The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  Kindled by the exhortation, in any event, Groves had immediately headed back to the University, still at this stage filled with an adventurous spirit, and captivated by three things mentioned by Professor Whitty in his cursory examination of Smeaton’s body. That the killer would need to be a man of extraordinary strength. Or a beast. Or a combination of the two.

  He deliberately had singled out for questioning those associated with Smeaton who were of formidable size and manifest power or those whom, through some uncanny perspicacity, he regarded as having a close association with the animal kingdom. In particular he had been plagued by visions of one particular student he had glimpsed on his initial visit, a boy as black as coal tar and improbably attired in a Highland kilt. In fact, Groves congratulated himself for not underestimating the intelligence of the Negro races and could not bring himself to dislike them, when so many others could not see past the vile rumors. Indeed, reading the reports of the troubles in Zululand, where the natives had almost overcome the superbly armed British forces, he would frequently doff an imaginary hat in admiration. So when he tracked down the ebony divinity student—Morgan Forsyth, absurdly, from the West Indies—he let the boy know promptly, through his unflinching gaze, repeated sniffing, and the slapping of his notebook against his thigh, that he was wise to his capabilities and had little doubt that, were the idea to take hold of him, the boy would have no trouble summoning his reserves of brutish strength to rip his tutor to pieces, bolt for cover like a cheetah, or indeed orchestrate his revenge through some secret communion with the clawed and fanged beasts of the earth, such as whatever fauna it was exactly that populated the environs of darkest Jamaica.

  Frustratingly, however, Forsyth was unfailingly eloquent and polite, seemingly unruffled by Groves’s insinuations, and in possession of a most sterling alibi: he was in fact a lodger in the house of Professor Calderwood of Moral Philosophy, who could attest to his presence on the night of the murder. Groves shut his notebook and narrowed his eyes.

  “I shall be speaking again to Professor Calderwood,” he said, as though he suspected some collusion between the two, or even that, with Smeaton out of the way, the young black might now turn his sights on his own sponsor.

  He conducted the remainder of his interviews in a state of distraction and headed off with a sense of relief to visit Professor Moir of Natural History in his laboratory of taxidermized zoology. Here he discovered just what he had suspected: the saber-toothed tiger was in fact extinct, so that in naming it as a possible culprit Professor Whitty had been speaking facetiously, or even through ignorance. “But there are no end of cats in this town,” Moir added. “I should not have to tell you that, poor creatures.”

  “I prefer the noble dog,” Groves said, thinking of his lamented police mastiff. (At one stage it had been customary for policemen to patrol with hounds.)

  “I was referring to wild cats,” Moir explained. “Predatory cats.” And when Groves still looked perplexed: “Lions and tigers, if you will.”

  “If you mean the Zoological Gardens, sir, they have been closed for many years.”

  “I mean circuses, good chap.” Moir studied the Inspector with frank curiosity. “Dear Lord, are you really telling me you’ve never been to one?”

  Groves felt taken aback. Certainly he was aware of the city’s circuses—in recent years there had been a proliferation—but since his days on the beat he had felt no inclination to venture inside, thinking them the domain of conjurors and acrobats, and other entertainments best left for the likes of children.

  “I wouldn’t be far wrong in saying there are more species of wild beast in Edinburgh than there are left in some Indian jungles,” Professor Moir said with a disdainful snort. “And I doubt whether some of them have set foot on ground so cold since the days of the woolly mammoth. I’m often called upon to attend to them, you know. And it’s not just circuses. You remember Wombell’s Menagerie, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “They sold off their animals at Waverley Market some years ago. Everything. Lynxes, jackals, llamas, even a Tasmanian devil. A retired bank manager bought a black panther and walked it each evening like a trained beagle, until it ate his neighbor’s whippets. There are likely a few of those lamentable beasts still in Edinburgh, chained in coops and stables somewhere. I suppose one of them might be capable of the savagery you mention, assuming it got loose. But you’ll need more than good luck if you’re meaning to track them all down.”

  Groves recalled a biblical verse that Piper McNab had been wont to quote: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” The sage piper had been drawing a connection to Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic plug that dominated the city’s eastern skyline and from certain angles looked uncannily like a great lion ready to pounce. Which only meant, according to the good piper’s philosophy, that the inhabitants of fair Edinburgh should be uniquely aware that evil lurked in the most unlikely places and should be especially alert lest they be snatched in a moment of inattentiveness.

  Groves decided he had no option but to take seriously the insinuations of Professors Whitty and Moir, and indeed of Piper McNab, and pursue such lines of investigation vigorously. He went first to New-some’s Hippodrome on Nicolson Street, but here found only tightrope walkers, trained Arabian steeds, laughing mirrors, and twirlie pokes. A similar story at Cooke’s Circus, set in a substantial brick palace in Fountainbridge. But at Moss’s Second Year Carnival at Waverley Market, in an inferno of flaring greaselamps and colored smoke, he discovered Count Batavia’s Colossal Den of Performing Lions, being a couple of scrawny beasts in a cage stuffed with moldering straw. The Count himself seemed openly amused by the suggestion that his “bastards” might have broken loose or been trained for some nefarious purpose, and encouraged Groves to venture his hand through the bars and tickle their ears. But Groves had no intention of doing any such thing, thinking it might be some rash plan to have him eaten before he could manufacture more nettlesome questions. So the Count squeezed into the cage with his cats and slapped them, tugged at their tails, sat on their backs, and smothered them with kisses, and the beasts did little more than blink and rumble disconsolately. They were sedated with measured doses of whisky, he explained, even while performing, so that one would be in more danger from an organ grinder’s monkey. And despite the man’s crude mouth and Cockney accent, Groves felt inclined to believe him. He watched one of the somnolent lions as its lips curled back on glistening enamel fangs, feeling curiously aroused.

  In a tormented state of half-sleep that night, however, he wondered if he had been unduly narrow in his focus, and was haunted by some of the freaks he had glimpsed in the course of the day, many of whom, like Chang the Mongolian giant, were of fearsome size and obvious mental instability. And in a state of semi-delirium he remembered the clown elephants of Moss’s Carnival and had a startling vision of a rogue pachyderm goring Professor Smeaton to death, recalling also that the 78th Highlanders had years earlier shipped home a teary-eyed Ceylonese specimen that marched at the head of the regiment as a ceremonial mascot. He knew the beasts had sizable memories, too, and he thought it entirely feasible that Professor Smeaton might have inflicted some indignity upon it, many years ago, for which he had been hunted through the lanes and crescents of the New Town before being speared through the face with a well-directed tusk.

  In the light of dawn, feeble and misty as it was, such whimsies appeared unlikely even to Groves, and he decided that in this entire angle of investigation he had wasted invaluable time. He cursed his inexperience, doubting that he had yet produced anything that he would be able to record with distinction in his memoirs, and wondering if Professors Whitty and Moir had been deliberately misleading in their suggestions, or speaking in some cryptic code of academic sarcasm. He suddenly loathed them and wished that they, too, were lying dead and faceless in the Cowgate mortuary.

  At Central Office he was again told of
a mad Irishwoman who was claiming to have dreamed major revelations. And Pringle, failing to read his sudden exasperation and wishing to be as helpful as possible, informed him of a recent trip he had made from Carlisle in which the train had stopped to allow a broken-down Gypsy circus to board. He had shared his own carriage, he said, with the infamous Pink-Faced Lady, who he discovered was actually a shaved bear. The lady now resided with other Lawnmarket Gypsies and frequently shuffled through the streets in their company. Was it possible, he suggested brightly, that she had reverted to her original bestial state and killed Smeaton indiscriminately before being hauled off and spirited away?

  Rather than answering, however, Groves was wondering just how Pringle had become apprised of this particular aspect of his investigation, when it had been his intention to be as secretive as possible about anything that had the potential to embarrass him. He was indeed painfully sensitive to his inadequacies, fearful of committing error, and countering such insecurities with manufactured surges of confidence that recoiled at the slightest hurdle, only to regroup later and build up into even greater and more reckless forces.

  He had been saved by a summons to the office of the Procurator Fiscal—the chief prosecutor—where he was informed of the new scandal, the brutal exhumation of Colonel Munnoch. On the surface there seemed no definite link to the murder of Professor Smeaton—or indeed to that of the lighthouse keeper, which Groves had to restrain himself from mentioning—but it was rumored that in life the two men had been acquaintances, despite age and denominational differences, and, more to the point, both had connections with Henry Bolan, the current Lord Provost. So the coincidence was striking, and the pressure steadily mounting.

  “We are currently treating Smeaton’s death as a willful murder committed by person or persons unknown,” the Fiscal informed him.

  “It’s the right thing, at this stage,” Groves said, as though asked for approval.

  “Have you made any progress that might alleviate us of this verdict?”

  “The investigation,” Groves said steadily, “is progressing according to plan.”

  The Fiscal seemed unconvinced. “You could do a lot worse than to settle this matter promptly, Carus. This is no time for the circus.”

  Startled by the last mysterious comment, Groves set off distractedly for Warriston Cemetery, where Pringle had already arrived with the Stockbridge constables. And here they were now, wondering what to make of it all, as the blackbirds hopped onto closer branches so as not to lose sight of them in the thickening fog.

  “You say you have no idea when the crime took place?” Groves asked the grizzled superintendent.

  “None, sir, and that’s the truth.”

  “When did you discover it?”

  “Just after dawn, sir, on my rounds.”

  “And before that, when was the last time you saw the grave?”

  The man was working his cap around his hands and looked bleary eyed and evasive. “I think it were last night, roughly midnight, but I canna rightly say.”

  Groves sniffed. “Have you no schedule, man, to which you apply yourself?”

  The superintendent shook his head. “None, sir. It always seems best not to work to a timetable.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “So that the ghouls canna plot their activities around ye.”

  Groves frowned. The man seemed almost old enough to have been around in the resurrectionist days, but was he really suggesting the body had been dug up for the purposes of theft?

  “You think they might have aimed to sell the body for medical research, is that it?”

  The superintendent took a puzzled glance at the decomposed corpse. “Not in its current state, no, sir.”

  “Then what is this talk of ghouls?”

  “I only mean the standard troublemakers, sir. Larking young ’uns and the like. This part of the yard, with the railway embankment, is ’specially popular with such types.”

  Groves sighed with disgust. He did not trust the superintendent, who smelled of gin and incompetence, but he relished the feeling of intimidating the man, a precious moment of mastery in the midst of all the confusion. “All the more reason, I would have thought,” he said, “to make this the area of more frequent patrols.”

  The superintendent gulped, genuinely fearful for his job.

  “Never mind, man. You heard nothing, in any event?”

  “The embankment…” the superintendent said feebly.

  “Makes it difficult to hear, all right. How long do you calculate it might have taken to dig, then?” He looked at the roughly gouged pit. The top half of the casket had been pried from the earth just enough to allow the lid to be smashed open—wood lay in shards and splinters—and the body dragged out by its shoulders.

  “With a pick and a shovel,” the superintendent said, “and a man or two…”

  “How long?”

  The superintendent did not answer directly. “It’s more the way the pit’s been dug, sir. It don’t look like a shovel’s been used, or any other form of implement.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…a man’d be more likely to dig a roughly square hole, separating the grave boards and turning the earth on either side of the plot.”

  Groves looked behind him at the disturbed earth, sprayed out in a great fan. “Are you trying to say this pit was dug by hand?”

  The superintendent looked reticent. “Seems…seems something like that, sir.”

  “By a beast?”

  The superintendent shrugged. “A beast would have no interest in meat as rotten as this, sir, with all respects to the deceased.”

  “Then it’s a man?”

  “A man wouldn’t punch open a lid like that, but use a lever.”

  “So which is it—man or beast?”

  But the superintendent could not answer.

  Again the specter of bestial strength had been raised, leaving Groves to wonder if his tour of the city’s circuses had been so foolish after all. A man and a beast—or a number of beasts—in combination. He remembered the hoofprints in Belgrave Crescent and scanned the area around the grave for more clues, but whereas most of Warriston Cemetery had been planted with evergreens—cedars and cypresses artfully distributed—here in the lost corner there was an abundance of deciduous varieties, so that the ground was carpeted with decaying leaves and no prints or tracks were apparent.

  He watched the photographer curse and splutter at his apparatus, unable to get a clear shot through the fog. Pringle spoke up. “Should we take the body back to the mortuary, sir? I’m not sure if we’d need a warrant, what with the body already exhumed.”

  But Groves disliked the prospect of Professor Whitty or his ilk poking around again and making equivocal observations. “There’s nothing this body can tell us,” he decided. “And it’s against the law to exhume a body after ten years.”

  “Twenty years, sir.”

  “Aye.” Groves felt flustered. “That’s very well, but all we can do now is return the Colonel to his box and seal him up as best we can. If the family wants a new casket they can make their own arrangements.”

  But as Pringle and the others bent over to gingerly raise the corpse it became apparent that the head had fallen loose. Pringle stood at the edge of the pit and held the jawless skull up, Hamlet-like, looking into the face and frowning.

  Groves took the opportunity to chastise him. “This is no time for morbid gestures, laddie.”

  “There’s something here, sir,” Pringle explained. “In the eye socket.”

  Groves frowned. “What is it?”

  Pringle pincered his fingers, inserted them into the cavity, and withdrew a crumpled ball of paper, which he handed across.

  Groves unfurled it distastefully. It was a page torn raggedly from a Bible, “ST. JOHN CHAP. VIII” printed across the top. He flipped it over. And saw that a particular phrase of Verse 44 had been crudely underlined in pencil.

  “‘He was a murderer from th
e beginning,’” he recited blankly, then looked up from the page, gathering his senses. “Is that all there is?”

  Pringle took another look inside the skull. “That’s all, sir.”

  Groves turned to the superintendent, holding up the page. “Could this have been buried with the body?”

  The superintendent looked uneasy. “I don’t believe it common for the dead to have pages stuffed in their heads, sir.”

  “I ask not for your opinion. I merely asked if it was possible.”

  Pringle interjected: “If the page were inside the body for fourteen years, sir, it surely would be more brittle.”

  “Fourteen years?”

  “The length the Colonel has been buried, sir.”

  Groves nodded. “So it’s a message, then?”

  “Seems that way, sir.”

  A message. And, notwithstanding the bodies themselves, their first tangible lead. Somebody human, with or without the aid of beasts, had worked Colonel Munnoch’s body to the surface for perhaps the sole purpose of inserting this sinister libel in the dead man’s skull.

  He was a murderer from the beginning.

  Groves looked from the decapitated body to the head still poised in Pringle’s hands, wondering what secrets the illustrious Colonel could possibly harbor to warrant such a belated accusation. His eyes wandered to the spartan stone and the man’s epitaph—“A Christian and a Soldier”—and he had a brief, Godlike vision of his place in the scheme of this mystery, the simple whaler’s son flung into the cauldron of Scotland’s capital and, at the end of his worthy career, sent to do battle with unimaginable forces. He felt the palpable presence of evil, too, its very sanguine taste, like nothing he had previously experienced, and he looked again at the page of Gospel in his hand as though it might actually spell out what his heart already knew—he was on a divine errand.