“How, Freddy?” said John gently.
“It smelled dead,” Freddy whispered. Then he nodded once, hard. “I should know because I work there all the time. I’m not lying to you, Mr. Vicar. In my dreams and on the tracks, the monster smelled dead.”
Chapter 8
As John moved down the steps to the pavement, he buttoned his coat and sighed. The brief surge of excitement he’d felt before reaching the station was gone, and now he was beginning to feel as dismal as the day was grey. Cab had obviously been expecting him to break through Freddy’s absurd tale and expose the truth, and it hadn’t happened. Now Freddy was in a cell, feeling betrayed, and he had no idea what, if anything, he could do about it.
His stomach growled.
He acknowledged the message with a lop-sided grin and, with a look at the sky and a prayer of thanks that the wind had calmed to little more than a stiff breeze, he decided to take his lunch at the Brass Ring.
The entrance was several doors off Centre Street, on Steuben Avenue. It was a small tavern only a handful of years old and, he suspected, not destined to last much longer than that since it could claim no regular clientele beyond those clerks and occasional laborers who used it for a quick glass before heading home at night; there was definitely no hope of competing with the Chancellor Inn for dining, offering little more than sandwiches at noon and bowls of pretzels and nuts the rest of the day; and more often than not the owner seemed disinclined to do much more than sweep a hasty broom over the uneven floor at the start of each drinking day.
The narrow interior, bar on the right and tables on the left, was darkwood and dimlight, and when he found that the table nearest the window was empty, he took it, opened his coat and leaned back against the wall. And straightened so quickly he nearly fell out of the chair when he found himself staring into Betty Jerrard’s face peering through the glass.
She laughed and came in, doffing her cloth cap and taking the chair opposite. “Well, this is hardly the place I’d expect you to be in,” she said, shaking her head to smooth out her hair.
“And you, Miss Jerrard.”
She giggled as she looked around her. “If Sterling could see me now, he’d kill me.”
Then she stared until he cleared his throat with a swallow and beckoned to a weary, bone-thin woman who took their order and brought two tankards of ale right away.
“I like your outfit,” he said after taking his first drink.
She was in a snug brown jacket with a white scarf loose around her neck, and a pair of trousers she wore when riding just to annoy her sister.
“Thank you,” she said, turning side to side. “Sterling threatened to disown me if I left the house in it today.”
“You left.”
“I own the house,” she said, and laughed, drank, put the tankard down and folded her hands around it. “Have you seen Freddy?”
He stared down at the foam and nodded, and needed no prodding to tell her what he’d heard that morning. Every so often he would look up, to see if she were affected or not, and each time felt himself more amazed. Most of the other women he knew would have been home by now, dousing themselves with salts and fueling their gossipy lives for at least the next six months.
Betty, on the other hand, was genuinely interested, and genuinely concerned. It was she, he knew, who had made sure Gert would find old clothes in the trash, and the odd parcel of carefully wrapped food.
He finished just as their sandwiches arrived, and with mutual grimaces of distaste, they ate. Quickly. Paying little heed to the odd looks they received from customers departing and entering. Ordering a second round of ale while John told her of his visit that morning, before Cab came to fetch him.
“But doesn’t he have a right to the piece?” she asked.
“That’s just it, I don’t know. But as I told him, I can’t just take his word that he’s entitled to it. First, I have to get the truth from Jeffrey, and Reskin if he ever shows up again.”
Her agreement was reluctant, but she said nothing more about it until after he’d paid the bill and they were outside, walking slowly along Centre Street, acutely aware now that their dress was markedly different than what was expected of them in public.
“We’re horrible, you know,” she said, taking his arm and hugging it to her side.
“Reprobates, at the very least.”
And he smiled at her, liking the fact that she was nearly his own size, liking the way she never treated him like a fool save when he was being foolish. It was, he knew, trust. As Ned trusted his flashes of insight, she trusted his belief in the future.
So why, he asked himself, don’t you propose and be done with it? She knows you’re going to, one of these days. What, Johnny boy, are you waiting for?
The answer was simple: he simply didn’t know.
“You know,” she said as they reached Chancellor Avenue and started east, for the park, “it seems to me that you three are being awfully stubborn about this.”
A moment passed before he understood her. “Stubborn? I don’t think so. Just careful, that’s all.”
“Are you sure you’re not just trying to teach Jeffrey a lesson. At Khirhal Bey’s expense, as it turns out?”
He would have argued no but an idle glance across the street made him stop. Frown. Look at her for so long that she frowned back and wanted to know what he was thinking.
“Gert,” he said, taking her hand and guiding her through the traffic to the other side of Chancellor. “I’d like to know how the hell you can beat a woman to death without a weapon.”
“No one said that,” Betty told him. “They just couldn’t find one.”
“Well,” he answered with a grin, “there’s another way to find out.”
The study at the end of the hall had only one key; not even the servants were permitted to enter. Its walls were covered with glass-fronted cases in which were displayed hundreds of relics of civilizations the owner had never seen, only read of. On its floor was a dark Persian rug. In the far corner was a writing desk, and a single chair sat by a small fireplace near the room’s only window.
The lamp on the desk burned low.
When thunder sounded outside, here it was reduced to a low throated grumbling.
“You assured me there’d be no violence! I had your solemn word.”
The speaker’s voice was forcedly calm, and his face was hidden, only the rings on his fingers caught the light in green and amber fire.
“Alas, there is always violence of one sort or another. Life is not life without it.”
“If we’re found out — ”
“We will not be. And if we are, who would believe it? You should not worry so much. It does not become you.”
The draperies covering the window rippled as a draught slipped over the sill.
“I don’t like it.”
“It is not yours to like. It is yours to obey if this thing is to be done.”
A grandfather clock sounded the sixth hour past noon, the chimes hollow, the echoes too long in the hallway beyond the closed door.
“I suppose . . . it was just an old woman after all.”
“That is so. Just an old woman.”
“Damn. And you’re sure they won’t know?”
“As sure as one can be, my love. I have done my best to learn what they know, but you must understand that I am not . . . how shall I put it? I am not one who can pass invisibly through your people. I must be careful. Extra caution is needed.”
“I don’t know why you just don’t let me do it.”
“If I am not invisible, what do you call yourself?”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“You repeat yourself.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”
Voices outside and the clatter of a carriage as it pulled under the portico.
“Darling, do you think we’ll get them? I mean, will we succeed?”
“There is no reason not to think so.”
“You sound doubt
ful.”
“Nothing is ever certain.”
“Christ, if they’d just stop playing at petty gods and give me the goddamn things, we wouldn’t have to go through this!”
“Be calm, my love. What is, is. What was, cannot be altered.”
“Of course. Be calm. Just like that.” A loud and deep breath. “And there is still no word from Peter. You’re quite sure of that. “
“Quite sure.”
“You know, it’s just possible that he panicked and left the country again.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
The rings flared as the hands shifted nervously.
“Tell me the truth — is he still alive?”
“If I knew that, I would be a seer. I am not. I am only a servant and have only a servant’s poor skills.”
A short barking laugh.
The study door opened after a large key had been turned.
Murmuring from below and a woman’s shrill laughter.
“I will see you at dinner on Friday, then?”
“Yes. I will be pleased if we are able to sit together this time.”
“I have no control over that.”
A gentle laugh, mocking.
“But you must listen to me — I will have no more violence, do you understand? I won’t stand for it!”
“You are a pretty man, and a foolish one. Have you not yet learned that what you like and what you do not like are no longer of any importance. What is important is that we finish what is begun. And do not fool yourself — it has begun.”
* * *
James Gravell’s office was in a low, dark brick building on Chancellor Avenue, facing the park. The right half was his living quarters, the left half his surgery, and John counted himself lucky that the doctor was free when he rang the bell.
“John! Miss Jerrard!” Gravell said heartily. “What brings you two here?” The bearded and heavily paunched man took Betty’s arm and brought her into the sitting room, John trailing. “Not under the weather, I hope. In this weather that could be fatal.”
John laughed dutifully and stood behind a frail-looking chair Betty accepted. Then he glanced around the room all frills and fragile furniture and wondered how a man as large as Gravell could stand being in a place like this. He waited until the doctor eased himself onto a couch that wouldn’t hold more than two rather thin children, then asked him about Gert Naysmith.
“Ah,” Gravell said. “So that’s it, eh? Playing detective again. And is Miss Jerrard your assistant?”
“Just giving him some help, that’s all, Doctor.”
Gravell sniffed, pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and went through the ritual of sniff, roll, clip, and light without saying a word. Then, with the smoke clouding about his head, he closed his eyes.
“They told you she was beaten to death.” A quick look then to Betty, who smiled prettily and assured him she wasn’t going to swoon. After all, she was the one who had found Jones and the body.
“Well,” the doctor said, somewhat disconcerted. “Well, you were told, then, about a beating.”
“Yes,” John said.
“I’m not so sure.” The eyes opened, slowly. “John, I don’t know how to explain it, but it looked to me as if she’d been trampled to death.”
“On the tracks? James, come on.”
“I know, I know, but that’s what I saw. What the police choose to believe is their business.”
With a touch to Betty’s shoulder, John moved to the high front window, staring out at the park’s iron fence and the thick stand of trees beyond.
“You’ve examined the body closely?”
“Of course I have.”
“No trace, then, of wood or whatever in her wounds?”
A loud series of puffs made John turn around. Gravell was staring at the ceiling, his expression one of indecision. He turned back just as the man said, “No. Not exactly.”
An electric passed the building then, and two riders who were joking with the old man driving the motor car. He thought about Freddy. “James, see to it that Gert gets a decent burial, won’t you? And send the bill to me.”
Gravell answered with a grunt and pushed himself to his feet. “You’re working for Jones, aren’t you,” he said, coming to stand beside him.
“In a way.”
“Come with me, then. Both of you.”
An exchange of shrugs as Betty rose, and they followed him into the surgery where, in a smaller room behind filled with glass-fronted cabinets of vials, instruments, and cartons of supplies, Gravell opened the drawer of a small desk and pulled out a tin box of the sort his wife probably used for buttons.
He opened it and held it out.
John looked a question at him, looked in, and saw lying on the bottom a strip of grey cloth tattered at the ends and edges, and flecked with dirt and dark stains. When he looked up, thoroughly puzzled, Gravell closed the tin again and placed it back in the drawer.]
“I found that under Gert’s body,” the doctor said.
“But surely the police — ”
“Say it’s a piece of her skirt.”
“You don’t think so, is that it?”
“I think, John, I’ve never seen cloth like that in my life.”
Chapter 9
Riding behind Betty on the already skittish grey was not something John enjoyed, despite the fact that it gave him a chance to put his arms around her without causing the entire village to turn red with indignation. They had left Gravell’s immediately after the doctor admitted to the temptation to run tests on the mysterious cloth, and Betty, more than he, had convinced him to give in; then she told him she had to be home to dress for dinner, Sterling having invited Edmunds and Turnbell over for an evening’s debate.
“Sounds lovely,” he said. “Is this a trial run for Friday night?”
She glared but couldn’t hold it, smiled and offered him the lift to his house.
At his gate he slid off, and was as surprised as she seemed to be when she leaned over and kissed him, and made him promise to be careful.
“Gert never harmed a soul in her life,” she said then, “and she certainly had no valuables. There’s something wrong, John, and I don’t want you doing anything foolish.”
And when she’d gone, he wondered how she’d known what he was thinking — that somehow Peter Reskin held the key to what was going on in the village. He had no idea if Naysmith’s murder and Jeffrey’s problems with the Egyptians were connected, but he told himself it wouldn’t do a bit of harm to find out.
And the only way to do that would be to have a look at the bogus professor’s cottage.
“You’re an idiot, you know,” he muttered several times later, when two hours of pacing aimlessly through the house had driven Mrs. Karragan to new anger, and himself to distraction.
“A complete idiot,” as he saddled the roan just after six and walked her out to the road.
And he said it yet again when he reached the end of the Pike, and the sun had already slipped below the tops of the trees, scattered in the greylight between shadows, scattering shadows in wavering spears over the tracks. There was no path wide enough on this side of the line that would take him to Reskin’s cottage, so he urged the horse over to Cross Valley Road and turned right, hunching his shoulders against the occasional gust of wind, squinting when a spray of sudden drizzle was blown into his face.
The clouds had separated out of their overcast and back into thunderheads that drifted across the sky, and in their passing left a chill that made his teeth chatter.
To the east he could see the outlines of distant farm buildings and smell the rich turned earth, the new crops, the lingering perfume of wildflowers dotting a fallow field; to the west, however, there was nothing but trees. The estates of Oxrun’s wealthy didn’t reach this far, and there were only a dozen or so scattered small homes to break the wall of dense woods.
The roan bobbed its head and snorted.
He steadied it with a soft word an
d peered into the shadows across the tracks, finally fixing on the clearing that marked Gert Naysmith’s place. The house was hidden; and there was nothing but shadow left.
Not a sound but the wind’s soft soughing.
The roan skittered sideways, shying at something he couldn’t see, and he leaned over its neck to speak to it again, stroking it, scratching it between its ears, and straightening when he came to Reskin’s cottage. A quick survey of the land around, and he dismounted, leading the horse across the tracks and frowning when it tossed its head in protest.
“For heaven’s sake, you’re worse than Mrs. Karragan,” he said, and wrapped the reins through a bush at the head of the clearing. The roan backed away immediately, its ears flat, its eyes wide and rolling. John held up his hands, his voice trying to be calming, but it reared without warning and pulled itself free. He yelled, leaping to one side when it charged him, then veered at the last moment and galloped back the way they had come.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said, hands on his hips. “You stupid . . . do you know,” he yelled then, “how far I’m going to have to walk, you stupid beast? Jesus!”
He kicked the ground angrily, yanked off his cap and raised a hand to throw it. Stopped. And shrugged. Walk he would have to do, but as long as he was here he might as well have a look around.
The trouble was, he thought glumly nearly thirty minutes later, there was nothing to see.
The yards front and back were empty; the house was closed up and the police, in an evident attempt to discourage looters and the curious, had nailed a new door on the front. The back entrance was locked. He’d tried peering in through the windows, but the gloom inside prevented him from seeing anything but his own weak reflection. And even when he managed to see past it, there was no sign of anything wrong. No sign of Peter Reskin. No sign of trouble.
He tried the front door again and swore at the police for being so damned efficient. Stepped back and glared at the roof. Stepped back again and wondered how much trouble he’d get into if he broke a window. The answer was in there. He knew it. And though he supposed he could go to the stationhouse tomorrow and probably talk Cab into giving him a key, his curiosity was feeding impatience like dry brush.
The Universe of Horror Volume 3: The Long Night of the Grave (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 6
