The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  “—don’t want to be intrusive,” she was saying, wringing her hands. “I have no doubt you are exceedingly busy, and I would not interrupt if I did not think I could contribute.”

  Groves had not risen. In a sort of petulant response to the Wax Man’s pronouncement about the futility of ink he had returned immediately to his desk in the Squad Room to construct an elaborate map of Edinburgh, linking the crime scenes to the residences of the victims and the suspects. He was not sure what it would achieve, but he was defiant in his resolve to find something. When Pringle informed him of the return of the insistent Irishwoman, however, he welcomed the diversion and ordered her in. They were now alone but for the sound, from the neighboring prison cells, of a drunk trying to prove his sobriety to the presiding constables with a particularly challenging tongue twister.

  “Never mind that, lass.” Groves sat back in his chair and pressed his foot against the desk. She was standing in front of him like a remorseful student, unable to pry her eyes from the floor, and he enjoyed the idea that his gaze was so searing, so masterly, that she could not bear to look at him. “My assistant, Pringle, tells me you claim to have had some dreams.”

  “That’s correct, sir. Dreams of a most vivid nature, which seem of significance. And when I heard of the events of the past few days…”

  “You claim to have dreamed of Colonel Munnoch’s exhumation, is that right?”

  “I did.”

  “What did you see in your dream?”

  “I…I dreamed of a cemetery. I recognized it as Warriston.”

  “You have been to Warriston before?”

  She nodded sheepishly. “A few times.”

  “You have family there?”

  “No…”

  Groves was about to query her further on this matter, but was distracted by the voice of the drunk from next door—“The sweep shook the shooty…”—and a round of derisive laughter. He blinked and looked back at her. “Go on.”

  She continued with effort. “It…it was night, in my dream, and there was a thick fog. It was very hard to see, but I heard much activity. Showers of earth and the like. I thought it must be the keeper but then the fog cleared for a moment and I saw that it…it was not the keeper.”

  Groves shifted. “A beast?”

  “I’m not sure, sir.”

  “A large man?”

  “I could not rightly tell.”

  “The sweep shook the sooty shweet…”

  Groves sniffed. “This is conveniently vague, lass.” But inwardly he was relieved, having briefly feared that history might record that the identity of the criminal—the whole solution to the mystery—had been furnished by a mad Irishwoman.

  “I saw a body being dragged from the ground,” she hastened on, as though determined to get it out before she was dismissed. “And a note shoved in the eye socket—a page of Scripture.”

  “This much is general knowledge.”

  “Then I woke up, and that was all.” She glanced up at Groves apologetically. “It was a nightmare, sir, and I could stand it no longer.”

  For just a moment Groves thought he had detected something in her—sincerity, perhaps—before deciding it was just an illusion.

  “The sweep shook the shooty sheet…”

  “So you saw all this,” he asked, “and yet you failed to notice who was actually doing it all, is that it?”

  “Fragments of my dream…”

  “What?”

  She squeezed her fingers. “Fragments of my dream return unbidden, sir. I have not yet been able to identify the figure, that is true…”

  “A grand thing.”

  “But I feel that it will come to me—I cannot escape it. I feel that I know him. I have seen him before. He is someone who has traveled far…”

  “Do you know many men who have traveled far?”

  She looked uneasy. “No…”

  “Then where have you seen him before? In the street?”

  “In my dreams, sir. I have seen him before in my dreams.”

  “A dream figure.” Groves delighted in his scorn.

  “It was the same figure that I saw k-kill Professor Smeaton, sir.”

  “Aye, that’s right—the Professor’s murder. You saw that, too?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “You could not identify the murderer, though?”

  Her brow furrowed. “It was dark and terrible, sir. I saw Professor Smeaton attacked…I cannot describe it…a terrible force, a whirlwind…I woke up screaming.”

  “The sweep shook the city…shook the sooty…”

  Groves sighed. “All this is again common knowledge, lass. I can see no reason for you to be here.”

  “There was a message, sir…”

  “The Bible page. You’ve mentioned that. Again, this is—”

  “No—an earlier message. A message was left beside Professor Smeaton, just as there was with the Colonel.”

  Groves stared at her. “There was no message.”

  “I had a clear image of a message.”

  “There was nothing,” Groves said defiantly, not liking the suggestion that he had missed something.

  “Accusing w-words. I saw them clearly.”

  “On a page, were they?”

  “I’m not certain, sir.”

  “And yet you say you saw them clearly?”

  “I know it is difficult to explain…”

  Groves examined the wee creature framed against the water-stained walls. She looked wounded and afraid. As though sent under instruction to do something for which she had no real appetite.

  “The shweep sook the sooty…”

  “I’m a busy man,” Groves sighed eventually. “As you yourself have observed. And this is a case of the greatest urgency. So I can only ask that you and any other psychic you know should have the good manners to look elsewhere for attention before you distract me from my proper duties.” He returned pointedly to his map.

  “I…I’m not a psychic, sir.”

  “Eh?” He looked up.

  “The dreams…” She gulped, fearing she had not made herself clear. “They’re not prophetic. I dream of the events exactly as they unfold.”

  “As they unfold.”

  “Exactly as they occur, sir. It’s as if…as if I am there.”

  “Without being able to tell me anything I do not already know?”

  “Fragments, sir. The dreams return in fragments.”

  “Fragments.” For some reason Groves thought of the pieces of herring he had left on the tearoom saucer.

  “It could be that his identity comes to me soon, that my dreams reveal him to me…but…” she faltered, “of that…I cannot be sure.”

  “The sweep shook the sooty street…”

  Groves exhaled expressively, having had more than enough. “Pringle will show you to the street, lass,” he said. “And get some sleep. A woman should regulate herself in all things.”

  Before she retreated she shot him another glance with her watery blue eyes that he would long remember: doleful, even defeated, but also possessed of a rare spark (he would later decide it was demonic, though at the time he mistook it for simple guile). It sent a curious, disconcerting signal to his loins, in any event, and impulsively he decided to pin her in place with a final question.

  “That accent of yours,” he said. “You came from Ireland, did you not? As a child?”

  “I went to Ireland as a child,” she replied, her hand on the door. “I returned to Edinburgh just recently.”

  “What part of Ireland? I don’t recognize the brogue.”

  “County Monaghan, sir. I went to Sparks Lake Boarding School and was educated by the Sisters of St. Louis. They’re French, sir.”

  “Ah,” said Groves, as though he had suspected just as much.

  “The sweep…shook the sheet…shook the sooty sheet…”

  “And what’s your name, lass?”

  She hesitated, her eyes still lowered. “Evelyn,” she admitted finally, and m
ight have blushed. “Evelyn Todd.” She waited, as though expecting further questions upon that revelation, or even a rebuke, but, hearing nothing, she bowed her head and went out guiltily, easing the door closed behind her.

  “The sweep shook the sooty street…shook the street in the sheet…shook the…ah, to blazes with the lot of you.”

  Chapter VIII

  EMERGING INTO the morning sunshine from a back door that was not his own—a pastime he had pursued with some enthusiasm—James Ainslie, entrepreneur, philanderer, gentleman thief, took a lungful of the bracing air and marched briskly down Clyde Lane in the direction of St. Andrew Square, his guilt successfully masked by his distinguished bearing, his immaculate attire, his perfectly waxed mustaches, and most especially by his vaguely militaristic gait—a legacy, like his scars, from his days in the Royal Rifle Corps.

  It was not, let it be said, that Ainslie was a man on whom guilt fed with any nourishment. In his childhood he had armored his heart through the torture of small animals; in his adolescence he had graduated to the mental persecution of pretty young ladies; as a soldier he had murdered with the exoneration of war; and as a businessman he had stripped investors bare with the impunity of personal necessity. It was an insincere and precarious lifestyle, founded largely on guile and the misplaced trust of strangers—and in no small part on the lupine instincts that had always enabled him to elude pursuing creditors—but it was also a life crammed so tightly with incident, danger, and the pressing need to survive on sharpened wits that he could conceive of no other existence. Even when, as now, he had been reduced yet again to petty larceny and groveling to impressionable fools.

  The wind shrieked around him and flapped the tails of his topcoat, but he was as impervious to meteorological conditions as he was to remorse. Gaily whistling a martial tune of the sort he had once bellowed from the pipes, he cut across Waverley Bridge and climbed Cockburn Street past the opulent apartment at which he rarely awoke, and at the junction with the High Street he paused to appraise himself in the gilded mirror of an antique dealer’s window. Here he fastidiously adjusted his necktie and plucked a single speck of soot from his lapel, determined to look his most dashing for his imminent meeting at the Caledonian Loan and Mercantile Association, where he intended to exert all his sparkling charm on the stammering finance director—a man he suspected was secretly in love with him.

  This was no misplaced conceit. Ainslie’s confidence, his devil-may-care philosophies, his taste for peril, and his seeming imperviousness to punishment—all had helped him accumulate innumerable admirers of all ages, sexes, and social strata. There were times, indeed, when simply strutting down the street he would be stared at like some parading zoo creature, some magnificent upright fox. Even now he caught a glimpse, in the shop mirror, of a lady in a Quakerish dress—a young creature who could easily have been his daughter—studying his movements fixedly from the opposite corner. But in a typically lightning assessment he dismissed her as too tightly laced to be worth even passing attention, and, resuming his grip on his cane, he took off again at a clip.

  As he crossed Hunter Square he victoriously patted the pocket holding the real prize of the previous evening’s conquest: a ruby-embedded bracelet of considerable quality, liberated from a velvet-coated case at the bottom of a poorly fastened hatbox. For close to three hours he had hunted diligently through wardrobes and bureaux for just such an item as his vanquished lover snored and groaned through a whisky-soaked haze—scotch being one poison against which Ainslie had inoculated himself with a lifetime of systematic and patriotic consumption.

  The conquest herself was the exceedingly plain wife of an India rubber merchant whose frequent absences had frayed her endearment. She was stroking her ring finger in a corner booth of the Crypt of the Poets—a sunken public house in West Port renowned for its darkness and ambiguity—when a prowling Ainslie had immediately identified her as a woman flirting with the very notion of infidelity. “Madam,” he had said, leaning forward with a feigned expression of earnestness, “might you have seen a lady with dark red hair approach this table? Hazel eyes, rather round face? I’m meant to meet her here, you see, at this very table. Would you mind so much if I sat beside you to wait?”

  But when the wait inevitably became rather prolonged, it proved most conveniently mitigated with conversation and increasingly frequent glasses of liquor. And by the time it became clear that the chubby-cheeked redhead most certainly was not going to appear, Ainslie had little need to feign disappointment. “What charming company you’ve been!” he exclaimed, artfully tapping his newfound companion on the knee. “One would think we’d known each other for years!”

  But alas, midnight was approaching unsympathetically. “I fear they will shortly be closing,” he observed, with no mere hint of regret, “and we’ll be dispelled forcibly if we try to stay. But might I make it my duty to escort you to your door? Our city’s streets are rarely safe at night, after all, but most especially with the strange goings-on of recent days.”

  And further, once they drew up outside her terrace house: “I knew both the victims, you know: Professor Smeaton—the one that was killed—and also the Colonel that was dug up. You laugh! But I’m quite serious—I had some business with them some years ago. Queer fellows, the two of them. Would you care to hear more?”

  And when, a few taxing hours later, he was confident she was completely insensible, he had gone to work, strategically ignoring some of the more conspicuous valuables and searching, as was his habit, for buried treasure. In the morning, triumphant, he methodically loosened the sash and broke the latch of a back window, to cloud the issue of culpability, and deposited a disingenuous sovereign on the pillow beside his dozing Bathsheba, before heading off to his prearranged meeting, sprinkled lightly with the wife’s rosewater and fortified heavily with the husband’s snuff.

  Presently weaving between traffic on the South Bridge he happened to catch another glimpse of the Quakerish young lady, still behind him, still watching him, though when he looked at her directly she lowered her eyes with a sort of fearful deference. He turned into Infirmary Street and glanced back with curiosity. Again she swiftly rounded the corner, as though tracing his path—purposely following him, he was sure of it.

  But he was in truth more intrigued than alarmed, finding in her persistence something peculiarly arousing. And he was in high spirits, after all, and certainly he had been followed by adventurous young women before. So with the inclinations of a seasoned game player he decided to make a sport of it. He ducked down a lane beside the Public Baths and soon heard the young lady’s footfall behind him. He turned into Drummond Place, and she followed him again. He curled into Nicolson Street past the Railways Parcel-Receiving Office, and once more she matched his urgency.

  He smiled inwardly, thinking that he was like some magnet that drew particles by some immutable force, some phenomenon not strictly within his control. And reverting to his military training, as he so often did, he decided it was high time for an ambush, a manly confrontation. Swinging into Hill Place, then, he turned immediately, arms folded, and set himself up beside a corner pillar-box. And when the startled young lady appeared seconds later he was ready for her.

  “Hullo there,” he said with a grin.

  She almost collided with him in her haste. “Forgive me, sir! I was—”

  “Following me, I take it?”

  “No, sir!” she protested, drawing back. “No, sir!”

  “I believe you were.”

  “Not at all, sir—I am simply on my way to work!”

  He smirked. “And you work around here, I suppose?”

  “Aye, sir, I do!” She had not raised her eyes above his collar.

  “And where might that be, then?”

  “Where—?”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I work there, sir,” she said, gesturing timidly across the road to a bookstore, where two old men were rummaging through the outside stalls.

  Ainsl
ie looked back at her doubtfully. “And you followed me around the Baths because you lost your way, I suppose?”

  “Because I needed to post a letter, sir—at the pillar-box near the hospital!”

  “And this one here would not suffice?”

  “That one is very popular with students, sir, and prone to overfilling!”

  Ainslie grunted skeptically, recognizing as he did something disconcertingly familiar in her manner, her exaggerated air of innocence. “I’ve seen you somewhere before,” he decided.

  “No, sir!” she insisted, surprisingly vigorous, and moved to pass him.

  “I believe so,” he reiterated, stepping out to block her. “Yes,” he said, squinting. “You were at the Crypt of the Poets yesterday evening…under the portrait.”

  “I was not there!”

  “Or outside my lodgings, then—I’ve seen you in Cockburn Street.”

  “It was not me!” She shook her head emphatically.

  “But I’m convinced I’ve seen you before,” Ainslie said, scrutinizing her pale features, the delicate lines of her face, and unable to reconcile a feeling pitched somewhere between curiosity and unease. “I’m convinced of it,” he said again, strangely haunted.

  “I’ve no idea what you mean, sir,” she stated, and moved to pass him again, and this time he did not impede her, for in truth she was not quite pretty enough to warrant his torture.

  “Then what might be your name?” he called out after her. “Can you tell me that?”

  She stopped halfway across Hill Place and looked at him directly for the first time. Her head was lit up by a probing shaft of sunlight, and her brilliant blue eyes shone like pharmacy lamps.

  And now it was an altogether different face that Ainslie saw: a timeless expression of defiance, resentment, even accusation. But the young lady did not identify herself, nor did she need to.

  “Evelyn!” called one of the old men from the bookstore. “Evelyn!”

  She continued staring at Ainslie.

  “Evelyn,” the old man cried again.