The Aylesford Skull (45 page)

The narrow inlet of the bay lay dead ahead, the tide surging through it. He looked back across the expanse of water toward the aptly named Shade House, where he saw smoke rising above the trees. Of course. St. Ives and his cronies had burned the place. It was a futile gesture, mere anger at having once again come too late to the fair. The launch crossed into the moving water of the Thames now, and the narrow mouth of Egypt Bay closed behind them.

* * *

It was St. Ives and Tubby who entered the cellar room through the trapdoor in the cottage floor, Tubby lighting the Argand lamp in order to brighten the dim room. St. Ives saw the body lying on the table, the open door into a tunnel at their left, another door, this one shut, at their right, a barred window beside it through which the wind blew, carrying on it the smell of pond water and heather.

“Good Christ,” Tubby said, looking at the man, who lay on his back on the table, strapped down with leather-covered chains across his chest and ankles, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling. His silk top hat sat behind his head.

The slit in his neck appeared to be a second gaping mouth, his chin and chest bathed in dried blood. His arms lay at his sides, although the hands had been severed at the wrists, and they gripped the chains that bound his chest. A calling card had been slid between two of the fingers. A prodigious quantity of blood had run out of his wrists as well as out of his throat. He had died there upon the table, St. Ives thought, his heart pumping out blood, although the wound in his neck had been delivered nearer to the door, where there was yet more blood on the stones of the floor. Someone had walked through it – a woman, clearly – who had gone out through the door. A bloody butcher’s cleaver was fixed in the tabletop. Everything in the room argued that Narbondo practiced human vivisection. No mere anatomist needed to bind down a corpse, and certainly Narbondo was no surgeon. The debt St. Ives owed Finn and Bill Kraken couldn’t be calculated.

Tubby plucked the calling card from the hand of the corpse and held it in the lamplight. “
Lord Moorgate
,” he read aloud. “What does this mean, do you suppose?”

“A falling out, perhaps. Or perhaps that Narbondo has once again found it profitable to alter his plans.”

St. Ives thought about this. Now that de Groot’s identity was certain, it was clear that Lord Moorgate had purchased the miniaturized lamp from William Keeble. Moorgate was the Customer that George had mentioned, or had been, and no doubt about it. There was no evidence that Eddie had met with violence here. If Narbondo had carried out his threats to harm Eddie in order to profit from Moorgate, he wouldn’t have scrupled to leave evidence of it for St. Ives to find. Indeed, it would give him great joy. Moorgate was dead and Eddie was not. Finn had saved Eddie’s life. St. Ives scarcely allowed himself to believe it, but it seemed possible that Bill Kraken had done his part to turn the tide, that everything had changed when Bill had appeared and Finn and Eddie escaped into the wood.

“We’re finished here,” he said to Tubby.

“Almost,” Tubby said, unscrewing the lid from the oil receptacle on top of the Argand lamp. He smelled it. “Whale oil, I believe,” he said. And with that he upended it, pouring it over the edges of the table and onto the floor. “There lies a second lamp,” he said, pointing at the Argand lamp that sat on the shelf above the glass boxes. “What do you make of that?” he asked.

St. Ives studied the broken glass box for a moment, having overlooked it in the darkness, and then having been distracted by the corpse. Now he noted the thin, bent pieces of lead came within the box, the shards of glass heaped on its floor, the bellows. It was dead clear what he was looking at: the results of a small coal dust explosion, contained within a double box, contrived, no doubt, to impress Moorgate, since Narbondo had proven the effectiveness of his methods often enough to be personally satisfied. Unless, of course, there was more to the trial than that. He studied the magnifying lens, pulling it down and peering through it. Gilbert had told them that a very moderate source of heat might set off the hovering dust. Greek fire might be necessary within the confines of the Fleet Sewer, but not at all necessary in a glass building.
Perhaps
, he thought,
it wasn’t the explosion alone that was of interest...

“Pity to waste this prime top hat,” Tubby said picking it up from the table to inspect it.

On the table lay a human skull that had been hidden under the hat. St. Ives stepped across to look into it, relieved to see that it was from an adult human, not a child. It had been trepanned – a three-inch diameter hole. A litter of small screws lay within, along with bits of copper and silver, beneath which lay a small photographic plate, cracked in half. He drew out the pieces, fitted them together, and peered at it in front of the window. The image of a woman looked back at him, the details very finely rendered, the wisps of hair, her rather coarse complexion, her cheeks rouged – wet plate collodion photography, certainly. She had a look of suspicion on her face, heartlessness, perhaps, which showed through the rouge and powder and paint. Perhaps she was a Dean Street prostitute, St. Ives thought, an easy victim who would scarcely be missed were she to disappear.

“I take it this is one of the fabled skulls,” Tubby said.

“Dismantled, yes. I believe that Narbondo called its ghost forth, if you’ll allow me to use equally fabulous language, imprisoned it within the glass box, and blew it to pieces. I very much hope that its spirit was released from bondage, if that’s the case.”

“Sheer lunacy, it seems to me,” Tubby said. “Do you have any objection to burning the entire lot of it?”

“None whatsoever,” St. Ives said, dropping the pieces of photographic plate back into the skull.

Tubby laid the top hat back over it and emptied the second receptacle, another quart of fresh oil over that which had by now soaked in.

St. Ives walked to the door and opened it, going out into the afternoon without a word. The place wanted badly to be burnt, and Lord Moorgate wouldn’t object. Tubby followed him, smoke already swirling out through the window. They left the door standing open, found their companions, and followed Finn into the wood and along the creek. It came into St. Ives’s mind to wonder how Lord Moorgate had found his way into the marsh. There had been no evidence of a coach, nor of a dead servant, had he brought one along. And the woman who had trodden through the blood? Was she the mysterious Helen? Clearly she had been safe from Narbondo’s depredations. There were mysteries unsolved, he thought, but much had become clear to him.

Some distance up the path they found George’s body in the brook, as Finn had described. There was no time to bury the man, and they could scarcely take the body along, for they were moving quickly now, bound for Cliffe Village, where Tubby, Jack, and Doyle would take the South Eastern Line back into London. In the village they could send someone to retrieve George’s body. It was their good luck that the path followed the stream, for there were enough footprints in the soft soil to tell a coherent story, or at least parts of the story. The big pirate had murdered George, but hadn’t gone on. The Crumpet’s fate was well known to them. There were no other tracks save Eddie’s for some little distance beyond where Finn and the Crumpet had turned back, but then Eddie had been met by someone coming along from the direction of the village – a woman. Who was she? Not the woman with the bloody shoes, surely. A stranger, then?

As for Narbondo, he had certainly removed himself and the coal to London. The emptiness of the inn, which had apparently been abandoned in haste, had spoken volumes. Finn had told them of a landau carriage in the barn, but the carriage and horses were gone. They had found a dead man in the tunnel. From the way the body lay, and from what Finn had told them, the man had almost certainly been shot while pursuing Kraken, which was heartening, unless there had been others involved in the pursuit who had been luckier than the dead man. Venturing deeper into the tunnel might have told the tale, but that wouldn’t do. They hadn’t the time. It was a difficult decision to make, since Bill might be lying in the darkness bleeding. The quicker they made their way into Cliffe Village, the quicker they could send someone into the tunnels to find him.

“Here now,” said Jack. “Someone’s joined. A man’s boot-prints.”

“A tall man,” Doyle said, given the size. “And staggering, too. Wounded perhaps.”

“Kraken!” St. Ives said, certain that he was right, yet worried that he would tempt fate with his certainty.

It took only a few minutes now to track him back to the tunnel in the limekilns, which settled the question. If these were the boot-prints of one of the pirates, the man would have gone off in the other direction, returning to the inn. Kraken was alive, or at least had been alive when he came out of the tunnel.

They hastened forward now, St. Ives calculating how long it would take for him and Hasbro to return to Uncle Gilbert’s bivouac for the airship. What they would find in London was uncertain. The only certainty was that speed was of the essence. If they were lucky, and Eddie were indeed safe, then they might do their part to stop the debacle at the cathedral. It suddenly seemed to St. Ives that his luck might perhaps be in again.

THIRTY-SEVEN

MRS. MARIGOLD

T
he very elegant coach, black lacquer and gold leaf, belonged to a Mrs. Marigold, whom Alice had met after Mother Laswell had gone off to the surgery to sit with Bill Kraken. The coach stood behind the inn, the horses apparently anxious to be away. Alice had put Eddie into the coach, the boy sleeping soundly again and likely to continue that way until they arrived in Aylesford. She stood in the sunshine, waiting for the driver and chatting with Mrs. Marigold, who was bound for Maidstone.

“Aylesford ain’t out of the way at all, Mrs. St. Ives,” the woman said to her. “Imagine having run into you by chance. My husband has spoken of Professor St. Ives on many occasions – very recently, I believe, when they were both in London, at the Bayswater Club. Mr. Marigold tried to interest him in becoming a member of the Piscatorial Society.”

“Mr. Marigold is keen on fish, then?”

“Nearly a fanatic, you might say. Very keen on pike, although he’s an enemy of the chub. He intends to rid the Medway of them, the poor dears. He’s organized an anti-chub meeting today, in fact, in order to give them a general cursing.” She smiled at Alice in a friendly way, and Alice smiled back. She rather liked the woman, although she had a hard appearance. In any event, Alice was happy not to spend the night in Cliffe Village waiting for the regular coach to appear in the morning.

“The chub has the habit of appearing where it’s not wanted,” Alice told her, “and of driving other species out.”

“In that way it’s not far removed from some women of my acquaintance. Here’s my driver now.”

An exceptionally small man with an immensely wrinkled, blackguardly face, wearing an old, high beaver hat, walked toward them. He touched his hat as he passed, and opened the door to the coach for them. Alice got in beside Eddie, Mrs. Marigold sitting across from them.

“Thank you Beaumont,” Mrs. Marigold said, and the driver closed the door. Mrs. Marigold manipulated a locking mechanism, which clanked home solidly. “The door has the unfortunate habit of flying open, especially on an unpaved road,” she said, “and Mr. Marigold understands the latch to be an effective deterrent to highwaymen, after that nasty incident at Bridgewood Gate.”

“At Bridgewood Gate?” Alice said. “Not recently, I hope. I would have thought the roads safe enough from highwaymen these days.”

“In the dark of night,” Mrs. Marigold told her, smiling in an odd way, “there is no safe place.”

The coach clattered out of the courtyard and away down the road at a good clip, running smoothly, the door making no effort to fly open. The two sat in silence for a time, Alice thinking of St. Ives, wondering where he was and wishing that she could tell him that Eddie was safe. It would be the one thing that he would pay a fortune to know. And she was horrified at the idea that Langdon might come to harm pointlessly, trying to save Eddie when he didn’t want saving. She knew there was nothing further she could do about it, however. In Cliffe Village she had sent a telegraph message to Dorothy Owlesby. If Langdon were in London, Jack or Dorothy would surely find him and send him home. She set her mind to imagining their return to the farm – the look on Mrs. Langley’s face.