CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

THE SAISEI RITUAL

“Are you sure it is the same one?” Holmes asked as he held Warwick’s ring to the light.

“I have never seen it myself,” I admitted. “But it’s how Clifford described it. A gold ring with an emerald stone.”

“Then it appears we have found our thief.”

“No wonder he didn’t want anyone investigating the disappearance of the ring. Not when he took it himself.”

“And what else, I wonder?” Holmes said, reaching into the hole once more. “A-ha—what is this?”

With a flourish, he pulled out a tattered old hairpiece.

“The periwig too!” I exclaimed. “It was Sutcliffe who knocked me out…”

“Only to double back on himself and ‘catch’ you and Clifford at the Lodge, the first on the scene.”

“Because he was already in the building!”

“Indeed,” said Holmes, tossing the wig to me. I dropped the horrid thing as if it were alive. Holmes’s arm was again searching below the boards. “There’s something else down here too.”

“I dread to think,” I said, wiping imaginary hairs from my hands.

Holmes drew out a long leather pouch.

“More relics?”

Holmes sniffed the leather. “The pouch is new.”

“But what’s inside?”

Holmes rolled the leather out flat on the floor to reveal three wooden rods, each roughly the length of a pencil.

“What do you make of that?” he asked, handing me one of the sticks.

“Some kind of stylus?” I asked, taking the implement. It certainly felt like a pen, but instead of a nib, five tiny needles were strapped to the end. I went to try them on my finger.

“I wouldn’t, Watson.”

“Why?” My eyes widened as a thought occurred to me. “They’re not poisoned, are they?”

“Nothing so melodramatic. The needles are hollow, designed to prick the skin and deliver ink from a reservoir in the bamboo handle.”

“For tattooing,” I realised. “Like Lord Redshaw’s?”

Holmes took the pen back from me. “The traditional Japanese method. Quite painful by all accounts.”

“You think Sutcliffe did them himself?”

“A distinct possibility,” Holmes said, looking at the parchments he had recovered from the floor. “Someone here was quite the artist.”

I looked at the pictures on the papers. Most were unfinished sketches, somewhere between the anatomical diagrams of a medical textbook and the Japanese art that Sutcliffe had presented to Redshaw. They all showed the body of a man lying naked on his back. His chest was open to expose the heart for all to see. In some pictures he was alone, while in others he was surrounded by a ring of small animals, each linked to the man by thin red lines that ran from their hearts to his. It was both grotesque and beautiful at the same time.

“What does it all mean?” I asked.

Holmes held the paper up to the light. “The stock is Japanese, similar to the envelope we found on Powell, but the ink isn’t right.” He fished around in the hole again, retrieving bottles of black and red ink. “As I thought,” he said, examining the labels. “Manufactured by Williams of Portland Square.”

“Here?”

Holmes shrugged. “Why buy expensive Japanese inks when you have a fresh supply on your doorstep?”

“So these are all the work of Sutcliffe. Forgeries for his business?”

“Possibly.” Holmes sorted through the papers. “All the same subject, gradually becoming more complex. Hullo…”

“What is it?” I asked.

Holmes pulled a sheet to the top of the pile. This one had the addition of Japanese writing running down its side, including a couple of characters I recognised.

“Those are the ones from Redshaw’s study, aren’t they? I recognise the symbol for rebirth.”

“Saisei,” Holmes confirmed, “and what is this?”

He had found a sheet covered not with Japanese but English. He held it up to read, his brow creasing.

“Watson, what was it Clifford told you about spells?”

“That Sutcliffe brought books of the things back from the Orient. Why?”

“Listen to this: ‘The Saisei Ritual. Death is not the end. A body preserved in death can rise anew. Follow the example of Izanabi the re-creator. Give a pure heart as he gave his. Take the completed body to the sacred grove on the day of his first birth. There, under the deceitful eyes of the damned, restore with the blood of innocent lambs. He who was lost will rise again on the day for the glory of all’.”

“What absolute twaddle,” I said.

“And yet, here it is, translated into Japanese on these drawings, although what it has to do with the legend of Izanami I don’t know.”

I told him what Sutcliffe had told us around the dinner table.

“But that’s not how the story ends,” Holmes said, on hearing about Izanagi’s life-giving broth. “Izanagi is so repulsed by his wife’s decaying flesh that he seals her in Yomi for all time. Furious at his betrayal, Izanami promises to slay one thousand of the living each and every day, to which Izanagi responds that he will give life to over a thousand more to make up the difference.”

“So he doesn’t raise her from the dead?”

“Not at all. I’ve no idea where Sutcliffe found his version of the tale, or this spell. It certainly features in none of these books, but I tell you what else I have found…”

He held up the spine of the small brown book he had brought with him.

“Byrne’s Annals of Bristol,” I read.

He nodded, flicking through the pages. “Volume thirteen, with the passage about Warwick’s body lined and annotated. Look.”

“The saisei kanji,” I said, seeing the now familiar characters scrawled in the margin.

“Think of it, Watson. ‘A body preserved in death’? Does that sound familiar to you?”

“Edwyn Warwick! You don’t think Sutcliffe believed all this hocus-pocus, do you? That he was planning to bring Warwick back to life?”

“It’s a possibility we need to explore, if only to eliminate it from our investigation. All I know for certain is that the theft of Warwick’s body has left murder in its wake; first the priests, and now Sutcliffe himself.”

“Not to mention Lord Redshaw.”

“A man Sutcliffe wanted dead. And I think it is about time we found out why.”