The List Of Seven (7 page)

She'd lit a candle. Felt a chest pain—she had heart trouble; that much he knew. She poured a glass of wine, opened the pill tin. The pain grew stronger, alarmingly so. Feeling claustrophobic, she opened the window to let in some air, and in doing so toppled the candle. When the curtains caught fire, she panicked. Her heart gave out. She fell.

Two objections. First, there was a fresh watermark on the table. The wineglass had been set down—it should have

fallen toward the curtains, along with the candlestick. Second, there were a number of pills on the floor near the body. Even now, the little rat dog was gobbling one up off the rug. Perhaps she had dropped the tin and was in the process of replacing them when ... no, there were no pills in her hand.

He examined the tin. Lint and other detritus were mixed in with the pellets themselves. So the pills had been spilled and then replaced—

At the sound of a whine and a cough, he turned in time to see Petrovitch's dog keel over, spasm, and then lie still. Dead—better off, in a way, thought Doyle: It wasn't a dog anyone else was likely to love—foam bubbling at the corner of its mouth. Poisoned.

So someone had poisoned Petrovitch and perhaps not surreptitiously. Doyle lifted her slightly; there were pills under the body as well. Livid bruises on either side of her jaw. She had struggled, knocking the tin away, scattering the pills. Her assailant forced the poison on her, then quickly tried to replace the pills in the tin before fleeing out the open window. Yes: There was a scuff mark on the windowsill. The candlestick knocked over during the struggle or perhaps more deliberately by the killer to obscure the deed. The body was still warm. The killer had left this room within the last ten minutes.

Another death to lay at his crowded doorstep. Poor Petrovitch. Impossible to imagine the woman could have herself inspired an enmity that would result in murder.

Careful not to touch the pills themselves, Doyle closed the :in and placed it in his bag and was at the door when he no-:iced a spot of white peeking out from behind a small mirror on the wall.

He pulled out a piece of paper and read:

Doctor Doyle,

Urgent we speak. I am off to Cambridge. Petrovitch will tell you where to meet me. Trust no one. Nothing is as it seems.

HPB

Dated that morning. Blavatsky in Cambridge. The killer had stilled Petrovitch but missed this note. He left Petrovitch to heaven, with no doubt now as to his own destination.

Doyle detected no one following him to the station, nor was he aware of anyone watching him purchase his ticket or board the train. After he took a corner seat with an unobstructed view of the door, no one entered the car who took even passing notice of him.

As the train chugged away, Doyle scanned a stack of discarded tabloids, searching vainly for mention of Lady Nicholson's disappearance. The engine's tail of exhaust folded indistinguishably into the city's morning mantle of soot and smoke. As he watched the street life flit by outside his window, Doyle's envy for the plain uneventfulness of those ordinary lives gave way to an edgy excitement. However fraught with danger, a mission beckoned, and mission signified purpose, the lodestone of his internal compass. In spite of fatigue, his senses felt sharply attuned: the sweet pungency of the sandwich he'd bought for the journey, the agreeably warm froth of the bottled beer, the ripe mundungus of Moorish tobacco in the air.

A bulky Indian woman took the seat opposite Doyle, her brown face obscured by a veil that revealed only her almond eyes and a daub of decorative scarlet on the forehead between them. An external representation of the mystical third eye, recalled Doyle from his Hindi dabbling, the window to the soul and the unfolding of the thousand-petaled lotus. He caught himself staring at her when the rustle as she rearranged the armful of parcels she carried brought him back to himself. He doffed his hat and smiled agreeably. The woman's response was inscrutable. High caste, he decided, assessing her clothes and comportment. He wondered idly why she wasn't traveling first-class, accompanied by family or chaperon.

The rhythmic rattle and roll of the tracks abetted the postprandial drowsiness of the alcohol, and as the train left the London environs, Doyle drifted toward sleep. He awoke sporadically, for moments at a time, and dimly remembered seeing his subcontinental traveling companion hunched over a small book, running her finger along lines of the page. Sleep finally overtook him. His dreams were hot and swift, a phan-

tasmagoric amalgam of flight, pursuit, dark faces, and white light.

With the jolt of the car coming to a sudden stop, he awoke to full consciousness, aware of some commotion. Along with the rest of the car's occupants, the Indian woman was looking out the window to Doyle's left.

They were in farming country. A rough road ran alongside the tracks, bisecting a vast tract of fallow land, planted with a failing crop of winter corn. A large hay trailer pulled by two huge drays had overturned in the ditch beside the road. One of the horses, an immense chestnut still tethered to the rig, bucked wildly, kicking at the air. The other, a dappled gray, lay on its back in a gully, struggling and braying, mortally injured. A young lad, the coach's driver, tried to approach the wounded animal but was restrained by two adult farm laborers. Looking farther down the road, Doyle saw what had perhaps been the cause of the accident.

Was it a scarecrow? No, although it bore the same basic silhouette, this was larger, much larger, than the conventional field figure, approaching nearly ten feet. Not made from straw—more molded and contoured. Wicker, perhaps. The figure mounted what appeared to be a cross—were those spikes—railroad spikes—pinning the arms to the wood? Yes, no mistaking, rising above the faltering corn rows just off the road, facing the tracks. It was a crucifix. And on its head was no crown of thorns. These were unmistakably horns, conical, sharp, and twisting. Doyle's mind flashed to the beast he had seen engraved on the glass bowl in the hallway of 13 Cheshire Street. This was, as near as he could remember, almost certainly the same image.

As awareness of the figure spread through the car, there was a rising sentiment among the passengers to put the torch to this blaspheming display, but before any reaction organized itself, the whistle sounded, and the brutish vision receded as the train pulled away. The last sight Doyle registered was one of the farmhands, over the protests of the boy, approaching the fallen horse with a shotgun.

The Indian woman, after a long look at Doyle, which she averted the moment his eyes met hers, resumed her reading. The remainder of the two-hour trip passed without incident.

There was the poster—photograph included, if there were any further doubts—plastered to a pillar just outside the Cambridge rail station.

LECTURE TONIGHT, THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. H.P. BLAVATSKY.

Eight P.M., the Guildhall near Market Place. Her whereabouts determined to the minute and location with four hours to spare, Doyle set out for King's College and the offices of Professor Armond Sacker.

The afternoon's sallow light was just beginning to fail. Doyle followed the road alongside the fens hard by the River Cam and down King's Parade into the old town center, raising his muffler against the brisk wind blowing down across the broad, open byway. Charles Darwin walked these paths as a student. Newton as well. Byron, Milton, Tennyson, and Coleridge. The hallowed colleges reminded him of his youthful disappointment when his family's modest circumstances required his attending the less financially rigorous University of Edinburgh. The deleterious effects produced by coming of age in the class system still resonated ripples of discomfort in his proud heart.

Across the commons from St. Mary's Church stood the great classical facade of King's College. Doyle passed through its gingerbread gatehouse and screen and found the court within entirely deserted with darkness quickly coming on.

Entering the only building to display a light, he heard a scuffling sound, and a wheezy snort that drew him to the entrance of a long library. A wizened clerk shuffled piles of books in a seemingly aimless pattern between the stacks and a mammoth wheeled cart. His face was mean, red and puckered, while his vulpine black robes and ill-fitting wig threatened to engulf the shrunken man entirely.

"Pardon me, I'm wondering if you could direct me to Professor Sacker."

The Clerk snorted again, taking no notice of him.

"Professor Armond Sacker. Antiquities," said Doyle, raising his voice considerably. "Most Egyptian. Some Greek—"

"Lord God, man!" The Clerk caught sight of him from the corner of his eye and lurched back against the cart, clutching his chest in fright.

"Terribly sorry. Didn't mean to startle you—"

"There's a bell!" the Clerk yelled. "You're supposed to ring the bell!" He attempted to regain his footing by leaning back against the cart, but his insubstantial mass was enough to motivate the wheels ever so slightly backward. Consequently, man and cart began crabbing slowly away from Doyle down the lengthy library corridor.

"I'm sorry, but I didn't see a bell," Doyle said.

"That's what's wrong with you boys today! Used to be students had respect for authority!"

Mortal fear of corporal punishment will do that to a body, Doyle was tempted to reply. Nudging the cart feebly ahead, the Clerk continued to retreat, not quite able to gain leverage to right himself, while Doyle kept pace equidistant behind.

"Perhaps if you displayed the bell in a more obviously visible location," Doyle offered pleasantly.

"There's a smart answer," die Clerk spat viciously. "When school's in session, I'll have you vetted to the Proctor's Office."

"You have it wrong there, you see, I am not a student."

"And so you admit you have no legitimate business here!"

The Clerk raised a long, bony finger in misguided triumph. From his squinting, Doyle realized the unpleasant little man was nearly as blind as he was deaf. And unless he was very much mistaken, this venomous old bookworm was a retired proctor himself; in his day Doyle had suffered plenty at the gleefully sadistic hands of the man's ilk.

"I am looking for the office of Professor Armond Sacker," Doyle said, producing Sacker's calling card—they had by now traveled twenty yards down the hall, and Doyle felt no impulse whatsoever to assist the toadish misanthrope back to bis feet—holding it just out of the sweeping arc of the man's reach, "and I can assure you, sir, my business with him is exceptionally legitimate."

"What sort of business?"

"Business I am not prepared to discuss with you, sir. Business of a more than passing urgency. And I daresay that if you are not prepared to assist me straight off, it will put me in a very foul humor indeed," Doyle said, pointing his walking stick at the man and smiling intently.

"Term's over. He's not here," the Clerk admitted, fear or exhaustion tilting him toward the cooperative.

"Now we're getting somewhere. So there is, in fact, a Professor Armond Sacker."

"You're the one who wants to see him!"

"And having established that the good Professor walks among us, if we could now turn our attention to where the Professor might be—"

"I'm sure I don't know—"

"Take careful note, if you would, my choice of words, sir: 'might be,' not 'is,' employing the speculative, as in speculation, sir: Where might he be?"

With a jolt, the cart collided with the wall at the corridor's end. The Clerk slid down to the floor, legs splayed, back against the cart, his pinched visage as pink as a well-scrubbed pig. He pointed up and to the right at a nearby door.

"Ah," said Doyle. "The Professor's office?"

The Clerk nodded.

"You've been most helpful. If I should happen to speak with your superiors during my visit here, I shall not fail to mention your timely and generous assistance."

"Pleasure, sir. Pleasure indeed." The Clerk's treacly smile revealed a badly matched set of false choppers.

Doyle tipped his hat and entered Sacker's door, closing it after him. The room was high, square, and lined with dark-wooded bookshelves, serviced by a ladder resting against one wall. Crowding the central desk were stacks of haphazardly open volumes, maps, compasses, calipers, and other cartographic tools.

The smoldering dregs of a bowl of tobacco sent up weak mist from an ashtray. The pipe, an elaborately carved meerschaum, was warm to the touch—the office's occupant had vacated the room, at most, five minutes before, a departure hastened by Doyle's voice in the hall? This Sacker was nothing if not an odd fellow, but would he purposefully avoid Doyle after what they'd been through together? If so, for what conceivable reason?

Surveying the desk, Doyle cataloged two standard texts on ancient Greece, a volume of Euripides, a monograph on Sappho, and a well-worn Iliad. Maps of the central Turkish coast, dotted and lined with calculations. Doyle hazarded a guess that the object of this quest was the legendary city of Troy.

An overcoat and hat hung on a rack by the far door. A

walking stick leaned against the wall; a bit short for the lanky Sacker, Doyle thought. He opened the far door, which led to a small antechamber—no doubt where students sweated out their tutorials—and then passed through another door, leading into a vast hallway.

Perched on the newel posts on either side of a grand ascending staircase, large winged gargoyles stood sentry, scowling at one another: one a griffin, long of tooth and talon, the other a reptilian basilisk, scabrous and scaled. The day's last light through the leaded-glass windows imparted a ghostly glow to the marble walls and floors. Total darkness was only minutes away and, saving a penny during the holiday, none of the gas jets were alight. Doyle listened but heard no footfalls.

"Professor Sacker! ... Professor Sacker!"

No reply. A chill ran through him. He turned around. The gargoyles glared down at him from their posts in the stairwell. Doyle set off to find a privy—had those statues been facing his way when he entered? A memory of their having faced each other persisted—perhaps Sacker had gone to answer nature's call.