Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01)

by Jonathan Green

  The voice at the other end of the line remained silent.

  “So if I might be permitted to continue with my preparations...?”

  “Saturday, then.”

  “Saturday. There is no need for doubt, everything is in order. Nothing can stand in the way of the plan, quite simply because nobody knows what is coming.

  “And when I fulfil my part of the bargain...” He left that particular thought hanging.

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  Le Papillon smiled and hung the handset back in its cradle.

  “Huh. Very patriotic,” Moreau grunted, peering nosily over the collector’s shoulder.

  Le Papillon had heard the other’s approach but had chosen to ignore him until now. He turned in his chair, the smile becoming a frozen leer.

  “My dear Doctor Moreau,” he said. “How goes it?”

  “Bloody mess, that’s what it is.”

  The man smelt of sour breath and potent body odour. The butterfly collector had to make a conscious effort not to physically recoil at the noxious smell.

  “What is?”

  “The transmitter,” the doctor grumbled. “Don’t know how the bastard managed to damage it, but he did. He should be dead by now, like the other two, but somehow he did a right number on it. Bastard!”

  “And this is why you called it back, was it?” Le Papillon said, the smile still fixed on his face.

  “It needs sorting. I can’t risk having that thing running loose out there and not be able to call it back. That would screw up everything.”

  The butterfly collector’s jaw tensed. The smile remained. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”

  “Bodes well for future missions. After all, for what was really little more than a glorified test run, I wasn’t really necessarily expecting to get two hits completed in one go.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “No, I was amazed it worked, actually.”

  “But I thought you said...”

  His house guest blushed. “Oh, you know how it is. You say anything to get a gig, don’t you?”

  “But you assured me. You said you could interpret and extrapolate your ancestor’s working notes.”

  “But it did work, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

  At that moment Le Papillon would have quite happily rammed his tweezers up the doctor’s nose and into his brain, but the plan had progressed too far to take him out of the equation now – at least, for the time being.

  Le Papillon’s expertise did not lie in primate psycho-surgery and cybernetics. His acquaintance with the young Doctor Moreau had taken months to cultivate, in case the circumstances arose when he might need the other man’s particular skills to help him achieve his own aims.

  Besides, only Doctor Moreau knew the intricate workings of the cyber-gorilla. Just as the first man to make a Babbage engine had been the only one able to interpret its internal workings, so only Doctor Montague Moreau knew how the transmitter and electrodes worked and what alterations or repairs would need to be made. A team of surgeons and cogitator specialists might well be able to work out what he had done, but only after completely taking the gorilla apart and re-building it again.

  It had to be said, for all his oafish mannerisms and seat-of-the-pants approach to engineering problems, Doctor Moreau did have a very particular talent, and one which was currently vital to the successful completion of Le Papillon’s plan.

  “So,” Le Papillon said through clenched teeth, the porcelain smile still on his face, but only just, “the damage the uplift sustained can be repaired?”

  “Oh yes. Just bloody annoying, that’s all.”

  “There is still the acoustician to be eliminated,” the anarchist pointed out. “Your pet’s targets totalled three. I made that very clear. The composer, the Babbage-engineer and the acoustic scientist.”

  “And he will be, don’t fret so.”

  “I am not fretting,” the man said, his jaw clenching, “but I thought I had made it very clear that all three were to be eliminated as soon after one another as was humanly possible; or inhumanly, if you prefer. It will only be a matter of time before the gendarmes discover the two it has already killed.”

  “So what?” Moreau said, almost laughing in scorn. “They won’t even begin to be able to work out what it was that carried out the killings, let alone trace it to here.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I’ll have it patched up and back to mission fitness in no time at all.”

  “No time at all?”

  “Alright, first thing tomorrow. I’ve only got to fix up the transmitter; and then I’ll have to fit it with some sort of shield or something, of course, to stop any more accidents like the last one fouling things up. Have no fear, my friend” – Le Papillon hated it when Moreau dared call him ‘friend’ – “project Black Swan will proceed as planned.”

  And soon all Paris will understand what happens when Le Papillon beats his wings, the collector considered, keeping his thoughts to himself.

  He turned his chair to fully face the noisome doctor now.

  “Your pet’s ‘little accident’ – wasn’t that what you called it?” Le Papillon goaded.

  Moreau shifted from one foot to the other in obvious embarrassment at being reminded of the incident.

  “Tell me more about this unarmed, one-eyed man who was able to fend off half a ton of technologically-enhanced adult silverback?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Scarlet Pimpernel Returns

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE that ruse actually worked,” Ulysses said, as he heard the door downstairs close after the departing policemen.

  Josephine took both his hands in hers, a delighted smile playing about her rosebud lips.

  “I mean, if I’m honest, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for taffeta, and I’ve been known to slap on the greasepaint once or twice in the past, you know, a little eye shadow in my student days for the Am-Dram club, but I never knew I could make such a convincing woman.”

  Josephine laughed.

  “And whilst wearing an eye-patch too,” Ulysses went on. “Are all Parisian police so short-sighted?”

  “A well-placed veil can hide a multitude of sins,” Madame Marguerite said.

  “I know,” Ulysses said, sniggering himself. “And who would’ve thought I’d look so good in a wedding dress? Do people often get married here?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Madame Marguerite chuckled throatily. “But you’d best take it off now. We’ve got Monsieur Vicieux coming in at three – he’s one of Amelie’s regulars – and he always likes her to play the innocent.”

  The dandy was suddenly filled with a rising sense of euphoria. On a whim, as their joint laughter rose to fill the room, Ulysses took Josephine in his arms and began to waltz her around the room, breaking into song.

  “They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere!” Ulysses sang as he spun the girl about her bedchamber, Madame Marguerite clapping along in time.

  Still weak from the surgery and all that had happened to him of late, Ulysses stumbled, gave Josephine one last spin, and collapsed onto the bed. The moment was past.

  “Are you alright, Ulysses?” the girl asked anxiously.

  “I’m alright,” he puffed. “Just feeling a little light-headed, that’s all, what with all the excitement...”

  Josephine held his hands in hers again, but said nothing more, the look in her eyes saying it all.

  “You need to rest,” Madame Marguerite said. “But you need to get out of that dress first. I don’t want you pulling your stitching.”

  Ulysses was slightly taken aback. “I didn’t know you cared,” he said, blushing.

  “It’s not that. I don’t want you getting blood on the dress. It’s a bugger to get the stains out.”

  “SO,” ULYSSES SAID, with heartfelt purpose, as he surveyed the array of newspapers and pages of his own not
es spread out on the bedspread in front of him, “where to begin? On the day I arrive in Paris, two murders are committed, within less than half an hour of each other, and both in the vicinity of the Rue Morgue.”

  Another day had passed since the police had called at Madame Marguerite’s. Two days of recuperating at the brothel and he was feeling better than he had felt in a long time – fifty-five years, in fact, after a manner of speaking. The mysterious Doctor Cossard clearly had some talent.

  Ulysses was sitting at the head of Josephine’s bed, his right leg folded under him. The courtesan herself had spent last night sleeping on top of the bed beside him, never once making the move to join him under the covers, which had surprised him.

  His right arm was back in its sling, and that – combined with the painkillers Madame Marguerite had provided him with from the brothel’s surprisingly well-stocked medicine cabinet – had meant he could at least now sit up and move his arm without feeling like white-hot needles were being plunged into his shoulder every time he did so.

  The sling did make it difficult for him to make notes, however, seeing as how he was right-handed, but simply being able to bounce ideas off Josephine as he thought things through made all the difference.

  As he spoke, he shuffled the pages before him, rearranging his thoughts as he set his mind to the matter in hand.

  After all, being top of France’s Most Wanted list – rather like the original Scarlet Pimpernel – would seriously restrict his movements around the city and beyond. In his current condition, if he were ever to escape back to England – that he might not only help his lover and her father, but also save his brother from the cruel end fate had in store for him – then he needed to make sure he was no longer wanted by the French police.

  The photo-fit didn’t help, of course. He was looking at it now, as reproduced inside that morning’s edition of Le Monde. It was surprisingly good, Ulysses thought to his chagrin, even if it did make him look like a pirate.

  An inspector by the name of Dupin had gone public about the murders, the house-to-house search conducted by the police having failed to uncover the suspect, and so his face was now one of the most widely recognised and despised in the country.

  And so the best way for him to be about his business, and ensure that the French Police would no longer be hunting him, was to solve the mystery of the Rue Morgue murders for them. But then he had one huge advantage over the detective and the gendarmes; he had come face to face with the true killer himself.

  “It looks nothing like you,” the girl said.

  Looking up he caught the look in her eyes. The skin at the curve of her neck was flushed bright pink. “I mean, you’re much more handsome.”

  “It’s the eye-patch, isn’t it?” Ulysses said, the corners of his mouth curling upwards. “Girls can’t resist a pirate’s rakish charm.”

  Josephine’s blush deepened still further and she broke eye-contact.

  “Anyway, back to the case in hand. As we now know, there were actually two men who died on Wednesday.”

  He extracted two rustling sheets from the piles in front of him, internal pages from two different newspapers. One bore a poor quality reproduction of a photograph, of a thin man with a face like a knife. The other – which might have been from the passport records office, by the look of things – was of a swarthy man with a mane of dark hair.

  Ulysses’ gaze lingered on the grainy image of the sharp-featured individual. “First there’s this man, the penniless composer Carmine Roussel.” Who I had my own unfortunate encounter with, he thought to himself. “And then, what could have only been thirty minutes later at most, this man” – his eyes moved to the picture of the swarthy man – “the ordinateur engineer Pierre Courriel Pascal also met his untimely end.”

  The dandy regarded the two articles he had torn from that morning’s papers.

  The two deaths had been unconnected by those who had reported them.

  The first was the murder of the celebrated, yet destitute, composer, which was described as both ‘brutal’ and ‘savage’ – depending on the particular report one was reading at the time. Having stumbled upon this crime scene himself, Ulysses would have been more inclined to describe the manner of the man’s passing using the adjectives ‘badly-timed’ and ‘irritating,’ seeing as how he was the one currently taking the blame for the murder.

  The write-up in the paper was accompanied by an artist’s impression of the man police were hunting in connection with the crime, one which made Ulysses look like some kind of Mexican bandit, emphasising his stubble and adding a scar to enhance the appearance of wanton criminality.

  The second article concerned the suicide of Pierre Courriel Pascal, expert Lovelace algorithm coder and apparently something of a pioneer when it came to Babbage engine design, although he was virtually unknown to the public at large. According to the reporter’s write-up, the poor wretch had thrown himself out the window of his fourth floor apartment, located only a few minutes’ walk away in.

  With the savage murder in the Rue Morgue occurring on the same day only a few streets away, the cogitator engineer’s suicide had received little coverage, worthy only of a few column inches in one paper, as far as Ulysses could see – the capital-centric Le Journal.

  Ulysses noted with interest that the police had clearly rationed the information they had fed to the press. There was no mention anywhere of the curious burn marks in the composer’s garret, or of Dashwood’s skeleton.

  But two pertinent facts that the press and the authorities were both aware of and yet had failed to connect was the proximity of the two deaths and their timing. They had occurred within half an hour of each other, by Ulysses’ reckoning.

  It would not have taken the killer long to get from one apartment to the other, even on foot. By a similar rooftop path to that which Ulysses had taken during his flight from the gendarmes, he could have got there even quicker.

  And then there was another fact of which the press, the police and everyone else was blithely unaware. Ulysses had witnessed an eight-foot tall gorilla climb out a fourth-floor apartment on the very street where Pierre Courriel Pascal had died.

  All things considered, it seemed highly likely – at least as far as Ulysses was concerned – that it had been the very same apartment.

  Suddenly, Ulysses wasn’t so sure that the poor programming pioneer Pascal had decided to end it all by taking a leap into the unknown from the fourth floor.

  “So,” he said, “on the one hand, we have a penniless composer knifed in his apartment, the door locked from the inside, the killer entering and leaving by an attic window, and on the other we have a pioneering Babbage engine inventor like as not thrown from the fourth-floor of his apartment building thirty minutes later, if not sooner.”

  “You think there’s a connection?” Josephine asked, hanging on his every word.

  Ulysses nodded. “I do.”

  Josephine kept her gaze fixed on him, a mixture of astonishment and delight in her eyes. “But what could it possibly be?”

  He thought back to the gouged ridges in the putty of the sill of the garret room window, marks that – now he thought about it – had looked like they could have been made by something with massive, man-like hands.

  “How about a half a ton of angry, cybernetically-enhanced gorilla?”

  “A what?”

  “Its forearms strapped in metal and electrodes like cattle-prods plugged into its skull,” Ulysses went on.

  “You’re joking,” Madame Marguerite boomed. “Such a thing doesn’t exist!”

  “You remember when I first awoke after the operation and you asked me how I came to be here,” Ulysses said, “and I couldn’t remember? Well now I do.”

  Josephine and the brothel-keeper exchanged disbelieving glances, their mouths agape.

  “So what did this gorilla do to you, exactly?” Madame Marguerite said. “Hurled you through Josephine’s roof-light, I suppose?”

  “Pretty much. Aft
er I disturbed it leaving Pascal’s apartment.”

  “Are you sure?” Josephine asked, flabbergasted.

  “No, but it seems likely. And besides, it’s the best lead I have right now.”

  Josephine blanched. “But the reports all say that Carmine Roussel was stabbed and that one about the engineer’s suicide said he jumped.”

  “I know,” Ulysses admitted, his brows knitting in consternation.

  His gaze wandered distractedly around the room for a moment.

  “But bear with me here for a minute. Let’s assume that Pascal was pushed. And suppose that Roussel wasn’t stabbed, or at least wasn’t supposed to have been... I know it sounds crazy; I haven’t completely worked that bit out yet... But just suppose...” Ulysses trailed off as he struggled to get his thoughts in order.

  “But even if the two men were both killed by this half-ton gorilla of yours,” Madame Marguerite piped up, “why? What possible reason could there be?”

  “You’re forgetting who,” Ulysses said sagely, a slow smile forming on his face, delighted as he was at the prospect of such an intriguing challenge.

  “Who?” the woman echoed.

  “The cyber-gorilla was a weapon – just like a knife, a gun or a bomb. I have a feeling the victims’ relationship with the ape was irrelevant. We shouldn’t be asking why they were killed, but who wanted them dead. Who would want a composer and a Babbage engine engineer dead?”

  The women were silent for several long seconds.

  “You think your best bet for getting out of Paris and away from France is by finding the answers to this question?” Madame Marguerite said at last.

  Ulysses smiled. “Indeed.”

  “Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier to simply swim the Channel?”

  “HERE, WHAT’S THIS?” Ulysses said, turning a page of the paper he was currently perusing. Below a piece about a highly decorated general of the USSA – one General Matt Zitron, Ulysses noted – and the ever-present ‘German Problem,’ there was a headline that had triggered another recent memory.