As the butler launched off into one of those Oh mercy me, talking-to-myself but really talking to the audience monologues, Turner-Smith became aware of a touch at his sleeve. He looked and saw that a shaven-headed, skull-faced man had appeared by his side and was holding out the same note that he’d sent backstage some ten minutes earlier. It had been opened, and a return message had been scribbled on it.
Turner-Smith took it, read the scribble, and then folded the note and tucked it into an inside pocket.
He said, “I’ll be waiting in the saloon bar next door. Tell no one else about this. Do you understand?”
The man remained silent, but inclined his head in assent.
Turner-Smith left the auditorium and crossed the foyer, emerging onto the street by the theater box office. He’d arrived in Manchester little more than an hour earlier. He’d told no one of his arrival, but immediately took a cab across the river and into Salford. He’d made the same journey twenty years before when, as a provost marshal, he’d been in pursuit of a deserter who’d killed a sergeant in barracks and run for home. He could remember a four-roomed terraced house full of children and having to face down the deserter’s mother, a woman more formidable than many a man in his regiment. She’d denied seeing her son when, in truth, he was hiding in the privy in a neighbor’s backyard. The boy had fled as Turner-Smith’s men began to search, and drowned himself later that afternoon. The river Irwell divided the borough from the city; a drowning would bring out the two sets of police with boat hooks, one squad of men on each bank, ready to shove the body toward the opposite shore for their neighbor force to deal with.
Liverpool Street was a wide thoroughfare, with broad stone pavements and tram rails set into the cobbles. Ahead of him, a girl of around eleven was pushing along an old pram loaded with firewood. More children could be seen outside the commercial hotel next door. They sat on the steps, they sat on the kerbstones with their feet in the road. Younger ones played in the care of their older siblings, all waiting for parents who were spending the evening in the public bar.
Turner-Smith bypassed the public bar for the more respectable saloon, where the drink came from another side of the same counter, but the extra penny bought a better class of room with upholstered seating, mahogany paneling, and waiter service. He settled alone in a three-sided booth, ordered a glass of Madeira wine, and paid for it when it came.
He said to the waiter, “I shall be joined by a gentleman, name of Sayers. He’ll be coming over from the playhouse. Make sure he can find me when he gets here, will you?”
The waiter dipped his head and went away. Turner-Smith laid his stick across the seats beside him, stretched out his bad leg, and settled back to wait. Behind him in the next booth was a party of commercial travelers; he eavesdropped on their conversation for a while, but soon felt his attention start to wander.
Children of the poor. They were everywhere. He’d been met by a crowd of them begging outside the railway station, and seen them scatter at the approach of a special constable. It was as if the growth of cities was like a gaseous reaction; for a certain volume of prosperity, an even greater volume of poverty was produced. The result was great public works and proud civic buildings and range upon range of desperate hovels, all standing as one under the same dirty sky.
After a while, he took out his watch and checked it. Sayers had undertaken to meet him during the play’s second act. He’d addressed his note to the owner of the Purple Diamond company, but it was this Sayers who’d responded. More than half an hour had passed since then.
Someone was standing over him. He looked up as the waiter spoke. “The gentleman is here now, sir,” the waiter said, and moved aside for his visitor.
“I’m Tom Sayers,” the man said, and took a seat on the opposite side of the booth. The waiter hovered for a moment, but the newcomer shook his head.
When the waiter had moved away, the man faced Turner-Smith and said, “What can I do for you, Superintendent?”
“I’d been hoping to speak to Mister Whitlock himself.”
“I’m Edmund Whitlock’s acting manager. I handle all the company’s practical affairs. If I can’t help you with it, then it probably can’t be done.”
Turner-Smith considered the man before him for a moment, and then decided that he could speak as one gentleman to another. They were more likely to have interests in common than in conflict.
“Take a look at this, please, Sayers,” he said, and placed before him one of the pasted-up sheets that suggested a link between paupers mutilated without apparent motive and the stage company’s progress around the country.
The other man read for a while, and then glanced up.
“Some of our less notable receptions.”
“The dates, Mister Sayers. Look at the dates.”
He read on for a while. Then he sat back in the attitude of a man conceding an argument that had already been won. “This is very revealing,” he said.
And Turner-Smith, who for the past minute had been given the opportunity for a closer study of his visitor, said, “Are you by any chance wearing greasepaint, Mister Sayers?”
The man threw the paper onto the table between them.
“Ah,” he said. “There you have me.”
Under the table, Turner-Smith reached out for his sword stick. He took care not to signal his intention. “Yet you are not listed on the playbills among the actors,” he said.
“Very true.” The man smiled. “I can see that you are too good a detective for me, Superintendent.”
A few moments later, the man rose from the booth and walked out of the saloon. The four commercial travelers in the next booth were laughing so hard at a story that none of them noticed his departure. One took a draft from his mug and leaned back in his seat, only to splutter it out all over the table.
His fellows were slow to catch on. Their humor ebbed, where his had vanished in a flash.
“What the devil?” he said. “Something pronged me!” And he turned in his seat to find out what it was.
All clustered for a closer look at his discovery. An inch of pointed blade protruded from the horsehair back of the bench on which he’d been sitting. “Lor’, Jack,” said the one with the walrus mustache. “They’ve sat you in one of them iron maiden thingies.”
“Iron maiden be buggered,” said the wounded one, and stood up to look over into the next booth.
There sat the white-haired, stern-looking man who’d come limping in on a stick about three-quarters of an hour before. His back was to them, his head bowed.
The stick was in two pieces now. The hollow shaft lay across the table by his emptied glass. The other, the blade and handle part, had been thrust through his chest and had him pinned in place like a bug.
James Caspar was across the alleyway and in through the stage door in no more than a dozen strides. The Silent Man pulled the door shut behind him and then followed along a snaking route through the backstage areas toward the wings. As he walked, Caspar shed his jacket, his cravat, and his collar. He let them fall and the Silent Man collected all of them in his wake. Out came the cuff links, his sleeves shaken loose. Up five steps and through a door, and ahead of them the fly ropes and the lights of the stage. He put his hand in his hair and tousled it, as befitted a man who’d been unjustly condemned at the end of the first act and was now being returned to life and honor, thanks to the remarkable insight and unstinting efforts of a sixty-year-old detective with rouged cheeks and a corset.
Out on stage, Whitlock had already spoken Caspar’s cue. It came at the end of an entire page of speech, delivered to a grieving Louise and building to a rip-roaring climax that usually brought the house to its feet as the lover she’d thought hanged was restored to her with a flourish.
Seeing no sign of Caspar, the Low Comedian had drawn breath for an ad lib to cover a stage wait. Before he could deliver it, Caspar sprang into view, not so much entering from the wings as being ejected from them. He flung down the hooded cloak of
the mysterious beggar who had been seen outside the window in the middle of the second act—all part of the detective’s brilliant plan to fool the true culprit into revealing himself—and threw out his arms to receive Louise. She ran to him and hit him like a train, and as the audience cheered their embrace, Whitlock quietly moved upstage of the pair ready for his next revelation.
At the back of the auditorium, Sayers had returned to the spot where he’d been standing earlier. As those around him whooped and whistled, Sayers nursed a heart like a heavy stone. The reason for this was a short conversation that he’d had with Louise in the brief interval between the play’s two acts.
It had gone like this:
Tom!
What is it?
I need to ask you something.
Anything.
Do you think James—Mister Caspar—likes me at all?
A silence.
Tom?
But everybody likes you, Louise.
Later, when the evening’s entertainment was over and the players were all leaving the theater, they were confronted by a considerable police presence around the public house next door. Two wagons were drawn up on the street and a large number of uniformed men had surrounded the building and were turning onlookers away. Lanterns had been set for extra light, and sheets and a stretcher were being taken inside. A man from the Salford Chronicle was talking to people on the pavement, trying to separate fact from fiction and getting some of the most enthusiastic accounts from those who had been nowhere near the events. It was a fight over a woman; it was the work of a gang over from Regent Road; two people were dead; three people were dead; everyone in the pub had been massacred. A drunk had run amuck with a knife. Sailors had fought with locals. It was the so-called Buffalo Bill’s Gang, local scuttlers stirred to a violent frenzy by their unreasoning passion for the penny-dreadful magazines.
Sayers made it his business to get the women away as quickly as possible.
Caspar was nowhere to be seen.
ELEVEN
Before he went for his train, Sebastian Becker went to church. It was his first visit for some time. The doors were unlocked but there was barely any light in the dawn sky outside, and it seemed he would have the place to himself for a while. When he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the fall of the iron latch echoed like a gunshot all the way up to the vaulted roof.
Perhaps this was a mistake. One look at his surroundings and again he felt some of the deep spiritual terror that he’d known as a small child, making its mark that he knew would never be fully erased. The Catholic Church, the same the world over. Whether it was a cathedral in Cologne or a mission in California, in their essence they never varied. Candles and gilt, darkness and mystery.
And suffering. Always suffering. In every image, in every hymn, and in every prayer; and it was always inflicted by a God who spoke in Latin, and borne by a Christ who resembled no Jew that Sebastian had ever met. As if the real Christ had been insufficient for the Church’s purposes, so they’d manufactured their own.
He knelt briefly in the aisle, and crossed himself. It took no effort to remember the procedure. He wanted to ignore it, but could not see how. The training ran too deep and he knew that he would freeze, unable to continue until the omission had been corrected.
Once that was over, he took a seat at the front of the church. Where the congregation sat, right in the front row. There were oil lamps around the high altar that had been burning all through the night. Behind the altar, in an ornate frame, towered some magnificent Renaissance painting that he could barely see. Before this shone a cross; in gold or brass, from here it was impossible to tell. He stared at it almost in defiance; refusing to pray, refusing even to admit the possibility of prayer.
So why was he here?
Last night’s news had shaken him. Turner-Smith not just dead, but murdered. Sebastian’s insides churned like a bag of snakes when he tried to come to terms with it. He should have been the one to pursue the information. Then Turner-Smith would be alive. But then Sebastian might well have suffered his superior’s fate in his place. Unless, by conducting himself differently, he reached a different outcome.
But perhaps his mentor had died because he had made some discovery that would prove vital to the investigation. In which case, his achievement and his sacrifice were bound together. For Sebastian to have replaced him and survived would be to negate both. While to make the same discovery and die in his place…well, in considering that one, Sebastian found proof that he did not have the makings of a saint.
There would be a funeral. A police funeral, with full honors. The streets of the town would be taken over for the procession, and people would turn out because all those black-plumed horses and men in uniform would be something to see. But Sebastian could never picture a funeral without thinking of the white coffin of his sister, small enough for one undertaker’s man to carry in his arms.
He’d been a few days short of his ninth birthday, and death had meant little to him then. Grief, though…that had been everywhere he turned, terrifying and oppressive. The house draped in black, the downstairs rooms crowded with somber people. He hardly dared speak. Even the appearance of his living self seemed to be taken as an affront, and so he kept out of his mother’s way as much as possible.
He’d dared to wonder if, given time, this turn of events might mean that he’d receive a fuller share of her affections. But as his ninth birthday came and went without notice, and the birthday after that, each overshadowed by the grimmer anniversary that preceded it, he grew to realize that not only was his dead sibling still loved, but loved more than he.
Why had his mother felt the need to write that letter to Turner-Smith? Did it indicate a concern that she’d never otherwise let him see? The experience of a lifetime suggested not. It was merely her way to place her mark on his affairs. She’d always responded to any of his plans or proposals by pointing out their potential for failure. She considered herself entitled to her opinion.
“Praying’s a skill like any other, Sebastian,” said a voice behind him. Sebastian looked back and saw Father Alexander, parish priest for the past eighteen years, in the aisle and moving toward him. He must have been elsewhere in the church, and had come in through one of the side doors. “I can’t say I’ve seen you practice it much, lately.”
Sebastian said, “Turner-Smith was murdered last night.”
“Turner-Smith?”
“My superintendent.”
“God have mercy on his soul. How did it happen?”
“The circumstances are unclear. I am to go there with what I know, and if there is an arrest to be made, I shall make it. If there is a God, may he guide my hand.”
The priest’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “If, Sebastian?”
Sebastian rose to his feet.
“Another time, Father,” he said.
TWELVE
Although it stood on a street in where there were a number of lodging houses, Mrs. Mack put up no board or sign, nor did she advertise. A theatrical landlady had no use for business from the public, who might expect to keep normal people’s hours. Theatricals and other stage people came home late at night, and many would sleep until midmorning. They’d expect supper at some unsocial time and then an hour or two of society after that. Their talk was of a world known only to their profession. And even now, in the minds of many theirs was not a respectable life.
Constantly on the move, they made few friends in the places they visited. Their only unguarded contact was with each other. Stage folk were like one great, fluid family, and in that family it was often the theatrical landlady who took the mother’s role: offering shelter and a welcome, keeping a special lookout for the young, and demanding moral standards from all who came under their roof. The most roaring reprobate of the saloon-bar lock-in would be as meek as a good son in his landlady’s presence.
Mrs. Mack was one of the legends. There was a Mr. Mack, but there is not much to be said about him.
It was after ten on the Saturday morning when Tom Sayers woke. He was usually one of life’s early risers, but the previous night he had been unable to sleep. Borrowing a latchkey from the kitchen, he had taken himself out for a moonlit walk. He was not a man who feared assault at any hour, and by then it was so late that even coshers and mashers would have crawled off to bed. He got as far as the wide river that divided the two boroughs—slow-moving, sparkling, dirty and dark as oil. He had walked with his mind in disorder, and returned with it feeling no more settled.
Lily’s words still rang in his mind. She seemed to be saying that there was no such thing as happiness, per se. It was more a matter of working out what will make you happy, and knowing you’re on your way to it. Always believing that it’s the destination, when in fact it’s the journey.
So, where was he going? Most men of his age had begun to establish themselves in one way or another. Wives, children, some steady form of income. But not Tom Sayers. Sayers performed all the functions of a businessman but he lived the life of a gypsy, always on the move, accumulating little. He had some savings and paid rent on a small house in Brixton that was his home for their London dates, but nothing of any more substance than that.
He’d begun to consider the idea that he might get himself off the road, perhaps set himself up as a personal manager to a select list of clients, dealing exclusively with their affairs. He could picture himself with a small office in Covent Garden, framed playbills in the waiting room and a clerk for the correspondence. One or two performers outside the company had expressed a wish that he might take on such a role, on occasions when he’d helped them out with some personal difficulty. However, when he allowed himself to imagine what form such a new life might take, there was only one client who ever featured in the scene with any consistency.
Louise. At times like this, he ached at the very thought of her. In his mind, he would relive the moment when she’d fallen into his arms. He’d take those few seconds of confusion and tease them out into an entire marriage of their souls that was timeless, graceful, and slow. James Caspar made no appearance in this world of his imagination. Sayers had cut him from the script.
The Kingdom of Bones Page 7
