The Italian Secretary

by Caleb Carr

  ‘I assume you have kept your most trusted staff here with you?’ Holmes asked, rather more pleasantly than I would have thought possible, or even necessary, at that instant.

  ‘Yes, Mr Holmes,’ answered Lord Francis, embarrassed. ‘The most senior staff, only – but I assure you, if you find that you require anyone to be recalled—’

  Again Holmes told him that he was sure such measures would not be necessary – and as he did so he looked to me, clearly requesting agreement. I played the role, stating that Lord Francis’s minimal staff would be more than adequate to meet our needs, and that Holmes and I were grateful for whatever hospitality he, to say nothing of Her Majesty, might be gracious enough to extend during the term of our work.

  But the rather petulant, even resentful attitudes of both Hackett and his footman son as they took our meagre baggage made me wonder if such hospitality would indeed be forthcoming, and whether or not gratitude would be the ultimate feeling we would take away from our stay. An examination of Hackett’s features deepened this impression: They were weathered, rugged, and altogether unsympathetic, while the hair was longer than would have been expected for a man in such a position; the black beard, meanwhile, was kept close-cropped, and did much to augment a rather ominous impression. But the feature that most gave one pause was Hackett’s left eye, which was in fact no eye at all, but a glass approximation of the same. This alone might not have been cause for alarm, despite the four very pronounced scars that ran away from the socket, one below and three above; but the eye had apparently been poorly fitted, for when Hackett scowled to excess, the pressure of his descending brow often dislodged the glass sphere, which the butler invariably snatched with his hand before it reached the ground. At such moments, the badly mauled flesh and exposed bone of the socket itself were revealed: a truly ghastly sight.

  The first time this occurred, Hackett was just bending over to retrieve my rod case, which his son had dropped. Being quite close by, I was able to observe the deft manner in which the butler plucked the falling eye from the air, quickly re-inserted it, and then stood, all without drawing attention to himself. On seeing that I alone had witnessed the process, Hackett darkened considerably, and he said, quietly but with the bitterness peculiar to certain strains of Celtic blood:

  ‘Your pardon, sir – I hope the gentleman was no’ repulsed.’

  It might have seemed an extraordinarily odd comment, had it not matched the general impression of the fellow that I had already formed. As our little procession moved to the palace entryway, I brought up the rear, now wholly uneasy: I could see no beauty at all around me, and noticed, rather, how much mist the rain had left behind, how very foreboding it made the landscape, and even how blackened by coal dust the large and rather beautifully designed fountain in the front courtyard had become. Small wonder, then, that, by the time I was about to enter the palace, I was forcing my head and eyes not to turn left, to prevent my taking one last look at the windows of the moribund west tower: I had very nearly become convinced that if I did, I would see there some other-worldly face, silently but desperately pleading for assistance, for salvation, for justice …

  And yet, how my mood was transformed by the world into which I next stepped!

  The palace’s square central court, and the cloister that encircled it, had Charles II’s cheerful (if sometimes excessive) hedonism in their every inch, helped along, that morning, by a sudden burst of Scottish sunlight: crisp in its tones, warming in its unobstructed plentitude. Lord Francis Hamilton kept up a steady monologue concerning the building of the palace’s baroque wings, and after a few minutes I even began to make sense of some of it, and to think that our stay in this place might prove a not altogether unpleasant experience, after all. We quickly entered the Great Stair, with its massively figured plasterwork ceiling, stone balusters, and charming Italian frescos, the latter purchased for their present home some forty years earlier by the late Prince Consort – our Queen’s beloved Albert himself. By the time we were approaching the relatively small but elegant dining-room on the main floor, my spirits had, thankfully, been quite lifted: an effect only compounded when we entered the room to find that a hearty Scots breakfast had been laid on for us by Hackett’s wife, a woman whose temperament was nothing like her husband’s, although she nonetheless exhibited the sort of nervous strain that living with such a man almost invariably imparts. This last manifested itself, chiefly, in a rather too quick tendency towards loud and unwarranted laughter; but the woman cut a healthy figure, and despite her highly strung air I found myself responding to her rather desperate attempts at conversation readily, being as I was myself starving for the company and conversation of someone who was not preoccupied with death.

  But the conclusion of breakfast also brought the end of these pleasantries, such as they were: for, much as Mycroft Holmes kindly recognised my own need for rest (his brother, he knew, had no such requirement), he made it plain that we must venture into the palace cellars before further refreshing ourselves. Apparently he was expected to return to Balmoral and personally report to the Queen on our arrival and our initial impressions. Such being the case, we rose from the table, stomachs (or my stomach, at any rate) glowing with the warmth of hot oat-meal, fresh eggs, puddings black and white, warmed tomatoes, fine-ground haggis, Yorkshire and Lowland tea blends, as well as a dozen other early morning delights that had changed very little since Queen Mary’s time; and, behind the gloomy, powerful figure of Hackett, who dangled a great iron ring of keys from one hand (while he held the other, or so it seemed to me, at the ready, in the event that his glass eye should again attempt liberation from the distasteful duty of serving in his unpleasant face), we prepared to return to the Great Stair, there to descend back into the world of violent death.

  ‘I shall allow Hackett to guide you, gentlemen, if you do not mind,’ Lord Francis said as we reached the Great Stair. ‘There is, as you may expect, much business to be attended to, with all this unpleasantness, and my father is quite anxious that I, as the presumably dissipated third son, should prove myself worthy by attending to it.’ A good-natured laugh followed this statement, again making me admire the fellow for taking the difficulties of his position so lightly. As he turned to leave us, however, his face became rather more serious.

  ‘Oh – but I must ask one thing—’ Lord Francis’s face screwed up with embarrassment and discomfort. ‘I do realise that we have asked for your help, and that you have every right to feel personally secure, but – well, this is a royal residence. And, Doctor, I could not help but notice that rather menacing service revolver that you carry beneath your jacket – I fear that bearing arms within the palace is quite forbidden.’

  Amid mutual protestations – of regret and understanding from myself, of further mortification from our host – I relinquished my Webley revolver to him; and, after assuring me that I should have it back upon departure, he disappeared down the hall towards the royal apartments. It was not until the rest of us were in the Great Stair, led by the disconcerting sound of Hackett’s ancient ring of keys, that Holmes murmured to me:

  ‘A pity to lose Mr Webley, eh, Watson? But we may still read our palms for protection …’ Suddenly remembering the gangster’s device that was resting snugly in my pocket, I thought for an instant of turning around and running to catch Lord Francis, in order to surrender it, too; but Mycroft Holmes stopped me.

  ‘Now, now, Doctor,’ he said. ‘After all, I’m sure that if the Metropolitan Police do not recognise the device as a legitimate firearm, then the royal family can have no objection to your retaining it on your person …’ He gave me a significant look, and said, in an even lower voice, ‘at all times …’

  Chapter VII

  POIGNARDER À L’ÉCOSSAIS

  Dennis McKay’s body had indeed been placed in what Mycroft Holmes had referred to as ‘an old ice chamber in one of the cellars’; what I had not counted on was how very relative the term ‘old’ might be. Hackett informed us that the walls of
the chilly space had originally been chiselled out of bare, naturally occurring stone that, over the centuries, had been patched with everything from bricks to granite blocks, all of which were held in place by great, crumbling dollops of concrete. Underground springs (although it was difficult to say just how far ‘underground’ we were, given the several irregular and unconnected staircases we had been forced to navigate to reach the spot) ran down the bare stone in a few spots, the icy liquid disappearing into the earthen floor of the chamber. My uneasiness at being in this latter-day catacomb – likely once a dungeon – along with the additional drop in body temperature that accompanied a stomach full of hot food, no doubt made the place seem colder than it was, as did the arrival, within minutes of our own, of a quartet of our friends from the train journey. But the great clouds of mist that emerged from all of our mouths and nostrils told me that my impression of significant chilliness was not simply a reflection of my mood.

  On a great block of what I at first took to be stone, but which was in fact ice, lay the shrouded remains of the unfortunate McKay. The near-bloodless bed-sheet used to wrap him after the discovery of the body mercifully obscured the depth and severity of his wounds, which we would discover only after we had uncovered the body – a task that would require no little assistance, so tightly was the bed-sheet wound about it.

  ‘Mr Holmes,’ said I to Mycroft, ‘perhaps some of your men could hold the body up, so that I can loosen the covering …?’

  ‘Of course, Doctor.’ Mycroft Holmes needed only to glance at the various members of military and naval intelligence who stood in the shadowy corners of the room (the pair we had met earlier were not present) in order for them to snap to it. The fellows took the body by its shoulders and feet and lifted it from the block of ice in an almost effortless manner: These clearly were not men to underestimate in a tight spot. As McKay’s mid-section cleared the ice, I began to uncoil the close-spun linen wrapping—

  And then I took note of something: something about the manner in which McKay’s body was drooping above the ice, suspended between the powerful grips of the young officers. At first I felt it necessary to make a more concerted effort to focus my eyes, believing the sight to be nothing more than the cumulative effects of Mycroft Holmes’s brandy, a lack of sleep, and the afore-mentioned rush of blood away from my brain and to my stomach. But a second look revealed the same curious, indeed stunning, image – although nothing drove home its reality as much as a quick glance at my old friend.

  Holmes had retreated into his own shadowy corner of the room before the men lifted the body, in order to put a match to a cigarette; and, by the glow of the small ember before his mouth, I could see that his piercing eyes had been so electrified by the sight of McKay’s suspended body that they seemed to have transcended mere man-made current, and to have entered a state of natural phosphorescence, like some eerie deep-sea creature. Both alarm and excitement filled his features, the latter making itself apparent in a smile that was more than the usual wry curl of his mouth: It was the delight of beholding some aspect of a crime that was altogether different, altogether new. Nor did I wonder at his feeling so:

  From shoulder to toe, McKay’s body was utterly flaccid. In saying this, I do not mean to imply the usual limpness of post-rigor death; no, the lack of any sort of structural integrity in his body – even the arms and legs, which either hung or drooped in so sickeningly slack a manner that his clothing might have been stuffed with meal, rather than flesh and bone – implied things about his death that went quite beyond even the terrible facts that we already knew, and beyond even the contorted expression of agony that dominated what must once have been his handsome Scots features.

  I hurried to get the body free of the sheet, and then the four officers lowered his form back onto the ice carefully. (Certainly, none of the four was a veteran of the battlefield, I now realised – for had they been, they would have recognised the extreme irregularity of what both Holmes and I had noted in such amazement.) Once the pitiful remains were back on that frozen surface, I made a great show of inspecting its two- or three-score puncture wounds – some ragged, some star-patterned, still others clean at the point of entry, but all hideous in their depth, their violence, and the amount of internal damage they had caused – as I waited for Holmes to speak.

  He did – and quickly. ‘Brother,’ he called out, with painfully enforced nonchalance, ‘I wonder if your men might not be better used patrolling the grounds around the palace. Being as so many members of the staff have been released, and given that it now seems entirely possible that our antagonists possess’ – Holmes looked directly at Hackett, who I now noticed was taking rather too much interest in our business – ‘a key or keys to various of the palace locks.’

  Mycroft detected the ploy immediately, and dispatched the officers on the errand Holmes had suggested; Hackett, however, showed no inclination to leave of his own accord. ‘We must not keep you, either, Hackett,’ said Mycroft. ‘Once these gentlemen begin an examination, there can be no telling how long it might take, and you must have many duties devolving upon your shoulders, just now.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Hackett in a low rumble. ‘But it’s no trouble, sir—’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mycroft quickly. ‘I insist, Hackett. We shall tell you when the body is ready to be transported to the police.’

  Hackett finally did leave the room; but before I could give voice to any of my extraordinary thoughts, Holmes had dashed to the doorway, opened it a crack, and assured himself that the butler was actually leaving the area. Given this interval, I returned to my ad hoc post-mortem, quickly examining not the wounds to, but the frame of, McKay’s body, and just as quickly finding what I was looking for.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ I whispered.

  This brought Holmes to my side. ‘Then it’s true, Watson?’

  ‘What is true?’ questioned Mycroft. ‘Sherlock, now that I have performed this little charade, would you mind—’

  ‘It’s McKay, sir,’ said I. ‘His skeletal structure – you saw how the body drooped when the men lifted it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mycroft answered. ‘But I thought that was natural—’

  ‘Natural for an earthworm, brother!’ said Holmes. ‘Or some other invertebrate. Most uncharacteristic for a man, however …’

  Mycroft became impatient. ‘No riddles, now – what do you two mean?’

  ‘The body,’ I said. ‘There is scarcely a bone in it, and none of any structural importance, that has not been broken in at least one place. Some, indeed, have been utterly shattered. And yet, look here, sir—’ I pulled one eerily formless arm free of its sleeve. ‘Notice the lack of bruising – here and here, where the fractures are compounded. That indicates—’

  ‘That McKay was already dead when the bones were broken,’ Holmes finished for me.

  Mycroft’s face became a picture of alarmed confusion. ‘But – the stabbing wounds. They cannot help but have been fatal.’

  ‘Certainly,’ answered Holmes.

  ‘Then why?’ Mycroft asked in amazement. ‘It cannot have been torture, if the man was dead—’

  ‘No. Nevertheless – a day or so after he died – something happened. Some terrible event, capable of simultaneously smashing dozens of bones in the same instant.’

  ‘How can you say that it was “a day or so” after his death?’ Mycroft’s voice retained an element of involuntary disbelief.

  ‘Watson?’

  ‘The number of breaks, Mr Holmes, along with the lack of blood on the bed-sheet,’ said I. ‘Had the body not yet entered rigor mortis, it would have been flexible enough for the injuries to have occurred together, but blood would have seeped onto the sheet.’

  ‘Perhaps they wrapped the body in the thing later?’

  ‘No, sir – look here, where this compound fracture corresponds to a tear in not only his clothing but the linen as well. He was wrapped in the sheet after the blood had ceased to flow, but before the rest of the damage was done �
� had the body still been in rigor, its own rigidity would have prevented such a plethora of obscure fractures. For it to have regained the flexibility to allow all this to happen at once … at least twenty-four hours.’

  Mycroft Holmes was not a man who often looked baffled, but this was one such occasion. ‘But what could possibly …?’ he asked slowly. ‘What could possibly manage such damage, and so speedily? And why, in Heaven’s name? The man had already been killed, by no less than – what would you say, Dr Watson? Some fifty wounds?’

  ‘At the very least, sir,’ I replied. ‘But as to how it all took place … The puncture wounds are, of course, simple enough to explain – several long and fairly stout blades – note the variation among the types of skin punctures – although why so many more thrusts than necessary, I cannot tell you. For the rest – not even the imaginary farming implement that you used to explain Sir Alistair’s death, I suspect, could have achieved it.’

  ‘Incidentally, Mycroft,’ said Holmes, ‘what was that “implement”?’

  ‘I’m dashed if I know,’ Mycroft replied. ‘Some sort of aerating device, or so Robert, the ghillie, informed me. The ground beneath the greenery on much of the palace grounds is nearly as hard as rock – characteristically so, for the environs of this city. It must be aerated regularly, to maintain the health of the grass.’

  ‘The ruse was not a bad one, sir,’ said I, ‘in so far as the obvious aspects of such wounds are concerned. It’s a pity that suspicions and fears had been so roused by all the other coincidental aspects of the two crimes that you were prevented from using it again.’