Untitled (12 page)

   The man—Mr. Heath, as it turns out, the proprietor of this shop—presses his fingers together and listens. "I see," he says. "I see."

   "And I am myself one of your patrons," he finishes.

   "But not recently." He gives a smile that shows small teeth.

   "Exactly right." Robert smiles back, but only with some effort.

   "Your hat, you see," says Mr. Heath. "The flat brim—it's more the French style."

   "You're right. I've lived in Paris for some years—working, in fact, with Monsieur Bertillon of the Paris Police Prefecture."

   "Ah, the famous Monsieur Bertillon, who would have us all measured up from the crowns of our heads to the length of our feet."

   "All criminals. In the case of the criminal element, it is all too easy for the name to become separated from the person." He lifts the hat. "An article such as this might bring the two back together, at least in the case of my burglar."

   "I see." Mr. Heath leans forward excitedly. "If we measure the hat for its size, we can compare it to the list of the gentlemen who have purchased such hats from my shop." He lifts the hat out of Robert's hands and holds it up to the light. "In the last three years, I'd say, from the curled edge to the brim. But its owner has not treated it kindly." He taps the dusty crown with one finger.

   Then he stands and runs his pale hands over the ledgers on the shelf behind him. "Yes, yes," he mutters to himself. He lifts two of the big books onto the desk, and pauses with one hand flat on the cover of the top one. He licks his lips. "You must understand that under normal circumstances I wouldn't—"

   "I quite understand."

   He nods as though this is good enough and moistens his finger on his tongue to turn the pages. His body is all angles, as though he is so excited by the prospect of this investigation that he can barely contain himself. He snatches up a pencil and pulls out a sheet of paper and starts to write.

   At first Robert can scarcely believe his luck. This man is as eager as he is to get to the bottom of this matter. But as the clock on the mantelpiece ticks out the seconds, then the minutes, and more than twenty have passed with Mr. Heath turning the pages and occasionally making a note, his foot starts to tap the air and he looks about him with vexation. If he does not leave in the next five minutes he will be late arriving at the prison, and the governor does not take kindly to his visitors—visitors who are there, after all, only under his sufferance—arriving late. So he clears his throat and sits a little farther forward. "Mr. Heath—are you getting close to the end?"

   "Oh yes, very close." He runs his finger down each line, on and on until, with a hiss of a sigh like a train coming in to a station, he holds out a slip of paper. "I have four names for you, Mr. Bentley. This hat size and this style—they are not often found in combination, as my records show. The hat size is somewhat larger than the average. We can assume, if we follow Mr. Holmes's methods, that your man is of above average intelligence, but of a rather retiring nature."

   "Retiring? I would hardly think so. He had the audacity to have himself let into my house and to rifle through my belongings."

   "Oh yes, retiring," repeats Mr. Heath. "Only the more shy of our customers would choose a hat so unlikely to draw notice to itself."

   The clock on the mantel strikes the hour, and Robert Bentley pushes back his chair. "Your help has been invaluable." He extends his hand.

   "A pleasure." Heath shakes it. "A pleasure, sir. Though I do have a couple of small requests."

   "Certainly."

   "If you are successful, would you be good enough to let me know who out of our four men is the culprit? You see"—he taps the side of his nose—"I have my own theory. Also, there would, of course, be no need to mention how you discovered his identity."

   "None whatsoever, I'm sure." Robert puts the folded paper into his pocket and takes up the hat.

   Outside the sun has taken the dampness off the air. His hansom is still there, the driver with a pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth and a grey cloud of smoke hanging about his head. "As fast as you can, now," he calls, and climbs in. The slip of paper is in his right pocket, and his fingers tremble slightly as he pulls it out. For a moment he fumbles with it—the paper is folded so precisely into quarters that with his gloves on he cannot open it. Then it spreads like a butterfly, a small white butterfly on which the hatter has written four names: Joseph McDonald, Michael Danforth, Richard Dupont, and David Tate.

   He doesn't recognize any of them.

   Isn't that the point, thinks Robert—to transform convicts? To make them want to earn positions of trust? To make them useful to society once more? And yet—and yet Flyte's eagerness annoys him, for in it he can't help but detect a note of insincerity.

   Flyte steps forward, head tilted towards Robert's. "I was beginning to worry, sir," he confides. "You've not been late before."

   Robert points for the guard to set down his box close to the table. Another stands by the door and looks on. They have a way of standing that sets him ill at ease. Is it the way they watch him? Yes, he thinks, because unlike normal men their heads do not turn when they want to look to the side, as though they're forever trying to catch you out by watching out of the corners of their eyes.

   Who can blame them? In this place there are murderers and men who have committed outrages on women—on children, too. There are men who must be locked away forever and who might have grown desperate at such a prospect. And they have ways—the governor told him this on his first visit—they have ways of secreting sharp objects on their persons, and the cleverest of them can fashion a weapon from the simplest object—a comb, a pencil even.

   Of course, Robert is used to such things. He knows that the governor has not mentioned the knives and money and other contraband that surely makes its way past the guards. He has been in French prisons, and their prisoners seem neither better nor worse than the English variety—he has seen fights in which men's throats were slit, and the way one man can leap on another and puncture his eyeball with a weapon that is never found.

   Yet at least the French, thanks to Monsieur Bertillon and his anthropometry, have a better idea of whom they have in their prisons. Should thief Marcel Desjardins be released and shortly afterwards a man calling himself Thierry Martin be caught breaking into a house, they will know them to be the same man. For a French recidivist there is no longer a sporting chance that a change of name and a shave of his moustache will be enough to make a different man of him. No. He will be betrayed by the length of his ears, the length of his fingers, by every measurement taken by Bertillon and the men he has trained.

   This is part of what Robert is here to do—to help train the guards in this prison who are responsible for processing new prisoners. An experiment of his own devising. A trial to see if such a method "works"—though it has been shown to work elsewhere. A chance to convince the Troup Committee that must soon decide: anthropometry or fingerprints? As though most of Europe hadn't yet decided, or the United States. As though there still remained any real debate.

   "So," he says as he tugs off his gloves and drops them into his hat, "are we ready to begin?"

   "Oh yes, sir," says Flyte. He lifts a hand and lays it along the length of his face in a way that he has. "The guards have been dispatched to bring today's men. As for Mr. Jessop and Mr. Arthur—" he glances at the clock high on the wall "—I expect they will be here shortly."

   "Thank you, Flyte." Robert sits.

   The guards are still by the door, stiff as posts, the two of them. They could safely leave him here with Flyte, but maybe they have been instructed not to. After all, Flyte is a prisoner, albeit hardly a dangerous one by the look of him. Robert watches as he fusses about the room. He gives the impression of being a small man, though in fact he can't be much less than average height. It's his stoop that does it, and his odd little ways with his hands, as though he is forever trying to find a good place to put them and has not yet come up with the right one. Even as Robert watches him, Flyte lays a hand on his belly—like Napoleon, he thinks—then, as he checks the pens and the ink pots, he lifts his hand and places it at the top of his chest, as a woman might.

   Maybe he's conscious of Robert's gaze, for he turns and smiles again. His face is thin like a mouse's, and his skin is tinged yellow against his uniform. "Is there any news from the outside, sir?" he asks. "Is the queen still poorly?"

   "Indeed she is, Flyte."

   "Well, I'm sorry to hear that, sir. I've always been a devoted subject of Her Majesty."

   At that one of the guards lets out a snort, and Flyte darts a look at him. His hands curl into fists, not like a man about to fight, more like a child who has been willfully misunderstood yet must hold back his frustration.

   Robert knits his fingers together and watches as Flyte comes closer.

   "I remember her jubilee." He glances behind him to where the guards are standing and lowers his voice. "Of course, that was before my present troubles. My wife and I held a little celebration in Her Majesty's honor."

   "Your wife?" says Robert, before he catches himself. Without giving it much thought, he had assumed that a man like Flyte, a man so womanly in his gestures, would not have a wife.

   "Yes, sir," says Flyte. "A beautiful woman, sir, even if I say so myself. And quite the one for organizing dinner parties."

   "I see." He nods. For what else can he say? This woman—this Mrs. Flyte—momentarily finds his sympathy. He imagines her: a small woman who chatters away in a hushed voice, who has cluttered her house with porcelain statuettes of shepherds and shepherdesses and the like, a woman who arranged dinner parties for her husband's colleagues—dismal affairs, probably, ill-afforded out of a small budget. For what else could Flyte have been before his fall except a clerk or something of that nature? And now—well, now most likely she would be earning her own keep for the first time in her life. She'd have had to give up the house and the servant, and spend her days taking in sewing or, even more pitifully, painting on porcelain and trying to sell her work, when London is awash with the handiwork of thousands of such ladies.

   What has Flyte done to ruin her life and his own? Some sort of fraud, Robert suspects. A slow draining of a bank customer's account into his own, or the sly redirection of a commercial house's funds when he thought no one would notice—and all because Mrs. Flyte needed a new dress for their next dinner party, and a new set of silverware, and another servant, not out of the workhouse, but one who could lay a table without disgracing them. Curiosity pricks at him, but it will pass. Better not to ask—he learnt that in Paris. One of the prisoners there had been a funny fellow, always ready with a joke, and a quick way about him that made him invaluable in getting prisoners measured. One morning Robert had asked a guard about him, and after that could hardly bear to be in the same room as the man. On Christmas Eve he'd beaten his sister so badly that her head had caved in, then had taken her body to the river, sawn it up, and tied it into sacks. Afterwards he'd washed and changed and gone to midnight mass, where he'd told everyone his sister had run away with the baker's apprentice. He'd only just escaped execution. His cousin had spoken for him, had maybe even bribed the judge.

   Footsteps, then the door opens. Two guards: Jessop with his small prow of a chin that rises so easily in indignation; Arthur with his eyes that look forever on the verge of closing in sleep. These are the guards Robert must train.

   Flyte is sent off to collect the first batch of new prisoners. They arrive sweating, fresh from the treadmill, though rather than the pointlessness of it wearying them, the exercise seems to have invigorated them. One man refuses to spread his arms, another to hold his head still. Only when the guards by the door come close do they allow Jessop and Arthur to measure them.

   And so the afternoon passes, with each man put through the Bertillon method, or as close to it as Robert has managed without all of the specialized equipment. He watches Jessop and Arthur do the measuring—three times for each measurement to make it accurate to the millimeter. That is another difficulty: these men confuse centimeters and millimeters, and he has to explain to Arthur yet again that there are not sixteen millimeters to a centimeter, but ten. Between writing down measurements and fetching prisoners, Flyte finds time to bring him a cup of tea. He drinks only half of it, for, horrified, he spots Jessop measuring a prisoner's foot with his shoe still on and springs out of his chair to intervene, then must rearrange the cards in the small cabinet he has set up for the purpose, since no matter how many times he explains, Arthur cannot seem to understand that a card misfiled is as bad as a card lost.

   When he gets back to his tea it is cold. He drinks it anyway, his mouth pursed against the unpleasant feel of it. If the fate of anthro pometry in Britain rests in part on these men, then his efforts, he thinks, might all be for nothing.