Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  “Yes?” Becker frowned.

  “Even though you choose not to appear in uniform, I hope you are professional enough to possess handcuffs.”

  “They are in my coat pocket.”

  “Put them on the Opium-Eater.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When you address me, call me ‘Colonel.’ Put the damned handcuffs on the Opium-Eater.”

  Becker hesitated.

  “Perhaps you too would enjoy a night’s lodging at Coldbath Fields Prison,” Brookline suggested. “You could pass the time with men you arrested.”

  “Do what he wants,” Father said. “At the moment, there’s no alternative.”

  “For a change, the Opium-Eater makes sense,” Brookline noted.

  I had difficulty catching my breath as Father held his wrists in front of him and Becker pressed the shackles onto them.

  “The key.” Brookline extended his hand.

  “Any constable’s key will fit any set of handcuffs,” Becker said, “but if you’re determined to have mine, here it is.”

  Becker gave him the key.

  When Brookline reached for Father, his impatience prompted him to push Ryan out of the way.

  Ryan bumped into me. “I’m extremely sorry, Miss De Quincey.” In the confusion, he pressed something into my palm.

  It was the key to the handcuffs that Ryan himself carried, I realized. The key would fit any set of handcuffs, including Becker’s.

  Brookline tugged Father toward the door.

  I forced myself to burst out weeping. “No!” After pushing my way past Brookline, I grabbed Father, doing my best to sob hysterically.

  “Everything will resolve for the best, Emily.”

  “We’re wasting time.” Brookline pulled Father toward the door.

  “I’ll pray for you, Father.”

  While I clung to Father, I put the handcuff key into his coat pocket.

  “Your Lordship,” Brookline told Palmerston as he pulled Father from the room, “it’s dangerous for you to go to your office tomorrow. For the time being, I recommend that you conduct your business here.”

  The next moments were a blur as Lord Palmerston’s guards urged Becker, Ryan, and me down the marble stairs. We followed Father and Brookline across the foyer and out the front door, into the lamp-lit fog, where we watched them climb into the coach that had brought us to the mansion.

  Father leaned out, shouting, “You know where I’ll be, Emily!”

  “Yes, in prison,” Brookline mocked.

  “Where I listened to the music.”

  “Completely insane.”

  “Remember, Emily! Where I listened to the music!”

  Brookline pulled Father all the way inside the coach. A guard stepped in with them, slamming the door. Another guard joined the driver on top.

  The gate opened. The horses clomped forward. Almost immediately, the coach disappeared into the fog.

  “Please bring another coach,” Ryan told a footman.

  “Not for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Colonel Brookline’s instructions were emphatic. He said the three of you can walk.”

  Beyond the illumination of Lord Palmerston’s mansion, the coach entered dense shadows, bumping over paving stones on the unseen expanse of Piccadilly. A lamp next to the driver cast a faint glow through an opening and permitted the occupants an indistinct view of one another’s faces.

  Colonel Brookline sat across from De Quincey. A security agent sat beside him.

  The handcuffs pained De Quincey’s wrists.

  “I met your son, Paul, in India,” Brookline said.

  “Indeed?”

  “In February of eighteen forty-six. After the Battle of Sobraon in the first Anglo-Sikh War.”

  “India’s a massive country. How surprising that you happened to meet him.”

  “Yes, a remarkable coincidence. Your son told me he enlisted in the military when he was eighteen.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I received the impression that he wanted to get away from home. To put considerable distance between you and him.”

  De Quincey refused to show that his emotions had been jabbed. “My children who survived to adulthood turned out to be wanderers.”

  “Now that I think of it, another of your sons joined the military and went as far as China.”

  “That is true also.”

  “He died from fever there.”

  “I do not wish to be reminded of that.”

  “Perhaps if your son hadn’t been so eager to get away from you, he would still be alive.”

  “You keep bringing my family into this.”

  The coach thumped over a hole in the road. The impact jostled them.

  It also aggravated the grip of the handcuffs on De Quincey’s wrists.

  “When I pulled you into the coach,” Brookline said, “I felt something in your coat pocket.”

  “I have nothing.” De Quincey was very conscious of the key that Emily had put into his coat. His heart cramped.

  “But you do. I felt it.” Brookline reached toward his coat. “Surely you don’t believe you can sneak something into prison.”

  De Quincey held his breath, trying not to betray his apprehension.

  “And look at this,” Brookline announced victoriously.

  He yanked the flask from De Quincey’s pocket and shook it, listening to the liquid inside. “Could this be cough medicine, or perhaps some brandy to ward off the night’s chill? Let us investigate.”

  Brookline unscrewed the cap, sniffed the contents, and grimaced. “Why am I not surprised that it’s laudanum?”

  He unlatched the window and threw the flask into the street. “Even mixed with alcohol, its odor is disgusting.”

  In the dark, the flask clattered across paving stones.

  “That’s where filth belongs. In the gutter.”

  “You’re familiar with the odor of opium, Colonel?”

  “The lime used to process it reminds me of the quicklime that is dumped into mass graves. In both warehouses and battlefields, I encountered the deathly odor of lime almost every day of my many years in India. When I arrived there, I was eighteen, the same age as your son who fled to India to avoid you.”

  “Perhaps you were fleeing your own father.”

  “If you are trying to bait me, you won’t succeed,” Brookline said. “My father has no relevance. I never knew him. My mother lived with a former soldier. He never complained about the military, so after he died in an accident, I decided to give his former profession a try. In India, I was trained by a sergeant who explained about the British East India Company and the opium trade. The sergeant said that if he caught any of us using opium, he would break our bones before he killed us. He called it the devil.”

  “He was right.”

  “That is not the impression you give in your Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. You praise the drug for increasing your awareness. You claim that music becomes more intense, for example, almost as if you can see what you’re hearing.”

  “Yes. But as I make clear in my book, the effect lessens with each taking. An increasing amount must be ingested in order to achieve the same effect. Soon, massive amounts are necessary merely to feel normal. Attempting to reduce the quantity produces unbearable pain, as if rats tear at the interior of my stomach.”

  “You should have emphasized that in your Confessions,” Brookline directed.

  “I believe that I did.”

  “The sergeant who warned me about opium owned a copy of your book. He made all his trainees read it so that we would understand the devil. In fact, he ordered me to read your foul confessions to those soldiers who could not read. I read it so often that I memorized your offensive text. But he was mistaken to order us to read it. Your book is an encouragement to use opium rather than a caution.”

  “That was not my intention.”

  “How many people became its slave because of you, do you sup
pose? How many people did you trap in hell?”

  “I can easily ask the reverse. How many people took my advice to stay away from the drug once they understood its false attraction? There is no way to know either answer.”

  “In India and China, every battle I fought, every person I killed, was because of opium. Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands died in conflicts because of it. Millions of people in China were corrupted by it. In England itself, how many slaves to opium are there?”

  “Again, there is no way to determine that number.”

  “But with laudanum available on every street corner and in every home, with almost every child being given it for coughs or even for crying, there must be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who require it without realizing the hold it has on them, do you agree?”

  “Logic would say so.”

  “Fainthearted women who seldom leave their homes and keep the draperies closed and surround themselves with a swirl of patterns in their shadowy sitting rooms—do they not seem to be under the influence of the drug? Laborers, merchants, bankers, members of Parliament, members of every stratum of society—they too must be under the influence?”

  “An argument can be made that you are correct.”

  “An influence that you encourage.”

  “No.”

  “My disgust for your opium-eating Confessions led me to investigate the rest of your vile work.”

  “I’m impressed. Some editors complained that I myself should have read my essays before submitting them.”

  “Everything is a joke to you. Not content with advocating opium abuse, you praised the Ratcliffe Highway killer, John Williams. ‘All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his,’ you said. You described Williams as an artist.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ratcliffe Highway murders were ‘the sublimest that were ever committed,’ you said.”

  “Those are indeed my words.”

  “ ‘The most superb of the century,’ you described them.”

  “Your research is thorough.”

  “Extremely so.”

  “ ‘Obsessive’ is the word that comes to mind.”

  “Opium abuse, killing, and death are not things to be mocked. In Coldbath Fields Prison, I shall demonstrate that truth to you.”

  Brookline lurched as the coach struck another hole in the road.

  De Quincey had been praying that it would happen again. He had primed his reflexes, knowing that this might be his only opportunity. He had thought it through carefully, anticipating precisely what needed to be done.

  As the impact jolted Brookline and the other man, De Quincey lunged toward the door.

  The force of the wheel coming out of the hole knocked Brookline against the back of his seat. He grabbed for De Quincey too late. The Opium-Eater was already out the door, jumping into the darkness.

  The force of coming off the moving vehicle threw him off-balance. He nearly toppled forward and smashed his face on the paving stones. But he managed to keep his balance, straightened, and ran panicked into the swirling fog. His direction was to the right.

  Brookline shouted.

  Boots landed hard on the street. Three sets: Brookline, the interior guard, and the man riding with the driver. As long as they made noise, the sounds that he himself made would be undetectable.

  Brookline seemed to read his thoughts and yelled, “Quiet!”

  Behind the Opium-Eater, the night became silent. Meanwhile his hurried bootsteps echoed.

  “That way!”

  De Quincey ran harder. The long strides of the tall men would soon close the distance he had managed to gain. Despite his age, fear gave him strength, as did his habit of walking thousands of miles a year. His only hope was to race back along Piccadilly in the direction of Lord Palmerston’s mansion.

  Green Park lay across from it. If he could reach that park, its grass would muffle the sound of his boots.

  A lamppost suddenly loomed. Heart thundering, De Quincey shifted to the side. His shoulder jolted past it, sending a shudder through him, making him groan. Again he was in darkness.

  “I hear him! He’s not far ahead!” Brookline shouted.

  De Quincey ran faster. His lungs burned. His shoulder throbbed. His legs felt the strain of greater exertion.

  Another lamppost loomed, but this time he avoided it. Abruptly an uneven paving stone tripped him. He landed and groaned, but his terror was greater than his pain, and he struggled upright, lurching onward into the fog.

  “He’s close!” Brookline yelled.

  At once the sounds on the street changed. Until now, echoes had come from both right and left, indicating that there were buildings on each side. But now the echo came only from the right.

  The expanse of the park must be on his left.

  Or perhaps his panic had distorted his hearing. If he was wrong, he would crash into a building.

  “I see a shadow moving!” Brookline shouted.

  In one of the greatest acts of faith in his life, De Quincey darted to the left. Reaching out, he touched the spike-topped palings that enclosed the park. As he raced along them, he heard one of his pursuers slam into the palings and curse.

  Running, De Quincey drew his hand painfully along the palings, searching for the gate. Where was it? Had he passed it?

  Bootsteps rushed closer.

  De Quincey felt the gate. Frantically lifting the metal latch, he pushed and ran into the murky park. At the same moment, he heard the rush of a hand grab for him and miss.

  The noises he made changed to silence as he veered to the right, leaving the stones of a path for the softness of grass.

  The bootfalls behind him became silent also as Brookline and his two men entered the park. Or almost silent. The grass didn’t entirely muffle sounds. Occasional dead leaves crunched under De Quincey’s soles.

  “Over there!” Brookline shouted.

  De Quincey was forced to run slower, to lessen the impact he made. Despite the night’s cold, his lungs felt on fire, but he couldn’t inhale fully to cool them, lest the noise of his harsh breathing indicate where he was.

  He heard one of the men strike something.

  “Watch out for the trees!” Brookline’s voice warned.

  De Quincey reduced his pace even more. After the illumination of Lord Palmerston’s house, the street had seemed in total darkness, but in fact, the lampposts had provided a periodic hazy glow. Now in the park the darkness was absolute. The fog was a veil through which he groped, the range of his cramped arms limited by the painful handcuffs.

  The throbbing in his shoulder intensified. His chin swelled from where he had fallen and injured it.

  Surprising him, his hands touched tree bark. He moved around the trunk. His waist struck a bench.

  “There!” Brookline’s voice yelled.

  What had been an urgent race was reduced to a tense walk. Behind him, someone scraped against leafless bushes.

  To his left.

  He veered to the right, all the while moving deeper into the park.

  “Reach under the benches! He’s small enough to hide there!” Brookline ordered. “And under bushes!”

  Again, De Quincey’s shackled hands scratched against a tree. He shifted around it, bumped his head on a limb, and moved warily onward.

  Abruptly he changed his mind. He couldn’t allow himself to move so far from the street that he would be disoriented and walk in circles. It was essential that he go back to the street. His plan depended on that.

  He returned to the tree, felt the limb that he had bumped against, and stretched up to determine if he could reach a higher one.

  Indeed he could.

  “Spread out!” Brookline commanded.

  De Quincey’s urgent pulse swelled his veins as he made another act of faith and climbed onto the first limb. His shackled wrists had sufficient space between them to allow him to grip the next limb and pull himself farther up.

  His clothes brushed against the tr
ee.

  “There!” a man yelled.

  Boots hurried quickly, crushing leaves. Using their sound to cover his own, De Quincey pulled himself higher.

  “I heard him!” Brookline’s harsh voice came from below him. “Somewhere around here!”

  Braced between a branch and the tree trunk, De Quincey held his breath.

  Trouser legs brushed against each other.

  “Stop and listen,” Brookline said.

  The park became quiet.

  The silence stretched on for several moments.

  “While we search under benches and bushes, he can keep moving,” one of the men noted.

  “Yes, he could be anywhere in the park by now,” Brookline agreed.

  They lapsed into silence again and listened.

  De Quincey’s chest ached from not breathing.

  “He can’t keep running forever,” one of the men said. “We’ll catch him eventually.”

  “I want him now.”

  They waited longer. De Quincey became dizzy from not breathing.

  “Colonel!” the coach’s driver shouted from the unseen street. “Shall I summon more help?”

  Brookline debated, cursed, then shouted, “No!”

  He led his men back toward the street.

  De Quincey parted his lips, trying to be as silent as possible when he released air from his lungs and slowly inhaled.

  But he didn’t dare move. For all he knew, Brookline had merely pretended to leave in the hope that De Quincey would feel confident and betray where he was hiding.