The Lamplighter (23 page)

“Then you believe the lady I have mentioned,” he asked, “for all her delicacy, might have been able to kill like a savage beast?”

There was another noise—the creak of someone coming down the stairs—and Stellmach, visibly ill at ease, answered in a hastening tone, “I would need to examine her and measure her skull, for there are many physical traits of the born killer, but many times the real indications are buried deep, and the examination would need to be very detailed.”

“But you would not discount it?”

“Her madness could be so great that she is capable of transformation.”

“Transformation?”

“I am most serious.”

“What sort of transformation?”

Stellmach spoke earnestly. “The great powers of women, the hidden powers, have been known for centuries and recorded in detail, but not in the medical texts, and you must know where to look.” He snapped up a pen and hunted frantically for a piece of paper. “May I write for you a list of books?”

“Books?” Groves tightened instinctively.

“The hidden history of hysteria, Inspector, which the other doctors ignore. It would be very good for you to visit the library and examine the evidence with your own eyes and tremble at the powers woman has unleashed over thousands of years, and which, under many names—”

But here he stopped, and froze as if caught in some crime, because the door knob had turned and a woman thrust her head into the room, I took it to be his frau, and she asked in a barking tone if he was ready to escort her to Jenners for Christmas shopping, and he smiled and begged her indulgence, saying he would only be another minute or two, and with great haste he scribbled out a scrawl of titles on a blank sheet, before ushering me out the door like I was a drunken sailor.

The listed books had daunting names, many in noxious Latin, and Groves had little intention of tracking them down until he returned to Central Office and was apprised of the reports, still surfacing from the Old Town in general and in particular from the Cowgate, of a monstrous figure glimpsed in the mist and shadows of the previous night. Descriptions were characterized only by a confounding lack of consistency: batlike, reptilian-skinned, scaled, silky black, beetroot red, bovine-eared, elegantly attired, man, ghoul, beast, apparition. Further, the wave of sightings seemed to unleash a tide of previously unmentioned encounters and memories: an ogrelike creature seen galloping in the Pentland Hills, an inhuman creature pursued by dogs near St. Bernard's Well, a ghost of formidable size inhabiting the mock Warlock Weir's House at the summer's International Exhibition (though claims of the last were easily attributable to canny publicity on the part of the organizing committee).

Moreover, he was informed that, as the investigation into Ainslie's business dealings had unearthed a ganglion of fraud, debt, and shady associations, Sheriff Fleming had made an approach to Seth Hogarth seeking more information, only to discover that the great tragedian was in St. Heriot's Hospital after tripping over a floorboard and plunging into the orchestra pit. The very idea that this might have been a cunningly contrived murder attempt, deliberately conceived to ensure the actor's silence, now troubled Groves deeply (as indeed did the Sheriff's investigation itself, which embarrassed him with its thoroughness). He declared his own intention to file a comprehensive report, and headed with a sense of escape to the library.

Though in truth he had little need for spectacles, the sensitive nature of his visit made him suddenly inclined to secrecy and, convinced his was a visage known all over Edinburgh, he procured a thick pair of lenses and a worsted jacket with an upturned collar, and made the brief journey to the Signet Library stumbling over runnels and buffeting hushed onlookers awaiting a verdict outside the Justiciary Court. Sweeping up to the top of the triumphal staircase, he was immediately intimidated by the deep ranks of books, the coffered dome, the pompous portraits and unforgiving silence, and he retreated cravenly to a corner, deposited himself in a leather-bound chair, and through his absurd glasses tried to make sense of the procedures without having to call for assistance. Ascertaining that a sheaf catalogue system was in place, and with Dr. Stellmach's scribbled list concealed in one hand, he was eventually able to locate the desired books—most of them grouped closely together—and he was on his way out the front door when he was informed that he was not permitted to leave the premises with such valuable items. Here he could have invoked his position or even his redoubtable fame by disclosing his true identity, but he prudently elected to sidle over to one of the substantial reading desks, arrange his miniature ziggurat of musty-smelling titles, and remove his pad and pencil to jot notes.

He read as a majestic shaft of sunlight, thickly populated with motes of dancing dust, swept across him like the beam of a slowly rotated lamp. The books were in scarred leather bindings and loaded with exacting typescripts and incomprehensible words. There was
Anatomy of Melancholy, Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, The Kingdom of Darkness,
the
Compendium Maleficarium
(three volumes),
Saducismus Triumphatus,
and the only title he was halfway acquainted with, the Scottish favorite
Satan's Invisible World Discovered
by the Reverend Sinclair, former professor of philosophy and mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. He struggled gamely at first, intending with great ambition to read every page before the sunlight faded, but he was soon frustrated, Stellmach's point eluding him, until some of the woodcuts slowly began to snare his attention and he incrementally became absorbed. These were books concerned with the folklore and perfidy of witches from the darkest ages to the most recent century, with frequent mentions of Edinburgh that invariably quickened his heart. He read of sabbats, orgies, seductions, shape changing, curses, spells, invocations, and nightmares and illicit dreams visited upon virtuous men. He read of Satan's propensity for capturing the minds of mournful maidens and leading them down the paths of iniquity. Of women who made stews of boiled children, walked on their backs, spoke in arcane languages, thrashed about, vomited strange objects, gushed blood from their orifices, and visited upon their enemies the most appalling species of violence. Of the Scottish witches Agnes Simpson, who raised fierce tempests; Isobel Grierson, who turned herself into a cat (the book did not suggest of which variety); and Isobel Gowdie, who soared through the skies and suckled Satan in 1662.

This was what Stellmach had directed him to, the madness of women in an awesome record of degeneracy and diabolism, now all but buried under the quilt of the Enlightenment and the silk of superstition. And the more Groves read, the more he was transfixed.

He learned of women who raise mists and flames to muddle the senses and affect pious demeanors to camouflage their nefarious intentions. He read of the symptoms of possession—debased imaginations, phenomenal strength, an emaciated appearance, and the ability to speak literary and grammatical Latin. He found repeated mentions of incubi, the insatiable demons frequently summoned by witches to quench their lusts and do their bidding, and who sometimes appear as men, sometimes as satyrs, and sometimes as beasts and illusions. He examined the dreadful family tree of demons, including Aerial Demons, who assume bodies made of the dense air of hell and stalk the earth searching for victims; Water Demons, who live softly with women until their anger is inexplicably and irreversibly aroused; and Lucifugous Demons, who walk only at night and kill strangers with some breath or touch. And with an accelerating pulse he read of
metamorphosis,
the theory accepted by Thomas Aquinas and sanctioned by Augustine, in which the devil forms an image in the mind of the witch and from this immaterial state knits a second body to correspond to that projection, indistinguishable from a real being.

By the time he was finished he had a notebook bursting with arcana: everything from the location of the
stigmata diaboli
(the devil's marks, most often buried in the privy regions), the demons' fear of salt, a list of prayers to be used as talismans, and numerous notes reminding him to check any future murder scenes for drips of wax (the devil was said to keep a lighted candle up his excretory passage). He left the library with his mind swarming with appalling images, convinced that Edinburgh itself had been a veritable seminary for witches and devil worshippers, and seriously contemplating whether he might be justified in extracting a confession from Evelyn with glowing irons and rawhide whips.

When he reached home some yellowish urchins were skipping rope outside his very door:

The childish voices, resisting the charm of the first bedtime prayers he had muttered in fifty years, whirled and weaved around visions of orgiastic sabbats and ritualistic attacks, trawled through his dreams, and were still with him now, huffing and clanking away like Arthur Stark's printing press, as he crossed graveyard-quiet Princes Street past stirring market gardeners and edgy piemen, with his head still throbbing and his heart pounding in his throat. He was heading directly for the Old Town, where he had Evelyn under constant surveillance and where his assiduous sentinels, making no secret of their presence, had reported mysterious shadows at her windows and unusual noises from inside her room (the men had been able to prove nothing, though, for knocking on her door had found her alone, ruffled as though having been disturbed from sleep, and staring at a single candle fluttering on her table). Her neighbors, too, agreed that she was an odd one, keeping unnatural hours, often departing for walks in the middle of the night, and harboring an uncommon affinity for homeless animals. None of this constituted damning evidence, of course, but neither did it dampen Groves's suspicion that he was dealing with an unbalanced woman who inevitably would spill secrets of a dark and diabolical nature.

But presently climbing Candlemaker Row he found Pringle, to his surprise, calling him back and redirecting him into the Cowgate and, from there, to the nearby mortuary, a building that already featured regularly in his nightmares.

He shuddered with a now familiar mixture of dread and anticipation. Clearly another body had been found, and the implications of that alone were staggering. All the defiant humor the city had generated—at the University they were speculating that the killer might simply be boosting his shares in the Edinburgh Cemetery Company—could not conceal a darkness that bore talons and a fog that tasted of fear. And Pringle's evasiveness suggested a new form of victim or a new manner of death: perhaps the body had been mutilated in a style more gruesome than could be accurately recounted. But that it was the work of Evelyn the witch—or Evelyn the devil's spawn, or Evelyn's own incubus—he knew in his very marrow.

“It's her, isn't it?” he muttered to Pringle as they passed a red-eyed cat.

But Pringle for some reason seemed amazed. “Aye…” he agreed in a whisper.

And when they opened the green-painted mortuary doors Groves braced himself.

The caretaker was in the middle of the sawdusted floor surrounded by bell jars and bloated organs, inspecting the body of a fully naked woman laid prostrate on the central slab. When he heard the two policemen approach he turned and retreated deferentially, saying, “Not a scratch anywhere, gentlemen. This was no murder. The death certificate has been signed.”

“I had Professor Whitty called to the scene of death,” Pringle explained to Groves. “He was the nearest residing doctor.”

But Groves was barely listening. He was staring at the white spotless body with racing eyes, unable to organize his senses but suspecting some unaccountable horror.

“Who…who is this?” he asked hoarsely.

“Sir?” Pringle said, looking at him curiously. “Did you not say you knew it was her?”

Groves squinted, confused, but then the realization cleaved him like a sword.

His eyes darted back and forth between the corpse's chopped hair, the dainty ridges of the spine, the cleft of the petite posterior, and the immaculate alabaster of the skin, and he felt helpless, confused, abandoned, and betrayed. Pringle was saying something to him, but the words seemed spoken in a separate room.

Surely, he thought, it could not end this way. But neither could he deny the terrible evidence before his eyes.

It was Evelyn Todd who lay before him on the ungodly mortuary slab.

“Where did you find her?” he said, barely audible.

Pringle looked at him. “In…in Belgrave Crescent, sir.”

“Where Smeaton lay?”

“In precisely the same position, sir.”

“There were no signs of attack?”

“None, sir, that are visible.”

“Then how…how did she die?”

“They will drain her stomach, sir, but they believe she has poisoned herself.”

Groves clamped his teeth together and felt a violent skirmish of emotions. There was disappointment: the murder spree might now be over, but there would be no triumphant conviction to be recorded in his diaries. There was an irrational resentment: in death the waif had taken her secrets with her, perhaps spitefully. There was a flicker of pity: perhaps he had misread the seriousness of her instability from the start, or underestimated the legitimacy of her grievances. There was even a modicum of doubt: perhaps she had nothing to do with the murders after all and now herself had become a victim of the terrible forces. But more than anything else there was a deeply troubling tremble of something dark and unspeakable, a shameful frisson he experienced when his eyes caressed her pale, bare-skinned body.