Moving Charles’ paraphernalia of personal effects proves to be a rather larger job than can be accomplished in a single morning. Thunder the cat likewise takes a good deal of persuading to leave his comfortable and accustomed billet and suffer the ignominy of being carried in a wicker basket halfway across town, banging every stride against his master’s knee. But by early evening a stack of boxes and trunks has finally been hauled up the stairs in Buckingham Street to the large bare resounding room at the top of the house, which Mrs McLeod has spent much of the day cleaning. And when she hasn’t been scrubbing and washing she’s been at the nearby hiring-office, picking out two candidates for Charles to inspect. The lad, Billy, seems both sensible and sturdy, with an open good-natured face and a ready grin. The girl could hardly be more different. She is small, almost too fragile for the heavy chores she will have to do daily, up and down four flights of stairs. But she is capable and accustomed to hard work – or so the manager of the hiring-office insists.
‘I know that’s what they always claim,’ says Mrs McLeod, conciliatory, ‘but I took one look at her hands, and I could see she’s a good worker. You don’t get calluses like that from arranging the flowers, you can take that from me. She does have one drawback though – but maybe you won’t see it as such. She don’t speak. They couldn’t tell me if she can’t, or just won’t, but I suppose the end result is much the same.’
There’s something else I have not yet mentioned, and nor, for that matter, has Mrs McLeod. In her defence, the point is so obvious that Charles can see it for himself. I do not have her excuse and you, of course, can only see what I allow you to see. So here it is: the girl is beautiful, and she is black.
‘What do you think, Mr Charles?’ says Mrs McLeod, an anxious note creeping into her voice at his prolonged silence. ‘There weren’t many to choose from, I have to say, but she has good references and at least she won’t be gossiping with tradesmen all day long.’
Charles is still looking at the girl, demure and self-contained in her apron and white cap, her eyes down, her hands motionless. As motionless, in fact, as all those drawings in his books and maps upstairs, but those crude sketches could never have prepared him for the delicacy of these features, the gleam of this perfect skin. So if he stares now it’s because he’s struggling to reconcile what he thought he knew with what he can actually see. It’s not the first time such a thing has happened, of course – he’s a scientist, after all – but in the past, the specimens have invariably been either invertebrate, or inanimate.
‘They weren’t sure of her real name,’ says Mrs McLeod, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Something long and fiddlesome in her own language, they thought. But she will answer to Molly.’
‘Molly it is then,’ he says, making an effort. ‘Thank you, Mrs McLeod. I’m sure they will both do very nicely.’
And so they do. So much so, in fact, that before two days are out, it’s hardly possible to remember living any other way. The drawing-room is put to rights, the broken window mended, the newcomers installed. Thunder takes the longest to adjust of all of them, but once he’s learned to avoid the loud and erratic old human on the first floor, he soon becomes reconciled to his new home, especially after he’s had his way with the rats in the basement, and discovered a route out of Charles’ eyrie on to the leads, where he can king it over the feral felines and prowl the chimney tops by starlight. Up at the top of the house the boxes and trunks start, slowly, to be unpacked and placed on the attic shelves, but when a sheaf of Chadwick documents slips from the atlas where Charles has stashed them and spill all over the floor, the thought occurs to him that it might be useful to have somewhere more professional to keep his working papers. Followed swiftly by the recollection that there is a small but serviceable room down on the ground floor where Maddox used to receive his clients, and where Charles might now receive his. If his ego is flattered by the idea of following so literally in his great-uncle’s footsteps, he has the good grace to acknowledge it. And it’s not as if Maddox will need it again; in the last two days he’s been by turns rambling and raging, but the man Charles once knew has not returned.
Tucking the papers back in the box for the time being, he makes his way downstairs and pushes open the office door. It clearly hasn’t been used for some time. There’s a smell of damp, and a spider’s web sagging from the (rather dirty) windowpane. As for furniture, there’s a hard spindle-backed chair, a small walnut desk, and a wall of shelves. Nothing more. The upper levels are stacked with boxes, most coated with grey dust; the lower ones are largely empty, though the marks on the wood suggest they once contained the books now ranged in the drawing-room above. But it’s what remains that attracts Charles’ eye: a line of leather-bound memorandum books. His uncle’s case files.
He is, suddenly, a small boy again. Standing at the entrance of this same room, summer sunlight glancing through the half-closed shutters. No damp in the air then, but the delicious aroma of baking drifting up from a kitchen that boasted not only a cook but two kitchen maids and a scullion: in those days it was Maddox’s business to know and be known, and some of the most eminent men in the land would eat regularly at his table, and count themselves privileged in the invitation. Charles remembers being surprised at finding this door open, and pausing at the threshold, tentative and fearful, knowing he shouldn’t be there. Then catching sight of the book open on the table and creeping forwards to look at it. Struggling at first with the handwriting, but making out a word here and there, and so engrossed in doing so he never heard his uncle’s tread.
‘And what, exactly, do you think you’re doing, young man?’
Maddox’s face – when Charles summoned the courage to look up at it – was unsmiling but not unkind.
‘Prying into my papers, I’ll wager, or so it would seem.’
Charles can remember, even now, the hot flush of shame, and the lurch of his stomach as Maddox laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.
‘Do you not recall what I told you?’
A nod, then another, quicker.
‘And what was that?’
‘That all that passes between a detective and his client is confi— confi—’
‘Confidential,’ said Maddox, with emphasis. ‘Quite so. And what does confidential mean?’
‘Secret.’
‘Exactly so. Secret, and not to be shared with anyone, however small, and however inquisitive.’
Maddox had sat down on the chair then, and lifted Charles on his knee, the wood creaking beneath their weight. ‘One day,’ he said, touching him lightly on the brow, and smoothing his hair, ‘one day, young Charles, when you are older, and the people in these files dead and gone, I will let you read about these crimes, and show you how I resolved them. But not today. Today I am too occupied, and you are still too young. So run along now, and have Cook give you a glass of milk. But ask politely, mind.’
Charles moves now towards the shelf and works back along the spines, wondering if he can find that same book, and read the pages he read that day, such a long time ago. He pulls out the volume for 1834 and is struck for a moment by the coincidence: it was this same year that Chadwick’s grand-child went missing from the Convent of the Faithful Virgin orphanage. Not that he expects to find anything so commonplace here. Here it is all forgery, and coining, and housebreaking, and theft. Profitable investigations, as the neatly noted fee receipts demonstrate, but rather lacklustre, from a purely professional point of view. He closes the book and pulls another at random from the shelf: 1811. Now this, it seems was quite another story. He spends half an hour enthralled by an extraordinary murder case at a Northamptonshire mansion, only to turn the page at the end and find himself confronted by what will prove to be one of the most infamous crimes of the nineteenth century: the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Charles already knows the bones of this story – the savage and apparently inexplicable murder of Timothy Marr and his family in their East End draper’s shop, followed twelve days later by a second equally brutal killing spree, which left the landlord of the nearby King’s Arms with his throat cut, and his wife and maidservant likewise. Charles – like most of his contemporaries – has always thought the man arrested for these murders was in all likelihood the one who committed them, even if he killed himself in jail before he could be tried. But as he winds deeper and deeper into Maddox’s notes, he finds inconsistency after inconsistency in the evidence, and failure after failure in the official police investigation – inconsistencies and failures that are amply and fascinatingly described, by the way, in a more modern account of exactly the same events by one of our most revered crime novelists (though the Baroness of Holland Park does not come to quite the same conclusions as the master thief-taker of Buckingham Street once did). By the time Charles is a dozen pages into Maddox’s notes, he’s already questioning whether the same lone killer can possibly have committed all these crimes, and is starting to wonder how on earth his uncle got drawn in—
‘The Home Secretary asked for my help.’
He looks up, just as he looked up all those years ago, only the man in the doorway now is bent and grey and leaning heavily on a stick. Though Billy’s good offices are clearly in evidence, for his hair is brushed, and his dressing-gown newly washed.
‘That was indeed what you were thinking, was it not?’ says Maddox, coming slowly into the room. ‘How I came to be involved in the Ratcliffe Highway case?’
Charles starts forward and helps Maddox to the chair. ‘Are you sure you should be on your feet, Uncle?’
Maddox waves his hand dismissively. ‘Don’t fuss, boy. You’re as bad as that damn Stornaway – man’s turned into an old mother hen. Show me the book.’
Charles slides the volume towards him, and the old man looks at it for a moment, turns back a few pages, reads a paragraph here and there, then returns to where Charles left off.
‘So what have you concluded thus far?’
Charles scarcely knows what to say, caught between his bewilderment at this utter and unlooked-for change in his uncle’s demeanour, and a dizzying sense of being still that same little nine-year-old boy, frantic to gain his great-uncle’s good opinion but never quite measuring up to the task.
‘Well, I—’ He hesitates. ‘From what I’ve read, I think it likely that the second murders were the work of other hands.’
‘The latter plural was, I take it, intentional?’
‘There were two men seen running from the inn soon after the attack.’
‘Indeed. Go on.’
Maddox’s tone is cool, non-committal; Charles can’t tell whether he agrees with him or not. He swallows, and plunges on.
‘I think the first murder was a robbery that went wrong, probably committed by someone with a grudge against Marr. That’s the only way I can account for the degree of violence involved. I also think this man must have been involved in some way with the Marrs’ servant girl – she was rather too conveniently out of the way when it happened, and seems to have behaved rather suspiciously thereafter.’
Maddox nods. ‘And the second murders?’
‘Made to look like the Marr killings, and in that respect almost entirely successful. But this crime was far more methodical in its execution, and seems to have been driven by something quite other than passion or revenge.’
‘Or robbery,’ says Maddox. ‘The only item missing was the landlord’s watch, which would have been next to impossible to sell, since it bore an engraving of a man’s name. Bravo, my lad, you’ve made noteworthy progress since I saw you last. Indeed you seem to be applying my principles with no small success. After all, there is no problem, however intractable, that cannot be resolved by the steady application of—’
‘Logic and observation,’ finishes Charles with a smile. ‘I can still remember the very first time you told me that. I was six years old, and you were visiting us in Berkshire. I’d found a broken window in the stable-block, and came rushing back in to tell you we’d had a burglary in our midst.’
Maddox, too, is smiling now. ‘But having conducted a thorough inspection of the scene, we were able to determine that the glass had fallen outside the building, not in, and the breakage was therefore far more likely to be down to a stable-boy’s carelessness than a determined assault on your father’s property.’
He sits back in the chair. ‘I recall we undertook a number of similar “investigations” that Christmas – the Strange Death of the Vagabond in the Ditch being one of them. Though I seem to remember we concluded he had merely had the misfortune to become intoxicated and fall asleep on the high road on an unexpectedly cold night. Did I not set you to write me an account of that?’
Charles grins. ‘Indeed you did. I have it even now. It took me a whole week – I was so desperate to impress you.’
‘As you did. As you do still.’
Charles flushes, just as he did when his uncle caught him in his office all those years ago, but now it is from pleasure, not guilt. They sit in silence for a moment, feeling the old relationship returning, the old closeness reinstating.
‘So was I right?’ says Charles at length. ‘About the Ratcliffe Highway murders?’
Maddox sighs. ‘As correct as my own conclusions at the time, and just as likely to be disregarded. If you had finished reading my account, you would have found that I was unable to persuade the authorities to pursue my theory of the case, and after the hapless Williams was found dead in his cell, they were only too eager to draw a line under the whole unfortunate episode.’
‘But you don’t believe he was the killer.’
‘Certainly not at the King’s Arms, because he had a perfectly robust alibi. And when I examined his remains in the prison mortuary, the corpse bore all the signs of a violent struggle. I suspect it was not suicide, as the turnkey claimed, but murder. Indeed, by that point I was firmly of the opinion that a large part of the evidence against Williams had been fabricated, and I had my own suspicions as to who might have done so. But given who those men were, and the public standing they enjoyed, I could not hope to convince Bow Street without concrete proof. Which I never found.’
Charles turns to the end of the case and finds a single final word. One he has never seen in these pages before: ‘Unresolved’.
‘They buried him like a felon on the public highway,’ says Maddox quietly. ‘With a stake through his heart.’ He looks away, his face troubled now. ‘It was my only other failure. That – and Elizabeth.’
Charles starts. He has not said her name since he left his father’s house for the last time six years before; has not heard it said since he was last in this house a twelvemonth before. Hearing it now, so unexpectedly, he feels the iron close again about his heart. This is what he has been evading, all that time; this is what he feared, coming here again. And yes, there was some tiny, hidden, shameful part of his mind that saw his uncle’s madness as a relief. A guarantee that they would not – could not – ever speak of her again. Only Maddox is not mad. Not any more.
Charles takes a deep breath. ‘You did everything you could. You weren’t there when it happened, and by the time you arrived it was too late to—’
‘That is no adequate excuse. If anyone could have found her, I should have been the one to do it. Taken like that, in the middle of the day, barely yards from where her mother was standing—’
Charles says nothing, knowing, just as Maddox does, that his mother never forgave herself for that moment’s distraction, those few minutes when her infant daughter was out of her sight.
Maddox strikes his hand against the arm of the chair. ‘I should have found her – what use are skills like mine if I cannot use them to spare my own family from a lifetime of regret and self-reproach?’
Charles shakes his head, but the memory, so long stifled, will be suppressed no more. And as if in revenge for such long denial, the pictures in his head are more vivid now than the day it happened – the sounds more intense. He sees the soft curves of his sister’s face, and the tiny golden curls escaping – as they always did – from under the edge of her straw bonnet. Sees himself being told to watch her by his mother. Hears the taunts of the street-boys because he was holding her hand. Feels himself letting that hand go, and turning away to play, his back to her all the while despite her tears. Hears then, and now, and ever after, his mother’s agonized cry. It was his fault. It had always been his fault. Not just what happened that day, but what it led to. It was all his doing. And he has never had the courage to confess it.
‘Is that why you did it?’ His uncle’s voice breaks into his thoughts, and Charles looks up – not flushed now, but white in the face. Maddox wasn’t even there that day – surely he cannot possibly suspect—
Maddox is watching him thoughtfully. ‘Is that why you took the Chadwick case? Because you hope to find not only a lost grand-child, but a lost sister too?’
Charles turns away and walks to the window. On the other side of the street two children are playing with a ball, and a little grey dog is racing around them, barking and wagging its tail.
‘I took the case because I need the money. That’s all.’
Maddox turns, rather laboriously, to look at him. ‘I suspect, my dear Charles, that you are not being completely honest in that response. Not least to yourself. You know what I have always said—’
‘That a detective must never allow his own feelings to become engaged by an investigation, for they will only impede it. I know, I know, but I have never been as consummate a professional as you always were.’
It may be that Maddox himself has not always followed his own dictates as strictly as this might suggest, but of this the old thief-taker gives no sign.
‘Take care, Charles,’ he says eventually. ‘I fear you will find neither child now, after all these years—’
‘You’re not the first to say that.’
‘But you run a very grave risk of losing yourself.’
The old man watches as the young man by the window stiffens, and then drops his head. Maddox has, in fact, long suspected what really happened the day Elizabeth Maddox disappeared, and is saddened that the boy has never felt able to confide in him. But he knows better than to probe. His great-nephew resembles him in far more than merely name and intelligence; neither is adept at intimacy, and both are very well-practised in the evasion of emotion. It may even be – though Maddox has never considered this – that the protégé has patterned himself on the mentor in this, as in so much else. And with the past Maddox knows he has, and the secrets Maddox knows he keeps, is it any wonder Charles finds it easier to keep people at a distance – to investigate them as suspects, or study them as species, or even buy their bodies by the finite hour. Anything to avoid an equality of exchange.
All this while Charles is still at the window, but Maddox can see now how rigidly he’s gripping the window-frame, and he thinks again of the image that has come to him so many times in the presence of this young man – an image of a bright sheet of smooth paper, folded and folded and folded again until it is nothing more than a hard tight knot, closed into a fist.
A moment later Charles has turned to face him again. Their eyes meet, but the old man barely has the time to register the look on the younger’s face before Charles turns quickly away and leaves the room. He can hear Maddox calling after him, but it’s only when he is halfway up to the attic that he hears the thud from below, and when he looks back down over the banisters, he sees the old man sprawled on the lower landing, his stick flung from his grasp. And then pandemonium breaks loose. Molly with bandages, Billy with brandy, and – last, but worst – Abel Stornaway, who deciphers what has happened in a moment.
‘What was he doing on the stairs all by his’sen?’ he says, as he lifts his master’s head. There’s a graze to Maddox’s cheek, and a wildness in his look now, that makes the eloquence of the last hour seem like a distant dream. ‘He bain’t as steady as he was, Mr Charles – he needs watchin’ all the time.’
Charles has nothing to offer by way of excuse, and there’s an accusation in Abel’s eyes that he cannot counter. Between the four of them they eventually manage to get the old man to his feet, but by the time they get him back to the drawing-room he’s already starting to mutter and struggle.
‘Should we send for the doctor?’ asks Charles meekly, as Stornaway settles Maddox into his chair.
Stornaway tucks a rug over the old man’s knees and shakes his head. ‘The cut is not sae bad. And that doctor would only scare him the more. Leave him be, Mr Charles, just leave him be.’
Sunday morning, and all the bells in London are ringing. Some near, some distant, this from Christchurch, Endell Street, that from St Paul’s, Covent Garden; all marking a different moment for the passing of the hour. Charles is still asleep, despite the noise, one arm thrown back, his legs tangled up in his sheets much as we saw him once before, only this time someone else is managing his laundry, and the sheets are clean. There may have been a tap, there may even have been the sound of the door opening. Something of the sort there must have been, because when he opens his eyes he sees Molly standing at the end of his bed with a letter in her hand. He sits up with a start and feels, for a moment, absurdly embarrassed, as if she had caught him atop a whore. The girl sets the letter down on the table by the bed and leaves the room, her bare feet almost silent on the wooden boards. She does not smile; she merely delivers the message and is gone. Charles rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, aware, for the first time, of the smell of hot rolls and bacon that has drifted in through the open door. Letter first, then wash and breakfast.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Sunday morning, eight o’clock
Mr Maddox,
If it does not interfere unduly with your devotions, I should like to see you this morning at your earliest convenience. I have the two letters that you requested at our last meeting.
Your obedient servant,
Edward Tulkinghorn
Attorney-at-Law
Charles looks at the note, and then sits back, his face thoughtful. The domestic demands of the last two days have not left him any time to set about the practical task of tracking Tulkinghorn’s culprit, but his mind has been hard at work all the same. Only what it’s finding for him so far are not answers, but more questions.
Charles has, on the face of it, no obvious reason to be so sceptical about such an unexpected and well-paid commission, but sceptical he is, and even more so now. He’s always had an excellent instinct for a lie, and his time in the Detective has done nothing to dull it. And what that instinct is telling him now is that a man like Tulkinghorn would never deign to deal personally with such a mundane affair, even for a client as consequential as Cremorne. The fact that he is so doing – and that even such a trivial matter as the delivery of supposedly insignificant letters cannot be delegated – is as eloquent, to Charles’ mind, as Tulkinghorn is taciturn. Charles, of course, did not see what we saw, and cannot know what we know, but he’s certain all the same that there’s something the old lawyer is not telling him. But what that is, and how deep it goes, even we cannot yet fully imagine.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields looks particularly beautiful this morning, the trees frosty against a brilliant blue sky, and somewhere among the branches, a blackbird singing. Charles presents himself as before, and as before he is shown upstairs, though progress is somewhat impeded by a little group of people in the hallway, gathered around a wizened and vociferous old man in a chair and a black skull-cap, attended by a lean female with a thin and wasted face. An angry altercation breaking out at just that moment, Charles leaves Knox to clear the house of such undesirable riff-raff and makes his own way upstairs. He arrives, as a result, rather sooner than his host seems to have anticipated, since Mr Tulkinghorn is not at his desk – is, in fact, still in a little ante-room Charles did not notice on his first visit, and from which come voices and the smell of fine tobacco. Charles catches sight – so briefly it is no more than an impression – of three men sitting round a table, and a fourth, older, grey-haired, standing upright with his back to the door. A moment later Tulkinghorn appears, closes the door firmly behind him, and moves, rather quickly for him, back to his wonted position of state behind the desk.
‘Good morning, Mr Maddox.’
‘Mr Tulkinghorn.’ As before, the lawyer takes the ring of keys from his waistcoat-pocket and unlocks the desk drawer. As before, the papers are placed on a plain brown sleeve. Two sheets. Tulkinghorn hands them to Charles.
‘This arrived six weeks ago, the other some three months before that. As you will see, our anonymous correspondent seems to be lacking in either imagination or vocabulary. Or, indeed, both. It does not seem to me that they add a great deal to the evidence already at your disposal, but here they are.’
There is, indeed, a dogged persistence in the content of the letters:
I naw what yow did
Yow cannot hide from me
Yow sins will find ee out
I will make yow pay
‘You were going to ask about the envelopes?’
‘I have put enquiries in hand. I am not hopeful, but if they can be found, I will have them sent to you.’
Tulkinghorn is about to close the drawer again when he notices that Charles is eyeing the strange black paperweight.
‘Such curios interest you?’ he says, as if casually, picking it up and holding it towards Charles in the palm of his small dry hand.
Charles reaches out and takes the object. ‘It’s Egyptian, I think? Obsidian?’
The old man raises an eyebrow. ‘Indeed. It came from a mummy discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in the Valley of the Kings. Some high-ranking official, buried with his master. I saw the body unwrapped before my very eyes. Some of my noble clients have a taste for the macabre, and such evenings are, I believe, becoming rather fashionable. This amulet was found among the linens. I was taken with it, and my client was good enough to present it to me. A small token of recognition for many years of loyal service. Of course, there are some who condemn such acts as sacrilegious – even accursed – but that, I am sure you will agree, is mere ignorance and uncouth superstition.’
If he did but know it, this hard, dark artefact is a rather interesting metaphor for its equally impenetrable owner. Tulkinghorn may not understand exactly what role it played, but if such things interest you, you can see these selfsame fingers in the British Museum, which is where – by a circuitous route that need not concern us – this object now finds itself. And as the label on the case will tell you, these long thin fingers were a tool of the embalmer, designed to hold the incisions closed after the organs were removed, so keeping malign forces at bay, and the body intact for all eternity. Whatever his view of the possibility of an afterlife (and if he has one, he keeps it as private as his opinions on every other matter of note), this is a role Mr Tulkinghorn would have appreciated, and one in which he is, in his own field, unsurpassed.
When he gets to his feet a moment later, Charles is intrigued but not unduly surprised to observe that Tulkinghorn has no intention of discussing the letters with him any further; he seems, indeed, solely concerned to show him off the premises with all dispatch. But when they reach the door of the chamber, he appears to change his mind, and turns to Charles with what passes, with him, for a smile.
‘Perhaps it would interest you to see my little collection? The top of the house is let off now in sets of chambers, but I still keep the lower floors, where the coolness of the temperature and the dryness of the atmosphere are ideally suited for my purpose.’
It could hardly be more contrary to what Charles was expecting, but nonetheless he accepts with alacrity. Tulkinghorn leads him down towards the ground floor, but stops on the half-landing by a door that is so cleverly concealed by the veins and swirls of faked marbled paintwork you could pass it by nine times out of ten and never even notice. He lights a candle and the two of them make their way down a spiral stone staircase to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion. The stairs are dark, and the candle throws the lawyer’s enormous, quivering shadow against the curve of the wall. But strange though it seems, the air brightens as they descend, and when they reach the foot of the staircase, Charles sees why. He’s in a small hexagonal chamber that opens into another, much larger room, lit from above by a huge conical dome of yellow glass with a stone rose in its centre. They must be at least two floors below ground, but the room ahead of him is double-height, with a catacomb of corridors opening away from him in all directions. The architecture is astounding, but even that retreats into insignificance compared with what it holds. It is like some augmentum ad absurdum of Charles’ own former lodgings – objects stud every surface, every wall, every shelf, as well as every passage and alcove within view. It is, quite simply, the largest and most extraordinary collection of classical statuary Charles has ever seen. Not even his beloved British Museum can rival this. Stone, marble, terracotta, alabaster – every texture, every colour from pearly ivory to a rich polished black. Funerary urns and a statue of Apollo, horn-eared gods and a snake-haired Medusa, busts of ancient emperors and fragments of vase, heads in profile, heads in relief, tiny broken details mounted on plaques, and perfectly intact slabs of huge architectural frieze. Tulkinghorn eyes his visitor with a quiet but obvious satisfaction.
‘Most of the best Greek and Roman sculpture is in here,’ he says, as if casually, ‘but I think Egypt is your own preference?’
Charles has no preference of the kind, but he has no objection to seeing what else his host is prepared to show him. Tulkinghon leads him towards the dome, and he sees now that this space is not a room at all, but a gallery round another, lower chamber that opens now beneath him, half-plunged in darkness, and dominated by a huge stone trough, throned on pillars and deeply carved with symbols and runes. No – not runes, thinks Charles, leaning over the balustrade as his eyes adjust to the light. Not runes but hieroglyphs, and it’s not a trough but a sarcophagus – an enormous, perfectly preserved Egyptian sarcophagus. He starts and turns to Tulkinghorn, remembering suddenly where he has seen this before.
‘But this is—’
‘The sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I. Indeed.’
‘But you said—’
‘That I was given the amulet. That is quite true, but we are speaking of two distinct occasions. The sarcophagus had to be paid for.’
‘May I go down?’
‘Of course. You will find the stairs in the corner over there.’
Charles heads round the gallery to the far side, but when he gets there he finds himself unexpectedly confounded. He knows this is where the stairs are supposed to be (and he is, as we know, rather better than most at finding his way), but when he turns the final corner by a niche containing a life-size statue of Pan, he finds himself face to face with – himself: a life-size reflection of himself. The glass is slightly convex, and the mirror so cleverly sited and angled that it makes the room seem at least twice its real size. It also serves, very effectively, as a blind alley, an optical illusion that can only be designed to lead the inexperienced visitor astray. What sort of man could possibly—? Charles turns and looks backs to the other side of the gallery. Tulkinghorn is still standing there. Standing and watching. A curious expression on his face – his customary sardonic superiority, yes, but something else as well, which in another man might suggest a barely suppressed excitement. The combination is unsettling, and Charles is struck suddenly by the conviction that more than half of the lawyer’s pleasure in this exquisite collection lies in the power it affords him to withhold that pleasure from everyone else. Even – or perhaps especially – those he ostensibly brings to see it. He has not merely constructed this astonishing gallery, and at unimaginable expense, but contrived every stratagem at his disposal to deceive the eye: light, shadow, looking-glass, trompe l’oeil. Indeed, as Charles now realizes, this space that seems designed for display has actually been created for another purpose altogether. An enfilade of architectural subterfuges that bestows with one hand what it conceals with the other. There are, unquestionably, incomparable treasures here, but not so many as the eye believes it can see – some are mere illusions, others tantalizing glimpses forever out of reach. Charles looks slowly about him, re-adjusting his mental map, and attempting to penetrate beyond the dazzle of remarkable objects to the bones of the building that must lie behind. Tulkinghorn is the Daedalus of this labyrinth, and no one understands its secrets better than the man who made it. He feels, surely and uncomfortably, that his host is toying with him, much as Thunder does with the mice behind the skirting-boards, when the weather is wet and there is nothing better to do. It takes a few minutes, but he eventually realizes that the catacomb effect is nothing but a spectacular sleight of hand: four of the six narrow passageways that appear to lead off the gallery are only mirrored alcoves. There is only one way in, which means there can be only one way down.
‘I congratulate you,’ says Tulkinghorn, when Charles emerges eventually beneath him. ‘Many visitors never negotiate that particular little puzzle. Even the more astute take rather longer than you did. You will find a lit candle in the small niche on the right-hand side. If you hold it carefully inside the sarcophagus, you will be able to appreciate fully the translucent quality of the stone. There are also, as you will see, some signs remaining of blue inlay, but sadly the alabaster has not aged well.’
His tone is almost cordial, as if Charles has passed some obscure initiation.
‘It is extraordinary, Mr Tulkinghorn. The whole collection. Quite extraordinary.’
The lawyer inclines his head. ‘I am gratified you think so. But I am afraid I will have to draw your exploration of it to a rather abrupt conclusion. I have a luncheon engagement with a baronet, and I cannot keep him waiting.’
Charles arrives home just in time to be too late for his own lunch, but Molly scrapes together the remains of the boiled beef and greens, and he elects to take his plate into his great-uncle’s room and sit with him while he eats. The slight graze to Maddox’s cheek has all but healed and – to Charles’ relief – he seems to retain no memory at all of how he came by it. Though if Abel has anything to say on the matter, it’s doubtful Maddox will ever move much beyond these four walls again. He is quiet today, but Charles has not the experience yet to know the difference between the quiet of composure, and the quiet of catatonia. His eye-glass and his watch are ready to his hand, though he has not yet picked up either of them; but perhaps he just needs something to stimulate his curiosity.
Charles finishes his meat and puts the plate on the floor beside him, then takes the Cremorne letters from the inside of his jacket.
‘Do you have a moment, Uncle Maddox?’
The old man eyes him, rather warily.
‘I have just acquired a new case, that I would like to consult you about.’
It may be the magic word ‘case’, or perhaps it’s something in Charles’ tone, but Maddox is suddenly alert.
‘What’s that? Speak up, boy, I can’t hear what you’re saying through all that mumble.’
‘I have a new case, Uncle. A problematic one. I wanted to ask your help.’
‘Go on, then, get on with it. I dare say you’ve got all the facts in the wrong order, just like you used to in the old days. Always went at a problem like a bull at a gate. All over the place. Hopeless.’
It might strike you that this runs rather counter to Maddox’s last expressed views on the self-same subject, and it may not be a coincidence that the old man’s tone is rather shrill. Charles edges forward in his seat, trying not to mind.
‘The client has been receiving letters—’
‘Letters? What sort of letters?’
‘Offensive letters. Anonymous letters. My task is to find out who sent them. That alone will be difficult enough, given how little I have to go on, but I’m convinced there’s more to it than what I’ve been—’
Maddox doesn’t appear to be listening. ‘Is that them there?’
Charles hands them over. The old man’s hands are trembling slightly, but his mind suddenly seems completely steady. He picks up his eye-glass and looks first at one letter, and then another, turning them over carefully several times. But then, to Charles’ horror, he takes one and flattens it against his face, breathing heavily. Charles tries to seize it, but Maddox will not let it go, and the two of them struggle, the flimsy sheet crumpling and tearing between their fists.
‘Uncle – please—’
‘What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me, you fool!’
‘But—’
Billy has heard the fracas from the adjoining room and appears at the door, his bright round face frowning and concerned. ‘Everything all right, Mr Charles? Only—’
‘Everything’s fine, Billy,’ says Charles quickly, embarrassed to be found in this ridiculous position, playing tug-of-war with an elderly man over a piece of wretched paper. ‘There’s no need to worry yourself. Go down to the kitchen, would you, and ask Molly for some tea.’
‘Right you are, Mr Charles. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’
When Charles turns back to Maddox, the old man’s face is very red and his chest is heaving.
‘I’ll thank you, Charles, to show me an appropriate degree of respect. My age, if nothing else, surely commands that much.’
It is as if a switch has been flicked – an analogy which is at least thirty years away, by the way, though the snap of a magic lantern will do almost as well. Maddox is looking at Charles now with as clear a gaze as his nephew can ever remember.
‘I’m sorry,’ he stumbles. ‘I did not intend—’
Maddox’s eyes narrow. ‘No, I dare say you did not. Now, to business. These letters of yours. You have, I presume, drawn the first and most obvious conclusion?’
It’s Charles’ turn to redden now. ‘Yes – that is, no—’
Maddox smiles, his eyes twinkling. ‘Well, that is no more than I expected. Have you forgotten all I taught you already? Logic and observation, my boy, logic and observation.’
He smoothes the torn paper against his leg and hands it to Charles. There is no trace of a tremor now.
‘Examine this – carefully, mind – and tell me what you find.’
Charles takes the paper and stares at it.
‘Well,’ he says slowly, after a few minutes. ‘The writing is not educated—’
‘Indeed.’
‘—and is in a man’s hand.’
‘Indubitably.’
‘He has some cause for grievance against Sir Julius, which he clearly feels very deeply, but does not specify. Is that significant?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Go on.’
Charles looks up. ‘That’s all. I can infer nothing more.’
Maddox smiles broadly. ‘Come, come, my lad. Surely you can deduce a little more than that? Do you not remember what I used to tell you when you were a boy? A letter is far more than a sequence of words written on a page – it is a physical object, and in that respect is frequently far more eloquent than its creator intended.’
Charles looks again at the letter in his hand. ‘The paper is poor, that much I can see, but that doesn’t get us very far. And as for anything else—’
Charles gapes. ‘What?’
His great-uncle is clearly enjoying himself. ‘Go on – smell it. It will not bite you.’
Charles brings the letter slowly to his face. It’s faint at first, but as the paper brushes his nose, he pulls his head away, coughing.
‘My God, whatever that is, it’s absolutely disgusting.’
‘Quite so. Absolutely nauseating, and absolutely unmistakable. An exceedingly unpalatable combination of cattle fat, rotting meat, and dog excrement.’
Maddox sits back in his chair, and joins his fingertips together. ‘Is it not obvious? Your culprit, my dear Charles, is a tanner.’
Charles’ eyes widen. This man is remarkable, completely and utterly remarkable. Who else but Maddox would have even thought to put the letter to such a test? And who else but he would know how to interpret what he found?
‘Moreover,’ Maddox continues, ‘the text itself is not quite so devoid of interest as you seem to believe. You stated – quite correctly – that the author of this missive is uneducated. But he is not – perhaps – as illiterate as you might assume. This word here,’ he points a gnarled finger, ‘naw, and here yow—’
‘I took them as mere spelling errors.’
Maddox shakes his head. ‘I am sure you did. Because that is exactly what they would have been had you yourself written them – indeed, had almost any Englishman written them. But there is one region of this kingdom where this orthography is quite common. I had occasion, some years ago, to be employed by Sir Jonathan Evershed, at his estate at Launceston. The infant child of one of his tenant farmers had been found murdered in her cradle. The perpetrator – inconceivable as it sounds – proved to be the family’s young maidservant, a girl of no more than fourteen years. She claimed to have been incited to the deed by a gentleman in black, who came to her bed in the dead of night. She was caught in the very act of attempting to strangle another child.’ His voice falters for a moment. ‘I endeavoured to persuade the magistrate that this was prima facie evidence of a diseased mind and that the girl was, in consequence, quite unaware of the nature, character, and consequences of the act she was committing. But I failed.’
He stops and seems to be gazing back into his own mind, seeing again, as Charles cannot, the crowd of silent bystanders gathered about the gibbet, and the thin body swinging slowly, slowly, under a leaden April sky. A moment later he shakes his head, and resumes. ‘A most deplorable case, but the point I wished to make was that in the course of that inquiry I had occasion to interrogate a number of local villagers and labourers from the surrounding district. Your suspect, my dear Charles, is Cornish.’
Charles sits back in his chair, dumbfounded.
‘I am very sorry, Uncle. When you put the paper to your face just now, I thought, well, I thought—’
‘You thought I was going mad. Deranged. Like that poor dead girl, seeing people who do not exist, hearing voices that are not there.’
A shadow crosses his face, and all his old self-assurance shrinks to fear. He reaches forward and grips hold of Charles’ wrist. ‘There are days now, Charles, when I cannot see beyond the dark – when I cannot trust my own body – when I can barely untangle my own thoughts. Do you know what that is like – for a man like me? Listen to me, Charles,’ he whispers, his grip even tighter. ‘These people watch me night and day, but you are the one I trust. Which is why I want you to promise me something.’
‘Promise me you will not let them take me away. Promise me I will not lose my mind.’
The old man’s eyes are locked on his own. Charles opens his mouth to reply, then—
‘Here we are, Mr Maddox,’ says Billy cheerily, bumping down a tray of tea on the table beside them. ‘Hot and strong, just the way you like it.’
The old man slumps slowly back in his chair, his head against his pillows, his mouth open. The moment has passed; the light in his eyes has gone out.