The Detective and the Devil (11 page)

‘Not if the Home Secretary tells him not to.’

And what if the Home Secretary is himself a Proprietor?
thought Horton.

‘Can we perhaps wait until after the coroner’s inquest, sir?’ he said. ‘Then we shall see what we shall see.’

‘No, Horton. We cannot. This is a terrible lapse. I will not stand for it.’

Harriott turned his chair to face the window. It was his customary way of dismissing his constable.

‘Salter was looking for you earlier,’ the magistrate said, to the window and the river. ‘He wishes to show you something.’

‘He is downstairs?’

‘Yes. With the bodies. In the basement.’

Horton noted how the Johnson family had lost their names. They were now ‘the bodies’. Subjects for inspection, not a family of warm-blooded beings. He left Harriott to his anger, and
went downstairs.

The basement was used to store bodies, inspect bodies, argue over bodies. No one had decreed it so, but it had become the unofficial morgue. Once a body has been stored in a room, it never quite
leaves. Horton wondered after the first body to have been stored in there; a dead waterman, perhaps, pitched over the side of his wherry, his head knocked on the starlings of London Bridge. He had
set the template, and now this little room was a laboratory of decease.

Salter was waiting for him, standing over the three bodies laid out on tables. When he saw Horton enter the room he folded the newspaper he was reading.

‘Bonaparte! The man is a devil,’ he said.

‘Indeed,’ said Horton.

Salter looked down at the bodies on the tables.

‘Perhaps it is for the best, that this family departed so soon. If Bonaparte makes it to the Channel . . .’

The surgeon sighed. The last time Horton had seen him, the man had been angered by the constable’s impertinence. Now, his dry old face was warmer.

‘You were right, constable,’ Salter said. ‘I should have checked the bodies unclothed.’

Horton looked down at the table. He sniffed the air as he did so. There was something oddly reminiscent about the odour.

‘Come to this side,’ Salter said. He pointed to the body of Benjamin Johnson. ‘The bodies are decaying rapidly. Another day, and the skin might have disintegrated
entirely.’ Johnson’s shirt was unbuttoned to his waist. Salter peeled back the two sides of the shirt, revealing the grey expanse of the man’s chest and stomach. There was a sense
of movement beneath the skin, as if the dead organs were beginning to slide around each other in their decay. It sickened Horton.

‘Now, constable. Can you see that?’

Salter pointed to the left-hand side of the chest, above Johnson’s still heart. There was the outline of a shape there, about four inches high, and faint. Horton leaned in, smelling the
horrible miasma around the body as it enveloped him, but smelling something else, that same strange smell he had detected when he came in. He peered at the shadowy image on Johnson’s flesh.
It depicted an odd geometric shape: a circle atop a cross, which itself sat on top of a figure three laid on its side. The circle itself was intertwined with a crescent, giving it the impression of
horns. In the middle of the circle was a single dot. Horton found himself oddly repelled by it, as if it were the sigil of some kind of demon.

‘A tattoo?’ asked Horton.

‘No. It is ink, but only on the surface of the skin.’

‘Have you seen the shape before?’

‘No. I had never seen anything like it. But I have since seen it twice more.’

Salter pointed to the dead woman and her daughter.

‘In the same place? Above the heart?’

‘Would you like to see?’

‘God, by no means. Your word is sufficient for me.’

Horton reached out and touched the point on Johnson’s skin where the pattern had been inked. The skin felt like death. He pulled his finger away.

‘Is it possible to say when it was put there?’

‘No. It is not a tattoo, as I said, so it must be fairly recent. The mark on Johnson’s chest is much fainter than those on the two females.’

‘So it was perhaps older?’

‘Yes. Perhaps.’

‘Or someone tried to wash it off, and failed. So they did not make the attempt on the other two.’

Salter looked at him as if he had performed some kind of magic trick.

‘Yes. Exactly like that.’

Horton stood up, and closed Johnson’s shirt himself.

‘Do you smell something odd on these bodies?’ he asked Salter.

‘Yes, I noticed that as well. A slight odour of bitter almonds.’

That was where he remembered the smell from. It was the same smell he had detected in Johnson’s kitchen. He thought it had been a cooking smell, but it seemed to emanate from the bodies
themselves.

‘What does all this signify, Horton?’ asked the surgeon.

‘At the moment, only that it signifies something,’ said Horton, not looking at him. ‘But that is better than nothing.’

Upstairs, he found a piece of paper and some ink and a quill, and drew the shape on Johnson’s body from memory. Then, next to it, he drew the constituent parts of the
shape: the upturned crescent and number three, the circle with a dot within it, the cross. He looked at it for some time, finding it strangely profane. Was it the mark of some secret society?

He folded up the piece of paper, and went to the street door of the office. He would walk home and show the picture to Abigail. Perhaps she would recognise it.

At the door, the porter handed him a letter which had been left for him. He paused on the street outside to open and read it. The letter was from Lamb, who had paid to have it delivered by hand,
presumably from East India House. Horton read the message as he made his way back over the road to his home.

Horton pondered the note as he climbed the stairs to the apartment. Lamb had shared an office with Benjamin Johnson, but it seemed he also shared something with Horton’s
own wife, Abigail – a disorder of the understanding which could not be shaken.

It depressed him. He had imagined Abigail to be recovered, but meeting Lamb and then reading his letter forced Horton to acknowledge that the mind, once bruised by terror, could never quite be
healed.

There was some breakfast waiting for him. Abigail was reading when he came in, and gave him little attention while he sat himself down and began to slowly break his fast at the
little table beneath the window.

‘What do you know of Charles Lamb?’ he asked. Abigail put down her book.

‘Husband, you are full of surprises. Why do you ask about Charles Lamb?’

‘Because I met him – yesterday, and last night. He was one of the contributors to my late night return, and to my dull head today.’

Abigail seemed amused.

‘Charles Lamb? The essayist and poet? He was the man you went to meet with last night?’

‘So he says. I have never heard of the fellow.’

‘Husband, your ignorance in such matters astonishes me.’

‘You read enough for us both.’

‘There is no such idea as
reading enough
, husband.’

‘So, this Lamb is a talent?’

‘He is a mighty talent, in my opinion. His poems are fine enough, but his prose is wonderful: clear and filled with a great heart. How on earth did you come to meet him?’

‘He is a clerk at East India House. He worked with Benjamin Johnson.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘He claimed, last night, that Benjamin Johnson had discovered a conspiracy at the Company, and that this might explain his death. He became upset when I said he may have imagined
it.’

‘Oh, Charles, what did you say?’

‘Only that we can see shadows where none exist, sometimes.’

‘If you had known more of him, you would not have said such a thing.’

There was great unhappiness in these words.

‘He wrote to me this morning, intimating past afflictions. Do you know of them?’

‘The Lambs have suffered terribly with mental disorders. Lamb himself has experienced them, but his sister has had it the worse. During one attack, she . . . well, the story is a
well-known one. You must remember.’

And now he
did
remember. Mary Lamb had killed her own mother during a rage brought on, it was said, by emotional disturbance. That had been almost twenty years ago, and the newspapers
then had been full of the sad tale. Charles Lamb was Mary’s brother? It had taken his wife – his dear wife, who had herself spent time in a madhouse only last year – to explain
the hurt in Lamb’s letter.

The indelicate conclusion was that Charles Lamb was as unreliable a witness as Horton had thought him. And yet this new story of Johnson’s inheritance, and of the sister of Mrs Johnson,
seemed plausible. It did not ring of paranoid fantasy. He thought it worthy of some investigation.

Abigail was looking at the book on her lap, though her eyes looked elsewhere. Were they remembering Brooke House at Hackney, the place she had gone to escape the world, the world he had allowed
in to poison her brain?

‘Stop it,’ she whispered, the harsh words breaking the silence. ‘Gods, I can almost
hear
your thoughts, Charles. Your infernal self-blaming. I will not have it,
husband. I will not have my condition laid at your door. You are not responsible, for you do not operate me. It is an insult, to me, to have you blame yourself so.’

They had had other conversations like this. There was always poison in them, but there was fresh bitterness in Abigail’s tone. It seemed to stem from this history of Lamb’s. For a
moment he faced the possibility that his wife hated him. But he was aware enough to slam that door shut, as if behind it were a cellar filled with waiting demons, their eyes green and bitter in the
darkness.

‘Abigail, I cannot help my desire to protect you.’

‘No, you cannot. But you can avoid inflicting your bloody
guilt
upon me.’

He waited for her to come back to him. She always did, and she did now. A breath of air through the nose, a shake of the head:
right, enough of that, back to it!
He watched her back
away from her own despair, and thought her heroic.

‘Do you want to know the result of my own investigations, husband?’ she said.

‘If you please.’

She took a bag from the floor by her chair, and brought it over to the table at which he sat. The bag contained the books he had brought back from number 37. She laid them on the table, one by
one.

‘It turns out that all three books have a common denominator – this man called Dr John Dee. And this is his most famous book.’ She held up the book. ‘It is called
Mathematicall Preface
. It’s the preface to an Elizabethan book on Euclid.’

‘On what?’ Horton asked.

‘Euclid was a Greek mathematician,’ his wife explained. ‘He laid down the principles of geometry.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the fact that two parallel lines will never intersect.’

‘Is that not obvious enough to make its statement unnecessary?’

She scowled at him.

‘I shall not try to elucidate Dr Dee’s essay to you, husband. It suffices to say that he had some very odd ideas indeed, combined with a trained mathematical mind. I understand
barely a tenth of what this book says – and so, it would seem, did Benjamin Johnson. He has written copious notes and underlinings in the book. There seems no pattern to them. And that may be
because John Dee himself had the most extraordinary set of beliefs. Which brings me to the second book.’

He opened the book she handed to him. It was the
Environs of London, Volume 1: The County of Surrey.
It was written by Daniel Lyson, and published at the end of the last century.

‘Some twenty pages were missing from Johnson’s copy,’ said Abigail. ‘This is another copy, from my lending library.’

‘What pages were missing?’