The Detective and the Devil (21 page)

The fat manservant unlocked the padlock, and opened the door. He glanced at Horton, as he had done time and again, and Horton wondered if a note had already been sent into the City to inform
Burroughs of the invasion of his property by unexplained investigators. What had Markland said to the servant behind that closed front door, while he waited in the carriage?

Horton was the only one to go inside, carrying an oil lamp supplied by the manservant. Inside the icehouse it was pitch dark, the only natural light coming from the little door, and he could see
immediately that he was wrong. This was just an ordinary icehouse. Meat hung down from hooks on the walls, and on the floor of the icehouse were metal boxes containing bottles of liquid drifting in
thick dark water. He put a finger into this liquid; it was ice-cold, and there were solid shapes within it where the water had made its mysterious transition into a solid.

A well-appointed, well-kept, well-designed icehouse.

A thought occurred to him, passing his lamp around the cramped interior. This was a rather
new
icehouse. He went back outside, blinking already, despite passing barely three minutes
within.

‘This icehouse was recently built?’

The butler nodded.

‘Yes, sir.’ He had called Horton ‘sir’ since their first arrival, apparently unable to place a London constable within his social taxonomy. ‘At the beginning of the
current century.’

‘It replaced another icehouse?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Does that icehouse still exist?’

The butler frowned.

‘Well, yes, sir. These things are impossible to demolish adequately, and . . .’

‘Where is the old icehouse?’

The man pointed through the trees.

‘Just up there.’

‘Take us there, if you please.’

The three of them walked down a small defile and further into the woods. It was darker, colder, altogether more forbidding within these trees, and Horton wondered why the new icehouse was not
built in here – the conditions were so much more amenable to the creation of frozen water. Perhaps it was as the butler had said: these things were impossible to demolish.

And there it was: squat, black, ugly, old, an excretion from the gloomy hillside, a barren piece of snot on the face of the wood. Bigger than the new icehouse, its door an ancient piece of oak
secured with another padlock, this one looking as if it had been placed there by Cromwell himself. But no – on Horton’s inspection, the lock revealed fresh scratches at the point where
the key had been inserted, presumably recently, and presumably in fumbling darkness lit only by a torch or a lamp. Horton could see the scene vividly – a carriage waiting on the driveway, men
huddled round the door, men going inside to remove the cargo within.

But more than that, the door held a clearer message. Painted on its surface in lime was the image of Dee’s Monad, untidily rendered but entirely deliberate. Beneath the Monad, a single
word:
Beware
.

And hanging in the air, the bitter stench of almonds.

‘The key?’ he said to the butler, knowing the likely answer. The man had no key. He stared at the door in wonder. Horton looked around on the ground, and picked up two heavy
rocks.

‘No, sir, you may not . . .’ said the butler, but fell silent when Horton turned to him, a dedicated man armed with heavy stones. Horton looked at Markland, who said nothing but
nodded slightly, in a way that might be denied later if it came to it.

‘I would step away, sir,’ Horton told Markland, and the magistrate did as he was told. The butler went with him. They stood some ten feet away.

Horton turned to the lock, and began to smash it between the two stones in his fist. It took a while. Flakes of the rock were sheared away by the impact, and the sound of metal on stone
clattered through the trees, but eventually the old lock surrendered its ancient grip, and the door opened.

Immediately, the stench in the air deepened, and it was as if almond-gas filled his nostrils and his mouth. His head was suddenly in sharp pain and then, just as suddenly, his mind deadened and
began to switch off, and the observing part of Horton – the part that was always active, always cataloguing and classifying – watched his body shut down, like a ship lowering its sails
as the wind drops, and darkness rushed up from his feet, and he fell.

He awoke to light dappling through the carriage window, and the regular rocking of its movement. His head groaned in pain, and his skin felt numb and oddly unnatural, as if
another man’s flesh had replaced his own.

He leaned out of the window, and yelled up to the driver to stop. Then he climbed out, slowly, every move slashing pain between his temples.

‘Where are we?’ he asked the driver.

‘Just coming up to Bexley.’

‘How long was I unconscious?’

‘Two hours or more. The magistrate ordered me to get you home and seek out a doctor.’

Two hours! He thought about heading back to that icehouse – but would the driver even take him? He had his orders from a superior.

It is gaseous at 20 degrees Celsius
, Salter had said. Which meant the temperature in the icehouse must have climbed sufficiently to turn some of the acid into gas, and for that gas to
escape when he’d opened the door. Was that right? Was that how this worked?

Standing outside the Shadwell carriage, there was a quiet moment. He imagined madness was about to descend. It would spread out from Seal Castle, the residence of Mr Robert Burroughs, alderman
of the City, gold and silver broker and Proprietor of the East India Company. Less than thirty miles from where he was now standing, the London establishment was carrying on its normal day, unaware
of the fuse which had been lit in a Kentish wood.

But what should he do next? He was in Kent, with a carriage driver over whom he had no authority. Behind him, a magistrate he did not trust was responsible for the thing he had uncovered: a
secret icehouse, with a now-familiar symbol on its door. He found himself asking an obvious question: why, actually, had Markland come with him at all? And what had Markland been doing in those two
hours he had been unconscious?

He did not, he decided, need to travel back to Seal. The presence of the icehouse was enough. It connected Robert Burroughs with the murder of the Johnsons, if what he suspected of the sequence
of events turned out to be true. A great anxiety was coming down on him, just as that awful gas had enveloped him, but what was he to do? He needed to get back to Abigail. If he was right, the
Company was elbow-deep in all this, and it would stop at nothing to hide its guilt.

He climbed back into the carriage, and they rode back to London. He asked the carriage driver to take him directly to Lower Gun Alley, and the driver agreed. He would check on Abigail and Rat
and talk to the other boys, and then walk back to the River Police Office to share his information and his concerns with his own magistrate.

As the carriage turned into Lower Gun Alley, Horton saw a dark shape on the ground, and instantly his acid-dulled senses raced. He yelled at the driver to stop the carriage, and jumped out.

It was Cripps lying there, and he had been knocked senseless. The boy groaned. The instrument of his injury seemed to be a brick lying nearby. Horton looked at it, and then rushed into the
building through the ominously open door.

Up the stairs to the first floor, and already he could hear the sound of a woman sobbing, and the flow of air was different through the landing and staircase, suggesting an open door or window.
Running inside his front door, he found them in front of the fire.

Abigail was kneeling on the floor, and Rat was lying across her, his head in her lap. They were framed by the fireplace, though no flame crackled behind them. The night was too hot for that. A
long dark line lay on the floor. The poker from the fire. Horton went to them, but Abigail looked up at him then.

‘Give him room, husband,’ she said, her sobs stopping while she spoke, her hand still repeatedly stroking the boy’s forehead, which was covered in his dark blood.
Abigail’s fingertips were covered in it. ‘For God’s sake, give him room.’

He had never seen her so unhappy, so distraught, so miserable. His heart broke.

‘Bloody . . . ’ell,’ said Rat, his voice barely audible. ‘Bloody . . . ’urts, that does.’ He never looked at Horton. His eyes were fixed on Abigail.
‘Has ’e gone, missus?’

Abigail, unable to speak, nodded.

‘Did ’e ’urt you?’

Rat’s aitches were draining away. Abigail shook her head.

‘Well, then. That’s all right, ain’t it?’

Rat smiled then, and turned his head slightly to where Abigail’s hand cradled his cheek. His dimming eyes looked at Horton.

‘I cut ’im, sir,’ he said, his voice fading like a passing rainstorm. ’’E didn’t get away un’armed. The skinny ape’ll be walkin’ with a limp
for some days yet.’

How long had Rat been lying here, fighting death, waiting for Horton to return so he could pass on this message?

The boy looked at Abigail again, then closed his eyes, and smiled.

‘You smell like flowers,’ he said, and died.

It was almost impossible to get Abigail to leave Rat, but in the end he persuaded her that the boy’s body would need to be investigated by the coroner, and that she
should try and leave it just as they had found it. When he said this she looked at him like he was a stranger. Her face was full of a pale horror as she said: ‘I won’t come back here,
husband. Ever again.’ He placed a cloak over her shoulders, and they left the apartment together for the last time.

Harriott was at his desk at the River Police Office when Horton and Abigail appeared, and took action immediately, despatching a servant to warn his wife that they would have guests for a few
days. Harriott had moved from a rather grand apartment in the Pier Head building to a small house on Burr Street, just upstream between the brewery and the Dock. Horton took Abigail there directly,
feeling the awful slump in her shoulders and listening to her traumatised breath.

He had never known such anger.

Mrs Harriott greeted them with copious affection, swallowing Abigail up into her womanly regard and telling Horton his wife would be safe with her, she would be fed and bathed and could sleep.
The house was cramped and meagre, and Horton remembered what Markland had told him about Harriott’s financial situation. A maid was running a bath.

‘Fetch her some clothes, constable,’ said Mrs Harriott. What she meant was,
leave her to me, man, your rage is pouring off you like the smell of smoke
. So he went back to
the apartment, where two fellow constables were already standing watch outside.

With Abigail gone, something had left the rooms he had once called home. He wondered if she had meant what she said: that she would not return here. Rat’s poor ruined body would remain on
the floor, waiting for the coroner, and Horton thought he could learn nothing from it. He did not want to look at it, in any case. He went into the kitchen.

‘We came home and disturbed him,’ Abigail had said, in an odd monotone as they walked down to Burr Street. ‘He was in the kitchen. He was pouring something from a metal
flask.’

‘Did you recognise him?’ he had whispered.

‘No. He was tall and thin. Rat threw himself at him, they struggled and then . . . Oh, God. Oh, Rat.’

The skinny ape will be walking with a limp
. He remembered Putnam folding himself into his chair at the private trade office.

There was a jug of water on the counter in the kitchen, which Abigail always kept filled from the standpipe in the street outside. A smell came from this jug, and it was a smell he could
identify immediately. It smelt both sweet and wooden. Something had been added to the water. He sniffed the large bucket under the kitchen counter – also filled from the stand-pipe. It gave
off the same smell.

So, here it was. The poison that, he suspected, killed the Johnsons in that Kent icehouse, and perhaps some of those dead Company captains as well. The slinking, underhand, covert material that
was the true cause of their deaths. He poured the water from the jug into the bucket. He picked Abigail’s kitchen knife up out of the sink, and shoved it into his old leather belt. He picked
up the bucket, carried it downstairs and into the street.

‘Tell the coroner not to drink any water,’ he told the constables outside. ‘And let me know when he arrives.’

He walked to the River Police Office, the poisoned water swilling in the bucket, some of it falling on the ground to merge with the shit and sewage and mud down there.

He poisoned Wapping as he went, and thought how poisoned Wapping had already become, to him.

By him.

He went up to Harriott, his clothes sticking to his skin. He had been in a frenzy of movement since sitting so still and so anxious in that long carriage ride from Kent. His
head still endured agonies. Harriott and his office were quiet. The knife in his belt felt like a bar of cool ice.

The magistrate looked up at Horton from a letter he was reading, and indicated the chair on the other side of his desk.

‘Sit down, Charles.’

The mast of a ship moved past in the river outside, being towed by some small unseen pilot boat. Harriott never asked him to sit down. And he never called him
Charles.

Horton carried the bucket of poison over to the chair: an appropriate cargo for one such as he, a husband whose wife was shivering in fear and dismay in a stranger’s bath, her life
infected by the venomous stench of her husband’s work.

He could not sit down. The knife in his belt prevented it. Harriott saw him hesitate, saw his hand move to his side, made his assumptions.

‘Leave the knife here, Charles.’

Horton did not immediately move.

‘That is an order. Put the knife on my desk, and sit down.’

An old Naval strain in the old man’s voice. Horton obeyed. He had been a lieutenant before he was a mutineer. The knife clattered onto Harriott’s desk.