The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  Then, lurching out of these thoughts, he became aware of the others staring at him expectantly, and he frowned at them crossly.

  “Just get that body put together and laid to rest,” he snapped. “We’ll need to prowl the area for more evidence.”

  Then he turned, as the others repeatedly tried to restore the Colonel’s head to his body, and, looking into the rolling fog, became aware of a peculiar tension in the air, the song of shuddering steel, and a monstrous panting sound, building in force and proximity. And he stiffened, momentarily wondering if the murderer might be returning expressly to rip him apart—the others had paused, too, with the corpse still in their hands, and the blackbirds had launched into the air—before, with great explosive puffs of steam and smoke, a red and black locomotive of the Edinburgh and Leith Railway surged out of the fog and thundered along the embankment in front of them, hauling behind it a string of first-class carriages, at the windows of which, staring through the mist at the grotesque tableau, sat a line of bonneted society ladies on their way to a Newhaven seaside banquet.

  Chapter VI

  MCKNIGHT EXAMINED the plundered Bible in the golden glow of the firelight, fingering the ragged remnant of page still clinging to the binding. “Remarkable…” he breathed, and when he looked up his emerald eyes were sparkling. “A beating sound, you say, like the wings of a demon?”

  Canavan crossed his legs. “It was surely the bats I heard.”

  “But bats don’t tear pages from Bibles.”

  “No…”

  “And you saw no signs of human intrusion? The gates are locked, are they not?”

  “They are.”

  “The fences are barbed?”

  “Aye.”

  “Then to tear a page from a book and escape without leaving a trace, a man would have to be unnaturally—dare I say supernaturally—adroit?”

  “The mist was unnaturally—dare I say supernaturally—thick. He could easily have hid behind a gravestone and escaped at his own pace.”

  McKnight chortled. “And then there is the destination of the page itself,” he said, for the full details of Colonel Munnoch’s exhumation, and the deposit in his eye socket, had already been disseminated through the city’s press. “How might you explain that little mystery?”

  “It could have been from any Bible.”

  “Naturally,” McKnight said with a wry smile, and he examined the book as though the missing page were still present. “‘He was a murderer from the beginning,’” he quoted, and looked up at his friend quizzically. “Can you recall the King James Version?”

  “‘He was a murderer from the beginning,’” Canavan replied.

  “The English Revised Version?”

  “The same. The King James, the Douai, the Challoner revision—all the translations offer no variation in that particular line. And knowing it’s a page of a Douai translation wouldn’t prove, in any case, that it came from your particular Bible.”

  “True, but it would add a pinch of coincidence to an already significant mound, you’ll admit that?” And when the Irishman still looked reticent: “Come now, is the devil’s advocate in you so unwilling to accept a miracle?”

  “It’s not the miracle that bothers me,” Canavan said, “but the fact that you seem so hungry for a personal invitation.”

  “The invitation has already been delivered,” McKnight corrected, with barely concealed relish. “And it’s now just a matter of composing the acceptance.”

  Canavan scoffed. The paradox of their current debate—that he had somehow assumed the role of skeptic—did not strike him as anomalous, for both men often arbitrarily adopted extremes as a means of establishing the parameters and locating the quickest path to the truth. What troubled him was that on his way home from Drumgate that morning he had for the first time in many months not encountered McKnight, and indeed, passing the man’s huddled little cottage—a place that seemed moored to the earth by a spidery net of ivy, and like its owner permanently wreathed in mist—he had discerned a thick line of smoke issuing from the chimney; this when the Professor had come to apply logs to his hearth with the same thrift with which he applied beef to his tongue. So, as eager as he was to return the ravaged Bible and to apologize for its condition, Canavan had elected to pass on by, convinced that his friend was not ill but—even more worrisome—was simply filching a day from the University’s calendar to apply his mind to his own burgeoning interest: the mystery of Professor Smeaton’s murder.

  Canavan was aware that as a lecturer McKnight had grown distracted, even irascible, and that his increasing failure as a teacher only exacerbated his financial insecurity. Pending annual salaries, the professors were paid by the students themselves at the opening of each seasonal session, meaning that, in the manner of a popularity contest, it was those most charismatic and accommodating who consulted the finest timepieces and were swept home in the swiftest broughams. The choleric were rewarded with classes small and inherently self-punishing, and the distracted—such as Professor Piazzi Smyth of Astronomy, who had developed an inordinate fascination with the Great Pyramid of Cheops—were incrementally ostracized and ushered in the direction of premature retirement.

  But if McKnight was now troubled by the implication, or even perceived it, he gave little indication. From a leather pouch he produced what appeared to be genuine shag tobacco and filled the bowl of his pipe, tamping it without a trace of self-consciousness. He leaned into the fire to light a match and chuckled when he singed his fingers. He ignited the tobacco with a flourish and, employing some previously hidden skill, blew out a flawless smoke ring. And all with such a gleam in his eye, and such an electricity in his spirit, that Canavan wondered idly if God might accept the current mayhem as an acceptable trade for the revival of a worthy man’s enthusiasm.

  “But let us first examine the story so far,” McKnight went on. “Beginning with the lighthouse keeper.”

  “The lighthouse keeper?” Canavan frowned.

  “You must have heard of it?” McKnight settled back into his armchair. “A month or so ago, before the current dramas, a retired lighthouse keeper was savaged to death while walking his dog.”

  “I remember the murder. But I wasn’t aware of the man’s former profession.”

  “I did some research,” the Professor admitted. “The similarities to the two more recent incidents, take my word, are more than simply striking.”

  “And you claim it’s the work of the same murderer?”

  “I claim nothing. I observe, examine, and try to prevent further tragedy.”

  “I think,” Canavan submitted, “that this is most certainly a task for the police.”

  “The police, as fine as they are, sometimes need assistance, don’t you think?”

  “They certainly don’t need meddlers.”

  “I have no intention of meddling. The police are welcome to their legwork. The investigation I propose—for both of us—will be conducted on a separate but equally arduous plane. That of logical and spiritual deduction.”

  “Aye?” Canavan smirked. “And what makes us suited to the task?”

  “A talent. A vocation.” McKnight puffed out an aromatic cloud. “In my case, a predilection for unraveling layers, which I fear to this point has been unhappily squandered. In your case, assuming you’re willing to join me, an enslaving propensity for good deeds.”

  Canavan snorted his amusement but did not commit himself, for it was part of a foil’s duty not to be too accommodating. “Let me first hear those supposed similarities,” he said, with a strange feeling he would regret it.

  McKnight did not hesitate. “Three men,” he said, “not one younger than sixty. Two dispatched with inhuman force. One disinterred with, from all accounts, a similar force—and surely the only reason Colonel Munnoch was not himself killed was the rather inconvenient fact that he was already dead. No apparent motive. No mutilation of the bodies apart from the initial injuries. No attempt to conceal them or deposit them in a place
where there might be more certainty of their being discovered. Unless the police are hiding something, and at this point I have no reason to believe that they are, the appointed investigators are most likely exasperated.”

  “And since you seem to have given it a fair deal of thought,” Canavan noted, “what might you be able to tell them?”

  “At this stage, what they should already know. The motive is almost certainly revenge, and for some injury that in some way extends back farther than fourteen years.”

  “How so?”

  “Colonel Munnoch was buried in 1872.”

  “A long time to hold a grudge.”

  “The injury is no doubt fitting.”

  “But why now? And not any other time in the past fourteen years?”

  McKnight smiled enigmatically. “Take a look at this fire,” he said, and he gestured to the hearth. “So vaporous and yet so powerful. The fundamental stuff of the universe, Heraclitus called it. And yet, as elemental and powerful as it may be…and as quickly as it can burn flesh…fire still takes time to forge steel.”

  Canavan was confused. “You think the killer is a kettle that has just come to the boil, is that it?”

  McKnight chuckled. “Only that he might have spent the intervening years changing his very mettle. Building to a point where he can kill like a lion, soar like a bat, and vanish like an apparition.”

  Canavan was about to protest—this seemed more madness than metaphysics—but at just that moment a fierce wind buffeted the cottage, whistled down the chimney, and harassed the flames into fleeing spirits and serpents. He shot a glance at the stammering window and for one unsettling moment thought he saw a woman’s face staring in at them, before deciding it was just a distorted reflection of the fire.

  “And the message?” he asked, to distract himself. “The biblical verse?”

  “Curious and invaluable. For what reason would Munnoch be labeled a murderer?”

  “Munnoch was a soldier,” Canavan said. “Perhaps the revenge has a political bent?”

  “No, I have an indefinable feeling about this. I’m convinced—I see it as if written in stone—that these men were intimately embroiled in some unspeakable crime prior to 1872.”

  “Involving murder?”

  “The biblical verse certainly implies it. And it could well be the case that they have just been identified by the killer—accounting for the delay.”

  “A professor of ecclesiastical law, a distinguished colonel, and a lighthouse keeper.” Canavan shook his head. “There seems no obvious link.”

  “If seeking a connection, one should think of them as they were fourteen years ago.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Smeaton had just been appointed to the University. Prior to that he had been minister in the parish of Corstorphine. The lighthouse keeper had retired five years previously. I checked the records today at the Northern Lighthouse Board in Queen Street.”

  “Very thorough,” Canavan said, vaguely disturbed that his friend, for all his insistence that their investigation would be a strictly cerebral one, had gone to such practical lengths.

  “For Colonel Munnoch I did not have to travel quite so far. His memoir was published in 1864. At six hundred pages it’s what might be called a rather meticulous chronicle.”

  “You have a copy?” Canavan asked, unsurprised.

  “Naturally.” McKnight nodded. “A very illuminating text. Would you permit me to read you a passage?”

  “I have just enough time,” the Irishman said, for he was due shortly at Drumgate.

  McKnight clamped his pipe between his teeth and reached down beside his chair for the volume, which he had already retrieved from his redoubtable library.

  Through the direst financial straits, McKnight had never been able to part with his books. He had stripped the cottage bare of just about everything else—every article of disposable furniture, from his pianoforte to his shaving mirror—and now slept on a monastic pallet, bathed in a laundry tub, and grilled his food in the fireplace beside Canavan’s crossed legs. But of his magnificent library, which contained many of his most financially valuable items, he could not select even a single fragment for sacrifice. He had started assembling the titles almost as soon as he could read (using money, in some cases, intended for the church plate), and before he graduated from university he was actually evicted from his student lodgings, because the landlord feared the weight of his collection might threaten the foundations. And he still had every one of them, squeezed into cheap shelves that groaned and creaked like ship timbers in a mysteriously sizable cavern in the cellar of his cottage, the strangely elastic walls of which seemed to expand and contract in direct response to the rarity of the text being hunted. It was a surreal chamber, dark and cobwebbed, where McKnight would lead the way bearing only a slush lamp filled with train oil, and the disorientated visitor was forever bumping his head against haphazard projections or stumbling over orphaned piles of manuscripts.

  “A Christian and a Soldier, Volume One,” McKnight announced, holding up a thick book bound in green morocco leather. “I refer to page two hundred and forty.” He had already donned his rather severe spectacles, the lenses of which Canavan suspected were well past sufficiency, and he now opened the volume at a bookmarked leaf.

  “‘There was the islet of Inchcaid,’” he read, “‘a frowning reef of phonolitic rock past Bell Rock north of the firth. A dreich place, where Covenanters were once imprisoned and smugglers roamed, and which was now given over to razorbills and seals. I had no inclination to visit it, believing it to be real estate of no particular value, but it was drawn to my attention that sailing ships had a propensity for imperiling themselves on its serrated edges, and was informed that a lighthouse would need to be constructed on the easternmost shelf. To this I gave my permission without a second thought, and upon its completion in 1846, I felt my interest sufficiently prevailed upon to make a visit, in the company of the proud engineers, and I found here a grand Pharos, a pillar of dovetailed granite slabs pounded by foaming waters. I spent a day meeting the obliging keepers, inspecting their quarters and storerooms, and examining the immense polished lenses and angled prisms of the great lamp itself, and from the heights surveying the ungodly huddle of rock, dusted with hardy gulls, that my family had acquired through some convoluted transaction or ancient gambling debt.’”

  McKnight folded the volume and set it aside. “That is all Munnoch has to say about the lighthouse itself. He has scant regard, in truth, for much else but his military campaigns. But for our purposes it provides a direct link to one Colin Shanks, a keeper at the lighthouse from 1846, when Munnoch visited, to his sudden retirement in 1867, aged forty-six.”

  “Shanks being the man slaughtered last month while walking his dog?”

  McKnight nodded. “No reason is given in the lighthouse board’s records for his premature retirement. But I noted that a fellow keeper at the lighthouse also departed the board’s services the same year ‘in tragic circumstances.’”

  Canavan frowned. “Murdered?”

  “An accident, according to what I was later able to find in the files of The Scotsman. During a violent storm the man was swept into the sea. It gives no indication how—just that his identifying cap was washed ashore two days later.”

  “Any suggestion Mr. Shanks was involved?”

  “It may indeed be entirely unrelated, though I’m prepared to add it to the list of mounting coincidences, and attempt to account for it only when I have gathered more comprehensive information. But for the moment I’ll settle for the link to Colonel Munnoch.”

  Canavan shrugged. “And Professor Smeaton? Anything in the book that links him to the Colonel?”

  “Nothing readily apparent. But the rest of the autobiography is rife with combat and expressions of seemingly divine righteousness. Munnoch fought in Java, Persia, and the Crimea, and marched on Lucknow and Tientsin. He battled Mussulmen, Hindus, Chinamen, and godless savages, and his book pract
ically drips with colored flesh and unbaptized blood. He has a peculiar eye for the exotic and sensational, and nary a page passes without a majestic Oriental palace or a great tempest.”

  Canavan could not see the point. “He should have been a novelist, perhaps?”

  “I merely ask you to imagine such a man pumped full of shrapnel and sent home to waddle around fair Edinburgh for the remainder of his days. Naturally he feels inhibited. Of course he hurls himself into his memoirs. And it’s not unreasonable to imagine him turning thoroughly eccentric. He spurns, in any case, the pleasures of self-indulgence available to him through his wealth and hungrily seeks some righteous cause into which to channel his considerable resources. Or a friend, at the very least, who shares his combative temperament.”

  “Professor Smeaton being a man of many righteous causes…”

  “A man, you’ll recall, who adorned himself in the very breastplate of righteousness.” McKnight reached for the second volume of the Colonel’s memoir. “May I draw your attention to the final paragraph?”

  “It’s not for me to stop you.”

  McKnight flipped through to the last page and readjusted his spectacles. “‘Unless you are fighting, you are not a soldier. Unless you are struggling, you are not a Christian. Unless you are armored in the breastplate of righteousness’”—he leaned on the phrase—“‘and sharpening your swords for the fields of Armageddon, you have no place in the Kingdom of God.’”

  Canavan shifted. “Tenuous, perhaps,” he said, “but I concede there might be a connection.”