Fatal Enquiry

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“Thomas, wake up,” Barker said to me the following morning.

I opened my eyes instantly and realized I had nodded off while waiting for Barker to waken. Sitting up in my chair, I rubbed my eyes for a moment before they finally focused on the Guv. He was sitting on the side of the bed with his feet on the floor.

“Can I help you do anything, sir?” I asked. “I can call for a nurse.”

“That won’t be necessary, but I need you to get me a new set of clothes and my long coat.”

“Were you thinking of leaving today, sir? I’m positive the doctors here would be against it. You’re still weak.”

“That does not change the fact that this case is not finished. There’s a killer loose in London and we must stop her before she kills again or escapes to the Continent.”

“Are you serious? The woman just saved your life!”

“Aye, she did, and I am grateful, but she has still taken eleven lives, and that’s just here in London. There is no telling how many she killed elsewhere before coming here.”

“But she was forced to work for Nightwine, sir,” I argued. “He made her do it. I’m sure she has no intention of doing so again now that he is dead.”

“That does not change the fact that she is a murderess. She must be held to account for the lives she has taken. Besides, if pushed against the wall by person or circumstance, she is bound to use those skills again. She is a menace to the public welfare and must be incarcerated for the rest of her life, if not-”

“If not hanged?” I interrupted.

Sometimes I despise my own imagination. Suddenly, I could picture her with a noose about her slender neck, the pale blond hair pulled up behind her head. They’ve dressed her in a drab, blue-black prison dress. She has been moved about from cell to cell for weeks, never knowing when the final day may be. Finally, they slide a partition to one side, and the noose is there. She’s trussed up quickly and a priest reads from the Psalms. Then the trap is sprung and she falls through.

“Oh, God!” I moaned.

“Tell me you haven’t fallen in love with the girl, Thomas,” Barker said.

“No, sir, I have not.”

Barker clasped his hands and rested them on his knees. “One can train a docile dog to attack, but afterward, it can never go back to its old life. It has become too dangerous.”

“She’s not a dog, sir,” I argued. “She’s a person.”

“That doesn’t prove your point, lad. A human is infinitely more dangerous than a dog.”

“She killed eight people at once. Suppose she sent one of her packages to the royal family, or left it on a train, or exposed it at a station. The carnage could be in the hundreds.”

I said nothing, but put my face in my hands, feeling miserable.

“I’ve nothing against the girl, personally,” he went on. “I do not believe her heart is naturally black because her father was a Nightwine.”

“Do we have to do this?” I pleaded. “Couldn’t Scotland Yard handle it for once? Abberline is a keen fellow.”

“He is, but I’d have to convince him that she was responsible for all the killings. By then, who knows where she would be. No, Thomas, it has to be us.”

“You can barely stand, sir, and I’m injured, as well. How are we going to subdue her or convince her to come with us?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but be certain to bring along a brace of pistols for each of us.”

That was that. He had patiently answered every one of my questions, but would not be dissuaded from his quest. I left Barker to haggle with the staff about whether he should or shouldn’t be traveling that day. Taking a cab to King’s Cross Station, I boarded the Underground for Elephant and Castle. Coming up the stairs into the bright sunshine by the old public house and the Baptist Tabernacle, eternal enemies, I promised myself that Sofia would not be harmed when we found her.

“Thomas!” Mac called when I entered. “How is the Guv?”

“Belligerent,” I said. “He’s determined to track Miss Ilyanova to her lair today.”

“What do the doctors say?” he asked, coming out of his room. He wore his cheater spectacles, which meant he’d been reading. The hall smelled of beeswax and not a mote of dust hung anywhere, so I supposed he deserved his rest. I knew Mac’s deep, dark secret: he liked to read romances.

“It doesn’t matter what the doctors say,” I countered. “Unless they can successfully tie him to the bed, I’ve got to get him some clothes and his pistols.”

Harm came out of the parlor where he’d been napping on a hassock and favored me with a reasonably enthusiastic wag of the tail. It was only me, the Fixture, nothing to get excited over. I reached down and scratched the back of his head.

“Can you recall precisely what time the Guv collapsed the morning of the duel?”

“They fought for about ten minutes and there was a bit before and after. I’d say a quarter past six. Why?”

“This is going to sound odd. At six-fifteen, Harm suddenly began howling in the garden. I’ve never heard anything so loud and strange in my life.”

“Pekingese were bred as guard dogs for the emperor, Barker told me. They do have an alarm cry, but are you having me on? It’s miles between here and Hampstead Heath. How could he possibly know?”

“He couldn’t,” Mac insisted. “He’s completely untrainable, and has a brain the size of a walnut.”

“How long did he howl?”

“About a minute and a half. I came out the back door to see if something had happened, like a cat getting in the yard. Then he suddenly stopped, and got himself a drink from the pond. I doubt he even remembered doing it.”

“Strange, indeed. Well, I’d better get on. I’m sure the Guv’s waiting impatiently.”

I gathered the items, loaded the pistols, and carried everything out to the Newington Causeway where I found a cabman willing to go as far as the priory. When we arrived, he waited while I entered with the clothes. Barker had prevailed over the doctors, or at least was being released on his own assurances. Having failed, the doctor turned on me, giving me a list of things to look out for: if he looks faint, looks tired, starts to wobble, turns pale, has trouble breathing, et cetera, I was to bring him back at once.

Cyrus Barker stood in the lobby of the priory, pacing like a Regent’s Park lion at feeding time. I brought him his clothes and he changed in his former room. He came out looking pale and damp, as if the exertion of changing clothes had been taxing to him. I knew he wouldn’t admit it, but he was barely holding himself together.

I saw no good outcome from this, but plenty of horrid scenarios: Barker’s weakened heart giving out a final time from too much activity; Sofia captured and denounced as a gruesome murderess in the newspapers; Sofia jabbing the Guv with her poisonous parasol, and he shooting her dead on the spot. It is times like this that I long for a normal situation, like a patent clerk or a shopkeeper.

In the cab on the way to the Albemarle, Barker sat back and rested, marshaling his energy for the coming battle. The last one had killed him. What drove this self-appointed guardian of the city to perform the acts he did? He was rarely paid and never thanked. Generally, he made more enemies than friends. Perhaps I would never understand what drove this man to do the things he did.

When we arrived in Praed Street again, I had the strangest sensation. I had stood there so recently facing Sebastian Nightwine that I recalled him in vivid clarity, the color of his bronzed skin, his blond mustache and eyebrows almost white against it, the honey color of his remarkable eyes. Now he was gone: to a just punishment in Barker’s opinion, to oblivion in his own. Is not infamy another form of fame?

Barker spoke to the doorman as if they were old friends. This was the man who had lent him the hat and coat and had traded places with him two nights before. I speculated he had met him earlier than that, keeping an eye on me when I was carried there against my knowledge a week earlier by Sofia. The doorman informed us that Miss Ilyanova had not vacated her rooms, although he had not seen her in a couple of days. Barker led me up the stairs to the door to her rooms and stopped. He pulled out his pistols and I mine. Another scenario presented itself: me shooting her dead, and having to carry that on my conscience for the rest of my life.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, when he hesitated.

“The room could be awash in ricin. There could be an unknown poison on the door handle. She could have packed the place with explosives.”

“Oh, lovely,” I muttered.

“Or she could have left it as she found it. I’m trying to piece together her actions based upon what little I know of her. Have you any insight?”

“I would say she fears you, based upon her sudden departure the moment you appeared here the other night, but she bears you no malice for her father’s death.”

“Good, then,” he said, and before I could stop him, he unlocked the door with the betty he kept in his waistcoat pocket and threw it open. He trusted me far more than I did myself.

There was no poison, unless it was a slow-acting one, no ricin, no explosives. The room looked deserted. There were no suitcases and her clothing was gone. I even looked for her weapons case under the armoire. She had decamped while Barker was convalescing. Good girl, I thought. I hope you’re far, far away from here.

“Thomas,” Barker said, directing my eye to the fireplace. There was a leather case there, a tube-shaped affair leaning against the side. She’d pinned a note to it that read “Mr. Barker.”

“The maps!” I cried.

The Guv crossed the room and squatted beside it.

“Ricin” he repeated. “If it is anywhere, it would be here.”

“No,” I assured him.

“Very well,” he said, and opening the lid, poured the contents out upon the floor. I held my breath, expecting to see powder pour from the tube. I had assured him, but there was no one to assure me.

Barker reached inside and pulled out a half-dozen parchment maps. They were yellowed with age and lettered in what I supposed to be Tibetan script. These were Nightwine’s private maps, the ones too precious or valuable to simply hand over to the Foreign Office. Nightwine was dead, but with them Britain could still launch an offensive action against Tibet of its own.

Still resting on his boots, he spread out the maps on the floor. Some were larger scale, showing mountain ranges and entire countries. Others were plans of buildings.

“Shambhala,” he said, pointing to the smallest of them all, no more than two feet by three. “Here is Lhasa. This one appears to be a detailed map of all the monasteries in the Himalayas, and this looks like a map of the Dalai Lama’s chambers. There’s even a hidden chamber marked to get in and out without detection.”

“Some of them look new and some look very old,” I remarked.

“They know how to preserve manuscripts in Tibet. Some of them could be as much as five hundred years old.”

Right after saying that, he lifted the corner of one and began to rip it in two.

“Sir!” I cried. “Stop!”

“It’s too dangerous, lad,” he said. “Far too dangerous. If these were in the hands of the Foreign Office, they would get into all sorts of mischief.”

“But is that your decision to make? I mean, we could bring them missionaries and medicine and education-”

“And smallpox and instability and slavery,” he continued, still ripping and destroying the maps. Some were on fresh onionskin and made a sharp, crisp sound as they ripped, while others crumbled into powdery pieces. It hurt my eyes to see such beautiful ancient works of cartography destroyed.

Barker stopped at the final map, the one of Shambhala. His hand hovered over it.

“I believe I’ll keep this one,” he said. “I’ve destroyed the one showing its location.”

He set it aside and then began shoving the torn maps into the room’s grate. A single match and they all ignited like tinder. I watched the fire consume them in the reflection of Barker’s lenses.

We lowered ourselves cross-legged on the floor and watched the fire. The blaze crackled with whatever resins or varnishes had been painted on the old parchments.

“She’s gone, then,” I said eventually.

“Aye,” he rumbled. “She’s gone.”

“I suppose we could alert Scotland Yard and have the ports blocked.”

“She would anticipate that,” he responded, watching a perfect little jewel of a monastery begin to char and curl. “She is no fool. Anyway, I don’t feel like aiding Scotland Yard at the moment. They must work their way into my good graces again.”

“You don’t regret letting the killer of Brother Andrew get away?”

“That’s just like you, Thomas, to argue one side on Monday and another on Tuesday.”

“Actually, it’s Sunday, sir,” I pointed out.

“Leave it to you to keep track of your day off.”

“Somebody must, until there is a private enquiry agents union.”

“You’ll be founding president, no doubt.”

“They’d need someone bright as a new penny.”

Carefully, Barker rolled the Shambhala map and put it in the leather cylinder.

“Come, lad,” he said. “Let us go back to the office and see what deviltry London’s got herself into now.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the lobby, Barker turned to the doorman he’d spoken to earlier, and tipped his hat.

“Give him half a crown, lad.”

I paid him and we went out to our waiting cabman.

“Half a crown?” I remarked when we were inside. “A shilling would have done. This was a very expensive case, I must say. I intend to add it all up when we get back to the office.”

“You do that,” Barker said. Crossing his arms and tipping his bowler hat over his spectacles, he rested in the corner of the cab.