The Detective and the Devil (32 page)

It was a distance of four or five miles to the eastern tip of the island, the last third of it bisecting the treeless plain that Seale had called Deadwood. There, surrounded by flat ground over
which St Helena’s peaks stared seawards, he felt like a flea abandoned in the cosmos. If a dragon had swooped down and carried him away across the Atlantic, he would only have been mildly
surprised.

The land rose, and he could see the silhouette of the Dutch fort. He rode past it, and past the big house and barn which Abigail had seen. No light came from either. A few minutes later he came
to the assistant treasurer’s residence.

This time, there was a light. Burroughs must have escaped Abigail’s knots. Horton tied up the horse at a lonely tree some distance away, and walked carefully up to the place. He
extinguished the lamp, allowing himself to be folded into the night air.

Burroughs appeared at the door so suddenly that Horton had to throw himself to the ground to avoid being seen, perhaps thirty yards away. The grass was dry, but cold, holding the promise of
night-time moisture. This was Horton’s first glimpse of the man who, until now, had been only a name, a shadow at the edge of the story.

He stood in the doorframe, lit by the light within. He did not look like a man who had, until recently, been tied to a chair by a woman after drinking a mild poison. He looked like a man under
astonishing self-control. He imagined Burroughs standing in that Kent icehouse over the dead bodies of the Johnsons. He imagined him marking their bodies with that device, Dee’s Monad. But
the question still pertained: why?

The dark-suited devil turned and shut the door behind him. The house stood silent again. Horton could not approach very closely, as there was no cover. But behind the house there were cairns and
clusters of rocks. Horton crouched and ran around the house, keeping as much of his attention as he could on the door, in case Burroughs should reappear. He settled down to wait.

It was perhaps another hour, though it felt like eternity. At the end of this first hour, the light in the house went out. Had the assistant treasurer gone to bed? He waited a while longer, just
to be sure.

He made his way towards the dark house. He reached its side wall, put his back against it and quickly glanced into a window. There was no light or movement from inside. He worked his way around
to the front door at which Burroughs had stood earlier.

He could see the silhouette of the fort from here; it was above him, its edges jagged in the moonlight. From the other side of the fort, the persistent breathing of the sea, in and out of that
cave below.

He tried the handle of the front door. It turned. The door gave slightly under his shoulder and then, as if making the decision for him, it opened. He pushed it open, staying as hidden as he
could around the edge of the door, pushing it back until it was against the inner wall, squeezing anyone who might be hiding there into an impossibility.

He peeked around the doorframe. The interior was dark and, apparently, empty. He stepped inside.

The air was cold. Burroughs had lit no fire. He could pick out the dim outlines of some furniture in the parlour: two chairs, a desk, a door out to the kitchen. A bookcase lit by a shaft of
moonlight from the window.

Slowly, carefully, Horton went through every room of the house, and found nothing. In the surprising light from the moon, he made what investigation he could, and concluded that apart from books
and furniture, Burroughs’s house was devoid of anything at all. It was even devoid of Burroughs.

He sat in the man’s chair, which faced the dead fire and the chimney breast. He stretched out one foot and pushed the rug. For a moment he imagined he saw a trapdoor. But it was no such
thing; just a line in the wooden floor, a gap between boards. And how, he asked himself, would Burroughs have returned a rug to cover a trapdoor once he had climbed down inside? He had allowed the
night to take over his imagination. It was time to think clearly. Time to head back into James Town, and speak to Seale, and to Abigail, and relocate his rational self.

But where on earth was Edgar Burroughs?

He got up and walked over to the front door of the little house, casting his eyes once more around the place, marking again the strange absence of objects other than furniture and books. All he
felt was an emotional vacuum. A building, not a home.

He opened the front door, and a dark blur appeared beside him. An arm settled against his chest and throat, and a sharp point broke the skin on his neck before pausing. A hand gripped his arm
and pushed it up behind his back, up impossibly far until the tendons in his shoulder screamed in protest and he cried out.

‘Constable Horton, I presume,’ said a voice.

She was washing pans again. Her husband was out in the South Atlantic dark, and she was washing pans. Seale had gone out, she suspected to drink. He had said little to her
since Charles had left. Perhaps their deception had made him unsure of her. She was alone, staring into the pane of glass which had become her familiar, her own face staring back at her.

Behind that glass, high in the sky, were the stars of the South Atlantic. John Dee believed the ‘fixed stars’ influenced events on earth; that their size and arrangement in relation
to the Earth dictated the strength of their various effects, and that these effects combined with the elements of the Earth – fire, earth, air and water – to create eddies of influence
and power. She recognised the nonsense of this, the underlying error – the stars were not fixed, they were in constant movement, not around the Earth but around each other. And yet, what was
this but another kind of influence? Did Newton not simply articulate this different kind of action at a distance? Was a distant star even now tugging at her, affecting her decisions, changing her
life?

She remembered the way her mind had slipped away from itself. More than a year ago now, it had been. It had been as if there were two Abigails – one acting, the other watching and
recording. When she saw her face reflected in the glass of the kitchen window, it felt like she was looking back at herself. There was pity in that watching face, and anxiety, and something like
loneliness.

And just like that, she felt alone in the world. She felt the utter absence of children in her life, the signal failure to reproduce herself, to have other eyes and other faces looking back into
hers, calling her mother, needing her regard. Abigail Horton had little need for God, for she had found so many explanations for the wonders around her in books and lectures. And yet she wondered
at God now, and at why he had denied her children. How did the men of science explain that?

She was angry and frustrated and worried. The fear which had rattled through her while she had undertaken to dose Burroughs with laurel leaves was now, if anything, a positive memory, of a time
when she was excited and at least partially mistress of her own immediate future. She had smelled the leaves, and they had smelled of almonds. She had conjectured that they must contain some of the
same materials as hydrocyanic acid. In this she had been right. She was clever and well read and imaginative. But now she had been left to wait, again, as all women must eventually wait: for a man
to make something happen.

She was very, very tired of waiting.

Horton woke in the dark. He was in an unlit tunnel, and from down at the other end of the tunnel he could hear the sound of the sea.

He sat up, and groaned. He put one hand to his head, and it came away sticky. He had done himself some kind of injury, falling down the stairs from the door. That mysterious bloody door which
Burroughs had opened, before he had disappeared.

How long had he been lying here? The blood on his head was sticky but not wet; the wound had congealed, it seemed. A half-hour, perhaps? An hour? He wondered where Burroughs was.

‘Edgar Burroughs,’ he’d said to the man who had held a knife to his throat outside the assistant treasurer’s house.

‘Of course. Now, walk. That way. Up to the fort.’

Burroughs’s voice had been cultured and educated, the voice of London salons and not South Atlantic hillsides. His grip had been astonishingly firm. The blade had felt cold against his
neck, and he could detect a warm trickle alongside it. His skin had been broken, then, by this man whom he still could not see. This man who seemed to be at the centre of every hole in this
case.

They had walked up the hill, Horton choosing his steps carefully, Burroughs allowing his own body to adjust to Horton’s pace and balance. The pressure on his shoulder had been enormous. As
Burroughs pushed his arm up behind his back, it had felt like his internal rigging might snap and pull him down at any second.

It had taken ten minutes to walk up the hill to the fort, past the big quiet farmhouse. The jagged shape of the place in the moonlight had been suitably Gothic. ‘Are you going to throw me
from the cliff?’ he had asked.

‘Believe me, I have thought about it,’ the reply had come. ‘I’ve asked myself whether it was a very bad idea, bringing you here. She had better be worth it.’

She?

They had walked under the gaping entrance to the fort, its wooden door long taken by the islanders for some purpose of their own. The fort was open to the sky, its roof a distant memory. Horton
had heard the waves crashing into Prosperous Bay, over the lid of the point.

Bringing you here
, Burroughs had said.
She had better be worth it
.

He had thought of Abigail, because he had thought he was about to die, and he had wondered what she was doing. How late was it? How long had he been waiting outside Burroughs’s little
cottage? She would be concerned, of course. No. She would be terrified. He had wandered off into the South Atlantic night, and he had not returned. Perhaps, now, he would never return.

They had walked up to the closed door, the infernal door that Horton had tried so many ways to open. With a little shove, Burroughs had pushed Horton’s body into the door, squeezing a few
more impossible degrees of arc into Horton’s agonised arm. Horton had turned his face so his cheek was against the door, trying to ease the pressure on his tortured shoulder.

It had been warm, the wood of the door. Hot, even. As if something had been generating heat from inside. He had listened as Burroughs wrestled with something metallic from within his coat, or
perhaps from a bag. Horton had turned his head around the other way, to the side he could detect Burroughs was standing, and he had seen something heavy and metallic being held against the door by
his captor. Something that had looked like an iron bar.

He had heard a grinding sound from the far side of the door, as if someone on the inside were unhitching a bolt. Burroughs had moved the iron bar along the door, from outer to inner, and the
movement had been matched by the metallic grinding from within. Then Burroughs moved the bar down six inches, and had performed the same procedure, and then quite suddenly the door had squealed
open.

Horton had found himself standing before a dark opening. Two or three stone steps, heading down below the fort, had been visible in the moonlight, but other than that the space had presented
only darkness. Burroughs still had hold of his arm, and began to push him towards the step, when suddenly there had been something else there, a shape from the outer darkness which had thrown
itself at Burroughs with an animal growl. Burroughs had cried out and had released his grip on Horton’s arm, and as if waiting for a cue Horton had spun himself around to see what had
happened, and had caught only a glimpse of a somebody or something struggling with Burroughs on the ground before his feet gave way beneath him and with a single cry he had fallen back into the
exposed entrance and down the stairs. He had managed to soften his body, become a ball almost, as he tumbled down the steps, but then his head had struck a rock at the bottom of the steps and he
had lost all consciousness.

But for how long? He put his hand out to stand up, and it grazed something on the ground, something with rough edges. The rock on which he had knocked his head, perhaps. Sitting up – his
injured shoulder screaming in pain – he reached out and felt with his hands. He stood up slowly and walked back up the stairs in the dark, and found the door at the top was now closed. He ran
his hands all over the door’s surface, felt its old wooden immensity, but failed to find anything with which to pull it open. The door continued to be a kind of impossibility, opened as if by
magic by an iron bar. So he turned from it, back to the steps down which he had fallen.

It was not quite dark here in the space behind the door. A weak glow came from the bottom of the steps, as if there were a light shining from somewhere within – from the same direction as
the sound of the sea. There was only one choice available to him. He began to make his way back down.

The steps were wooden, not stone. They had been built into the rocky cavity beneath the fort. Every step he took was an adventure, and the bottom of the wooden stairs came suddenly and
jarringly, the absence of a final step shuddering through his leg. He squatted down in the gloom and felt the ground: soily sand, pretty dry, above a rocky base. He could feel the shape of the
passageway around him; it seemed to have been carved by man, its edges relatively smooth. He was reminded of the absence he’d felt beneath his feet while floating at the sea-cave.

He breathed in. He took a step. And then another. And then another.

He walked forward again, hands outstretched. Ahead, something had disturbed the darkness. A yellow light, adding little illumination, such that he could see the shape of the space through which
he was walking. He stepped forward with a little more confidence.

After a few more minutes, he put his hands out again to either side, and they touched nothing. Breeze ruffled the end of his hairs, like a memory of the real world. He felt like he was standing
in a larger space, and looked above and around him. But the darkness revealed nothing of its dimensions.