As if by Magic (33 page)

The gate was hanging by one rusted hinge and, wincing at the noise it made as it scraped across the stone flags of the yard, Jack pushed it open. Once inside the yard, he paused. The clatter from the vegetarian restaurant continued unchecked and he relaxed.

He didn't know how long it had been since anyone had last entered the yard but, judging from the dark moss between the flags and the sickly ash shoot springing up in the corner, it must be a couple of years at least. The door to the draper's was locked, of course, and he didn't want to break a window because of the noise. He examined the kitchen window and smiled. Drawing out his clasp-knife he slipped it under the beading round the window. It came away easily, exposing the crumbling putty underneath. Within ten minutes he had scraped out the old putty and, digging in behind the glass with his knife, pulled out the entire sheet of glass and climbed in over the filthy sill. His trousers, he thought ruefully, would probably never recover.

The house was deathly quiet and, coming out of the kitchen into the hallway, he saw that the door to the shop stood partly open. He caught a glimpse of the old mahogany counter, dim in the dust-filtered light, but it wasn't the shop he wanted, it was the stairs.

Flicking on the torch, for it was very dark, he climbed up the grimy wooden treads to the third floor. The odd rustle told him that the house had mice – he hoped it was only mice – but no human sound reached him. The door to the attics opened on to a steep staircase. Here, three floors up, there was light from a window high enough to catch the gloom of a November day. The attics had a scattering of junk – old bolts of cloth, some brown paper, parts of a sewing machine – and a little door was set into the eaves.

It was secured by a latch and Jack needed his clasp-knife to open it. Once the door was open he switched on his torch, knelt down and peered inside.

He felt like cheering. As he had hoped, the attic eaves stretched far beyond the confines of the draper's shop, linking all the houses in the terrace. He took off his coat and left it in the attic. Stooping, for it was a small door, he wriggled through on to the sooty rafters.

The wind blew through the narrow gaps in the roof, staled by grime and smoke. The underside of the slates shone with the reflected light. There was, once his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, enough light to pick his way and he pocketed the torch thankfully, glad to have both hands free. It wasn't high enough to stand upright, but by keeping to the attic wall and crouching down he could step carefully from rafter to rafter. The last thing he wanted to do was break through the plaster.

It took him some time to reach the eaves of the Continental but, granted it was the last house in the row, at least there was no possibility he would come out in the wrong building. He crouched down beside the door to the attics of the Continental and listened. He was at the front of the house and from under the slates came the noise of Tilford Lane – footsteps, voices and the occasional creak of a wheel or growl of a faraway car – but on the other side of the door was complete silence.

A rim of light surrounded the little door, a black bar showing where the latch was. He inserted his knife under the latch and flicked it open. Again he waited, then put his hands on the door and lifted it up and out. The wood grated, sounding unnaturally loud, but no challenge met the sound and Jack, who had unconsciously been holding his breath, gave a sigh of relief.

He gingerly climbed out into the attic. For a moment he stood rigidly, listening for any sound, then relaxed, stretching his cramped muscles and taking stock of his surroundings.

The room was illuminated by a skylight and a partly open door and contained a collection of trunks and boxes. That it was used from time to time was evident from the footmarks on the dusty floor and by a book of matches and a used candle stuck into a champagne bottle placed on a trunk by the door. He picked up the bottle, weighing it thoughtfully in his hand. Now he was actually here he felt the need of a weapon and the heavy bottle would do nicely. Holding the bottle by the neck, he put the candle stump into his pocket and slipped out through the door.

It led on to a small landing from which a substantial stairwell descended into the house. Through the filthy window at the top of the stairs he could make out a thin slit of sky and solid blocks of the houses overlooking Dainty Alley. These must be the back stairs. He could see the banister rail running down in a succession of decreasing squares to the ground floor below. The back door of the Continental was open, letting daylight into the bottom of the stairwell. A hum of noise came clearly up to the deserted landing.

It was, Jack knew, dangerous, but there was no point in retreating now. He needed some solid facts to back up his theory and those facts lay downstairs. As quietly as he could and once more keeping closely to the wall, he stole downstairs to the next landing.

This was a cleaner replica of the floor above, with a window and a door. He paused for a few moments outside the door, his senses twitching, alert for any sign of life, before he slowly turned the handle.

Everything was quiet. Peering through the hinged side of the door, he could see shelves, a filing cabinet and a desk with a covered typewriter and a letter tray. Offices! He crept into the room, pausing by the desk. The letter tray contained about thirty small brown envelopes, each with a typed name and address, waiting to be posted. It was a bit risky but Jack took one of the envelopes and put it in his pocket. The letter it contained might make useful reading.

He slid open the top drawer of the desk. It contained a desk diary and a bunch of six keys. The keys were labelled
Club, Office, Bar, First Floor, Second Floor, Stairs.
He took the bunch to the door opening on to the stairs and tried the one marked
Stairs
in the lock. It fitted. They, thought Jack, might be useful, but he could hardly walk off with the whole set of keys. With a sudden grin he took the candle stump from his pocket and a sheet of paper from the desk. He lit the candle so that the wax pooled on to the paper, then took impressions of the keys, leaving the wax on the desk to harden.

He looked at the desk diary next. There were various entries, mainly of names. The entry for 31st October made him pause. With a lift of his eyebrows he read
Culverton – the works.
Yes! This was what he had been hoping for. This was real evidence at last. However, it was, frustratingly, all. He wished the diarist had been more specific about what exactly
the works
entailed. He flipped the pages forward. The entry for this coming Friday had a word underlined:
Pegasus.
Underneath it were three names:
G. Stoker, A. McCann
and
S. Bierce.
Pegasus? Friday, he knew, was the day on which the Pegasus would take its maiden flight, the day Anne Lassiter had arranged the glamorous and much-talked-about dinner in the air over London. He closed the diary and opened the second drawer. This contained a flat cardboard box. He opened it and drew out a handful of black silk. Masks, he realized, spreading the silk out on his hand. The box contained about three dozen black masks. Of course! If Culverton was concerned enough about his privacy to cut the labels off his clothes, he'd want something to cover his face. He put one of the masks in his pocket, replaced the box in the drawer and looked at the filing cabinet thoughtfully.

He would give an awful lot to go through that filing cabinet but he still had more exploring to do. He picked up the wax impressions of the keys, put them in envelopes from the desk, and, placing them carefully in his pocket, walked quietly across the room to the far door. Once again he paused and listened before he opened it a crack.

It took him a few moments to make sense of what he saw. He was looking into a large, dark, thickly carpeted space. The office had been dingily but adequately lit by natural light from the windows, but the room he was looking into now seemed, at first glance, to have no windows at all. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom, he could make out a sliver of light from above the curtained windows.

Leaving the door open behind him, he went in. This was no use. He needed light. Taking out his torch, he snapped it on, blinking as the beam cut through the darkness. He swept the light round the room. It was set out as a nightclub with a bar at the far end. It looked, at first sight, very similar to the Continental. However, whereas in the Continental the tables and chairs were for eating and drinking, the seats in this room were large, luxurious sofas. The space in the middle looked like an ordinary dance floor but it was raised about a foot above the rest of the room. It was, in fact, a circular stage. The torchlight came to rest beside the bar. Here, painted on to the wall and running from floor to ceiling, was a mural of the Eiffel Tower.

Paris! Jack gave a little sigh of satisfaction. He was in Paris, Culverton's Paris. It was here Culverton had planned to come on 31st October. This was the
Paris
he had noted in his diary. Jack realized something else, too. Downstairs, in the Continental, this was the thing which had niggled him. The Continental was decorated with European landmarks but the Eiffel Tower, perhaps the most famous landmark of them all, the one object that signified, to the majority of Britons, France and the Continent, had been missing. He hadn't spotted its absence at the time, but he'd known that something wasn't right.

There were other pictures on the walls, too. These weren't painted on to the plaster but hung like ordinary pictures in frames. That was where the similarity between these and ordinary pictures started and finished. The subject of all of the pictures was, as he had expected, sex. Jack felt a stab of desire, which, as he continued to gaze, was replaced with revulsion. These brutal images weren't about any sort of love, they were about power, the refined and complete subjection of helpless human beings. And he hated it. The paintings weren't coarse or uncultured, they were technically brilliant and only too realistic, but there was nothing here of vigorous high spirits or animal exuberance. There was nothing in them to suggest the vitality of men or the sympathy of women. Instead they showed screaming, tortured flesh, perverted for a diseased pleasure and unnatural desire. He put his hand to his mouth, sickened by the room, with its sybaritic furniture and its images of rape and conquest.

He dragged his gaze away and forced himself to walk round the room, taking in the details. There was a door leading, he imagined, on to the main staircase but that was locked. He left the room and went back into the office.

Walking to the back staircase, he listened again for any sound, then relaxed. Going back into the office, he opened the filing cabinet, taking care to support the drawer with his hand so it opened as silently as possible. Inside were a collection of manila folders, each marked with a name. Culverton's name leapt out at him. He had his hand on the file when there came the sound he'd been dreading. In the adjoining room, in that ghastly club, someone was turning the key in the door.

Jack put back the file, delicately closed the cabinet and escaped on to the back stairs. He didn't close the door but pushed it to. Not only did he have to keep quiet, he wanted to know exactly where the newcomer was. As he listened he heard the sound of muffled voices. There were evidently at least two of them. He heard the click as the door to the office from the club opened and the voices got suddenly louder and clearer.

‘. . . clear away and see about getting some more champagne up from the cellar.'

Jack put his eye to the crack in the door. There were two men and he could see enough to realize he didn't know either of them.

‘Taittinger or the cheap stuff?'

The other man laughed. ‘We'd better have enough Taittinger to whet their appetites but you know what this lot are like. Once they get going you could sell 'em anything as long as it looks all right, even if it does taste like petrol. Half of them are off their heads with snow anyway. It helps to keep up appearances, so to speak.'

They both laughed. There was the sound of a drawer opening and closing and Jack saw a hand reach forward and pick up the envelopes from the tray.

‘I've got to get these in the post. We'll go out the back.'

Jack couldn't wait. He slipped out of the office, up the stairs and back towards the attic door, sacrificing caution for speed. He groaned inwardly as the wooden stairs creaked beneath his feet and he flattened himself against the wall, not daring to move.

The two men came out of the office door. ‘Did you hear something?' asked one.

‘I dunno.' The voice was puzzled. ‘You don't suppose anyone's creeping about, do you, Steve?'

‘I wouldn't have thought so,' came the reassuring reply. Jack breathed a silent sigh of relief then tensed as Steve added, ‘We'd better have a look, I suppose.'

Jack sensed rather than saw the moment the men started to climb the stairs. Dropping to his knees, he hefted the champagne bottle and dropped it through the banister. There was an almighty crash as it shattered at the bottom of the stairwell, followed by a startled exclamation from the two men.

‘Strewth! What was that?'

Their feet clattered down the stairs and away. Jack momentarily closed his eyes, thanking his lucky stars, then went back into the attic. Taking off his jacket, he used it to hastily brush his footprints away behind him as he made for the safety of the eaves. Once on the other side of the little wooden door he relaxed and, still on edge for the sound of any pursuit, groped his way back along the rafters to the deserted draper's shop.

‘Hello, ugly,' said Bill Rackham cheerfully as Jack was shown into his office. He stopped as Jack unbuttoned his coat, revealing his dirt-smeared shirt and filthy suit. ‘What the dickens have you been doing? You look as if you've been climbing chimneys.'

‘Yes, the old whistle and flute copped for it a bit,' said Jack, drawing up a chair and putting his hat on the desk. ‘I stopped off at a Gents to wash my hands and face otherwise I think your official watch-dog downstairs would have run me in for vagrancy. I've been visiting a club.'