The Lamplighter (6 page)

“Were there any indications?” he asked uncomfortably. He seemed to remember that Canavan had been on the verge of proposing.

“There were warnings, I suppose.”

“How did she explain herself?”

Canavan seemed unwilling to elaborate. “I think she had lived long enough without security,” he said, generous enough to make excuses for her.

But McKnight suddenly saw with great clarity that the lass had rejected Canavan simply for the condition of his cuffs. And though the Irishman might publicly disavow any disappointment—and might indeed still harbor an abiding affection—McKnight was sure that, for an idealist, such an act of cynicism would have been a bitter blow.

“When I married my own Meg,” he now found himself saying, not sure how it would help, “the two of us had no savings and few prospects, but we had each other, and by God that was enough. And those early years were tough, let me tell you, but we fought through it, and I believe we were never happier.” And for a moment he was lost in a delightful nostalgia for those sunny days prior to the onset of his wife's pneumonia, when it seemed they might live forever on the strength of the one's philosophies and the other's practicality.

“Truly, I envy you…” Canavan managed, but at the same time he was dismayed by his own insincerity. For he had seen an old calotype portrait of the married couple against a backdrop of St. Giles, and no amount of charity could suppress the notion that the much-mourned Mrs. McKnight, for all her exemplary qualities, had a face that would not have looked out of place glowering from one of the cathedral cornices.

Which left both men wondering, as they continued into the cutting breeze, why it was so often the case that an angel could have the heart of a demon and a gargoyle could have the heart of a saint.

D
EEP INTO
the following night a clinging haar swept off the firth with the east wind and crept like a tide of floodwater across the fields between Craigmillar and Liberton, piling up against the barbed walls of Drumgate Cemetery and, eventually surmounting them, drifting in threads and knots around the tangled sycamores and lichen-blotted headstones. Well after midnight Canavan heard a groan and an unearthly creak, like that of a crypt being opened, and saw a whorl of disturbed mist rise up and dissipate in the southeast corner. He picked up his feeble lamp and headed out to investigate, though in truth he was not concerned.

Ominous noises were familiar to Drumgate. Dating to the days of James IV, the old cemetery was set on an acre of sloping earth and bramble between the ruins of a chapel and a burned-out hunting lodge, the resting place of everyone from lords advocate and Covenanters to consumptive peasants and Gilmerton coal miners. Before it was finally closed by the Chief Medical Officer in 1870, it had become the cheapest available burial ground for the city's poor and destitute, and opportunistic superintendents, seeing to it that not an inch of earth was left unturned, had shoehorned tinderbox caskets and canvas-wrapped cholera victims into graves often scandalously close to the surface. The crowding of this subterranean population, together with a legacy of subsurface cavities from the body-snatching days (the cemetery's isolation made it an easy target), meant that, years after its official closure, it was still prone to belated settlings and unexpected tremors, its air still polluted with the occasional eruption of some long-brewed putrescence. As well, though there were no cats in the cemetery (unlike at central Greyfriars, where they ran in swarms) and no foxes, badgers, or even birds, a sizable colony of long-eared bats had taken residence in a decayed ash tree close to the center of the yard, and, squeaking and flapping, they would regularly wheel out on some nocturnal expedition. All of which meant only that there was no shortage of explanations for any sound, disturbance, or apparition emerging from the ruptured earth, and no real reason for Canavan to investigate other than an ingrained sense of duty and a simple need for purpose.

Rumors that the place was haunted—a malevolent demon, they said, or a specter of supernatural terror—most likely had been cultivated by insecure sextons hoping to ward off the medical inspectors in the 1860s. But the reports of desecration ultimately had become so frequent, and so inexplicable, that the Town Council had gone to the lengths of appointing a nominal superintendent and a night watchman: families of historical renown were buried here and, notwithstanding the cemetery's official closure, there was still the odd addition to a family tomb. But though not ill-disposed to the belief in miracles or any other permutation of the supernatural, Canavan himself had in four years of solitary nights encountered nothing that raised even a mild shudder. And certainly he had seen no demon.

With the lantern held at shoulder height he now picked his way diligently down the curling paths. He knew every headstone, plinth, and cracked entablature, every rock, thorn, drooping branch and berry of cotoneaster. Where possible he avoided crossing the graves themselves, but many of the paths were so narrow and uncertain that quite often he had no option but to pick his steps over the consecrated plots and hold his breath respectfully. In the southeast corner, where the sound had seemed to issue, he turned in a circle, holding the lamp high above the mist, trying to find an anomaly.

There was nothing immediately apparent. He dropped to his haunches and made a sweep of the earth. He prodded around amid the rotting leaves. He angled the light at the gravestones, the table monuments, the sarcophagi, the bowed trees, and looked pensively at the domain of stars. The mist gathered at his side and oozed around him. He glanced back across the jumble of crosses, fractured obelisks, and fluted columns to the superintendent's cottage and the two-story cylindrical guardhouse, his second home, which in the light of the gibbous moon stood out like a castle turret in a sea of fog. He inhaled the frosty air, satisfied that there was nothing amiss but unable to reconcile a curious sense of disappointment.

It was ostensibly a miserable job, of indeterminate duration, offering no prospects and paying a pittance. When not performing his perfunctory rounds he spent the entire night in the tower with a rug draped over his legs, nibbling at his meager rations and reading academic texts provided most graciously by Professor McKnight. In lieu of a university education, the expenses of which were far beyond him, he now studied every subject from biology and astronomy to rhetoric and metaphysics, so that, while physically confined to a watchtower in a dour Edinburgh graveyard, his mind capered from primeval slush pools to the cusp of the very heavens. He was currently alternating among Brown's
Lectures on the Human Mind,
Thoreau's
Walden,
a tattered Douai Catholic Bible (a frequent companion; he was a self-educated student of Bible translations), and the numerous books of moral philosophy to which inclination made him most partial.

Canavan came from a family of ill-fated Galway coopers and from the start seemed destined for physical labor—quarryman, coalman, malt-man—and the sort of menial tasks which were in truth far beneath his capabilities but to which his altruism inevitably directed him for fear of depriving some stranger of a more glamorous vocation. He was particularly sensitive to the brutality of comparison, and shirked any public exhibition of contentment that might throw another life into unfavorable relief. He was prepared to be uncompetitive—even in love, withdrawing from the pursuit of Emily's affections upon learning of a rival suitor—but only, paradoxically, because he felt so powerful: capable of wearing defeat with equanimity and simultaneously sparing the weaker and more volatile.

He felt most comfortable with McKnight, but in fact, for all his owlish hours and meager income, he maintained a wide field of acquaintances and was never less than adaptable, generously adjusting his manner and concerns among the Irish of the Cowgate, his festive companions in the shebeens, and the prostitutes of Happy Land. His association with the last might to a stranger have seemed the most puzzling—all the more so because he consistently rejected their sympathetic advances—but he was drawn to such fallen women by a powerful need to provide them with a male presence that was not carnal, parasitic, or admonishing (he had little interest in lecturing them). Hardy and tragic, with shoulder-length hair, doleful eyes, thickset arms, and a chest of considerable girth, he might well have caused many a female heart to flutter, but in intimacy he was hindered by a tremendous flush of impermanence—the implacable conviction that his life would be truncated without the realization of those things generally associated with happiness: marriage, progeny, a steady accumulation of years culminating in a peaceful surrender. But the profundity of this belief, which could be distinguished sharply from self-pity, afforded him a sort of transcendence: the ability to be unfettered by selfish and materialistic concerns, and the gift of savoring each new day, and each new friend, as an inexhaustible well.

Presently he released a despondent sigh and pushed himself to his feet. Satisfied that there had been no intrusion, but with his feelings still unresolved, he began sauntering in a circuit back to the guardhouse, flashing his lamp left and right at the graves like a loving matron in a dormitory. He favored the ornate stones of the southern wall, as always, where among the bunched scrolls, cherubs, drapery, and carved roses were the epitaphs that so invariably moved him.

And, most affecting of all, a comparatively recent epitaph that bespoke an intolerable tragedy: twenty-six-year-old Veronica, dead on December 25, 1865, and buried with her daughter, Phoebe, born and died on the very same day:

It was a terrible and exquisite thing, to have a heart that was not a muscle but a wound. McKnight, for one, would have found no logic in squandering pity on the unknown dead, but in sentiment the Professor only saw vulnerability, while in his own Canavan found a home.

He suddenly heard a noise—a thud—from the guardhouse, and a stir of activity: the musical clatter of his pencil. He narrowed his eyes, staring, but from a distance, with the tower unlit and the lamp in his hand, it was difficult to detect anything out of order. A knot of moonlit mist had temporarily enveloped the guardhouse in any case, and when it passed on, trailing its torn pennants, there was no indication of any presence. Clearly something had fallen, he decided—a book left in a precarious position—and after a few cautious moments, listening intently, he set off on a more direct return course.

When he arrived in the proximity of the tower, however, with the lamp creaking in its brace, he perceived further activity and saw what looked like a great inky shadow detaching from the window and soaring through shreds of mist.

For a moment he was frozen, unsure what he had witnessed and unwilling to trust his senses. But then he heard the great beating of leathery wings and, turning, discerned a squadron of squealing bats returning to the bowl of the ash tree.

He breathed out, satisfied with the corollary, and stepped into the tower to find that the Bible had indeed fallen to the floor with his notebook and pencil. Setting his lamp in place and resuming his seat, he drew the rug over his legs, huddled against the cold, and sat watching the breakers of mist swell and crash across the old cemetery and the last of the agitated bats file one by one into their nest.

He hoped that the solitude was not playing tricks on his imagination. It was part of his unforgiving fate that, as much as he felt at home in the presence of others, the majority of his time was spent alone. And there was always the possibility in such circumstances that a man might hunger for company of even the darkest and most inexplicable kind. So he now made a firm resolve to resist such inclinations, no matter how attractive, with all the power of his common sense.

It was only when he returned to the Bible—he had been studying the Gospel According to St. John—that he noticed that a single page had been torn raggedly from the binding.

He could find no explanation in reason or intuition.

B
Y THE TIME
the mist had reached the garden cemetery at Warriston, on the other side of Edinburgh, it had developed into a fog
as thick as the broth my dear mother once cooked
(Groves would later write),
though not half as warm
. The Inspector, wrapped tight in his uniform greatcoat, looked down at the ravaged grave at his feet and was given cause to remember the note the police doctor had appended to Smeaton's death certificate: “Most Curious.” He sighed and snapped open his pocket watch. It was not yet noon.

Much larger and newer than Drumgate, Warriston Cemetery was arranged in a curvilinear network of pathways and graves ranked as precisely as New Town villas: Gothic shrines, neat Romanesque vaults, Ionic pillars, and Grecian urns in exacting and reverent order. In a triangle of the cemetery beside the gurgling Water of Leith, cut off from the rest of the yard by an embankment of the Edinburgh and Leith Railway, Groves now stood with Pringle, a couple of constables from the Stockbridge substation, a frustrated photographer, and an apprehensive cemetery superintendent, staring down at the brutally exhumed body of Colonel Horace Munnoch, “A Christian and a Soldier.”

The Colonel's wizened remains, attired in the scarlet doublet, withered feather bonnet, and tartan of the Seaforth Highlanders, and with an impressive array of medals and clasps at his breast, had been dragged from the casket and dumped on the ground with his head bent grotesquely and the eyeless sockets staring past Groves's boots to the lines of wide-flung dirt. The chest had long collapsed, the uniform was discolored, and the legs were still dangling into the hastily dug pit. Blackbirds were waiting patiently on nearby branches to raid the disturbed earth.

Pringle was typically informative. “He saw action in the Kaffir Wars and the Crimea, I think, sir. He owned a lot of land—he was the fifteenth Laird of Strathrae in succession, something like that. He lived in Moray Place but spent most of his time in the clubs. He gave a lot of his money to Church interests. To the Magdalen Hospital. To orphanages.” Some years earlier Pringle had been an “Educated Boy,” one of the well-spoken youths paid to visit the city's clubs and read aloud selections from
The Scotsman
for those with inadequate eyesight, and he still spoke in a declarative tone.

“Aye,” Groves said. “Episcopalian, was he not?”

“That's right, sir. Very strict, I believe. He did not sing, or drink, or even smoke. He was peculiarly spartan—you can tell that, if I may suggest, from his grave.” The stone had only a name, a date, and a prosaic epitaph. “He did not care much for his estates. He had a mansion he barely visited and a couple of lodges. He divided his time between Edinburgh and Colinton. I think he owned an island somewhere.”

Groves sniffed. He was well aware that the Colonel had been one of the city's most eminent citizens—he would not have been here otherwise—and he disliked being upstaged by Pringle, who had the advantage of a prodigious memory and years of reading obituaries to acquaintances of the deceased. But he had already embarrassed himself, upon first inspecting the corpse some minutes earlier, and he had little desire to seem petulant by issuing a gratuitous reprimand.

“Do we have any idea how long the man has been buried?” he had asked the superintendent. “Are there records available on site? Or can we determine something from the state of decay?”

“I think,” the superintendent answered, a trifle nervously, “that the headstone will do as good a job as any.” And he gestured to the dates: 1802–1872.

Groves immediately seized up with humiliation, and it took him a painfully long time to manufacture a particularly feeble obfuscation.

“Aye…” he said. “But I've heard they sometimes rearrange the plots at these cemeteries. Dig up the coffins and lay them elsewhere. I thought perhaps the wrong grave had been visited, and the wrong body brought up.”

“We do no rearranging here at Warriston,” the superintendent assured him.

“Aye, that's grand. Then we can agree that there has been no mistake.” And he immediately performed a few laps of the grave, peering in from various angles with a frown of consternation, as though troubled by his examinations.

“What is it, sir?” Pringle asked.

“Most curious,” Groves intoned, clicking his tongue, but he scrupulously chose not to explain.

He was tired, that was the truth of it. He had barely slept in two nights, giddy with responsibility and excitement, and exceptionally aware of the personal interest of higher authorities—the Lord Provost himself was said to be taking a more than mayoral interest—as well as the imminent return of the Wax Man. He felt a formidable weight on his every movement, order, and decision, all the more so because he had never been saddled with a case of such gravity. But, as unflagging and determined as he had been, his investigation into Professor Smeaton's singular demise was yet to yield any answers. The previous morning the Chief Constable had again elected to impress upon him the intolerable nature of the crime, and—with a trace of embarrassment, as though reciting a speech written by higher authorities—had stressed Edinburgh's sensitivity to such atrocities and historical intolerance for bloodshed. This when the city was practically marinated in the effluence of violence and death: in witch burnings, body snatching, public hangings, plague, pestilence, and the carnage of war. The blood had congealed between the cobbles and, dampened with rain, was still prone to infiltrating the nostrils and disinterring memories buried far deeper than personal experience.

Kindled by the exhortation, in any event, Groves had immediately headed back to the University, still at this stage filled with an adventurous spirit, and captivated by three things mentioned by Professor Whitty in his cursory examination of Smeaton's body. That the killer would need to be a man of extraordinary strength. Or a beast. Or a combination of the two.

He deliberately had singled out for questioning those associated with Smeaton who were of formidable size and manifest power or those whom, through some uncanny perspicacity, he regarded as having a close association with the animal kingdom. In particular he had been plagued by visions of one particular student he had glimpsed on his initial visit, a boy as black as coal tar and improbably attired in a Highland kilt. In fact, Groves congratulated himself for not underestimating the intelligence of the Negro races and could not bring himself to dislike them, when so many others could not see past the vile rumors. Indeed, reading the reports of the troubles in Zululand, where the natives had almost overcome the superbly armed British forces, he would frequently doff an imaginary hat in admiration. So when he tracked down the ebony divinity student—Morgan Forsyth, absurdly, from the West Indies—he let the boy know promptly, through his unflinching gaze, repeated sniffing, and the slapping of his notebook against his thigh, that he was wise to his capabilities and had little doubt that, were the idea to take hold of him, the boy would have no trouble summoning his reserves of brutish strength to rip his tutor to pieces, bolt for cover like a cheetah, or indeed orchestrate his revenge through some secret communion with the clawed and fanged beasts of the earth, such as whatever fauna it was exactly that populated the environs of darkest Jamaica.

Frustratingly, however, Forsyth was unfailingly eloquent and polite, seemingly unruffled by Groves's insinuations, and in possession of a most sterling alibi: he was in fact a lodger in the house of Professor Calderwood of Moral Philosophy, who could attest to his presence on the night of the murder. Groves shut his notebook and narrowed his eyes.

“I shall be speaking again to Professor Calderwood,” he said, as though he suspected some collusion between the two, or even that, with Smeaton out of the way, the young black might now turn his sights on his own sponsor.

He conducted the remainder of his interviews in a state of distraction and headed off with a sense of relief to visit Professor Moir of Natural History in his laboratory of taxidermized zoology. Here he discovered just what he had suspected: the saber-toothed tiger was in fact extinct, so that in naming it as a possible culprit Professor Whitty had been speaking facetiously, or even through ignorance. “But there are no end of cats in this town,” Moir added. “I should not have to tell you that, poor creatures.”

“I prefer the noble dog,” Groves said, thinking of his lamented police mastiff. (At one stage it had been customary for policemen to patrol with hounds.)

“I was referring to wild cats,” Moir explained. “Predatory cats.” And when Groves still looked perplexed: “Lions and tigers, if you will.”

“If you mean the Zoological Gardens, sir, they have been closed for many years.”

“I mean circuses, good chap.” Moir studied the Inspector with frank curiosity. “Dear Lord, are you really telling me you've never been to one?”

Groves felt taken aback. Certainly he was aware of the city's circuses—in recent years there had been a proliferation—but since his days on the beat he had felt no inclination to venture inside, thinking them the domain of conjurors and acrobats, and other entertainments best left for the likes of children.

“I wouldn't be far wrong in saying there are more species of wild beast in Edinburgh than there are left in some Indian jungles,” Professor Moir said with a disdainful snort. “And I doubt whether some of them have set foot on ground so cold since the days of the woolly mammoth. I'm often called upon to attend to them, you know. And it's not just circuses. You remember Wombell's Menagerie, of course?”

“Of course.”

“They sold off their animals at Waverley Market some years ago. Everything. Lynxes, jackals, llamas, even a Tasmanian devil. A retired bank manager bought a black panther and walked it each evening like a trained beagle, until it ate his neighbor's whippets. There are likely a few of those lamentable beasts still in Edinburgh, chained in coops and stables somewhere. I suppose one of them might be capable of the savagery you mention, assuming it got loose. But you'll need more than good luck if you're meaning to track them all down.”

Groves recalled a biblical verse that Piper McNab had been wont to quote: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” The sage piper had been drawing a connection to Arthur's Seat, the volcanic plug that dominated the city's eastern skyline and from certain angles looked uncannily like a great lion ready to pounce. Which only meant, according to the good piper's philosophy, that the inhabitants of fair Edinburgh should be uniquely aware that evil lurked in the most unlikely places and should be especially alert lest they be snatched in a moment of inattentiveness.

Groves decided he had no option but to take seriously the insinuations of Professors Whitty and Moir, and indeed of Piper McNab, and pursue such lines of investigation vigorously. He went first to New-some's Hippodrome on Nicolson Street, but here found only tightrope walkers, trained Arabian steeds, laughing mirrors, and twirlie pokes. A similar story at Cooke's Circus, set in a substantial brick palace in Fountainbridge. But at Moss's Second Year Carnival at Waverley Market, in an inferno of flaring greaselamps and colored smoke, he discovered Count Batavia's Colossal Den of Performing Lions, being a couple of scrawny beasts in a cage stuffed with moldering straw. The Count himself seemed openly amused by the suggestion that his “bastards” might have broken loose or been trained for some nefarious purpose, and encouraged Groves to venture his hand through the bars and tickle their ears. But Groves had no intention of doing any such thing, thinking it might be some rash plan to have him eaten before he could manufacture more nettlesome questions. So the Count squeezed into the cage with his cats and slapped them, tugged at their tails, sat on their backs, and smothered them with kisses, and the beasts did little more than blink and rumble disconsolately. They were sedated with measured doses of whisky, he explained, even while performing, so that one would be in more danger from an organ grinder's monkey. And despite the man's crude mouth and Cockney accent, Groves felt inclined to believe him. He watched one of the somnolent lions as its lips curled back on glistening enamel fangs, feeling curiously aroused.

In a tormented state of half-sleep that night, however, he wondered if he had been unduly narrow in his focus, and was haunted by some of the freaks he had glimpsed in the course of the day, many of whom, like Chang the Mongolian giant, were of fearsome size and obvious mental instability. And in a state of semi-delirium he remembered the clown elephants of Moss's Carnival and had a startling vision of a rogue pachyderm goring Professor Smeaton to death, recalling also that the 78th Highlanders had years earlier shipped home a teary-eyed Ceylonese specimen that marched at the head of the regiment as a ceremonial mascot. He knew the beasts had sizable memories, too, and he thought it entirely feasible that Professor Smeaton might have inflicted some indignity upon it, many years ago, for which he had been hunted through the lanes and crescents of the New Town before being speared through the face with a well-directed tusk.

In the light of dawn, feeble and misty as it was, such whimsies appeared unlikely even to Groves, and he decided that in this entire angle of investigation he had wasted invaluable time. He cursed his inexperience, doubting that he had yet produced anything that he would be able to record with distinction in his memoirs, and wondering if Professors Whitty and Moir had been deliberately misleading in their suggestions, or speaking in some cryptic code of academic sarcasm. He suddenly loathed them and wished that they, too, were lying dead and faceless in the Cowgate mortuary.