The Solitary House (17 page)

He pushes his way to the back of the crowd and manages a word or two with the harassed proprietor. The house, he finds, was closed down weeks before, when the floorboards in the ground floor caved in on an open sewer choked with corpses. It turned out the landlord had excavated his basement and started a lucrative side-trade in bargain burials, with standard no-frills interments for less than half the price of the official graveyard up the road at St Clement’s Lane. With two slaughter-houses nearby no-one had even noticed the smell. Something that may also explain, Charles realises suddenly, why a tanner might choose to lodge in a place like this. A quarrel now breaks out in the queue of women outside, but before Charles loses the butcher’s attention altogether, he manages to elicit the one fact that has been eluding him all this time. The one fact—small though it seems—that will make all the difference.

A name.

A name that even Charles recognises as unmistakably Cornish. William Boscawen, late of this parish. Lodging now at Bell Yard, Holborn.

It’s an area, as it happens, that Charles knows well. Part of that warren of courts and lanes behind Lincoln’s Inn, and hard by the far more palatial residences of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that number among them Mr Tulkinghorn’s tall and blank-faced house. Another fact that cannot—surely?—be irrelevant. Bell Yard, by contrast, is narrow and dingy, and the lad he corners by the entrance points him towards Cook’s rag-and-bottle shop at the far end of the court. First impressions are not encouraging. The windows are all but pasted over with old law notices and Offers to Buy, and the other side of the glass is stacked to obstruction with oddments of iron and brass, and shelves of dirty used bottles of every conceivable shape, purpose, and colour. Inside the shop there are tables of chipped plates, tin pans, and old rusty kettles, and the broken remnants of a horse’s harness hanging on a hook, as well as sack after sack of assorted unsavoury rags, human hair, and ancient laceless boots and shoes, none of which seem to be in pairs. A sudden movement at the back of the unlit shop betrays the presence of what Charles can only deduce is the said Cook, eponymous owner of this unprepossessing emporium of unconsidered trifles. A squat hairy man with spectacles and a moth-devoured cloth cap, his eyes wary and his brows low.

“You there!” he growls, coming towards him, a guttering candle in his bony hand. “Have you anything to sell?” He looks Charles up and down, then, “Or perhaps you’re interested in the room I have to let? It’s a fine room, even if I do say so myself.” He squints at Charles slyly. “You can live up there as private as you like. I’ll ask no questions. Even if you should want to bring ‘company’ home. Know what I mean?”

He winks obscenely at Charles, who returns his gaze with a controlled composure. “I’ve come to see one of your tenants—Mr Boscawen. Is he in?”

The man screws up his eyes. “Not him. Never here at this time of day.”

“May I wait inside? I’ve come a long way.” A lie, of course, in the literal sense, but not perhaps in the metaphorical.

The man ponders him for a moment, and then steps aside to let him pass.

“You can wait if you want. You may even find something to interest you in my shop,” he continues, as Charles stands looking about him, “though most of it is mouldering in cobwebs, and the rest rotting in the damp.”

There’s certainly a smell of something in this close dusty little room, but it isn’t rot. Or damp, for that matter. The air reeks so strongly of cheap gin that Charles starts to feel a little light-headed.

“You a friend of his?” asks the man warily.

“An acquaintance.”

Charles’s tone is steady, but Cook’s penetration is unnervingly sharp.

“What do you want with him then?”

“That’s between me and Mr Boscawen.”

The landlord sniffs and lowers himself carefully into a rickety chair. “Never heard no-one talk like that who weren’t police. Or one of them accursed lawyers I see about here.”

“Then you’ll be relieved to hear I’m neither.”

Cook nods slowly. “If you’re going to hang about, there’s nowhere to sit. I don’t go in for entertaining.”

“Perhaps I could wait upstairs?”

“Perhaps you could.”

“Would you mind?”

“It’s not for me to mind. You
say
you’re a friend of his, and I’m in no position to know if that’s true, or if there’s something else you’re after.”

It’s too dark in this gloomy room to see whether Charles flushes at this, but I can tell you he does. He turns away to hide his awkwardness,
and sees for the first time that there’s a narrow staircase in the corner of the room. He doesn’t wait for further permission but makes his way quickly through the assorted lumber and up the uneven stairs. The first room he comes to is clearly the one available to let. A cramped empty room with one or two scraps of old furniture the landlord has clearly extracted from his more presentable stock. The door to the attic at the top of the house is closed, but even on the landing Charles can tell that the air up here is bad; a cloying mix of soot, sweat, and the scummy fatty smell he remembers only too well from his jaunt to Bermondsey. The room itself turns out to be large—much larger than the one downstairs—but there is little in it apart from the remains of a coke fire in the grate and a low bed covered with rough ticking. Much more interesting to Charles, though, is the desk in the corner, with its pile of twisted paper and stumps of pencil. Boscawen is no man of letters, if this illegible and barely literate scrawl is anything to go by. But there is no mistake: Charles has seen this writing before. The letters posted to Sir Julius Cremorne were sent by this man. There’s a creak on the stairs and Charles stuffs the scrap quickly into his pocket before turning to face the beady eye and watchful face of the owner of the shop.

Only it’s not him. The man filling the doorway is thick-set, dark-faced, bearded. His hands black with grime, his trousers worse. And he has some sort of cudgel in his right hand.

“Who are yow, and what dusta think yow doing?”

Charles takes a step back without even realising he’s doing it. “I—I was interested in the vacant room. I must have made a mistake.”

The man moves towards him, and Charles can now see the landlord standing blinking in his shadow. A furtive smile twists his face.

A moment later Boscawen has seized Charles by the collar and lifted him almost off his feet. He’s about to protest when the man’s heavy fist hits him dead centre and he drops heavily to the floor, completely
winded. He rolls over, trying to get back up again, but Boscawen has him by the hair and hauls him to his feet. His face this time. Jaw, cheek, temple, nose. Slumped again. Retching. Something hot running into his eye. By this time things are getting a little blurred round the edges, and there’s a sharp pain in his right side that wasn’t there before. Up again, and he braces himself, but this time nothing comes. The man brings his face close to Charles’s, and he can feel the heat and stench of his breath.

“If I find ee anist here agen, or hear yow’ve been arsting any more questions arter me, sure’nough I will give ee such a basting as will gut the bettermost of ee. Are’ee hearing me?”

Charles wants to answer back—wants even more to spit straight in the man’s face—but his lips are so swollen he cannot form the words. Boscawen’s fingers tighten on his neck, and he nods. The next thing he knows Boscawen is dragging him to the door and throwing him hard down the first flight of stairs. Then the door slams above him, and he lies there for a moment, gazing up at the landlord, who is silently watching him, his eyes narrowed and a curious, almost exalted expression on his face.

By the time Charles drags himself the short distance to Lincoln’s Inn Fields the night is falling, and with it a sharp icy sleet. Anyone with any sense would have found a cab and gone home, but we already know that there’s a certain stubbornness about Charles that does not always serve him well. More than one passer-by eyes him nervously in the street, and he’s lucky not to encounter a constable, since he would quite probably have taken one look at Charles’s bludgeoned face and taken him in for further questioning.

Knox peers at him warily from behind the door and it’s some moments before Charles can persuade him to open it and let him in.

“Mr Tulkinghorn is dining, sir. Was he expecting you?”

“No, he wasn’t, but I’m here now and I want to see him.”

Knox shakes his head. “I’m not at all sure you’re in any fit state to—”

The fury festering in Charles’s mind heaves suddenly up and boils over. He seizes the pinched little clerk by the arm, pushes him roughly to one side, then strides up the stairs to Tulkinghorn’s room and throws open the door. His client is sitting quietly in his usual place, a plate and knife and fork placed neatly before him. To one side there is a glass and a bottle of port more than fifty years old, drawn from what remains of a bin that was laid down long ago in the cellars that lie deep beneath the house. He has eaten his bit of fish, brought in as usual from the coffee-house nearby, and is now sitting in twilight, sipping his wine. The sound of the door swinging open brings him to himself with a start. The sight of Charles, grey with dust, where he is not reddened with his own quickly darkening blood, is something of a shock and—frankly—quite unprecedented at this hour, and in this place.

“Mr Maddox. I was not aware we had arranged to meet today.”

“We hadn’t.”

“In that case, I assume you must have something both urgent and significant to impart. Something that—evidently—cannot even wait for a bath and a change of clothes.”

Charles walks towards him slowly, taking the paper from his pocket, his eyes never leaving the lawyer’s face. He comes to the table and lays the crumpled sheet on it with exaggerated carefulness. It is, perhaps deliberately, just beyond Tulkinghorn’s easy reach. The lawyer looks at it, and then at Charles, then makes a gesture towards a second chair. “Will you join me in some wine? I can have Knox fetch another glass.”

“No. Thank you, but no.”

“It is a very old wine, Mr Maddox. And a splendid one.”

“All the same.”

The lawyer nods, and swirls the amber fluid round and round slowly in his goblet. The room fills with the fragrance of the warm south.

“So what is it you have brought me?” says Tulkinghorn at length. If it’s a poker game these two are playing, it is Tulkinghorn who has blinked first.

“I have discovered the man you asked me to find.”

Tulkinghorn sits back in his chair. He brings the glass to his lips.

“I gather from your unsavoury appearance that your quarry was not best pleased to be located.”

“There was an—altercation, yes.”

“What did you tell him?” The question is quick, possibly a little too quick, and they both know it. Tulkinghorn shifts in his chair.

“I told him nothing. He found me in his room, that’s all.”

“And what do you know of him?”

“He is a Cornishman by birth, but works now as a tanner in London. In Bermondsey. And as this piece of paper will prove, he is quite definitely the man who wrote those threatening letters to Sir Julius Cremorne.”

“But you have no idea why he did so—no suggestion to offer as to his reasons?”

Charles shrugs. He, too, wishes he had found the answer to that question—but only because he would have so deeply relished the pleasure of withholding it. “I wasn’t in the room long enough to find out. Always assuming there was something there to find, of course. After all, didn’t you claim he was in all probability just another motiveless malignant?” He’s rather proud of the phrase, which he’s heard somewhere before, but it’s hard to say all those
m
’s without slurring. His mouth keeps filling with blood, and two of his teeth feel loose.

“Indeed I did,” says Tulkinghorn quietly, “and it seems I am very likely to be proved right. Who is this man, and where does he live?”

“His name is William Boscawen. He lodges above a rag-and-bottle shop at the bottom of Bell Yard. You might walk it from here in less
than a quarter of an hour. Take it in as part of one of your customary evening perambulations.”

The lawyer betrays nothing beyond the slightest, almost imperceptible, widening of the eyes. He is not used to other people knowing his private movements. He takes out his handkerchief and starts to clean his spectacles, then—in no apparent hurry—opens his drawer, unlocks a small strong-box, and takes out a purse of money. He does not open it or count the contents, but tosses it lightly across the table. This also, perhaps deliberately, lands just beyond Charles’s reach. The two of them look at each other silently for a moment, then Charles leans across and picks up the purse. He’s half-way to the door when Tulkinghorn calls him back.

“And the letters, Mr Maddox?”

Charles spins round. “I’m sorry?”

“Could you return the letters I gave you? And the envelopes, of course. I assume you have them with you.”

Indeed he does, but something about the look in the lawyer’s eyes prompts a prevarication.

“No. I’m sorry. I don’t have them here.”

“In that case I will send Knox for them in the morning. Ask him to come up, would you, as you leave?”

Charles nods.

“And Mr Maddox—”

“Yes, Mr Tulkinghorn?”

“I’m told the chop-house on the corner does very good steak. You might request one if you are passing that way.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Not to eat, Mr Maddox. For your eye.”

After the door closes, Tulkinghorn sits silently, once more sipping his wine. He is to all appearances more imperturbable and impenetrable than ever. At length he opens his desk drawer once more, extracts
a sheet of paper, and starts to write. Knox appears a few moments later, and stands at the door, awaiting his instructions.

Tulkinghorn looks up and places his pen on his desk. “I will have a letter to take in half an hour. For Curzon Street. We have a name.”

TEN

A Discovery