A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  Before she died, the walls had been covered by small paintings and working drawings done by the artists she’d met in her job as assistant to the director of the gallery in the basement of Sunderland House, only a few blocks away on Curzon Street. People like Victor Passmore, John Piper, Roy de Maistre, and his ‘friend,’ Francis Bacon, whom Black had never seen sober during the entire time Fay had worked at the gallery. Some, like Bacon, had achieved recent fame, while others had drifted into alcoholic obscurity, but neither their fortunes nor their varying talents made any difference to Black.

  A week after burying Fay within the peaceful confines of the Jewish Cemetery on Hoop Lane in Golders Green, all the paintings had come off the walls, replaced by the small, delicate watercolours Fay had painted of daily life in Shepherd’s Market, seen from the easel by the window. Paintings she’d always been too shy to show to anyone, himself included. Paintings he had grown to love, not for what they depicted, but as small jewels of frozen time, each stroke and wash of colour bringing the brush and the hand that had held it briefly back to life. The last of her. Christ! Letting her go was so bloody hard!

  Going to the bar, Black made himself a small Scotch and soda then took it back to one of the chairs beside the cold iron hearth of the fire. He lit a cigarette, sipped his drink and went through the post.

  There was little of interest: a statement from his bank, which he didn’t even bother to open, an invitation to the bar mitzvah of a boy he’d never heard of – undoubtedly the grandson of one of his mother’s unbearable friends – and a discreet announcement of an upcoming auction of rare stamps at Gibbons. Leaving the bank statement and the invitation on the table beside his chair, he slipped the Gibbons notice into his jacket pocket then took his drink and cigarette down the hall to his study.

  It was very much a man’s room. Fay’s only contribution to it had been the elegant ebony desk he used for sorting through new acquisitions. The chair was a monstrosity of scarred wood and cracked green leather upholstered with brass tacks, the carpet was a buffalo skin complete with head and horns and the nap on the hideous blue velvet club chair was so worn that Fay had insisted on shrouding the entire object with a throw of grey-and-black-striped mattress ticking.

  The oddments of furniture had been in the flat when he took it over and wisely Fay had never even suggested that he get rid of them. The desk took up one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up two more and the fourth wall, bracketing the door, was occupied by several tall wooden storage cabinets for his stamps.

  He sank wearily down in the club chair, balancing his drink on the broad arm, and glanced at the ranks of neatly ordered books on his shelves. Two of Stevenson, including a uniform edition of his complete works in sixteen volumes. A shelf of Dickens, another of Mark Twain, one shelf shared by Dumas and Defoe, one more for Conan Doyle.

  James Fenimore Cooper, Melville, a dozen or so volumes on Drake, more on James Cook, Bligh’s diaries, Darwin’s voyages and recent studies of Scott’s expedition, the strangely vanished flight of the Eagle from Spitsbergen and the equally ill-fated Nobile expedition in the Italian dirigible Italia only a few years ago.

  Fawcett’s disappearance on the Amazon. The search for the Nile source. A thousand adventures, from Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight to the discovery of the Indies by Christopher Columbus.

  All the places he’d never go, the people he’d never meet, the things he’d never do. A secret cosmology all his own, its beginnings rooted back in his childhood and represented by the first book he could remember buying with his own money – a well-worn copy of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, purchased with his father at a bookstall in Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell. Fay had teased him about his adventure stories but she’d never made an issue of it. Now it seemed almost foolish. Perhaps it was time to grow up and put away childish things.

  The first bombs began to fall, the sound reaching into the windowless study like the urgent muted rumblings of an approaching storm. The East End again tonight; if they were lucky, the clouds would make the raid a short one.

  Black drained the last of his drink and stubbed his cigarette out in the pedestal ashtray beside the chair. No gliding up rivers in a canoe with Radisson or The Last of the Mohicans tonight; the Luftwaffe was knocking at London’s door and there was Queer Jack to think about.

  He cursed Capstick silently; the name was firmly in his head now and Black knew that it had almost certainly taken up permanent residence. The detective lit another cigarette and sat back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. His quarry had been named; how long would it be before he had a face as well?

  Black peeled off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. One thing was certain: the face, when it was finally revealed, would be grotesque only in its ordinariness, as mild and unassuming as the bland features of a shop assistant at Harrods.

  Stevenson’s Hyde had been a bull-necked, thick-jawed monster in evening clothes but the reality of murder was usually dressed in the camouflage of normality – Crippen’s neatly trimmed moustache, Seddon’s starched collars and the so-called Tiger Woman, Winnie Judd, the trunk murderer with apple cheeks and a permanent wave. In the end of course, what the murderer looked like didn’t really matter a damn but Black found that being able to visualise his quarry seemed to help. It was part of the Sight.

  Over the ninety-eight years of its existence the Criminal Investigation Division of the Metropolitan Police had employed hundreds of detectives. Most of them had been at least competent, some had been very good and a very few qualified as great. Richard Capstick, for instance, was the epitome of the ‘good’ detective. He wasn’t ‘bent’ like Perrin for one thing – and avoiding corruption was no small feat for a man who worked within an organisation rife with bribery and whose members had been faced with three separate salary cuts in the past ten years.

  He was hard-working, methodical, accurate and intelligent and equally important he was the soul of patience, willing to spend weeks and months pursuing the shreds of evidence and testimony necessary to build a strong case. He had a good eye, a flair for detail and he got along well with colleagues and villains alike.

  But Capstick lacked the one thing that made the difference between a ‘good’ detective and a ‘great’ one. He lacked what was generally referred to at the Yard as the Sight.

  The Sight wasn’t something ever found mentioned in the popular press and, if asked, few if any detectives employed by Scotland Yard would ever admit to its existence. But everyone knew it was real and anyone who’d ever worked with Morris Black knew that he had it in abundance. Some of his co-workers thought of the Sight in almost metaphysical terms – an extra sense that some were given and others denied – but Black himself viewed it as the subtle difference between craft and art.

  The majority of his colleagues saw their work as nothing more than a job, a multilayered process of time and labour during which the much larger bureaucracy of authority pitted itself against the smaller forces of larceny and defeat. The villains had the mobility of lawlessness but the Yard had a world of time and endless patience.

  Black saw his work as something else. He knew and fully appreciated the skills of a man like Dick Capstick, and he also knew the value of hard-slogging work, but for Morris Black there was always a point within an investigation where a sudden theoretical leap beyond the evidence could succeed where a hundred interviews had failed. It was imagination and intuition combined. It was the Sight.

  But it wasn’t working now. He had no sense of Queer Jack, no tickling itch about the murder victims. Jack was a faceless phantom without character and motive, who left nothing behind pointing to his personality except the enigmatic Z.

  Typically the investigation of a murder centred on elements of fact both prior and after the act. How had the murderer and his victim come to the place of execution and who had seen them? What was done to the victim and what evidence of those actions might have been overlooked by the murderer t
rying to cover his tracks? Who was the victim and how did he relate to his killer? On leaving, who had seen the murderer depart?

  Eventually one of those questions would be answered and the answer to one would almost inevitably lead to the resolution of the others. With enough effort put into the investigation a pattern would appear, shimmering up out of nothing like a line of ghostly footprints leading inexorably to the murderer.

  It seemed, however, that Queer Jack wasn’t playing by the rules. Capstick had concluded that both victims had been homosexuals but nothing really proved that. In Rudelski’s case there was at least the same presumption by the people who’d known him but for the young man this afternoon there was nothing except his fey good looks and his nakedness. While both men had been unclothed there was no obvious indication that their nudity had any direct sexual implication.

  Jack the Ripper at least had the common decency to disembowel his victims, paying particular attention to their genitals; his latter-day namesake wasn’t being so clear as to the motive fueling his madness. It was as though Queer Jack didn’t really exist at all. Two young men had simply taken off their clothes in the midst of a raid, gone to sleep and died.

  Black frowned, listening to the crumpled roar of the exploding bombs in the distance. Follow that way of thinking and he’d be attending seances before he knew it. He shook his head. There was no magic here. Any unsolved murders, those two included, were nothing more than music hall illusions. It was only necessary to discover how the trick was played.

  He sighed, stood up and went to the toilet. Returning to the living room after relieving himself, he switched off the lamp then crossed to Fay’s easel. Drawing back the blackout curtain, he opened the window and looked out. On the far side of Market Street he could still hear laughter drifting up from Ye Grapes. He leaned out a little and took a deep breath. It was probably only his imagination but it seemed as though the very smell of London had changed these past few days. The drab odours of the city had been added to. Something primitive was in the air as well as petrol fumes. Old tangs of ancient clay, brought to light after ten thousand years by order of the German Air Force. The smell of burnt wood and roasted flesh. Must and mould and coffin planking.

  He looked up over the rooflines of the buildings at the end of the street. Every few seconds there was a brilliant flash, followed by a jarring clap of thunder. He wondered if Queer Jack was watching as well, seeing the same sheets of brilliance burning across the sky, hearing the same furious roaring of the bombs.

  Black shivered as a faint gust of autumn air blew up the street. Maybe Dick Capstick was right; his frustrations about the case made it easy enough to let his imagination run loose. Lighting another cigarette, he continued to stare out at the flashing sky. Maybe it was time for him to get out of the game altogether. Fay had been dead for more than a year but he still couldn’t shake the deeply rooted malaise of his grief. Perhaps with her death some part of him had died as well. Could he have been robbed of the Sight by the anguish of his broken heart? Or was it something else? Was the Sight showing him something he didn’t want to see? Despite what Capstick had said, Black was sure that Queer Jack knew when the bombing raids would come. And that seemed impossible. Madness.

  * * *

  The Number frowned with concentration as he worked in the semi-darkness. The grinding wheel gave off no feathery gush of sparks as he pushed the tip of his instrument against it. The machine had originally been designed for jewellery fabrication and the dull black carborundum wheel had been coated with a thick layer of dark green rouge. Number 6, about midway in terms of its abrasiveness. Each time he brought the gleaming edge of the tungsten steel against the wheel, it created a tiny wisp of smoke, filling his sensitive nostrils with the scent of burning oil. The smell made him think of his mother’s bright kitchen and he frowned, pushing the razor-sharp vanes harder into the rouge.

  His mother’s bright kitchen, flies swarming, gathering delicately above the skins, blackening in the terrible heat. Dust motes hung in the still air, gold flecks in the brighter sun. Motar, seated at the door, brown legs curled up under him like twisted pieces of old dark wood, the pocks on the skin of his narrow face like deep craters, his gnarled hands steadily pulling on the handle that moved the fan in the kitchen ceiling round and round, while the desperate child watched the slowly spinning blades, too terrified to let his eyes touch Motar’s eyes, but hypnotised by the fan blades, which were in turn connected to the sawing motion of the rope as it travelled through the pulleys, down to Motar’s shrivelled arms and brown root fingers; and then one hand would slip like a dry brown spider, scuttling under the stained cloth bound about his hips and under it to stroke and squeeze and stroke and pull, and the unoiled mechanism of the fan and that awful rhythmic squeak and the crackling of blistering oil as Ata the old cook dropped in the pieces of speckled plantain to sputter and hiss and fill the air with that wonderful sick smell and faintly, faintly, somewhere in the golden light outside the groan of the pipes and the thrill of the drum, the bark of the Sarmajor’s voice and the stamp of the Sarmajor’s booted feet in the dark, hard-packed earth of the parade ground. And nobody knew. Nobody ever knew.

  The Number blinked, staring into space, then turned back to the grinder. He switched it on again and studied the wheel turning to a blur as it came up to speed. He went back to his work, watching the razor edge magically becoming mirror bright between his fingers, seeing the frayed rope pass between the pulleys, smelling the hot oil in his nostrils again and the hotter fear.

  The words from the fairy tale his mother used to speak when they walked through the narrow streets and watched the bent widows in their dark saris squatting in the dust, spindles twirling between dark fingers aged to the colour of blackened bone.

  ‘Toil and spin, toil and spin, my name is Rumplestiltskin. Toil and spin, toil and spin.’

  The frayed rope between the pulley wheels. The smell of hot oil. Motar’s hands and the dusty slap and thunder of the Sarmajor’s boots, too far away on the parade ground to help. The spinning wheels, counting each traverse, counting each movement, counting each dust mote in the air. Toil and spin, like a prayer never answered. Until now.

  Straw into gold, toil and spin.

  Steel into death.

  Chapter Six

  Wednesday, September 11, 1940

  9:30 a.m., British Summer Time

  Black found an urgent message from Spilsbury waiting for him when he arrived at the Yard the following morning. Slipping a copy of Rudelski’s RAF photograph into his pocket, as well as a mortuary photograph of the second victim, the detective left the building on the Thames Embankment and took a taxi to the main building of University College on Gower Street.

  The laboratory occupied by Sir Bernard Spilsbury was surprisingly small considering the pathologist’s status and reputation. It consisted of a single, narrow little room with a window overlooking the courtyard in the north wing. His microscope was on a wooden bench under the window, with a sink and glass-doored cabinets along the left wall and another bench for Bunsen burners to the right. There was also a long table close to the door, stacked with boxes containing Spilsbury’s case cards – a meticulous record of sudden death spinning back for more than thirty years.

  Dressed in his usual white lab coat, Sir Bernard was hunched over his microscope when Morris Black stepped into the room. The blackout shutters were still up over the window, blotting out the sun. The only light came from a green-hooded gooseneck lamp on the bench beside him and the steady blue flames of the Bunsen burners to his right.

  ‘Sir Bernard?’

  Spilsbury lifted a hand and waved, his eye still pressed to the microscope. He adjusted a knob then reached out blindly, picking up a small tool. He used it to poke at something on the specimen platform.

  ‘Take a look at this.’ The pathologist straightened, then shifted slightly on his stool, leaning to one side. Black approached then leaned over, squinting through the eyepiece of the microscope.r />
  He found himself staring at what appeared to be an Indian arrowhead made out of a dark, highly polished metal. Instead of two, or perhaps three, cutting edges, there were six, each one slightly flared, thicker at the base and narrowing to a perfect point. At that magnification he would have expected to see nicks or flaws on the cutting edges but there were none.

  The base of the arrowhead was circular and tapped for a screw. A few flecks of something were caught within the minuscule threads. Black blinked as Spilsbury plucked the miniature weapon off the platform with a pair of surgical tweezers. Black stood up. The pathologist was holding the tweezers under the bright light of the gooseneck lamp. The arrowhead was barely visible between the pincers. Base included, it was no more than a centimetre long.

  ‘Astounding,’ said Spilsbury. ‘The craftsmanship is quite extraordinary.’

  ‘What exactly is it?’

  ‘A murder weapon.’

  ‘Rudelski?’

  ‘Yes. I expect to find the same thing with the newer victim.’

  ‘I thought you said he’d been drugged.’

  ‘That was my original hypothesis. Tests proved otherwise. All I could find was a mildly elevated alcohol level. I went back and checked again.’ He held up the deadly little projectile. ‘And found this.’

  ‘It hardly looks as though it could cause a fatal wound.’

  ‘The puncture was almost invisible. Hidden by the hair on the nape of the neck. Sliced through the upper quadrant of the trapezius, entering between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae, severing the spinal cord and the autonomous ganglia. Death was paralytic and virtually instantaneous. No time to react at all.’

  ‘Powerful.’