A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  He looked up at the windows of the old building. They still bore some of the original crown glass, cleaned and restored, but in the darkness behind, where there should have been only brick, he could detect signs of movement: a certain shimmering, like pools of water gently rippling, catching the artificial light from the offices beyond and reflecting it, transformed, on the walls above.

  And as he witnessed this display, Quayle was afraid.

  CHAPTER XLI

  Bob Johnston’s cloth bags did not contain books alone but also printed papers, copies of photographs, and a series of single-word notes written in block capitals as aides-mémoire, all relating to the subject at hand. Johnston had been circumspect in his investigations, some of which had caused him to delve deeper into the world of the despised Internet than he might otherwise have cared to venture. Parker had warned him to be wary. Quayle was alert to signs of pursuit, and he was certainly not unique in his interest in the Atlas.

  Johnston produced a photocopy of a bookplate bearing the letter “D” twinned, and beneath the motif the single word “London.” Parker recognized it from the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales—later retrieved from the body in Arizona—that Quayle had traveled to the United States to find.

  “The bookplate was the starting point,” said Johnston. “And, in a way, the end.”

  * * *

  DUNWIDGE & DAUGHTER, ANTIQUARIAN booksellers: founded in Chelsea in 1775 by one Cardwell Dunwidge, and destroyed by fire in the 1920s—not that many mourned its passing, the loss of its stock apart; and even this, it was whispered, was better off burned. From the start, the business dealt only in occult volumes, a very specialized area of literary commerce often noted for the rarity of the items involved, and the anonymity of their buyers.

  Unlike his competitors, principal among them being James Lackington, the crown prince of the London book trade at the end of the eighteenth century, Cardwell Dunwidge did not issue catalogs. He was familiar with the specific requirements of his clients, and frequently acquired books with the profits from their future sale already as good as in his pocket, but he was not above making speculative purchases. These he would collate into lists, copies of which were then handwritten by his clerks, and circulated to interested parties.

  Because such books were rarely available in numerous copies, they retained a desirability for collectors that was only enhanced by their transgressive nature. Even those without a particular interest in the occult might be prepared to invest heavily in a book that was sui generis. On the other hand, some volumes were so “specialized” that it was better to keep the fact of their existence less widely known, and limit the details of their sale to those individuals best positioned to appreciate their particular qualities without being overly troubled by issues of taste or morality. Auctions were held in which the bidders did not even set eyes on one another, but placed their bids from nearby clubs or coffeehouses, the sums written on folded sheets of paper and brought to Dunwidge by a succession of illiterate urchins.

  Lackington despised Dunwidge, as did Lackington’s business partner, John Denis, who was responsible for convincing Lackington to include an occult section in their first catalog, issued in 1779. As a competitor, Dunwidge should barely have been worthy of their attention. Lackington’s catalogs included tens of thousands of volumes, and he was selling close to 100,000 books a year. Dunwidge’s sales, meanwhile, might have amounted to a thousand volumes in a good year, but were probably closer to six or seven hundred.

  But what sales! More than £26 from the painter Richard Cosway for a cabalistic manuscript attributed to the painter Rubens, and almost £160 from the same Cosway for a manuscript of emblems from the Coronatio Naturae, this when a farm laborer earned nine shillings a week, and so could work for seven years and still not be able to afford what Cosway had acquired after perhaps only a moment’s pause to listen to his banker’s wails.

  So Dunwidge was their rival not only for inventory but also for customers, especially at the more select end of the market. Yet it was widely known that Dunwidge had debased appetites, and kept street children close for more than the purpose of transporting letters and bids. While this was no crime in the eyes of the law, Lackington, although somewhat lapsed from his Methodist faith, regarded Dunwidge as an abomination, and Denis agreed. Unfortunately, few of Dunwidge’s clients had similar qualms, and some even shared his taste for pedophilia.

  Denis, who was himself a collector of the occult, eventually severed ties with Lackington to set up his own firm. When he died in 1785, his son, also John, inherited both his father’s business and his prejudices. Dunwidge continued to be a goad to him, and an affront to decency, but at least Denis was in good company, for rare was the bookseller in London who would openly admit to commerce with Cardwell Dunwidge.

  Privately, though…

  Well, that was another matter.

  The Dunwidge family remained pariahs in the London book trade, but successful ones, a situation that persisted until the ascent to the Dunwidge throne of Eliza, sole scion of Wenham Dunwidge, at the turn of the twentieth century. She was cleverer than her progenitor, even at an early age, eventually achieving the notable distinction of having the fact of her existence appended to the company name, and the less welcome one of burning to death in the fire that had finally wiped the family business from the face of the world.

  “What caused the fire?” Parker asked.

  “It may have been started by a man called John Soter,” said Johnston. “He was suspected of beating Eliza’s father to death, and of killing a London book scout named Maggs. He was also believed to have murdered a prostitute named Sally Campion, as well as two street children.”

  “Why?”

  “That I can’t tell you. Most of what I discovered came from the newspapers of the day, and even they weren’t entirely clear on what might have caused Soter to commit his crimes. And Soter wasn’t around to ask: he disappeared, believed to have fled to Europe, or even the United States. What I do know is that Soter was a private detective, hired to locate a missing bibliophile named Lionel Maulding, and also to locate a book: an atlas.”

  “Who hired him?” Louis asked.

  “That’s where it gets really interesting,” said Johnston. “Soter was working for a London lawyer named Atol Quayle.”

  * * *

  QUAYLE PAUSED WITH THE key in the lock—or one of the keys, in one of the locks. Even after all this time, he was never less than scrupulous about the security of his stronghold. It seemed to him that he had heard a sound, as of a voice crying out in uneasy sleep: a formless utterance, without meaning but undeniably human. Such a yell was not unusual in the city at this time of night, but what disturbed Quayle was that it appeared to have emerged from somewhere in his own rooms. He completed the unlocking as quickly and quietly as he could, the dust of the tunnels still upon him, before hurrying up the stairs to his living quarters, where he faced one final door to unfasten. Even as he did so, he wondered if he might have misheard. If the doors were all secured, how could someone have gained access?

  He entered his lair, and was bathed in preternatural light.

  * * *

  “QUAYLE?” SAID PARKER. “YOU’RE sure that was the name?”

  “Atol Quayle,” Johnston confirmed. “Lionel Maulding was one of his clients. Maulding was a recluse, but a wealthy one. His disappearance, like the Soter killings, made all the papers of the day. It was a hell of a mystery—still is, I suppose, if we’re discussing it almost a century later.”

  “That would make Atol Quayle—” Angel did the math, working it out on his fingers.

  “You need to borrow a hand?” asked Louis.

  “Hush, I’m counting… Maybe the great-grandfather of the man we’re looking for?”

  Parker guessed that their quarry was probably in his late sixties or early seventies, although it had been difficult to tell. He dyed his hair, dressed in well-cut clothes, and wore fashionable glasses, but in harsh light the wrinkles o
n his face were clear to see, and his eyes were those of a sick old man.

  “Assuming ours didn’t pull the Quayle identity from a hat,” said Louis. “This is a guy with at least two passports in other names.”

  “No, the choice of the Quayle name wasn’t random,” said Parker. “Whether it’s real or not, it meant something to him, but my guess is he wasn’t lying about it.”

  “Sorry to rain on your parade,” Johnston interrupted, “but there are no more Quayles. The firm was very old, but it ceased to exist after World War II. No partners, except way back in the sixteenth century. The partner, Couvret, was a Huguenot refugee, who came to England to escape religious persecution in Europe.

  “As for the law firm, the line of continuity is hard to trace. Sometimes it passed to a son or brother, at other times to a cousin or nephew, but it was always a Quayle, until this last one, Atol, closed up shop in 1946, and died shortly after. Here: I found a death notice from The Times of London, dated September 1948.”

  He pulled another sheet from his file and handed it to Parker.

  “ ‘QUAYLE, Atol,’ ” Parker read, “ ‘solicitor of the Inns of Chancery. Died London, after a short illness. Service private.’ Odd that it doesn’t give a date of birth, or even the month he died.”

  “No details about parents, either,” said Johnston, “or qualifications, or his career. No surviving relatives, obviously, because there didn’t appear to be any.”

  “Then who placed the obituary?” said Parker.

  “He might have arranged it himself, before he died. That would explain the absence of a date of death. He could have left instructions, possibly with another lawyer, to be followed to the letter.”

  “What about Couvret?” Louis asked. “Did he stay in the legal business? Maybe his descendants took care of Quayle’s affairs, and vice versa.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” said Johnston, “but Couvret died—violently murdered by persons unknown shortly before the end of the sixteenth century. There’s a reference to the killing in William Herbert’s Antiquities of the Inns of Court and Chancery, 1804, and Thomas Allen’s History and Antiquities of London, Southwark, and Parts Adjacent, from 1839, although Allen seems to have drawn on Herbert’s account, which makes his contribution largely redundant.”

  Louis stared hard at Johnston.

  “You seriously need to find a woman. Or a man. Just someone.”

  “I have my books,” said Johnston, defensively.

  “Any of them shaped like a woman?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “What happened to Quayle’s premises?” Parker asked.

  “He owned a number of properties, all adjacent. Some were destroyed in World War Two, but most of those that survived were later demolished, and the sites redeveloped. They’re now mostly law offices, from what I can tell.”

  “And who got the money?” said Angel.

  “According to the terms of sale, it was paid into what’s called an ‘interest in possession’ trust, where the trustee is obliged to pass on all income from the trust as it arises. The trust was set up back in the nineteenth century, with the trustees in this case being a firm of London attorneys named Lockwood and Dodson. They could have been the ones who had Quayle’s obituary published. The advantage of an interest-in-possession trust is that the trustees pay tax on the income before it’s handed over to the beneficiary, so if it’s set up right, the beneficiary doesn’t have the tax authorities snooping around.”

  “Is Lockwood and Dodson still in existence?” said Parker.

  “Absolutely, although it’s now Lockwood, Dodson and Fogg. The firm was responsible for the development of the site, and its offices now sit where Quayle’s once did.”

  “And who is the beneficiary of the trust?”

  “I don’t know. In Britain, trusts have to be registered with Revenue and Customs, the equivalent of the IRS, but as long as the taxes are paid, they couldn’t give a shit about the beneficiary. Like I said, if you establish the trust properly at the start, you ensure a certain amount of privacy. If money is still coming in from investments covered by the trust, then we’ve no way of finding out the ultimate destination.

  “Most of the information I’ve shared with you was easily available online or in books, so I didn’t have to dig too deeply. You warned me to be guarded in my inquiries, and I have, or I hope so: I don’t want this Quayle, whoever he may really be, to come knocking on my door asking why I’m interested in his affairs. The dangerous stuff I leave up to you, although it strikes me that all of this is dangerous, so it may simply be a question of degree.”

  Louis ordered another round of drinks. Parker opted for a final glass of red wine. Nobody was rushing to make them pay the check, not that the management would have been likely to move Louis on in any case, not even if the line stretched to the sidewalk. You knew you were in good company when the appetizers were comped.

  “What about Soter?” said Parker.

  “War veteran,” said Johnston. “Suffered some form of trauma during the Battle of the Somme at a place called Delville Wood, which was about as bad a spot as you could choose to frequent in 1916. He was shipped home in the aftermath, and spent time at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, which was where they treated officers suffering from shell shock. While he was up there, his wife and children were killed in a bombing raid on London. The papers speculated that grief, combined with whatever he’d gone through in France, might have driven him insane. He was later arrested for bothering some general he blamed for the slaughter at Delville, but was released without charge. By then he was working consistently as a private detective: mostly divorces, straying husbands, fraud cases, that kind of thing. He’d been in the same business before the war, which was when he came to Quayle’s notice.”

  “What was his background?”

  “Not unlike your own: he was a police detective until 1912, part of the Criminal Investigation Division of the London Metropolitan Police.”

  “Any clue as to why he left?”

  “None.”

  “I mean, did he jump or was he pushed?”

  “Again, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that he had a talent for finding people, which is strange.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Angel.

  “Because,” said Johnston, “he seemed so lost himself.”

  * * *

  QUAYLE’S LODGINGS CONSISTED OF a dining room; a living-room-cum-library, in which he spent the majority of his waking hours; a kitchen; a bedroom; and a bathroom. The living and dining rooms were wood-paneled, and had remained largely unchanged since the nineteenth century, apart from the addition of marginally better lighting, a radio, and a record player. He accessed the Internet, if only occasionally, via a secure dongle provided by Mors. The bookshelves contained many legal tomes, both old and more modern, since Quayle, although long retired from the profession, enjoyed keeping up with developments; a great deal of classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, along with a considerable collection of poetry and drama; and a valuable assemblage of occult volumes, some of them purchased in person from Lackington, Denis père et fils, and generations of Dunwidges, although even Quayle had kept Eliza Dunwidge at a distance. He was, he had often thought, rather glad that Soter had caused her, either accidentally or intentionally, to be burned alive.

  A door was set in the shelves facing the entrance to Quayle’s rooms. Had a stranger succeeded in opening it, he would have discovered only a blank wall, and an exploratory tap would have suggested a reassuring thickness. Then again, any stranger taking such liberties would very quickly have ended up dead. The ethereal light bathing Quayle’s walls was leaking through the frame of this door. So, too, was the sound he had heard from the yard. It was a man’s voice, one that Quayle had not heard in almost a century.

  It was the voice of John Soter.

  * * *

  SOTER, SEATED IN A corner of the Ten Bells in Spitalfields, loo
ks up from his copy of the Evening News, and rumors of war with Germany, as his name is called.

  “Mr. Soter? Mr. John Soter?”

  Standing before him is a man he does not recognize, although he knows the type: a functionary, running a master’s errands. A cheap suit, growing worn at the elbows and cuffs, but clean and unwrinkled; old shoes, but well shined; ink on the fingertips of the right hand, and a corpse’s pallor. A junior clerk, but not from a bank: the clothes are too sad, and the demeanor too cunning. A legal man: Soter has spent time with enough of them to be able to identify the breed by sight.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “My name is Fawnsley. My employer, Mr. Atol Quayle—an esteemed figure in Chancery—would like to meet you.”

  Soter checks his pocket watch. It is almost 8 p.m., and he has the thirst for another beer.

  “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  “Mr. Quayle would prefer you to join him immediately. It’s a matter of some urgency—and delicacy. He instructed me to inform you that you would be paid generously for your time, regardless of whether you ultimately elected to accept his commission.”

  Fawnsley, hat in hands, wringing the brim as though to relieve it of a weight of water.

  He doesn’t want to disappoint his employer, thinks Soter. And not just that, he’s frightened of him. Atol Quayle: the name is unfamiliar to him, but then, there are as many lawyers around Fleet Street and the Strand as there are rats by the river, or so it often seems.

  “All right, I’ll go with you,” says Soter.

  After all, what else has he to do? Another pint to consume, more bad news to read, and screaming children and a tired wife waiting for him at home. These nights stretch on so as winter closes, the darkness accumulating, its weight growing heavier upon him.