The Lamplighter (31 page)

“Do you want me to have her taken away, sir?” asked the clerk.

“Not yet.” Fleming sighed. “We're not leaving until we get some sense out of her.”

“More coffee, then, sir?”

“Aye. We could do with some of that.” Fleming dried his hands and looked across the room at Groves. “Has she said anything to you? Anything that made the slightest bit of sense?”

And now Groves, questioned directly, was forced to find refuge, like so many others before him, in the security of ambiguity. “It has been a case,” he said carefully, “of little sense from the start.”

It was a case,
he wrote later,
that the Sheriff himself could scarce credit, and though there was no message left at the scene of Bolan's murder, as there had been in the past, what I had seen with my own two eyes was message enough, and now I was ready for anything
. For all the new developments, indeed, Groves felt remarkably serene. No one had said anything directly, but the death of the Lord Provost would lead inevitably to that which he had always feared: the Procurator Fiscal assuming complete command of the case and, ultimately, the forced reappointment of the Wax Man. The Prime Minister would write letters; perhaps the Queen herself would register interest. The pressure applied to Central Office through the frigid Yuletide season would heat the rooms more efficiently than any furnace.

All of which might have been cause for concern, except that Groves had moved to an elevated plane. Having been with the investigation from the start, he was confident he was still the one who knew it most intimately, whatever intrigue might have been conducted beyond his knowledge and influence. Further, while Pringle and a couple of constables had glimpsed an indistinguishable shape bolting down Atholl Crescent Lane, he was the only one who had seen the Beast's face directly, and from a distance that left little doubt as to its identity. So he had been accorded a special status far beyond anything he would dare explain, and Fleming's manifest incredulity only made that clearer. It was his fate to be there at the end, he was suddenly and irrationally convinced of it, and the machinations whirling around him seemed as insignificant as the buzzing of jungle insects.

“Have you met this Todd lass she speaks of?” Fleming asked.

“I have.”

“And what was your impression?”

“A troubled woman,” Groves admitted.

“But diabolical?”

Groves smiled enigmatically.

Fleming looked at the stove, where the coffeepot was beginning to bubble, and sighed heartily. “It will need to be a powerful brew,” he said to the Sheriff-clerk. “This could well take all night.”

The lamps fluttered, the whispers spun, and in her little room on Candlemaker Row, Evelyn unfastened the muslin sealing her window and, craning her head, looked down into the starkly lit street, where at least two sentinels were visible, staring up at her tenement.

She withdrew, feeling a wave of revulsion on top of the nausea she already experienced since the Lord Provost's murder in the nightmare she knew was real. Since the departure of Inspector Groves and the unpleasant gleam she had discerned in his eyes.

She had not slept. She doubted she would ever sleep again. She knew they would be coming after her now. They had been planted outside for days, occasionally even knocking on her door to verify her presence. Soon they would find no option but to come and claim her. They would not know what they were doing, but they would need to do something. She was resigned to it. She
wanted
it. There was an enormous congestion in her heart, and a great turmoil in her head.

She heard the rat resuming its busy scratching in the roof and she rose stiffly, filling a glass with buttermilk and setting it on her tiny table. She lit a candle and fixed it in the middle of a saucer, then returned to her little bed and sat primly on its edge, staring into the candle flame until the brightness filled every corner of her vision. It was something she did occasionally, when she needed to block out all distractions, but she did it now with a particular urgency, drawn to the process by a need beyond her conscious understanding. Was she escaping? Or driving herself deep into danger? She knew only that the answer lay in the brightness of revelation.

She stared at the mesmerizing flame.

Her head was radiant with light and she felt herself plunging when, as on previous evenings when she had attempted the procedure, she heard a pounding on the door.

The brightness faded rudely.

Another knock, and she heard a voice. “Evelyn…”

She swallowed her despair.

“Evelyn…will you open the door?”

It was too late.

“Evelyn…”

She pushed herself from the bed and paused, her hand on the latch.

“Evelyn…I believe you have been expecting us.”

She frowned, puzzled by the familiarity of the voice, and opened the door, not sure why she was surprised.

Professor McKnight smiled at her from the hall, his hat in his hands, and behind him Canavan looked at her with his customary warmth. “May we come in, Evelyn?” the latter asked, in little more than a whisper, and of course she could not refuse.

T
HEY ARE HALFWAY
to Kumasi when they stop to rest on a fallen cottonwood trunk amid trees the size of Big Ben. They are gasping from heat and exertion: the humidity is unforgiving, and the path has become progressively more entangled with cordlike creepers and shrouds of leathery leaves. Corporal Ainslie is the fittest of the three—always alert, always scheming; never pays to turn your back on Ainslie—and it is now the canny Scotsman who recovers first, after a ration of water and biscuit, and as though personally challenged by the environment to announce his origins or to herald his conquering of it, he lodges his Highland pipes against his shoulder, applies the blowpipe to his freshly moistened lips, and begins sounding off some experimental bass drones before launching into a spirited strathspey.

It is a music unlike anything the jungle has previously heard. It hums through the ribbed trunks, unsettles columns of industrious ants, and vibrates through the rigginglike mass of corkscrew creepers to the vast canopies of leaves. Here sparrow-size parrots pause in their chattering to listen to the wheezing of this unfamiliar beast, and, cocking their heads, they eye with some trepidation a white stalker-man, far below, being assailed by some monstrous arachnid, while his two companions look on with no visible concern. The parrots, too, eventually determine no reason for alarm, and return with renewed vigor to their discordant song, raising the pitch to account for the pervasive new intonations.

But when Ainslie stops, a good five minutes later, it is most abruptly, as though he has been struck by a spear. The parrots tilt their heads. The pipes whine to silence. Ainslie's companions turn to look at him in surprise and follow his gaze to the far end of the fallen tree, where a native boy is staring at them.

There is no sound at all but for the drip of sweating leaves, the gurgle of rising sap, and the disquiet of the birds shifting in the branches.

The boy is perched on his haunches and is completely naked. As young as he is, he seems as old as eternity. He smiles at Ainslie with glimmering black eyes.

“Pray continue,” he says.

“From the start, madam,” Fleming said impatiently. Lessels was anchored in an oxhide armchair in a room that stank of starch and vinegar. She was forever declaring her innocence and bursting into tears.

“I was only there to assist, I tell ye.”

“You've said as much, madam. Now—”

“I attended to the lass, and that was all.”

“Aye, you have said that a dozen times. Now please take us to the beginning. How did you first meet the Lord Provost?”

Lessels shook her head. “He was no Lord Provost back then. It were twenty years ago or more.”

Groves, having been invited to take part in an unofficial capacity, now interrupted. “At that stage,” he suggested, “Henry Bolan would have been only a medical doctor.”

“Aye,” Lessels agreed, “a doctor. But to me, he was just another face in the Mirror Society.”

“The what?” Fleming asked.

“The Mirror Society,” Groves answered, as though in a dream. “The official name of the club that convened tonight in Atholl Crescent Lane. The previous victims were all members, and as of tonight there are only two remaining.”

He was focused on Lessels, who refused to look up at him as he spoke.

“Munnoch and Smeaton were part of it. A society dedicated to rigid principles and the suppression of dangerous ideas…”

“The Mirror Society,” Fleming said dubiously.

“But that,” Groves said to Lessels, “is not really where the story begins, is it? There was another point, wasn't there?”

Her face seemed to tense.

“Involving some devilish scheme…”

In the subsequent silence Lessels at last seemed to gulp the first morsel of responsibility. She glanced up at Groves with a guilty expression.

“Aye,” she agreed at last. “I suppose that is true.”

“Go on, madam,” Fleming ordered as the Sheriff-clerk prepared his pen.

“I suppose it begins with Ainslie…”

“Your unconscious is a delicate device,” McKnight said, “and you can be assured that we will treat it respectfully. We will gingerly remove it, Evelyn, with your full cooperation, and we will blow away its dust, scrape out its rust and algae, and return it to its case as a polished and newly oiled mechanism. It is what I believe you have called us to do.”

He was holding a burning candle fifteen inches from her face and repeatedly drawing his thumb and forefinger from the bridge of her nose to the flame.

“You will remain masterful,” he said, “and clear-minded and cognizant. You will surrender because it is your own command, and with the absolute certainty that it is only temporary, and you are in any case surrendering only to yourself. We are bound by your instruction to do you no harm.”

Canavan was half sitting on the corner table, having fully accepted his purpose by now: a presence, a foil, the personification of reassurance.

He watched in fascination as Evelyn began to respond to the Professor's mesmeric passes. Her limbs by degrees seemed to lighten, her right arm in particular rising as though by some independent impulse. Her eyelids fluttered a moment and were still.

“You are beginning to see dark spots at the periphery of your vision,” McKnight told her. “A warmth invades and floods through you. All your sinews are loose, your muscles are pliant. You glory in your security and contentment. You have never been more relaxed, and yet you are entirely in control. This universe is completely your own.”

It was imperative to overcome Evelyn's barricades, and to do so her defenses had to be breached from within. That McKnight had reached this point, especially after the inflammatory tone of his previous questions, might have been deemed a significant achievement. Except that it was a path down which Evelyn had always been guiding them.

After nearly twenty minutes of flourishes and deeply intoned words she was frozen, her senses subjugated but alert, and still awaiting a question. The Professor now handed to Canavan the candle, much of which had dissolved into a puddle of wax, and instructed him to hold it steadily as a continuing focus for Evelyn's eyes. He stretched, worked the blood back into his limbs, and refreshed himself with a few sips of buttermilk.

“Tastes sour,” Evelyn said dreamily from the chair, and McKnight glanced at Canavan with a smile of satisfaction.

Lieutenant Colonel Hammersmith of the 4th West Indian Regiment has been hallucinating, stricken by a most implacable species of fever. None of the usual remedies has proved in the least bit effective. He has been moved from the stockade near Kotoko to the cruising HMS
Cobra
at Accra, where it is hoped the sea air might restore him. But after two weeks he is deemed close to death, and in desperation one sergeant, one bluejacket, and Corporal Ainslie of the Royal Rifle Corps have been dispatched through fifty miles of hostile jungle to Kumasi. Here, in the Ashanti capital, King Kwaku Dua I is rumored to employ powerful native restoratives stewed from acanthema petals and the wings of monarch butterflies. It is said that no Ashanti has died from fever in living memory.

But when the three Britons fall into Kumasi after days of sapping heat and relentless downpours, they are barely alive. The King receives them in a Moorish palace decorated with skulls and clots of flesh. From his golden stool he booms with laughter when he is informed of Hammersmith's plight and offers a gourd filled with a stinking paste that might, in fact, be a miraculous remedy but looks like something less. He sends them back through the jungle to the pounding of the death drum.

Two days later only Ainslie is alive. The Ashanti gourd is completely empty, the supposedly magical restorative consumed in vain by his two companions. Resting half-delirious amid candlestick trees not far from where he first played the pipes, the Scotsman is approached by two saintly natives in saffron robes. He assumes they are tribesmen of the Fanti, who inhabit the surrounding rain forest and have fought alongside the British in numerous engagements.

They offer him sweet water, which almost instantly clears his head, and escort him to a platform high in the ribbing of a vast, umbrellalike tree—a magical haven festooned with flaglike cloth and populated by chattering monkeys. A fetish priest with ornate scalp tattoos and ageless eyes, chewing continuously on amber leaves, welcomes him and communicates to him with hand signals, the native Twi, and fractured English.

That thing, you make music with it?

“If you mean the pipes, I am the one,” Ainslie agrees, ill at ease in the lofty cabin.

My master, he like to hear this music again.

“Again?” Ainslie asks, confused. “Your master has heard me before?”

Some days ago my master, he met you.

“At Kumasi?”

In the jungle he met you, at that place you have come from.

Ainslie blinks, thinking about it. “The boy? The boy is this master of yours?”

The priest agrees, and Ainslie feels strangely chilled. “I will gladly play for your master,” he manages, “but I have little time to spare.”

Play now, and my master, he will hear the music echo.

Ainslie is further puzzled by this, and asks the fetish priest to repeat himself several times to make sure he has understood.

“Where…where is this master of yours?” he asks, frowning.

My master, you can see him here
, the fetish priest replies, and gestures to his eyes.