by Adam Millard
“Come on, you,” he said, staring across the room and into the shadows. He gently patted the arm of his chair.
Mouse slowly emerged from the darkness, glancing around as if to say, “Is she gone?”
“You’re quite safe,” Octavius told the cat. Mouse jumped up onto the tinkerer’s lap and began to purr. “Everything will be okay.”
Yet, as the words passed his lips, he knew he was lying both to the cat and to himself.
23
Abigale was not surprised to discover that Alcorn was penniless and sans passport. He told her that travelling halfway across the world had not been on the cards on the morning he’d left London.
“You seldom require a passport for Chiswick,” he told her, which was, at first, about as far as he was willing to go to track Thorneye down.
Fortunately, Mordecai Pick had presented her with enough money for two tickets to Paris, which was where they found themselves heading.
The carriage was of decent size, with plenty of legroom for Alcorn. He was a tall man, taller than Abigale had remembered him from their previous encounters, and he required a certain amount of space for those gangly limbs of his. Abigale, on the other hand, was more than happy curling up on her seat with her feet nestled beneath her. It was how she always sat if she could.
“Can I ask you something, John?” A deathly silence had fallen over the carriage, and she wanted to stifle it before it got any worse.
He glanced up at her with no uncertain amount of trepidation, as if frightened of what she might ask. “If you must.”
She allowed her feet to drop to the carriage floor and sat forward. “Why, after all these years, have you never given up on chasing me?” She smiled.
Alcorn didn’t.
“You’re a criminal,” he said. “It’s what I’m paid to do.”
Abigale shook her head. “No, you’re paid to uphold the law. I know that, but surely you knew you were wasting your time trying to find me.”
It wasn’t obnoxious cockiness with which she asked the question, and Alcorn could see what she was getting at.
“I will admit, Abigale Egars, that you have been a most formidable adversary. I would even suggest that, on several occasions, I found myself enjoying the thrill of the chase. You sure like to make a detective work for his supper. But that doesn’t mean I would never have caught you.”
“Are you suggesting, John Wesley Alcorn that if we were not here now, inextricably linked by sheer luck and nothing more, you would have eventually captured me on the streets of London?”
Alcorn nodded. That was exactly what he was suggesting. “You can only run for so long. In the end, there is only ever one outcome.”
“Gaol?” She was starting to hate that word even more that it was all that awaited her back in London.
“Gaol,” he said. “Most people, though I’m not suggesting you are ‘most people’, have a tendency to grow tired of it all, of running and trying to remain one step ahead of the police. One day, they simply forget something simple, leave a strand of evidence behind that would inevitably lead back to them.”
“So, you think that a felon intentionally allows that error in order to put an end to it all?”
“People like you don’t make mistakes,” he said. “You said it yourself. No matter how close I always thought I was, you were out in front, probably watching and laughing. Yes, I would have caught you in the end, but would it have been through my own resoluteness? I highly doubt it. There would have come a time when you simply tired of running, got bored of dodging peelers left, right, and centre, and that’s when you would have allowed yourself to make a mistake.” He arched his back as if satisfied with his answer. “I’ve seen it a hundred times before.”
Abigale sat back in her seat. She could never imagine allowing herself to be captured. It had never once crossed her mind. It just went to show the utter ineptness of the Met, if they had to rely solely upon the mood of criminals to meet their monthly quotient. How many people were sitting in gaol just because they could no longer be bothered to keep a low profile? It boggled the mind.
“So tell me something about yourself, Abigale Egars,” Alcorn said, allowing his eyes to close for a moment. He looked…peaceful.
“What’s there to tell?” she said. “Surely you’ll get it all out of me during the interview at the station…”
“No, tell me something about you,” Alcorn pressed, still with his eyes closed. “Something no one else knows. You’re not just a thief, you’re a person. Tell me something about Abigale Egars, the person.”
To say that Abigale was taken aback was an understatement. No amount of preparation could have readied her for such a thing. “Erm, okay. I’m a Sagittarius.”
“Born December 7th,” Alcorn said. One eye was wide open and trained upon her. “I said tell me something I don’t know.”
If she was taken aback by the initial question, she was wholly flabbergasted about how he knew her date of birth. She’d only ever told Octavius, and it was rarely celebrated. It meant that, at some point, Alcorn had found out about her biological parents, maybe gotten hold of a birth certificate. He really hadn’t been too far behind catching her, after all.
After a few moments of pondering, Abigale said, “I like purple.”
Alcorn opened one eye again. “Purple?”
“Purple,” she said. “It’s my favourite colour, but don’t tell anyone. For some reason, I’m always associated with red and green. Must be the hair and the hat.”
“Okay,” he said. “I won’t tell a soul. Now let me go to sleep. Do you not have anything in the way of preparation to be getting on with?”
How could one prepare for the unknown? She had plans of The Louvre, yes, but there was nothing more she could do to ascertain things went off without a hitch. Still, she removed the notebook from her satchel and laid it open upon her lap.
“What about you?” she said, forgetting for a moment Alcorn’s prior instructions to leave him in peace.
“Excuse me?” His eyes remained shut.
“I’ve told you something about me,” she said. “It’s only fair that you should share a little something about yourself.”
“There is nothing I could tell you that would elicit excitement on your part,” he said, though in a manner which was relaxed.
Abigale knew she could get something out of him if she persisted. “Oh, come on, John,” she said. “It hardly matters now. After all we’ve been through, and you can’t give me a simple piece of information about yourself. That seems highly unfair, and more than a little suspicious.”
One eye fell open yet again. “I was married once, a very long time ago.” The way it came out, so matter-of-fact, implied that the parting of he and his wife was less than amicable.
For the briefest of moments, Abigale wasn’t sure that persevering was the best course of action, but when she glanced up to find he was staring back at her through his one open eye, she knew he was expecting more questions, and that it was okay to ask them.
“What was her name?” Seemed like a good place to start. The nasty details could wait.
“Emma,” he said, shifting slightly in his seat. “I was young, she was younger. It was never going to succeed, especially with my job.” He paused as if in fond reminiscence, and said, “It was nice while it lasted, but it’s a mistake I’ve never looked to repeat.”
Abigale nodded. She knew precisely what he meant. Love was hard to come by in their line of work. If you were a criminal, it was one more person to lie to, and if you were an officer of the law, it was simply another soul to disappoint when you failed to return home at a decent hour.
“What happened?” Abigale said. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She held up a conciliatory hand because he’d already told her more than enough.
Alcorn took a deep breath. “Her father, he was a churchgoing man. In fact, he was practically part of the clergy.”
He laughed though Abigale could
see it pained him.
“Anyway, one day, Emma and I were setting out for a trip. I can’t recall where we were going, now, but I believe it was somewhere down on the south coast. We were in the middle of packing our cases when her father arrived at my house with a rather unscrupulous looking bunch of gentlemen. They smuggled Emma off in a hansom while her father remained behind to hand out some rough justice. Apparently, I should never have married his daughter. You see, we’d eloped the week before. She was barely of age, and I had no real job to speak of. It was only going to end badly.”
“So they just took her?” Abigale said. “Your wife of one week.”
Alcorn nodded. “I don’t blame him for what he did. We were stupid and young, and neither of us knew what to expect from life. It was never a marriage, really. Just two dumb kids with a piece of paper.”
Well I never, Abigale thought. You think you know a hard-arse and then they suddenly drop a bombshell like this on you. “Did you ever see her again?”
“Actually, I saw her the following week. She was in the bank with her father. He gave me a look that would have terrified a herd of wild buffalo, and she did her utmost to ignore me. I have to admit, that was one of the worst moments of my life. If it wasn’t bad enough that the woman who I loved…. At least, thought I loved, had been cruelly snatched from my arms, she was now ignoring me at the request of her father, the clergyman.”
“Well that, John Wesley Alcorn, is one of the most depressing tales I’ve ever heard.” Abigale shook her head. In a way, she was glad she’d managed to get him to open up, and in another, she wished she hadn’t bothered. “You can go to sleep now,” she said, settling back into her seat.
“Why, thank you very much,” Alcorn said, his words dripping with sarcasm.
For a while, Abigale simply sat watching him. He snored, and occasionally the corner of his eye twitched as if he was being pestered by an invisible fly. It was such a surreal moment—her and Alcorn sharing a carriage to Paris where a crime would be committed and they would both be involved—that it was hard to believe it was truly happening.
She scribbled the name Emma in her notebook and drew a large heart around it. For some reason, it seemed appropriate, but for what reason, Abigale didn’t know. She closed the book and turned her attention to the window, where large fields rushed by at an incredible rate. It wasn’t the first time she’d travelled on a locomotive, but it was no less thrilling than when she’d visited Southampton for the purposes of acquiring a very large ring.
It would be another twenty-five hours before they arrived in Paris. Abigale made a mental note not to ask John Wesley Alcorn any more private questions.
24
The Gare du Nord was filled with the hustle and bustle of a busy weekday, and as Abigale and Alcorn debarked, they were immediately troubled by the hectic station.
“People sure do love Paris,” Abigale said, making sure her satchel was properly concealed beneath her arm. The last thing she wanted was to fall prey to a Parisian dipper. To them it would be a handful of money and an object they would never be able to discern, but to her, it would mean an excruciating death at the hands of a very disappointed Mordecai Pick.
“They call it ‘the city of love’,” Alcorn said, glancing around at the ensuing chaos. “It’s a lot like London, only they speak French here.” With that little nugget of wisdom, he led Abigale away from the locomotive and through a series of halls and doors until they arrived safely on the street out front. “Oh, and they like to call them Rues instead of streets. Apart from that, just another busy city in another shite country.”
“Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the carriage,” Abigale said. To her, Paris looked nothing like London. In London, she would have been pick pocketed five times by then, and then there was the smell. There was something of a difference in air quality. Where London had the Thames, a veritable quagmire of filth and bodies, Paris had the Seine, and it was the wonderfully perfumed scent drifting from the city’s river that assaulted her senses. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, all the while thinking, Try doing that in London and see how far it gets you.
“So what now?” Alcorn said.
Abigale could see he was agitated, and with good reason. He was part of a bizarre scheme, soon to be up to his neck in it. For a man of the law, that took some balls.
“Well, I don’t think our giant friend has followed us,” she said, though it didn’t hurt to scan the crowd one last time. “We know he’s capable of magic, or immortality, or both, so we can’t take anything for granted.”
“You say that like it’s the most natural thing in the world. All this talk of wizards and…and raising the dead…doesn’t it bother you, because it scares the bejesus out of me?”
Abigale nodded. “You have no idea how scared I am right now. But as long as Gulliver’s back in Saint Petersburg, I don’t think we have much to worry about.”
“You’re assuming he didn’t climb onto the roof of the locomotive and hitch a ride all the way across with us.” As soon as he’d said it, he glanced around, making sure that there was no sign of the big man with the chainsword, or his pet wolf. “No, you’re right. He would have come after us on the locomotive, wouldn’t he?”
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Abigale said. The crowds were going about their business around them, closing in like walls of flesh.
Alcorn nodded. It was the most sensible thing she’d ever said.
*
Le Maison d’Anne was an elegant little townhouse not far from Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. It was certainly better than its Russian counterpart, but Abigale quickly pushed thoughts of Anja and Oleg away, for she didn’t want to consider the idea that they had not survived the chainsword-wielding maniac’s attack.
The only thing Abigale didn’t like about Le Maison d’Anne was the woman examining Alcorn as if he was a piece of rather expensive venison. She’d introduced herself as Miss Anasthasie Blaine, which to Abigale meant that no one in their right mind was stupid enough to marry her. She had stupidly tall hair, and her cheeks were so daubed with rouge that she looked like a porcelain doll. What annoyed Abigale more, however, was the fact that Alcorn was ceding to the woman’s charms and flirting as if tomorrow would never arrive.
Though, in their case, perhaps that wasn’t too far off the mark.
“So, the room is yours,” Anasthasie said, holding out a hand with a key dangling from it. As Alcorn went to get it, she snatched it back and smiled. “If you need anything, anything at all, then please come see me, yes?”
Alcorn nodded, and graciously accepted the key. “Thank you.”
“And the same goes for your daughter,” Anasthasie said, before smiling toward Abigale. “She has your eyes.”
Abigale scowled. She didn’t like the lady, not one bit, but before she could retort, Alcorn was ushering her along the foyer to a large door. Once they were safely through it, and heading up a set of stairs, Abigale said, “I saw that, by the way.”
“Saw what?”
“You and the Parisian Madame,” Abigale said. “So that’s the kind of girl you go for.”
Alcorn sniffed. “I’ll have you know that girls of any kind do not interest me. I merely aim to make polite exchanges when possible. One never knows when a little flirting might pay off.”
As far as Abigale was aware, flirting only paid off in the form of more carnal intercourse. There was never much in between.
They reached the room and Alcorn slipped the key into the lock. As he pushed the door open, Abigale peered round. “I like it,” she said. The room was sparse, and what furniture there was had been arranged entirely at one side.
Alcorn stepped in and pushed the key into the lock on the other side, ready to turn once they were both settled. He faced their quarters, stepping aside to allow Abigale room to pass. “It could be much worse,” he said. “At least there’s a river between us and the museum.”
La Seine cut through the city like a deep scar, and
their lodgings were south of the river. Alcorn had insisted that they keep a fair distance from the Louvre, and even though Abigale had tried to force him to reconsider, he had been resolute. Once they had arrived, she did, though she would never tell him, agree with him. Taking up residence across the street hadn’t worked out too well back at The Hermitage.
Alcorn followed the chain protruding from his pocket all the way along to his pocket watch. He checked the time and said, “We have seven hours to kill before the museum closes for the night. I don’t suppose Madame Blaine has furnished us with anything in the way of games.”
Abigale fell backwards onto what she’d already chosen as her bed. “I’m sure there are a few games she would care to partake in with you,” she said, trying not to sound bitter. Why was she so affected by their landlady’s interest in Alcorn? She didn’t…no, that wasn’t possible…
“Like I said,” Alcorn sighed, “I don’t have time for any of that nonsense, not that it’s any of your business.” He wandered across to the window and absorbed the view. Down beside the river, a steady stream of carriages moved along, the horses at their helms seemingly disinterested by the romance of the city. “Do we need to hide that thing?” he said, suddenly turning from the window. The view was nice, but there were more pressing matters, not least the S-shaped item currently sitting in Abigale Egars’ satchel.
“What thing?” Abigale pushed herself up onto her elbows and frowned.
Alcorn gestured to the satchel hanging around Abigale’s neck. “The thing. The weird object that everyone seems to be falling over themselves to possess. Shouldn’t we be putting it somewhere safe?”
Abigale hadn’t thought about it, but once she did, it seemed to make sense. “You’re right. Goliath seems to be able to latch onto it as if it’s calling to him.” She removed the satchel and took the small, golden article, placing it upon the flowery-patterned quilt making up her bed. “The only thing is…what do we do with it? I mean, how do we stop him from tracking it, tracking us?”
