were holding back a crowd. A horse-drawn Black Maria van awaited him. Windowless, its panels riveted and strong, its rear door open and ready.

Sayers looked back toward the lodging house. It was a tall, narrow building, with steps up to the front door and railings to the pavement. There, in the sitting-room window, stood Louise Porter. Her face was a pale mask of disbelief. Behind Louise stood James Caspar.

As Sayers watched, Caspar placed a solicitous hand on Louise’s shoulder and leaned in to murmur something in her ear. It seemed to Sayers that, despite the distance and the window glass between them, Caspar was making the gesture as much for Sayers to see as for Louise’s comfort.

His escort took his hesitation for rebellion. Seizing him by the arms, they ran him up the steps at the back of the wagon and propelled him inside before slamming and padlocking the door.