The Lamplighter (17 page)

Canavan felt a flush of anger. “Then why twist a knife in the wound?” he asked, and a passerby turned, surprised by the outburst. They were halfway up Candlemaker Row.

McKnight stopped and looked at his friend patiently. “We are here to cauterize the wound and drain its poisons. I certainly have no interest in inflicting further damage. It is our task, indeed, to shield her from those who in their haste might seize her prematurely, and do more harm than they could ever imagine. If I did not consider myself a sort of guardian angel”—and here he reached into his jacket—“I would not have taken this.”

He produced a black-bound book.

“A Bible,” Canavan said, taking it with a frown.

“A Douai Bible. Remarkably similar to my own.”

“You lifted it from her shelf?”

“When she was not looking. Before others discovered it.”

Canavan was puzzled.

“Check it, if you wish,” McKnight said. “John 8:44: ‘He was a murderer from the beginning.' The entire page is missing.”

Canavan moved to the corner, where gas lamps swept down the street like a line of votive candles. In the fluttering light he leafed through to the final Gospel and discovered that the page had indeed been torn out, leaving nothing but another serrated edge clinging to the binding.

“But this…doesn't incriminate her,” he protested. “Any more than it incriminates us.”

“Truly, I would prefer to believe you.”

Canavan drew a breath. “And then there's the lamplighter,” he noted. “The figure she has already identified as the killer.”

“Ah, yes, the lamplighter…” McKnight said skeptically as the midnight omnibus rattled past.

“What, you don't believe even that, I suppose?”

“Oh, I think her conviction is certainly real. But of the lamplighter himself…I believe he has always been a convenient scapegoat.”

“So you know who he is, too?”

“You could say I have a fair idea.”

Canavan briefly considered a further expression of doubt, but ultimately could not contain his curiosity.
“Who?”
he asked tightly.

But McKnight only narrowed his eyes at him reprovingly. “Good Lord,” he said as the streetlamps flickered and faded eerily, “I would have thought that to you, of all people, that would have been fundamentally obvious.”

T
HE
C
ORSTORPHINE
C
HURCH
of St. Andrew was a crusted, crocketed little brig with mullioned windows, built on a hill by retired mariners in the seventeenth century. The headstones of its graveyard, where Professor Smeaton himself now rested, were surmounted by sailing ships, anchors, compasses, and sextants, its single spire by a sort of crow's nest, and the crow's nest in turn by a golden weathervane in the shape of a fully rigged schooner. The last was squeaking and sailing in the stiff wind when Groves made his way through the drifts of dead leaves and entered the little church close to ten o'clock, finding a memorial service in progress for the dead of the
Ben Nevis,
wrecked off Berwick some thirty years previously at the expense of half her crew.

He took to the comfortless rear pew, exuding impatience. Though he was not yet prepared to elaborate on his mounting suspicions about Evelyn to his superiors, the pressure for a solution was all the time building steam and might have been enough to push him beyond the bounds of prudence but for two reasons: the Sheriff's own investigation had failed to yield any results (the Procurator Fiscal himself had noted that it was a mystery “unlike anything seen in this city since the days of the warlock Major Weir”), and the Wax Man still was eschewing any involvement and loudly proclaiming confidence in his colleague's abilities. Groves tried telling himself it was an opportunity more than a burden, and again reminded himself of the wisdom of Piper McNab. “The thing about poison chalices,” the old sage once said, “is that they can sometimes turn out to be Holy Grails.”

Presently Groves shifted and the whole pew creaked like a crypt door. The congregation was a mixture of sea-scored survivors and briny widows, muttering their prayers dutifully as the fat, warble-voiced minister went through the motions of an interminable service. Groves's eyes wandered restlessly to the arched ceiling and alighted on an unusually flamboyant mural of seething seas and swirling clouds, through which a giant hand marked “Jehovah” dragged the imperiled boats clear of a huge black dragon labeled “Persecutio.”

Persecutio
. Already Groves had constables at Central Office rummaging through both Bibles and Catholic missals in search of a context for the words
innocentium persecutor
(it was the Papists who still employed the Roman language in their liturgies, and Evelyn was of their ilk), and now he wondered if it might be more than just a coincidence that Professor Smeaton had once been the minister of this little parish with its terrible dragon. Could it mean that the murderer had visited this little church? Had been a parishioner? And sat in this very pew?

These were waters Groves had never dreamed of navigating. As much as he was becoming increasingly convinced of Evelyn's involvement, he still could not reconcile the ferocity of the attacks with such a frail member of the weaker sex. In fact, he had never been able to settle on a firm impression about women: on one hand he viewed them as sort of holy sepulchers, whose strength lay in their very delicacy; on the other he had encountered too much cunning and depravity in their ranks (“The Lavender Tassels,” “The Blossoms of Elm Row,” “Merry Molly Shows Her Colours”) to be surprised at their capabilities. “The sly little creatures come from Adam's rib,” Piper McNab once reminded him, “and when they strike a man it's most likely in the place where that very rib is missing.” And it was moreover all too easy for Groves to conceive of Evelyn as a construction of ribs, because she seemed made of little else.

But a dragon? A savage beast? Groves still was trying to establish a
taint.
If he could see that in her—a record of prostitution, or petty theft—then, combined with the look of primeval indignation she had employed once or twice in his presence, he would begin to find her capable of anything. But word from the Register House was still pending. He had assigned Pringle to shadow her all day and had constables poring over the police records. And at the North Bridge Telegraph Office he had cabled a message to Ireland to verify details of her education under the Sisters of St. Louis.

He ached for decisive progress, for a divine hand to drag him clear of his own persecuting dragons. Again and again he pictured the discovery of the final incriminating article of evidence—located through his sheer persistence, his preternatural attention to detail—and the glorious moment of righteousness, when he clamped a hand on her quivering shoulder, declared her under arrest, and hauled her off to some soulless cell and a more comprehensive punishment. Anything standing in the way of this moment was now an obstacle to be disdained, and as he surveyed the grizzled old heads lined up atop the pews like melons, he wondered what it might be like to crack them open with his truncheon.

Finally the minister rose to offer a solemn blessing and the precentor exhorted the congregation into hymn. When Groves slipped out of the church in anticipation of following the minister to his manse, the mourners had submerged grief in a stirring celebration of a mariner's defiance:

The minister, still in his collar, was a strange one to my mind, a ruddy faced gent with a fondness for buttered scones, his lady wife was forever offering them to me like they were God's own, but I was not there for the pleasures of the stomach. He seemed eager to please, too easy to my mind, like he had some secret bottled up inside, and he had his grand children wailing and kicking up a ruckus in the surrounding rooms, the little imps seemed lacking in discipline to me, but that is the days we now occupy, when even a man of the cloth can no longer control his charges.

“Are you certain I can't offer you a scone?”

“I thank you, Reverend, but no.”

“They really are splendid scones.”

Groves coughed. “You were saying about Professor Smeaton, I believe.”

“Well…yes,” the minister agreed, a little disappointed. “Yes…he really was a man of his own convictions, as I say. But you'll appreciate that it is difficult for me to speak poorly of an esteemed predecessor, and most especially in the week following the unfortunate man's demise.”

He looked at Groves, who stared back unsympathetically.

“But he was an archconservative, let me say that,” the minister managed, “and of a type that, while always admired for its resolve, is nevertheless…a trifle anachronistic, if you understand my meaning.”

Groves nodded, though in truth he was not sure he followed. “A persecutor of innocence, perhaps?”

“It would be a wee bit extreme, I think, to call him that. Professor Smeaton was a man who believed hard men are needed for hard times. He had lived through the Disruption, you see, and was trying to come to terms with all sorts of scientific discoveries. His beliefs were under siege, everything he held dear, and it's not difficult to see how he developed certain…orthodoxies.”

“So you don't share those beliefs, is that what you're saying?”

“Well…” The minister chuckled lightly. “It's been a century now since the Enlightenment.”

Groves stared at him.

“And…and the Church has embraced concepts that no longer make certain theologies viable. It's impossible to believe, for instance, that people are born into the world incurably wicked. That is repugnant to reason. But all the same, you can see how it is possible to disapprove of such flawed philosophies, and yet admire a man like Smeaton at the same time. For his very inflexibility.”

He seemed to be saying that he had little respect for the late professor, but in such an unmanly way that I found myself wishing that I was speaking to the maligned deceased, who from every account was not one to shirk a harsh word.

“Have you ever heard of a certain lamplighter?” Groves asked.

“A lamplighter?”

“Or of Smeaton's association with a man of this trade?”

“I don't believe so,” the minister said. “But my dealings with Professor Smeaton were minimal, you understand, and only go as far as the transitional days when I assumed control from him, and our occasional exchanges thereafter.”

One of the minister's grandsons now darted into the room and ran around giggling and slapping the walls. “Not the spyglass, Billy!” the minister cried, fearing the fate of a shining brass telescope perched on a nearby sideboard. “Not the spyglass—not the—that's it, boy, that's it!” The child departed the room, gurgling and squealing, and the minister settled back, laughing with seeming admiration. “Such energy…” he marveled. “Truly astounding.” He looked at Groves apologetically. “But the spyglass, you see, it belonged to Sir Francis Drake…” And he chuckled again self-consciously, inviting the smallest hint of understanding.

But Groves merely grunted. “Did you know of Smeaton's association,” he asked, “with the others who have recently perished?”

The minister thought about it. “Well, not exactly. But Professor Smeaton…yes, I suppose he certainly had some important connections.”

“Aye? What sort?”

“Perhaps you've heard of the Mirror Society, Inspector?”

Groves paused, wondering if this was general knowledge. “A mercantile association?”

“Not quite. It was a small group of men, from all walks of life, who met every month or so, in secrecy.”

“For what purpose?”

“To understand that, you would need to know the story that inspired its name,” the minister explained. “Have you heard, by any chance, of a certain Enoch Rutherford, a minister from Selkirk?”

“I have not.”

“He was a man who suffered a crisis of faith after looking in a mirror, would you believe.”

The minister laughed uneasily, but seeing Groves's expectant look, and realizing he had more or less committed himself to further explanation, he steepled his hands and forced himself on, with as much conviction as possible.

“Each morning, you see, the man would shave in front of a small mirror in his bedroom and then repair to his kitchen for breakfast. But one day it occurred to him to wonder if his reflection was simultaneously enjoying breakfast. The reflection that he could no longer see, that is, the reflection in his mirror. Further, when he set off on his rounds he wondered if his mirror image was also doing the same thing somewhere in the labyrinth of the mirror world. And when he took to the pulpit that morning he became distracted, insensible even, fascinated with the idea that somewhere in the realms behind the mirror his reflection was also sermonizing.”

Groves frowned incredulously, and the minister elected to chuckle.

“It's a peculiar story, no doubt. But the man was vulnerable, you see, having recently been exposed to the works of certain philosophers and scientists. He was beginning to doubt his own claim to identity…he was losing faith in himself…and it seemed to him that the mirror universe had as much claim to existence as the world in which he imagined he lived. For why is it, he actually asked his congregation, that we believe an unseen reflection does not exist? If that is the case, do we ourselves exist when unseen? And since we perceive objects in the mirror of our own eyes, can a mirror not also be said to perceive…?”

Here the minister paused, disconcerted by Groves's deepening frown, and again he had to force himself on, hoping he was not driving the Inspector deeper into confusion.

“And when one looks in one's own reflection, does one see what one's own eyes see or what the mirror sees? And who can say that he is not in fact a reflection or the reflection is not in fact real? And who can say that a reflection does not have its own reflected thoughts and feelings? Or that a reflection does not doubt its own existence, and in its own way wonder about the world on the other side of the mirror…the world Enoch Rutherford no longer had the presumption to call reality?”

“He was mad,” Groves said tersely.

“That is one interpretation.” The minister chuckled, relieved for any reaction. “But, you see, this doubt—which threatened to shatter his faith, his entire sanity—this doubt could be said to have been sown by the boundless skepticism of the Enlightenment. And because of it he had become incoherent and muddled in his convictions. This doubt was a demon, you see, and it had to be overcome, and it all came back to what he saw in a mirror. So do you know how he dealt with this? How, in the end, he confronted and overcame the crisis, and defeated the demon?”