The Solitary House (3 page)

He sees Wheeler’s eyes widen and realises his mistake at once.

“Last I looked,” says the other man, “my rank was
Sergeant
. And if I were you,
Mr
Maddox, I would keep a civil tongue in your head and that temper of yours under control. It’s already cost you more than you could well afford. Or so I hear.”

Charles feels the heat rush across his face under the man’s steady gaze. The bastard knows. Of course—they
all
know. Charles has never learned the trick of coping with injustice—not as a small child, punished for something he hadn’t done, and not now, as a man of twenty-five, unjustly dismissed from a job he loved. The official charge was insubordination, but he knew, and his superiors at Scotland Yard knew, that his real crime was daring to challenge the deductions of a higher-ranking officer—and challenge them as not just scientifically unfounded, but rationally unsound. Looking back, it might have been wiser to make his views known privately—or keep them entirely to himself—but a man’s life had been in the balance, and he’d felt then as he did still, that he had no choice. It was no consolation, months later, to find that new evidence had come to light; by that time an innocent man had already been taken to a place of lawful execution, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.

The eyes of the two men are still upon him. He turns, as pointedly
as he dares, to Wheeler. “Tell Inspector Field that I will continue to be grateful for any information he might come across that could have a bearing on my case. I will detain you gentlemen no longer.”

He is out of sight in five yards, and out of earshot soon after, but all the same he struggles to keep his anger in check until he is back at the Circus, then vents the full force of his fury on a stack of wooden crates outside the Horse-Shoe, sending glasses and bottles spinning and smashing across the cobbles, and spewing rank beer on the already filthy ground. He stands there breathing heavily for a few moments, then straightens his collar and pushes open the inn door.

TWO

In Mr Tulkinghorn’s Chambers

I
T’S LATE WHEN
Charles wakes, his head wooden with hangover, and the sulphur of fog still in his mouth. The curtains hang open, and a line of sunlight glances across the farther wall. He sits up slowly, as if careful to keep his brain from tilting, and then pushes his hands through his hair and kicks back the twisted sheets. He opens the door and calls to the landlady to send out for half a pint of coffee from the shop next door, and then goes to the wash-stand and pours a jug of cold water over his head and neck, eyed all the while by the cat, who is understandably disdainful of Charles’s dismal efforts, having attended rather more thoroughly to his own ablutions some two hours before. As he’s towelling his face dry, Charles catches sight of his letter, still unfinished, on his desk. If things had turned out differently last night he might have had something worthwhile to say—a reason to rip up his mealy-mouthed draft and begin again, but as always this case leads only to dead ends. And dead children.

The landlady knocks with the coffee a few minutes later, and as he’s fumbling in his pocket for what’s left of his money, he sees for the first time that there’s a white edge of paper jutting out from
under the trodden rope-matting which is all the room can boast of by way of carpet. Someone has slid something under his door. He looks down at it for a moment. He has no memory of seeing it when he got home the night before—not much memory of getting back at all, if truth be told—but he knows it wasn’t there when he left. Strange. He’s on the point of calling Mrs Stacey back up, but recalls that Tuesday evening is her Harmonic Meeting, and the maid had probably taken the opportunity to sidle out the back and meet that greasy pot-boy from the Three Tuns. He bends down and slides the piece of paper from under the mat. It’s a very superior kind of paper, he sees that at once. Fine-textured, heavy, and sealed ostentatiously with thick red wax. The paper of a very superior kind of man. The kind of man who does not expect to be refused, and does not care to be kept waiting.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Tuesday, midnight

Sir
,

I would be grateful if you could present yourself at my chambers, at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. There is a small matter of business I wish to discuss with you
.

Your obedient servant
,
Edward Tulkinghorn
Attorney-at-Law

Charles knows the name. Who, in his line of work, does not? A hard, gruelling, and arid man; widely feared and rarely worsted. Such words apply to Mr Tulkinghorn, as they apply to many other eminent London lawyers, but Tulkinghorn of the Fields is, all the same, a man apart. There is hardly a noble family in England that does not have its name inscribed on one of the locked iron boxes that line his room. He speaks only when he can charge to do so, and offers no opinion that has not been paid for, and handsomely. Little is known
of him beyond his accomplishments in Chancery, and how he spends that portion of his time that has not been purchased is his private secret. There, he acts for himself alone, and he is never more careful than with his own confidences. To be consulted on a matter of business by Edward Tulkinghorn is an event of some moment, even for the great; to be—perhaps—employed by him is a professional distinction so distant that Charles can scarce allow himself to contemplate it. He has, in any case, very little time to do so. The appointment is less than an hour away.

He washes again—quickly, but more carefully this time—and retrieves a shirt from the closet. It’s been worn, but not too often, and it’s the best he has. He smoothes his unruly hair as well as he can, and retrieves his comb from where it is currently doing service as a bookmark in the second volume of Erasmus Darwin’s
Zoönomia
(Charles has recently chanced upon a new work by the great man’s grandson, but considers him, on this showing at least, to be far inferior to his illustrious forebear).

A quarter of an hour later he leaves the house. The difference in the day is dazzling; the events of the night before begin to seem nightmarish and unreal, a hallucination of the poisonous air. It is hardly possible to believe that such a hell-hole exists, on such a bright, cold morning. Charles retraces last night’s journey as far as the Circus, though progress through the crowds is rather slower than it had been through the fog. Little boys tug at his coat-tails offering walnuts and apples, housewives pick over fruit and vegetables, and tiny children risk trampling to sift up the cigar-ends swilling in the gutter with the rest of the refuse and excrement. The local whores are out in force already, and Red Suke winks lewdly at Charles as he goes past. And it’s hardly surprising—it’s not just his clear blue gaze and thick bronze curls, though they undoubtedly have their effect—there’s something about the way he walks, a swagger that is not quite a swagger, that draws the eye and catches the attention, and has got him into trouble more than once. And even though you will never get him to acknowledge it, even to himself, that trouble is not always or exclusively of
the female variety. Suke is clearly in a cheerful mood, having downed her usual three morning quarterns of gin and peppermint before presenting herself for paying custom.

“Where’s you off to in such a rush, Charlie? Got y’self a sweetheart, have yer?”

When he turns and grins at her, the whore hoots with laughter and replumps her ample décolletage in his direction.

“You can al’as fall back on me, Charlie boy. Though falling for’ards might be more to the purpose.”

The air is raucous with hawkers’ cries, and heaving with the hot smell of open-air cooking. For someone who’s had nothing to eat since lunchtime the previous day the aroma of sizzling fish is too much to bear. Charles decides he will indulge himself, just this once, even if it means no eggs for breakfast tomorrow. Though on this showing it may not surprise you to learn that he goes without his eggs more often than he has them. The decision made, he shells out a penny for a toasted bloater wrapped in bread and eats it greedily in three bites, licking the salt from his lips and wiping the butter from his chin with the back of his sleeve, having forgotten until it’s too late that he no longer owns a handkerchief. As one would expect, none of the usual pickpockets are yet abroad—thieves are alone in loving the fog, and weather like this is no environment for profitable dipping. A couple of the Fenhope lads are making faces at themselves in the boot-maker’s window, but the next moment they’re gone, disappeared into the huddle of women gathered round a stallholder’s table. At least we must assume it is a table, since no square inch of the surface is actually visible under the jumble of teapots, crockery, artificial flowers, plaster-of-Paris night-shades, clothes-horses, tea-caddies, and tins of rat poison. It looks like some absurdly over-elaborate version of the memory game—as if at any moment the proprietor might whisk across one of the much-darned sheets drooping over his head and challenge his customers to name every rag and cast-off. But then again, you might well counter that this dishevelled display bears more than a passing resemblance to our own young man’s muddle of
assorted curios. But if you were to say such a thing to Charles, he would merely look at you blankly: He collects scientific specimens; these people trade in trash.

A scatter of crows cackles into the sky above his head as he crosses into Holborn and heads towards the City. The crowd thins a little but the traffic is as heavy as ever. Wagons and hackney-coaches rumble past him, and he’s relieved, in the end, to turn in to the relative tranquillity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Mr Tulkinghorn has not specified a house number, trusting, perhaps, that a man like Charles should either know it, or be able to find it without undue exertion. If it is any sort of a test, then Charles passes it easily. He presents himself at the impressive and oddly Egyptian-looking façade at precisely five minutes before eleven. The door is unlatched before he has raised his hand to knock and swings open to reveal a middle-aged clerk, a little out at elbows, who is showing out a bald timid-looking man with a shining head and a clump of black hair sticking out at the back. Having completed this task, the clerk turns to Charles, who does not, apparently, need to give his name.

“Mr Tulkinghorn is expecting you. Follow me, please.”

They pass the high pew where Charles’s guide normally sits, and proceed at an appropriately ponderous pace up the imposing staircase to the first floor. There Mr Tulkinghorn is sitting in state behind a large writing-table, at the far end of a room painted the colour of blood. The blinds are drawn and the green lamp is lit; the bright day clearly has no business here. Mr Tulkinghorn seems not to have noticed Charles’s presence, though the creak of the floorboards must have given him away the moment he entered. The air is close with the must of old paper, but Charles is uncomfortably aware that there is also a distinct under-tang of fried fish, which can only be his own personal contribution. All the same, it is at least another slow minute before Mr Tulkinghorn lowers the paper he has been reading and removes his spectacles. Charles makes sure to keep his eyes fixed upon him, all the while making his own private map of the precise configuration of the room. To the left, a cabinet of parchment scrolls
and leather-bound law books, the lettering all but dissolved into the spines; to the right, the shadowy portraits of eminent and anonymous men, ranged one by one between the long windows; and on the wall behind Tulkinghorn, a rack of iron boxes in niches that resemble nothing so much as a
columbarium
, a last repository for cases long dead, and a hiding-place for secrets still very much alive. The surfaces are dusty, like Charles’s own; but clear, unlike his own. There are no papers visible, aside, of course, from the one Tulkinghorn has been reading.
Has been
being the phrase, since the lawyer has now placed that paper carefully on his desk and raised his eyes to meet his visitor.

“You have been recommended to me.”

It’s not the opening Charles expected, but it is, all the same, a promising one. He waits; Tulkinghorn waits. There’s a chair on Charles’s side of the desk, but he’s not invited to use it.

Tulkinghorn picks up a piece of broken sealing-wax and weighs it in his hand. “It is a—somewhat delicate matter.”

“Most of my work is.”

Tulkinghorn raises an eyebrow. “You mean the Chadwick case? That, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a waste of your time. I would say a waste of your talents, but I am not sure, as yet, how far those talents extend. You will never find that child, as more seasoned police officers than you have already discovered. If the earth has not swallowed it, this city has. Even if it lives, it will be as depraved and degenerate as the rest of its class. You could not find it, even if you searched every thieves’ den and rookery lair in London.”