Tom All-Alone's

by Lynn Shepherd

  A baronet.

  And while the ‘Sir’ of a baronet may look the same, and sound the same, as the ‘Sir’ of a knight, they are as dissimilar, as species, as a mythical unicorn and a Common Eland. Indeed, why else should Bucket keep repeating the Baronet in Sir Leicester’s name, if not to emphasize the immeasurable distance between that great county family and those who may use the same designation before their name but can lay claim to neither the same ancestral lands nor the same ancient lineage? And what was it Mrs O’Driscoll overheard Abigail Cass say? That a girl had been cruelly used, and cruelly wronged, and ‘all the noble rank and money in London would not be enough to conceal it’. Now as Charles is well aware, a mere baronet does not – on the most scrupulous technicality – actually qualify for the ranks of the nobility, but a woman like Abigail Cass is unlikely to have known that. What she would most definitely have known, on the other hand, is that despite the enormous fortune amassed by the Cremornes – rumoured to exceed even the Dedlocks’ – there is an invisible but adamantine barrier impeding Sir Julius that not even an alliance with an earl will ever entirely do away: unlike Sir Leicester, who owes the title before his name to nothing more than accident of birth, Sir Julius has earned his money in trade, and achieved his knighthood by dint of his own toil.

  Charles is furious with himself for not realizing it before, but he sees it all too clearly now: the man Abigail Cass was talking about can’t have been Cremorne at all, but someone else entirely. Someone, it now seems clear, who not only knows Cremorne, but in all probability has the same tastes as Cremorne, the same secrets as Cremorne, and the same reasons as Cremorne to have those secrets silenced and suppressed. And who better to do so than that dusty old mausoleum of all that is treacherous and compromising, Edward Tulkinghorn? Did Abigail Cass discover what they were so concerned to conceal and threaten to expose them? Was that why she had to die? And who are ‘they’ anyway? Charles remembers – not before time – those four men he glimpsed in Tulkinghorn’s ante-chamber, and realizes with a jolt that it is quite possible Cremorne was among them. One of them certainly fitted the description Jacky Jackson gave of the stiff old man with grey hair seen in Sir Julius’ company at the Argyll Rooms. So does the same dark conspiracy envelop them all? And if that’s the case, who else is involved, and how long has it been going on? A host of questions suddenly, but for a man like Charles, it may not be as difficult as it first appears to start unearthing some answers.

  He covers the last few yards to Buckingham Street at a run, leaving his two Good Samaritans looking down the road after him, denouncing his discourtesy and wondering at such an uncommon incident. But both of them being writers of some note, as well as friends, I would not be at all surprised to find one of them making good literary use of it one day or another.

  Back at the house, Charles clatters up the stairs three at a time and nearly collides with Molly, who is scrubbing the first-floor landing. Up in the attic he spends half an hour ransacking the crates for his long-lost scrapbook of English heraldry, which he does indeed manage to find, but which turns out not to contain anything even remotely resembling the black swan adorned with the red hand. Which is infuriating, but not, thankfully, the only way of getting at what he needs. He could wait until morning and go to the British Library and pore over learned tomes for hours, or he could take a short cut. The latter will undoubtedly be quicker, and will furnish him besides, with intelligence no library could ever provide, but is he prepared to take such an enormous risk?

  On his way back downstairs, Charles stops at Maddox’s door, and gently pushes it open. The old man is asleep in his chair by the fire, his mouth slightly open, and the coals burnt low. Charles hesitates, wondering whether to wake him and tell him what he’s discovered, and what he plans to do now, but he remembers what Stornaway once said about how fast his uncle’s grasp of the world plunges as the day declines, and decides he might be doing more harm than good. There’ll be another opportunity, he tells himself. I can talk to him tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Closing In

  The room is darkened and still. A thin sliver of moonlight slices between the shutters from the street outside, and zigzags crookedly down the columbarium of iron boxes marshalled like a silent legion of the dead behind the empty chair where their master once sat enthroned. He is as silent now as they are, encased in his own dark box downstairs, awaiting the moment when he too will be allotted a narrow niche that bears his name. This room was never much given to receiving company, and seems to have lapsed with relief back into its familiar emptiness. There is no sign, now, of the dozens of uninvited feet that have trod these floors these last few days, sifting every locked drawer, and staring, many of them, up at the ominous ceiling, with its prophetic pointing Allegory, who gazes down as blindly now as he did before, at the mahogany desk and the stiff-backed chair. There is still a bottle of wine and a glass upon the table, and still the two silver candlesticks at either end. But there is a stain on the ground before the table now that was not there when last we visited this place. It’s not so very large, that stain, nor so very dark, but it’s curiously compulsive, and once noticed you cannot seem to escape it, and find it lurking at the corner of your eye, wherever you look about the room. Many a housemaid will try to get that stain out, and many a housekeeper berate them for incompetence, but soap and scouring will neither rid nor blanch it, and in the years to come that fact alone will endow this room with a fearful fascination for all who come here – a fascination that swells into shivering frisson when they raise their eyes to the ceiling and contemplate Allegory, pointing down now with a terrible accuracy at the very spot on the floor where Tulkinghorn lay, all those dark hours alone, face down and bleeding, with a bullet in his heart.

  Time passes. The blade of light creeps, inch by inch, across the floor, turning the flecks of floating dust to diamond in its cold brightness.

  And then – what’s that?

  A noise. Too muffled by stone and brick and wooden doors to hear distinctly. Is it merely the breathing of the old house, or has someone penetrated its closed and curtained seclusion and found a way within, despite the heavy bar now nailed across the high front door? Yes, yes – look there, on the stairs – the ghost of candlelight grows and takes shape, and wild shadows shudder up the wall. But as the unknown man emerges on to the landing and stands for a moment before the door, shading his candle against his palm, we can see that the hand that holds it is bound about by bandage. And who, indeed, but Charles Maddox would have the impudence to intrude on a house of mourning – for surely these walls must lament their master’s untimely passing, even if no living soul ever will.

  If he hesitates as he stands there, it’s only because the candle is guttering badly in the draught, and he’s concerned not to advertise his presence to anyone watching from outside. He crosses quickly and noiselessly to the window and pulls the shutter close, then moves to the desk and tries the drawer – the drawer he’s seen Tulkinghorn open so often, but always, in the past, with a key. But Bucket has been here before him, and this time the drawer slides open and the ring of keys he’s seeking lies revealed. And next to it, that small obsidian paperweight that Charles once coveted so much. He should have expected to see it there, but it seems to snare his attention all the same. After a moment he reaches out to touch it, and finds to his astonishment that the stone is warm, even in the chill of that cold room – as if its master’s grasping fingers cannot quite relinquish it, and have left what heat they ever had, locked inside this hoarded trophy. A voice in Charles’ head tells him to take it – tells him to slip it into his pocket, unnoticed – tells him that no one will ever know, and that whoever it is who will now take possession of Tulkinghorn’s many treasures, he could not possibly appreciate this obscure object of desire more than Charles does. Is he tempted? Of course, but it is the ring of keys that his fingers close upon. Then he turns to the racks of boxes behind him, and takes the little set of worn library steps in hi
s free hand. We can already see, just as he soon does, that some of these boxes are no longer quite as dusty as they were when Charles first came here, even if others are slumbering still under years of neglect. The next thing he finds – and it’s with a surge of quick elation – is that the boxes are marked not only with the names of Tulkinghorn’s clients, but with a small etching of their armorial bearings. A weakness this, perhaps, in the old lawyer’s otherwise impregnable facade, a hint of vainglory, of overweaning professional pride that has now met with all too vertiginous a fall. Resisting the urge to go immediate swan-hunting, Charles turns first to the Cremorne coffer and spends ten fruitless minutes flicking through wills and title deeds and dull affidavits. Little of it is recent, and none of it is even remotely personal in nature, but on second thoughts that is not so very odd, given Tulkinghorn’s almost preternatural concern for caution and circumspection: Cremorne is the only name Charles has ever been given, so if any one box here has had its compromising contents removed elsewhere, it is surely this one. Though he cannot fail to notice, in passing, that the box on the shelf below dedicated to Dedlocks dead and present has also been emptied of most of what it must once have contained. But that he suspects is the inspector’s handiwork, not the lawyer’s. He slides the Cremorne box back into its place and begins his search for the black swan. And now even the alphabet proves to be on his side: no Vavasour or Smithson this, but filed neatly under ‘G’ a mere two shelves further down. The box has the thinnest film of dust, and no recent fingerprints, so it seems Bucket’s incursions have not stretched this far, though it appears very possible that Tulkinghorn himself was busy about this box in recent days.

  Charles pulls the box out and takes it to the table. Then he sits down at the desk, and opens the lid, holding the candle so close to the sheaves of dry paper that they seem to uncurl and stretch in the heat of the flame.

  He’s so absorbed in trying to make sense of this correspondence, so intent on discovering the crime – for crime there must be – that lies concealed behind the bland legal language, that he is not as alert as he should be to the creak of the boards – not as suspicious as experience should have taught him of the elaborate oriental screen so carefully and so conveniently positioned. But what he does not hear, he soon senses in another way. Faint at first, but unmistakable. Just as it was once before, in this very room. The aroma of the finest Turkish tobacco.

  He raises his head and sees at once a figure in the shadows in the far corner. How long he has been there, Charles does not know. Pure instinct tells him it’s Cremorne, but he sees almost at once, even in the half-light, that this figure is surely too slight, too short. But if not Cremorne, then—?

  The floor creaks again as the silhouetted shape moves closer, but when he emerges at the edge of the circle of light cast by the candle, Charles almost laughs out loud with the absurdity of his own fears. The man in the shadows is barely a man at all – so small, in fact, that his black coat skims its tattered hem along the floor. The assailant his mind manufactured in the darkness is no more fearsome in reality than Tulkinghorn’s groom. The strange-looking lad with the queer yellow eyes. The rush of relief is just giving way to mystification about what on earth he’s doing here – now, in this room, in the middle of the night – when the boy puts his fingers to his mouth and Charles sees what is in them.

  A cigarette.

  It’s not merely that the boy is smoking in the house that shocks him, though it does, no question. In fact, it’s not so much what he’s doing, but what he’s doing it with. Charles’ upper-class contemporaries may be partial to cigars, but the working man of 1850 smokes only a pipe – indeed it’ll be at least another four or five years before English soldiers in the Crimea are introduced to cigarettes by their Turkish comrades. And even if there are fine hand-rolled versions available in London this very November evening, it is only from one very expensive and exclusive shop in Bond Street (though the name above the door would probably be familiar to you). That this lad – this not-much-more-than stable boy paid no more than ten shillings a week – should be smoking one, and smoking it in so casual, so pointedly nonchalant a fashion is utterly unaccountable. Or at least at first. Because the cigarette is not the only thing he’s holding. As he moves slowly forward and into the light, Charles sees what was invisible at first, and is even now partly concealed by the folds of the coat. In his left hand, catching in the candle flame, is the glint and glitter of a long ebony-handled blade.

  It takes a fraction of a moment for Charles to realize he’s been wrong all along – not just wrong but hopelessly, disastrously wrong. The long dark coat Jo saw on the killer of Abigail Cass – the same long dark coat worn by the man Lizzie Miller was with the night she died. The smell of a gentleman’s tobacco that made Charles think it was indeed a gentleman Mrs O’Driscoll overheard. The voice that whispered in his own ear as a knife sliced into his flesh.

  ‘So it was you,’ he says slowly, getting to his feet. ‘You killed them all. Cass, Boscawen, Lizzie Miller. And it was you who attacked me in the City Road.’

  The lad smiles, a curious off-centre smile that does not reach his eyes. The more Charles looks at them, the more saurian they appear. Who is this parody of a child, who commits such appalling murders with such frozen proficiency?

  ‘Worked it out, ’ave yer? Took you long enough.’

  His voice is of a piece with all the rest – high-pitched, nasal, whining. Easy to mock were it not for the knife in his hand, and the pictures in Charles’ head.

  ‘Think you’re so clever, with all yer fancy methods – you ’aven’t got a bloody clue. I’d been following yer for days before that, but someone like me, we’re beneath the notice of the likes of you. I could have ’ad you there and then if I chose’ – he draws the knife across his own throat in an arc so perfect, a gesture so practised, as to be almost beautiful – ‘but that weren’t what I was being paid for. Not then.’

  ‘Whereas now?’

  ‘Ah, well now it’s different. Then you was just making a nuisance of yerself. Now you know. Or soon will, unless someone puts a stop to you.’ He smiles, and turns the knife so it catches the light. ‘Guess that’d be me then.’

  They stand facing each other, little more than a yard apart now, both knowing that the first move will in all probability be decisive. Charles has the advantage of height and size, but he has no illusions – and, more importantly, no gun. It’s not the first occasion he’s had cause to rail at Bucket, but never before with such a perilously good reason. His fingers tighten imperceptibly around the candlestick. It’s the only other weapon at his disposal, but it will give him one chance, and one alone, and like as not he’ll destroy the only evidence he’s ever likely to get in the process – evidence he hasn’t even got to the bottom of yet – evidence that’s cost him so much time and pain to find, and for which others have paid an even higher price. But what other choice does he have?

  A second later – and without ever taking his eyes from his opponent’s gaze – he drops the candle into the box of paper and the parched leaves leap up like bushfire. Before the boy can move or react, Charles flings the blazing box in his direction and dashes for the door, to a howl of burning curses. He’s halfway down the stairs before he hears footsteps start after him on the floor above and realizes that even if he makes it back through the kitchens and into the courtyard he’ll be tracked down long before he can scale the six-foot fence. But even as that thought takes shape his fingers stub blindly against a crack in the plaster. No – not a crack – Tulkinghorn tolerated no such faults in this flawless house – it’s the edge of a door, the hidden entrance to the hidden gallery, the frame so perfectly crafted as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Charles turns and fumbles up and down the jamb until he hears a soft click and the door swings heavily open. It’s as black as death at the top of the stairs, but he knows from experience that it will be lighter lower down. And there is a full moon.