Murderer in Shadow

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Stark knew all too well what Lawrence Marquest meant. When first posted to Hammershire after that dustup in London, he thought the villages quaint and picturesque, relics of a vanished England, preserved only in the memories of doddering pensioners and the mawkish pages of the reactionary This England. Disillusionment came quickly and hit hard. Now he looked upon those same villages as facades. Look behind the charming exterior, he now knew, and you would find evil such as would make any East End slum seem squeaky-clean, and festering corruption that went all the way back to the blood-drinking savages that so terrified Rome’s legions.

  “A couple of times, I heard Dad tell Mum ‘poor Dale’ didn’t have the heart for being in that family, but don’t know what he meant, and still don’t.” The man frowned. “I really wanted to know what it was that drove Dad out of the police, but when I tried asking him outright about it…” He sighed. “Well, you know how fathers can be. Want to draw you close even as they push you far away.”

  Stark waited for Lawrence to digest his own thoughts.

  “When Mum died Dad shut up about it altogether,” Lawrence finally said. “No more eavesdropping, no more rumours, no more tabloid stories to look up.”

  “So that was the end of it for your dad?”

  Lawrence nodded and leaned back; then shifted forward, rested his chin on fist, and frowned.

  “Think of something else?”

  “Highchurch.”

  “Inspector Highchurch? What about him?”

  “Dad wrote him every month or so,” Lawrence said. “Started after Mum died. Kept up for a couple of years, then stopped.”

  “What did they correspond about?”

  “It wasn’t really a correspondence, back and forth,” Lawrence explained. “There never were any replies to Dad’s letters. Had there been, I would have seen. I sorted the post, both here and at home, so if old Highchurch had written back, I would have known.”

  “What were your dad’s letters about?”

  Lawrence shrugged. “The envelopes were always sealed when I saw them in the outgoing. I knew better than to ask, and I hadn’t the guts to do any steaming – Dad was usually an easygoing chap, ever polite, even when some old cow was getting up his nose about cutting the price of a Queen Anne walnut bureau bookcase by half, but he would go into a sudden rage if he thought anyone was prying into his business.” He touched the left side of his face. “Private man, he was. You learned to watch your step.”

  “You’re sure the letters were to Morris Highchurch?”

  “Absolutely. I recognised the name from the tabloid stories,” Lawrence said. “Don’t remember the address, not after so long, but it was in Yew’s Reach.”

  According to the text sent by Ravyn, more terse than usual, or so it seemed to Stark after he had passed on Heln’s directive, Highchurch was a complete blank about his former sergeant. Why would the old boy lie about something like that?

  “Did you ever try to contact Mr Highchurch yourself?”

  “When Dad died, I thought about letting him know so he could come to the memorial if he wanted. Then I thought, bugger the silly pillock!” He blushed. “After the funeral, I had a case of the regrets. After all, he and Dad had worked close for years, and maybe he had equal reason to be bitter about the whole thing. In the end, I clipped the obit from the newspaper and posted it to him. I sent it care of the postmistress at Yew’s Reach, let her sort it out. Don’t know if old Highchurch ever got it.” He shrugged. “Don’t really care.”

  “As I mentioned, we’ve reopened the case,” Stark said. “Part of that is looking at the old evidence.”

  Lawrence nodded.

  “There was only one evidence box, mostly witness statements.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Normally, the evidence generated by a particular case, both in terms of interviews and forensic material, is proportional to the magnitude of the case.”

  “So, with the murders of six…”

  “Now, seven.”

  “With so many people, you would expect more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “From what I read, the villagers were uncooperative and the murder weapon was never found.”

  “Even so…”

  “Yes, I take your point.” Lawrence settled back in his chair. “Is there a chance Mr Highchurch kept anything for himself? I’ve come to understand, after too many years, that, as bad as it was for Dad, it must have been worse for his guv’nor. Anything in that?”

  Stark shook his head. “Seems not. My guv’nor interviewed him. No joy there. Bitter as bile about it. Put it all behind him soon as he shook the dust from his feet. Didn’t keep anything.”

  “And you want to know if maybe Dad did?”

  “It had crossed our minds.”

  “Not that I’m aware of, Sergeant, but, as I told you, the Stryker Case was not a topic of conversation around the house,” Lawrence said. “Other cases he told stories about, at least the funny bits or the ones reeking of irony, but Stryker…” He shook his head. “The only one I was really interested in, but the only one he would give me a good cuff for if I pestered him directly. I learned not to get cuffed.”

  “You never saw any folders, boxes, anything like that?”

  “Not that I recall.” He was silent a moment, then said: “Dad had an office of sorts in the attic at the house. Kept a lot of literature about the business, auction catalogues and the like. Had he held back anything from his old life, he would have kept it there. Mum and me were banned from entering.”

  “But after he died…” Stark prompted.

  “Well, yes, I did go through it then, didn’t I, but if there was anything like what you’re looking for…” He frowned. “Course, that was after the burglary, so…”

  “Burglary?”

  “Happened while I was at the funeral,” Lawrence said. “Not all that uncommon, from what I was told by the police. Housebreakers keep an eye out for funeral announcements, break into places they think might hold good swag. Dad was well known for antiques and art, so they might have thought they’d strike it rich.” He uttered a small chuckle. “Anything we had of any real value was here.” He gestured . “And the shop is well protected.”

  “What was stolen?”

  “Well, that’s what was puzzling,” Lawrence said. “They made quite a mess, furniture knocked over, books tossed around, papers scattered, that sort of thing, but nothing taken, not even the telly or the computer. That was why the police suggested it was a specialist gang with illicit connections in the art and antiques world. Not every dealer or broker shares my or my dad’s ethics. Some of them are very untrustworthy, quite dishonest really.”

  “So I’ve heard. Nothing at all was taken?”

  “Not in the house proper, but elsewhere…” Lawrence leaned forward, as if sharing a secret. “In Dad’s attic office, the burglars were particularly destructive, pulling down every book, catalogue and circular, ripping them apart, scattering about every piece of paper they could lay hands on.”

  “As if searching for something?”

  Lawrence shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was, to me, the most disturbing part of the break-in. I hate violence for the sake of violence, destruction for the sake of destruction. And that is all it was to me, like a tantrum thrown by a petulant and spoiled child told he can’t have something he wants. They break in looking for treasure, find naught but dross, so they trash the place.”

  “You didn’t find anything when you were cleaning up?”

  “Oh, I found lots of rubbish.” Lawrence uttered an exasperated little snort. “Old catalogues, out-of-date circulars, letters from and to dealers long out of business, and all sorts of books that dealt with antiques only tangentially. Most everything got binned.”

  “What sort of books?”

  “Vanity books mostly, what pensioners write, then pay a printer to run off a thousand copies. Even gifting them, they leave hundreds when they die. Local histories, boring memoirs –
that sort of thing. I see them at auctions occasionally. All rubbish. I let others overpay five quid a box. Old books are usually just old books. No value.” He frowned with the strain of memory. “Well, the occult books might have had some value, but it would have been too much time and trouble to track down the one barmy bloke who might want them. Magic, demons, alchemy – not my cuppa.” He laughed. “Maybe Dad was a little potty toward the end.”

  “What happened to the books?”

  “Binned, like most everything else,” Lawrence said. “If I didn’t need them to keep the shop going, out they went.”

  Stark sighed. The dearth of evidence had engendered faint hope that Marquest’s son might reveal a document trove, but if it ever existed, Lawrence had binned it. Still, even if Marquest had not shared his superiors’ certainty about Dale Stryker’s guilt, would he have held onto anything from the case that ended his career? Highchurch, having fallen further, might have had a reason, but not his sergeant. But Marquest, Stark reflected, had been more connected to the case than Highchurch. Stark did not know either man, except through uninformative official files, but Marquest spent his most formative years in Denby Marsh, in the very shadow of Knight’s Crossing. That alone told Stark that while Marquest might be cut from a different fabric than the ignorant and dark-minded folk of Knight’s Crossing, he shared the same weave. Both sets of villagers were the salt of the earth, a most corrosive salt.

  Lawrence sighed. “I really wish he had written Dad, no matter what was in the letters. They probably had a lot in common, maybe could have helped each other deal with it. Ah well, there’s no changing what’s been done. As bad as it was for Dad, I can’t say I’m unhappy. If things had worked out in Hammershire, I’d be up there and not here, happy doing what I do.”

  Stark shifted uncomfortably. “Just what is it that you do?”

  Lawrence broke into a wide grin, his first since learning Stark was from the police. “I dare say, you probably thought I was some kind of a lunatic when we first met.”

  “Never crossed my mind,” Stark lied. “But I was confused.”

  “You were expecting an antiques store.”

  “Marquest’s Antiques and Fine Art.”

  “Yeah, I carried it on a few years, following in Dad’s footsteps, so to speak,” Lawrence said. “It was what I’d been trained to do. He was an expert, and he passed that down to me. I knew the antique and art worlds intimately, so when Dad died it seemed natural to do what I had already been doing, only as master, not apprentice.”

  “But it didn’t work out?”

  “Cheap-minded cows and old biddies from Sevenoaks.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “As I mentioned, Dad was patient, at least with customers,” Lawrence said. “Never bothered him, a silly cow trying to talk him into parting with a Georgian highboy for a song, or Lady La-Dee-Da ordering him about as if he were one the help, insisting he ship a Jacobean bedstead back to Kent, or wherever, just so Lord La-Dee-Da could give it thumbs up or thumbs down. Sod all that!”

  “So, you decided to get out of the antiques business,” Stark said, “and into what?”

  “Well, not entirely out of antiques and art,” Lawrence said. “I still go to auctions and estate clearings, always keep an eye open for gentry in a pinch, but I sell almost exclusively to the trade, to other dealers. Or I buy for them, taking a commission. Not as rewarding, monetarily speaking, but it provides an extra income and I don’t deal with retail customers.”

  Stark thought of the odd lot seen milling in the sales room. He raised curious eyebrows.

  “What you saw is my bread and butter,” Lawrence said. “Those people you regarded so queerly, well, they may be customers, but they are also my friends. Steampunk, Sergeant – Victorian science fiction manifesting itself in this new millennium. That is what I, as you put it, got into.”

  “Steam…”

  “...punk.”

  “Steampunk?”

  “Just so – steampunk.”

  To Stark, the term punk was interchangeable with yob, and not far from hooligan and thug, or, for that matter, the violence-prone teddy boys his own dad used to rail about. Odd that someone who claimed to hate violence and destruction would throw in with a lot as peaceful as Visigoths and Vandals. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine the people seen in the sales room breaking windows and overturning cars, not even the sooty clerk with the lace half-gloves and impudent pink tongue. And…steam?

  Lawrence laughed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but the look on your face is priceless. Please allow me to explain.”

  It obviously had nothing to do with the investigation, was more of a time waster than the journey to Brighton itself, but Stark’s curiosity was piqued, and hooked. Reluctantly, he nodded.

  “Steampunk started out as a literary movement, a sub-genre of science fiction that drew inspiration from the works of Jules Verne and other Victorian writers, but it quickly blossomed into a cultural movement, encompassing such diverse disciplines as art, fashion and music,” Lawrence said. “It has become a lifestyle.”

  “So, you play dress-up and, what, have parties?”

  “Conventions of like-minded individuals, social gatherings of all sorts,” Lawrence replied. “From formal cotillions to flash meets to tea duelling.”

  There were times Stark wished he could restrain his curiosity. When Ravyn mentioned anything was one. This was another.

  “I’m probably not explaining it very well,” Lawrence conceded. “It’s a failing of mine, assuming what’s mundane for me is familiar to everyone else, a specialist speaking to a layman.” He rose quickly, darted to a bookcase, and handed Stark an oversized tome. “Perhaps flipping through this while I try to explain myself will help.”

  Stark looked at the book. A fan-shaped title amongst a montage of woodcut vignettes announced, boldly, that he was holding a copy of The Steampunk Bible. Idly, and a bit sacrilegiously, he wondered if it included Jesus on a mechanical cross and Romans with goggles and light-sabres.

  As Lawrence droned on about Steampunk aesthetics and the excesses of Colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, Stark saw a baffling array of machines, including a steam-powered elephant, images of books never read and films never seen, and an endless gallery of buxom (very buxom) young ladies in uplifting corsets and gowns that would have made Victoria blush…and Aeronwy more than a little perturbed at him. And his reaction to them.

  “So, where my father looked at the past and saw the past, I, on the other hand, looked at the past and saw a future that I could…”

  “Ah, yes, I understand perfectly now.” Stark quickly snapped the book closed, but not before an image of Aeronwy in corset, top hat and goggles, sporting a death-ray rifle, flashed into his mind. “I had no idea. Thank you for sharing your…”

  “But I’ve barely scratched the…”

  “You’ve scratched deeply enough,” Stark said. “Thank you for your time.” He paused. “Before I head back, there is one other thing I’d like to do, if possible.”

  “Anything I can do to help, Sergeant.”

  “I’d like to search your father’s office.”

  “Really? Do you actually think you’ll find anything useful after all this time?”

  Stark shrugged. “If I can find a straw, I’ll grasp it.”

  Chapter 9

  Grimoire of a Mad Boy

  The attic office Lionel Marquest once used for his antiques business was small, lit by a desktop banker’s lamp and a circular window. Neat and clean, it held only a few antiques reference books and some current correspondence from Lawrence’s clients. To Stark, it seemed a dead end, not a straw in sight.

  And yet it was his last hope. If Lawrence was right, everything of the past had been swept away, either by the burglars or his own actions afterward. Anything pertaining to the case had vanished. If it had ever been there at all, he reminded himself.

  He sat in a Nineteenth Century barrister’s chair and surveyed the room. Had he
himself held something back from a case, what would he do with it? A fair question, Stark told himself. After all, he and Marquest shared both rank and background. He had no doubt that the former detective sergeant had, in his time, also chased down agile villains, collected dog vomit for forensic analysis and arrested homicidal vicars atop crumbling bell towers – all the myriad tasks for which God created detective sergeants, but not chief inspectors.

  More importantly, he thought, they had both searched many dens of iniquity looking for things no one wanted found. A man who knew how to find things was an expert at hiding them. A burglar need only be smarter than the average householder, not all that difficult – a safe hidden behind a painting, a hollowed-out book from a high street shop, a strong-room lock vulnerable to a seven year old with a penknife. No, not difficult at all.

  Stark searched slowly and methodically. A layman would have been puzzled by him passing up obvious places of concealment and minutely examining spaces where not even termites could have found refuge. In less than a half-hour, he found what he sought. He pulled the centre drawer in the desk’s right pedestal to its fullest extension, then tilted it up and carefully levered it out.

  “Crafty old bugger,” Stark murmured.

  The drawer’s false end panel perfectly matched the wood in the other drawers, an indication, Stark thought, that the hidey-hole was the handiwork of the original craftsman. The half-inch space was ideal for a lawyer’s secrets or a bag of crowns held from the king’s tax man. Marquest used it for an old book. Its leather cover was cracked with age and incised with a star within a pentacle. Not exactly a pentacle, Stark thought, remembering past cases that had had a Satanic twist. The limbs of the star were curved and at the centre of the star was a staring eye.

  * * *

  “Martha Bishop was one of two beauties in Knight’s Crossing; I was the other.” Then Mabel Link laughed. “Don’t judge by what you see. We turned every boy’s head – maybe a few girls’ too, but that… Well, that was then, wasn’t it? Time was cruel to Martha, you might think, but she’s still beautiful in old men’s dreams; me, they see only what I’ve become. So who’s better off, I ask?”