The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  “No, no, Tom. I mean what happened this morning, at dawn.”

  “I heard nothing.”

  The Rector swallowed. “He’s dead, Tom.”

  McKnight actually stopped in his tracks and stared incredulously. “Smeaton?” he asked. “Dead?”

  “Torn open. As if by wild beasts.”

  McKnight frowned. “Where?”

  “The body was found in the New Town, by a milkmaid.”

  “In which street?”

  “In several streets, Tom.”

  McKnight’s frown deepened. “Murdered?”

  “Aye. By someone. Some thing. The body has already been identified and removed to the mortuary in the Cowgate. The police are with the Chancellor now.”

  McKnight set the pipe stem between his teeth.

  “There’ll be an investigation, Tom. You might be called in for questioning. Formal procedure, you know. For motive, and the like.”

  “Of course…” said McKnight, and the Rector, clearly uncomfortable in his presence, set off to inform the others.

  Resuming his way up the corridor, McKnight approximated a familiar look of consternation, so that any onlooker would have little doubt that he was troubled by the news. But inwardly, and with an unsettling laceration of guilt, he thought that the murder was the most logical thing he had heard in many years.

  Chapter II

  CARUS GROVES, acting Chief Inspector of the Edinburgh City Police, had been imagining this moment all day. Indeed, for all the horror he had encountered since sunrise, all the demands of investigation, the interviews, the confrontations and speculations, it could be reasonably calculated that most of his mental energy had been engaged in projecting him forward to the moment when, squeezed into his desk in the corner of his Leith Walk bedroom, illuminated by a paraffin lamp, he dipped his pen into an inkwell, raised the nib over a blank page, and lovingly inscribed, in a headlinelike script:

  THE MURDERER FROM THE MEWS

  Then he settled back to watch the glistening ink dissolve into the paper with the authority of God’s inscriptions on the Sinai tablets.

  It was not the first title he had considered. “The New Town Murder” had given way to “The Murder of the Great Professor,” which in turn was superseded by “Murder by the Good Book,” and—penultimately and most ambitiously—“Murder Most Dark & Sinister.” He had settled with delight on “The Murderer from the Mews,” not for its accuracy—there was in fact little evidence that the killer had been hiding in the mews lane—but for its alliterative quality, which even to his policeman’s ears, attuned more to whistle blasts than poetry, carried a sonorous ring.

  He returned to the text promptly, for his little schoolroom desk was not conducive to lounging (and indeed had been purchased, from the defaulters’ furniture market opposite Craig’s Close, for that very reason), and applied his loving pen to the page.

  This was the most brutal example of attack this detective has had the misfortune to set his eyes upon, he began, and this was no exaggeration: Professor Smeaton’s body had been scattered across the intersection of Belgrave Crescent, Queensferry Road, and Dean Bridge in three ragged chunks, a nauseating spectacle for Groves, who had seen smothered children (“The Lothian Street Horror”) and maggot-infested corpses (“The Body in Dean Village”), but on the whole had been spared involvement with the city’s most gruesome investigations. And this was the reason “The Murderer from the Mews” carried such enormous personal significance.

  Groves had been at the forefront of nearly three thousand cases in over twenty years, but in all that time he had toiled in the consuming shadow of Chief Inspector Stuart Smith, a man famed throughout the kingdom for a near-perfect correlation between investigation and conviction. By virtue of his authority and experience Smith secured nearly all the cases involving capital offenses and the sensitive realms of Society, leaving Groves to concentrate on hucksters, thimblers, drunks, Jezebels, shoplifters, and other pests—a thankless task he performed with inordinate pride. Singular in the force for his literal interpretation of the first oath—“He must devote all his time & attention to the service”—there was nary a petty criminal in Edinburgh who was not familiar with his overhanging brow and frostbitten dome, and had not seen him at some stage stalking the wynds, patrolling the streets, and nabbing suspects with a brusque clap on the shoulder and a stern pronouncement in the ear: “You cannot escape the hand of Groves.”

  But Chief Inspector Smith was currently in London supervising the installation of his likeness in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, in a Chamber of Horrors tableau celebrating his arrest of “Silly” Sally Crombie, the Canongate poisoner hanged in Calton Jail ten years previously. The Evening News had dubbed him “Edinburgh’s First Man in Wax,” and later—when it was pointed out that Sir Walter Scott and David Hume, not to mention Burke and Hare, were already residents of the famous museum—simply “the Wax Man,” noting that it was a status he shared with Napoleon, Lord Nelson, and Henry VIII.

  Groves, on the other hand, had invested his hopes for immortality entirely in the completion of his memoirs, begun some thirteen years earlier and augmented every evening with detailed notes relating to fresh cases. When each investigation was complete he would critically examine his ledger book notes, embellish those details not verifiable, add a moralizing flourish, and only then decide if it was worthy of transcription into his gilt-edged casebook entitled The Fearsome Knock of Inspector Groves; or, The Reminiscences of a Detective in the Modern Athens.

  The book would of course not be complete until he had officially retired, and to this point had been perused by only one acquaintance: the late Piper McNab (“The Philosopher on the Corner”), the fully kilted bagpipes player whose accessible fund of gossip and wisdom—the man had been more a fixture of the streets than any patrolman—had earned him, in Groves’s view, the honor of being the first to run eyes across his much-considered words. McNab had registered admiration for the work but had observed, in the friendliest manner possible, that to ensure success the book would need to be “seasoned and garnished” with more of the “salacious and sensational” incidents without which the contemporary reader’s “lamentable attention span wanes and his voracious appetite for scandal goes unsated.” In effect what he was saying—and Groves was not so conceited that he could not see it—was that a record of shopliftings, forgeries, snowdroppings, and petty larcenies did not constitute the makings of a publishing milestone. “Blood lust,” the sage Piper offered, “is as much in the nostrils of the curate’s wife as it is in the muzzle of the Cowgate cur.”

  I had arrived as usual at Central Office in the High Street when I was informed of this most grisly tragedy, he wrote. He had in fact been relishing the idea of performing an unsolicited tidy-up of the Wax Man’s appalling paperwork when a breathless constable had bolted in with the news: the Reverend Alexander Smeaton, Professor of Ecclesiastical Law at the University of Edinburgh, had been viciously murdered. A shiver immediately ran through Groves like a lightning strike. A leading figure of the city’s intellectual and theological communities cut down. No witnesses. No culprit apprehended. And now it was upon his rounded shoulders to apprehend the demon responsible. This was no longer the sort of case that he observed from the periphery; this was his very own investigation, and it was his duty to be decisive—he was aware the others were looking at him expectantly.

  “I want a photographer,” he said. “Four constables to roam the area. A sheet, of course, and the hand ambulance. Notify Dr. Holland. And where the devil is Pringle?”

  Dick Pringle was the Wax Man’s indefatigable young assistant, assigned to Groves for the duration of the Chief Inspector’s absence. It was a sensible yet in practice curious arrangement: Pringle was in awe of seniority, and Groves, for his part, was assiduously guarding his mystique for fear that the slightest flaw might unveil his vulnerability.

  “Smeaton, sir, did you know him?” Pringle was sitting beside Groves in a racing cab, four constables clingi
ng to the outside.

  “There are few in the city I do not know,” Groves replied, though in fact he had little reason to associate with a divinity professor.

  “He was none too popular at the University, they say.”

  “They say the same about many at that institution,” Groves remarked, making a mental note to launch his investigation at the University as soon as possible.

  They arrived in the New Town shortly after nine, minus one of the constables, who had fallen off swinging around the Mound, to find the murder scene closed off by local patrolmen.

  No one had ever seen a body like it, and my first instruction once the photographer had attended to his duties, was to have it covered by a sheet, to protect the delicate sensibilities of the ladies in the district.

  Belgrave Crescent was in an area of perfectly aligned terrace houses, strictly regulated shrubs, and mirrorlike gold plaques—home to famous surgeons, advocates, academy presidents, and “more knights than there were in Camelot.” Groves had always disliked the New Town for its self-reliant discipline and secretly enjoyed the idea that its immaculate streets had been soiled with blood.

  The Professor was a man of habit, every morning he cut across Dean Bridge on his way to the morning office at St. Giles, the murderer was waiting for him at the end of the Crescent, lurking there in the mews opposite the Holy Trinity Chapel.

  It seemed an eminently feasible speculation. But Groves’s search of the immediate area, as the professor’s body was shoveled into three oilskin sacks, turned up little: cart tracks in a shoulder of mud, loose straw, some hoofprints. The milkmaid who had discovered the corpse, drained by the various manifestations of shock, was interviewed and her details recorded. A deacon was interrogated as he scrubbed blood from the church facade with a soapy brush. The constables swept through the district to question residents. Groves and Pringle themselves headed off to face the family with a palpable sense of purpose. In nearly all the cases involving violence with which Groves had been associated (including “The Hawker’s Surprise,” “The Grief of the Bereaved,” and “Not Seen in the Stars”) the perpetrators were of the victim’s kin. He had even dared to pronounce as much to Pringle while raising the brass knocker to administer his fearsome knock: “Watch closely when I prod,” he said under his breath. “There’s likely some wound I’ll make bleed.”

  RAT-TATTA-TATTA-TAT.

  But Mrs. Smeaton was an inconsolable mess. Further, she had already been informed of the death—had identified the body, in fact, at the request of an enterprising constable (“Get the cove’s name” was all Groves said)—thwarting a proper assault. There were two children, one in Cornwall, the other on the Continent. The servants were accounted for. There were no other close relatives in Edinburgh, and the widow could not conceive of possible motives.

  “You must know that your husband was not popular at the University?”

  “Who…who said such a thing?” she asked indignantly, a handkerchief clasped to her face.

  “It…has been said.”

  “Lies!” she insisted, and the handkerchief bellied like a sail. “My husband was the most respected man in Edinburgh!” And she launched into such a sustained burst of sobbing that Groves saw no option but to retreat.

  Once a Minister in the parish of Corstorphine, he lectured in Bible history and other church matters. Smeaton had written books on Agnosticism, Theism, and the history of the Holy Land to the time of Constantine. His class at the University was over a hundred strong, made up of budding ministers of the Scottish kirks, native and foreign, along with some older types—retired soldiers and advocates, mainly—who in their declining years had assumed an interest in matters theological. And to Groves every one of them was a suspect.

  “He was intimidating in many respects, and marked with a corresponding appearance,” the Chancellor of the University admitted later in his gloomy office. “You’ve seen his face, of course?”

  Groves did not want to admit that the face was in no state to be appraised for its characteristics. But he had certainly examined a portrait in the Smeaton home. “A man to be reckoned with,” he agreed suggestively.

  “A man of strong views and little hesitation. A challenging man, yes, but I would not say threatening.”

  “Ah?” Groves offered a grin that might have been a smirk. “These lines are delicate, are they not?”

  “I think you will find, Inspector,” the Chancellor said, “that most of his colleagues were stimulated by his manner. Provoked, yes, but these are men of intellect who secretly relish a sport, no matter how much they might deny it. I can certainly think of no one who might inflict physical damage upon him.”

  “And yet his body now lies on a slab in the morgue.”

  The Chancellor ignored the insinuation. “You’ve heard of Professor Whitty in Forensic Medicine, of course? The finest in his field. I suggest you allow him to examine the body closely.”

  “You suggest that, do you? And how can I be certain that this man is trustworthy?”

  The Chancellor frowned. “Whitty? Trustworthy? Clearly you don’t know the man.”

  It was true, Groves knew Whitty only through his close association with the Wax Man, though in this alone he found sufficient reason for resentment. And the thought of the man now solving the mystery with one brilliant forensic flourish, and thus robbing Groves of his rightful glory, was decidedly unappealing. So he hastened on. “What of Smeaton’s students, then? Young men are prone to grudges and rash temperaments.”

  “I think you might find these lads more devoted to prayer and reflection. They may not have loved Smeaton, or even liked him, but they respected him enormously, which you’ll see for yourself when you meet them.”

  “And you?” Groves asked of the Chancellor pointedly as the two men departed the room. “What did you make of the man?”

  The Chancellor paused to consider. “I think the University will be the poorer for his passing,” he managed, closing the door behind him.

  The divinity students looked ashen when informed of the news. Groves asked each of them a few terse questions and Pringle took a list of names and addresses. The professors were called one by one to a vacant storeroom beside the Chancellor’s office, and—fortified by his contempt for such lettered eccentrics, who knew nothing of the real world—Groves passed much of the afternoon conducting curt interviews and meaningfully jotting notes.

  There were a couple of these learned gentlemen, rivals no doubt, whose attitudes I did not like, they tried to look upset, but I knew Smeaton was not popular, and I could read on their brows the word “deceit.”

  “Any ideas, Inspector?” Pringle asked later.

  “Nothing I am willing to admit at this stage.”

  The professor of forensic medicine—“Whitty by name and nature”—accompanied them in a carriage to the mortuary. “A body in three pieces…” he mused, shaking his head. “A case, it would appear, in which the body is as much a puzzle as the murder.”

  Groves frowned at the inappropriate mood. “A grand thing, sir, that you look upon this business in such a way. I assure you that this is no game.”

  “I can only pray,” said the good professor, “that the culprit shares that sentiment.”

  The preliminary death certificate had been signed by the police doctor, subject to amendment, the manner of death listed simply as “decapitation by means unknown.” An unusual “expression of feeling” had been appended to the bottom of the sheet: “Most Curious.”

  “That barely begins to describe it,” said Professor Whitty, once he had peeled back the sheet and examined the pieced-together corpse under hissing gaslight. He pointed at the compressed head. “Observe the mandible…the way it’s been all but forced through the upper jaw…the collapse of the septum…and the ragged character of the tears to the throat. It’s difficult to conceive of this as having been perpetrated by a normal man.”

  “How so?” Groves asked through a tightened throat. There was the penetrating
odor of carbolic disinfectant in the air.

  “It’s as if the body were some sort of doll, made of rags and ceramic, picked up by a spiteful child, squeezed around the arms, bitten around the head…and torn simultaneously in three directions.”

  “You’re not suggesting this was done by a child, sir?”

  “Cum grano salis, Inspector. But still…the enormous power it would take…” Whitty tapped a pencil against his chin. “And acts of unusual strength are invariably linked to passions of exceptional magnitude…”

  “A madman?”

  “I’m not certain,” Whitty admitted. “The intensity of this hatred…I find it difficult to attribute this to a human being.”

  “You’re saying it could have been an animal, then?”

  “Did you find any evidence of an animal in the vicinity?”

  “Only hoofprints.”

  Whitty pursed his lips. “I was thinking more of a saber-toothed tiger.”

  But Groves could not quite read his tone. “You can’t make any conclusions, is that it?”

  “Not on a superficial examination, no, and to go further I’d need a warrant from the Fiscal. Though it seems to remind me of another recent case.” He glanced at Pringle. “You remember that man brought in last month?”

  Pringle nodded. “The lighthouse keeper?”

  “Aye. The way his face had been gouged from his skull?”

  Groves interjected. “What man was this?”

  “A case of Chief Inspector Smith’s,” Pringle told him. “You must remember, sir. The man walking his dog by Duddingston Loch?”

  “He was a lighthouse keeper?”

  “Retired.”