by Louis Bayard
—Am I at the head of the queue today, Mrs. Pridgeon?
No response. The funeral march has begun. As I follow my fellow pallbearer up the stairs, I sneak a look at the sitting room, expecting to find it empty, and thus all the more startled to find another visitor, yielding place to me. A man of perhaps fifty years, hat in hands, observing me with the keenest interest. How familiar he seems: that theatrical bearing, the fine wounded eyes with their deep-revolving plans. It is the very man who was studying me last time I was here. No more inclined to part with me now than he was then. Even after he has passed from view, I can feel the ray of his gaze striking me between the shoulder blades. It prickles, this gaze—unmans—and it is a decided relief to stand finally on the first-floor landing, in the half light, with nothing but the prospect of Uncle N’s bedroom door before me.
—Knock first, says Mrs. Pridgeon.
The fire is still roaring in the bedroom grate, but the bed itself is empty, and the bedclothes have been tossed off like gift wrapping, and I’m just beginning to wonder if this is a form of holiday prank when I catch sight of Uncle N’s robed form by his converted dressing table—bent over a microscope, oblivious to outside distraction.
Who would have dreamt? Uncle N, back to his collecting.
For many years, of course, he collected nothing but mammon. But his friends having long pressed him to take up a hobby suitable to his station and time of life, he, after due consideration, hit upon one that, in some peculiar way, expressed his inner nature. Which is to say, he became an amateur naturalist, specializing in fungi. A small collection at first—mostly mushrooms from the local market—gradually expanding to include rusts, smuts, and mildew. Now and again, Peter and I would bring him a fistful of brewer’s yeast or a particularly mouldy loaf of bread that the Cratchits had given up on. One might have thought we’d brought him Arabian perfume: he would sweep his booty into his arms and, with a distracted smile and a promise to return presently, make a headlong dash for the microscope. We might not see him again for an hour.
I once plucked up the nerve to ask him what he found so very appealing about fungi.
—Oh, but they’re ingenious, Tim, don’t you see? They grow in soil, water—wherever they can grow, they grow. Perfect little opportunists.
Much as you used to be, Uncle: that was the un-Christian thought that first seized me. Over time, however, I came to appreciate the exemplary qualities of fungi. As proof, I offer you Uncle N himself, grabbing the first opportunity to grow out of bed, colonising the surface nearest to hand. Ingenious in his own right.
—You look much better, Uncle, I tell him now.
He draws away from the microscope, rubs his naked eyes. Smiles faintly.
—I find myself at one of those strange crossroads, Tim, between illness and health. Trying to glimpse the signpost, as it were.
—To health?
—To home.
And in that moment, it’s as though the air were being drawn open like a drape: I see this same house as it will be not so many years hence. The microscope abandoned in a corner, the fungi scattered to the winds. Strange hands filling and cleaning the lamps. Strange feet resting by the downstairs grate, strange voices commenting on its old-fashioned Dutch tile, the scriptural tableaux. “What sort of person would have kept such a grate?” they will ask, and will not stay to answer.
Uncle N exerts himself to rise from his chair, then abandons the effort halfway. Making a virtue of necessity, he crosses his legs and leans back in an attitude of boulevard ease.
—Well, this is a lovely surprise, Tim. I hadn’t expected you back so soon.
—I am as surprised as you, Uncle. I will not keep you long.
—You may keep me as long as you like, I have no objection. Time is bizarrely irrelevant at my stage in life. As are pastimes.
He has taken the room’s one chair, and so my only recourse is to sit on the edge of his still-unmade bed. The feather mattress collapses gently beneath my weight, virtually soundless in its protest.
—I have come because I need your help, Uncle.
—You shall have it, if it is mine to give.
—I hope it is. I am looking for an honest policeman.
Carefully, he wipes his spectacles on the sleeve of his robe.
—Why, that shouldn’t be so difficult. There must be dozens, surely.
—Be that as it may, I have reason to be skeptical.
He returns his glasses to their original perch and peers at me over the rims, and in that instant, his face assumes the shrewd mercantile air my parents used to speak of. It passes, however, before I can fix it for posterity. All that is left is a straightforward query:
—Does it relate to that business of yours? The one you alluded to last time you were here?
—Yes.
—And is it fair to say that in the course of pursuing this business, you have encountered some less-than-sterling representatives of the Metropolitan Police?
—Yes.
—And you are looking for someone who would not be beholden in any way to these aforementioned persons?
—In a manner of speaking.
One long, knobby finger taps the bridge of his nose in a rigid pendulum beat. He starts to speak, stops himself, starts again.
—I know of a man.
And as though to reassure himself that yes, yes, he does know a man, he nods several times over and says:
—Surtees is the name. Detective Inspector Graham Surtees. Curious sort of fellow. Assisted me with a rather tricky embezzlement case some years back. One thinks he’s not quite attending at first, then it turns out he’s attended far more than one could have imagined. Quietly dogged, no matter how he behaves on first acquaintance. If there’s any of them to be trusted, he’s your man.
—I will remember, Uncle. And now, would you be so kind as to write me a letter of introduction?
The ink and paper are easy to procure, and within two minutes, he has written, in his tight, sharply angled hand:
I herein commend to you my de facto nephew Timothy Cratchit. Would you have the goodness to hear him out with all due kindness and deliberation? He is most awfully bothered about something, and knowing him as I do, I can assert with conviction that he is seldom bothered without cause. Please assist him as you would me, and you shall have my
Everlasting thanks and gratitude,
EBS
Smiling mostly to myself, I fold the letter in half, turn it into an unsealed envelope, and tuck it inside my jacket.
—Thank you, Uncle. I shall see him this afternoon, with your blessing.
—You have it. Only stay a moment.
—Yes?
—I have promised, I know, not to pry into your affairs, and I am bound and determined to keep that promise. But remember what I told you, Tim. If in these next few days, you need anything, anything at all, you have only to send word, and I’ll rouse myself from this bed and tear down rafters and…and…oh, that line, Tim. The one we used to laugh about.
—Spirit-calling, you mean?
—Yes, tell me how it goes.
—I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
—And the other fellow, remind me what he says.
—But will they come when you do call them?
—Ha! That’s it. Excellent, yes, very fine.
For nigh on another minute, he speaks the line over and over again to the square of floorboard between his feet, chuckling after each iteration and muttering:
—Oh, fine…deuced fine, that.
Whereupon, seemingly replenished, he looks up at me again.
—Tim.
The briefest hesitation then. And in that interval, I feel a roiling inside him and all round him, and I have to fight the impulse to quit the room without a backwards look.
—I was only wondering, Tim, if you still see your father.
—Yes. Here and there.
A great expanse of air issues from his throat—more air than I would have thought that shrunk
en chest could hold. His head tips to one side, and it looks as if it might keep tipping all the way to the floor, but then, like a flat, bony pillow, his hand rises to meet it in a trembling stasis, and it is from this nearly recumbent angle that he gazes at me and says:
—I used to see spirits, too, Tim. Terrible things. How I miss them.
At the age of eleven, I was persuaded, for about ten minutes, that I was destined to be a bobby. It was Peter who informed me, as gently as he knew how, that even were I able to walk someday without a crutch, I would very likely fall short of the height requirement. In fact, that would indeed prove the case—I tapered off just shy of sixty-eight inches. And so to my adolescent mind, the members of the Metropolitan Police came to seem like another race altogether: stiff-lipped, fat-necked giants, bestriding our narrow streets like colossi.
So here I am at last, in the colossi’s den, stepping into this disreputable cluster of buildings off Whitehall Place and finding not giants but a hive of discombobulated bees: sergeants in top hats and swallowtail coats bustling past on no discernible trajectory, vaulting over piles of books, tripping on stray saddles and blankets, smacking their knees on balustrades. The air sings with din and velocity and confusion, and with the crackle of my own foreboding.
This is Scotland Yard….
Inspector Graham Surtees, to whose office I am ushered, bears as much resemblance to the rest of the constabulary as a salmon does to a school of herring. He is not so much bigger as more concentrated: tall and stretched thin, with eyes at once stern and watery, and a chin that slopes imperceptibly into his neck, and long, skeletal fingers that he interlaces across his chest. This last gesture gives him the air of a slumming don, and even so, the donnishness seems rather carefully constructed. Squint hard enough, and you can see the vowels and consonants and inflections and mannerisms piled atop one another, brick by brick, according to someone’s blueprint. Piled, perhaps, too high. The air is thin where Inspector Surtees now lives.
He asks me first if I would like some licorice, and looks chagrined when I decline. He compensates by jamming a piece into his own mouth and clamping down on it with all the force of a bear trap. Through clenched teeth, he asks after my uncle.
—How is good Mr. Drood? Still slaving away at the law?
—Banking, actually. And the name is—
—Ah yes, the counting house. Getting and spending.
—And the business, such as it is, has been handed over to his nephew. His blood nephew, I mean.
—Blood, yes.
He snatches up a piece of paper just to the right of his elbow, reads it with a show of great interest, then crumples it and tosses it over his shoulder, where it joins a great cairn of paper snowballs by the grate. All of them apparently waiting to be consumed by fire, although the strands of cobweb across the grate testify to months of disuse.
Without warning, Inspector Surtees slams down a hand on the desk.
—Well, Mr. Cratchit, you profess to have urgent business. Will you do me the kindness of proceeding? But stop…you’re quite sure you won’t take some licorice? No? Well, proceed then, by all means.
He looks me square in the eye to begin with, but as the tale unfolds, his eyelids grow swollen and listless, and his head sinks very gradually towards his chest, and one would think him asleep were it not for a curious galvanic current, which manifests itself in an agitation of the fingertips and in jerks of the head that leave me feeling, each time, like a burglar caught with his fingers in the eaves.
It takes me longer than I expected to finish, and perhaps in deference to my labour, the good inspector allows a cloud of silence to build up round us before he offers his thoughts.
—I wonder, Mr. Cratchit. I sometimes wonder if papist blood runs in my veins.
—Sorry?
—I’m so enormously attracted to trinities, you see. I simply dote on them. And here, as a kind of early Christmas gift, you have given me the most remarkable trinity. Three girls, Mr. Cratchit. Compellingly triangulated, but each intriguing in her own right. And so we take them, for no good reason, in sequence. This first one…you found her body where?
—In an alley off Jermyn Street.
—Ah, Jermyn. Did you know—why this should come to mind, I can’t say—Newton lived there.
—Did he?
—Can’t think of the house number right off. Hardly matters, does it? Now this aforementioned girl. If I recall correctly, there were constables on duty at the time.
—Two of them. I assume, as a consequence, there is some record of the crime.
—Record. Mm.
He flutters his fingers towards the wall behind him. My eyes take in the half-open cabinets, all of them vomiting paper—paper of every colour and thickness, poking out at all angles and sprouting long tendrils of dust. On the floor behind me, still more paper, crammed pell-mell into biscuit crates and flowerpots and already yellowing with antiquity.
Inspector Surtees gives his fingers another flutter.
—For economy’s sake, let us move with lightning speed to the second girl. The one you and your friend found downriver. May I ask where you left the body?
—With the coroner’s office in Rotherhithe.
—Did you stay to make a report?
—No.
—How peculiar. Why ever not?
—I don’t know. My friend wanted to. I don’t know.
His eyes fog over.
—Friends, yes. They…redoubleth joys, and they…and they cutteth griefs in half. Something along those lines. Bacon, I think. Neither here nor there, but tell me, if you please. The name of your wise friend?
—I’d rather not say just now.
—It would be most helpful to have corroboration.
—I know it would.
He pulls down one of his grey eyes, regards me for a cool half minute.
—Your friend is perhaps engaged in an unorthodox profession. You’ll note I do not say “illicit,” I say only “unorthodox.”
—He is a retired seaman. How he earns a wage currently, I couldn’t say.
—And how do you earn a wage, Mr. Cratchit?
—I am a tutor.
—In what subject?
—Reading.
—And whom do you instruct?
—That is not for me to say.
This draws from him the most amiable smile of our brief acquaintance.
—It is vexing, Mr. Cratchit. You come to me for assistance in prosecuting a crime, and yet you decline to answer any of my questions.
—Because the questions do not pertain to the crime. If I may remind you, Inspector, we are talking about three girls—at least three, quite possibly many more—all of them, by my reckoning, abducted, branded in the most horrible fashion, almost certainly cozened into prostitution, and in some cases murdered. If you would care to direct any inquiries to me on this subject, I should be delighted to answer them.
For whatever reason, he chooses that moment to dive behind his desk. An angry rattle, the scraping of a drawer—more licorice?—and from the same general vicinity, the inspector’s disembodied voice, asking:
—How old were these girls, Mr. Cratchit?
—I can speak for the one who is alive. She is ten.
—You mean that is what she told you.
—I mean that is what she is.
His head reappears above the horizon of his desk.
—And the ages of the other girls? The ones you found?
—I have no way of knowing.
—Your best guess, then. Have a go.
—Ten or eleven. Twelve at most.
His eyebrows pinch together; his lips push outwards.
—I ask only—why do I ask? Oh! Because the age of consent, you see, is thirteen.
—I wasn’t aware that murder victims needed to tender their consent.
—Ah, but we don’t know that these are murders, do we? You said yourself there were no marks other than…bloody hands, was it?
—Yes.
<
br /> —A certain look of terror in the eyes, was that it?
—Yes.
—Anything else?
—No. No, that was quite enough.
And now he is up on his feet, strolling through his office as though it were a village common. Sniffing the air, pumping his arms. Sliding his boots through the drifts of snow-paper.
—You mentioned a man in a carriage. With rings and whatnot. Let us fasten on him for a moment.
—I don’t know who he is, Inspector.
—Not a clue?
—I have…I have a frustrating sense of having seen him somewhere, but I can’t recall where.
—Perhaps there’s something else you recall. A stray nuance. I adore nuance.
—I’ve told you everything. There was…there was a coat of arms on the carriage.
—Can you describe that for me, Mr. Cratchit?
—I didn’t get much of a look.
—Anything at all.
—There was, I think, a lion in it.
—A lion.
—It seemed to be a lion. A lion’s tail, at any rate. Haunches. That kind of thing.
—Ah, yes, haunches.
It doesn’t matter how often I come back to that coat of arms. It’s always muddle. And the muddle never clears, although it does brighten. Indeed, it becomes extraordinarily vivid in my mind, and this vividness is somehow indivisible from the muddle, as though the image acquires, in the act of breaking down, a prodigious and supernatural power. Can things do that, Inspector?
—There was another man, Mr. Cratchit. The one who pursued you with the blade.
—Yes.
—Perhaps you could describe him for me.
—I can do better.
The drawing looks quite small, spread across the expanse of Surtees’ cherry desk. It seems almost to be shrinking before my eyes—awaiting the fate that must come to all paper in this place.
—Did you sketch this yourself, Mr. Cratchit?
—My young friend.
—And is it a good likeness?
—An ideal likeness.
He pushes his face to within six inches of the paper. And there is something about the way he holds his pose, something about the way his eyes fix on the image, rather than glancing away, something that makes me say:
—You recognise him.
