The Kingdom of Bones

TWELVE

Although it stood on a street in where there were a number of lodging houses, Mrs. Mack put up no board or sign, nor did she advertise. A theatrical landlady had no use for business from the public, who might expect to keep normal people’s hours. Theatricals and other stage people came home late at night, and many would sleep until midmorning. They’d expect supper at some unsocial time and then an hour or two of society after that. Their talk was of a world known only to their profession. And even now, in the minds of many theirs was not a respectable life.

Constantly on the move, they made few friends in the places they visited. Their only unguarded contact was with each other. Stage folk were like one great, fluid family, and in that family it was often the theatrical landlady who took the mother’s role: offering shelter and a welcome, keeping a special lookout for the young, and demanding moral standards from all who came under their roof. The most roaring reprobate of the saloon-bar lock-in would be as meek as a good son in his landlady’s presence.

Mrs. Mack was one of the legends. There was a Mr. Mack, but there is not much to be said about him.

It was after ten on the Saturday morning when Tom Sayers woke. He was usually one of life’s early risers, but the previous night he had been unable to sleep. Borrowing a latchkey from the kitchen, he had taken himself out for a moonlit walk. He was not a man who feared assault at any hour, and by then it was so late that even coshers and mashers would have crawled off to bed. He got as far as the wide river that divided the two boroughs—slow-moving, sparkling, dirty and dark as oil. He had walked with his mind in disorder, and returned with it feeling no more settled.

Lily’s words still rang in his mind. She seemed to be saying that there was no such thing as happiness, per se. It was more a matter of working out what will make you happy, and knowing you’re on your way to it. Always believing that it’s the destination, when in fact it’s the journey.

So, where was he going? Most men of his age had begun to establish themselves in one way or another. Wives, children, some steady form of income. But not Tom Sayers. Sayers performed all the functions of a businessman but he lived the life of a gypsy, always on the move, accumulating little. He had some savings and paid rent on a small house in Brixton that was his home for their London dates, but nothing of any more substance than that.

He’d begun to consider the idea that he might get himself off the road, perhaps set himself up as a personal manager to a select list of clients, dealing exclusively with their affairs. He could picture himself with a small office in Covent Garden, framed playbills in the waiting room and a clerk for the correspondence. One or two performers outside the company had expressed a wish that he might take on such a role, on occasions when he’d helped them out with some personal difficulty. However, when he allowed himself to imagine what form such a new life might take, there was only one client who ever featured in the scene with any consistency.

Louise. At times like this, he ached at the very thought of her. In his mind, he would relive the moment when she’d fallen into his arms. He’d take those few seconds of confusion and tease them out into an entire marriage of their souls that was timeless, graceful, and slow. James Caspar made no appearance in this world of his imagination. Sayers had cut him from the script.

The day would surely come when the Purple Diamond tour would have to end, if only because there would be no one left in England who had not seen it. When the end arrived, it was hard to say what might happen; whether Whitlock would pay out money for another play and raise a new company out of the old, or return to good old Shakespeare (but not his Romeo again, please God, not his Romeo), or buy himself that cottage down in Kent to see out his time in some more sedate manner.

One way or another, there would be upheaval. With any luck, Caspar would go his own way. And that, Sayers felt, would be the time to broach the subject of offering his personal service to Louise. Anything sooner would not be appropriate.

He’d spent another fitful hour or two lying in his bed and staring at the moonlight through the curtains, until finally sleep had taken pity and claimed him.

His was one of the attic rooms, three flights up with a part-sloping ceiling and a hook on the roof beam to hang his shaving mirror. His window was really a skylight. Between the washstand and his cabin trunk there was little room to spare.

He threw back the covers and sat on the side of the bed. He put his face in his hands and tried to massage it into something that might resemble a man awake. As he was doing this, there was a discreet tap at his door.

Very discreet. Almost womanly.

Panic began to stir in Tom Sayers’ breast. Whatever this was, he was unprepared. He slept in his underwear, and his underwear was a testament to the longevity of unbleached wool and his skills with a darning needle.

“Yes?” he said.

It was a man’s voice that answered. “Mister Sayers?” But it was not a voice that he recognized.

“Who is it?” he said, reaching for the trousers that he’d hung by their braces on the end of his bed.

Instead of a reply, his door burst open. Two policemen were across the room and onto him before he could respond. They seized his arms and held him fast while another, this one with a sergeant’s stripes, came in close behind them with handcuffs at the ready. They hauled him to his feet; and when he began to struggle, they turned him and ran him back to pin him against the wall. The impact drove the breath from his body and gave them a few moments of dominance.

Last into the room came a dark-eyed man of around thirty. He glanced around as the handcuffs were being placed over Sayers’ wrists and screwed down, the uniformed men containing his struggles and ignoring his protests.

“Watch those hands,” the younger man warned. “He was a prizefighter, once.”

Clearly, the situation was of this man’s making. Not in a uniform himself, he commanded those who were. Sayers managed a look at him over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Sir!” he said. “This is outrageous!”

The plainclothesman did not respond immediately. When the sergeant was done with the cuffs, he said, “Search his possessions.” Only then did he stand before Sayers and weigh him up from one end to the other, before looking him in the eye.

“You dare speak to me of outrage?” he said calmly. “Please do not test me so, Mister Sayers. I have a certain pride in my professional restraint. I would not wish to lose that over someone like you.”

Sayers doubled his fists and thrust the handcuffs in the air. “Explain yourself,” he said, “and then explain this!”

“I am Detective Inspector Sebastian Becker,” the plainclothesman said. “And you know why I am here. Pretend ignorance if that is your only defense. It will not save you from the hangman’s rope.”

“Sir…” said the sergeant, and all turned to look. Becker’s threat of the hangman had only served to bewilder Sayers even more. He felt like an actor who’d walked through the wrong stage door into the midst of another company’s drama. As he craned to see what new disclosure was to be sprung upon him, he became aware that there were more policemen on the landing outside his room.

With some difficulty, the sergeant had opened up his cabin trunk. As always, it stood on its end, so that it could be opened as a traveling wardrobe. One side contained shallow drawers and compartments. The other was a hanging space for suits of clothes and linen. These had been torn from their hangers and lay crammed into the bottom of the trunk, while the space set aside for them was filled with something else.

In a private exhibition of curiosities in London, Sayers had once been shown an anatomical model in wax; it was of a woman, cut from clavicle to pubis, her belly a removable lid that revealed the gestating fetus within. Perfectly formed, but imperfectly understood, the unborn was depicted as a tightly packed homunculus of adult proportions.

It was in similar manner that the slaughtered body of fifteen-year-old Arthur Steffens had been folded and crushed, upside down, into the confines of Tom Sayers’ trunk.

Sebastian Becker crouched by the inverted cadaver and looked it all over with care. He touched nothing until he came to the head and then, with great delicacy and some distaste, he knelt and reached in and teased something from the boy’s partly open jaws. It was a piece of paper, screwed up into a ball and stuffed into the young man’s mouth. The body had been dead for long enough to grow rigid, and Becker took some time to extract the paper without tearing it.

Sayers felt his legs giving way. The policemen holding him on either side sensed him going, and pulled him back to his feet. His mind had turned blank. He was so distressed at this discovery of the young boy’s situation that, for a moment, he had ceased to question his own.

Becker opened up the crumpled sheet and smoothed it out. Still down on one knee, he laid the unfolded paper on the floor and contemplated it for some time.

Then he said, “The last time I saw this, it was in the hand of Superintendent Turner-Smith.” He looked up.

Sayers could offer him nothing.

“Don’t play the innocent, Sayers,” the detective said, rising. “Clive Turner-Smith is the name of the man you murdered last night. That would have been just before you came back here and did for his informant.” He looked to the men holding Sayers. “Get him dressed,” he said. “And nobody touch the boy. I’ll call for the police surgeon.”

They let Sayers struggle into his trousers and boots. They refused to take off the handcuffs and so his shirt, coat, and waistcoat had to be slung over his shoulders. In this humiliating state of disarray, he was bundled from his room and out onto the landing. He attempted at least to tuck his shirttails into his trousers, but was only able to make half a job of it.

The building was full of policemen. He couldn’t count them. He could see more outside, through the windows. It wasn’t difficult to imagine an entire hostile army of them, with Sayers himself at the center of their inward-facing circle. As they marched him down the stairs, men on each landing held the other guests back and obliged them to stay in their rooms. Once Sayers had gone by the guests were allowed out, and on each level they gathered at the balustrades to look down the stairwell and watch him go.

Down in the hallway stood Edmund Whitlock. For once the old tragedian was stricken by genuine emotion; his eyes were watery and red, and his hand trembled as he folded and refolded a handkerchief to dab them with.

As they went by him Becker said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mister Whitlock.”

Whitlock seemed not to hear the detective. He was looking past him, and at Sayers.

“Oh, Tom,” he said, helplessly. “What have you done? I feel only a great sadness for you.”

“I have done nothing,” Sayers began to protest, but a shove in his back propelled him onward.

Out on the street, the police were holding back a crowd. A horse-drawn Black Maria van awaited him. Windowless, its panels riveted and strong, its rear door open and ready.

Sayers looked back toward the lodging house. It was a tall, narrow building, with steps up to the front door and railings to the pavement. There, in the sitting-room window, stood Louise Porter. Her face was a pale mask of disbelief. Behind Louise stood James Caspar.

As Sayers watched, Caspar placed a solicitous hand on Louise’s shoulder and leaned in to murmur something in her ear. It seemed to Sayers that, despite the distance and the window glass between them, Caspar was making the gesture as much for Sayers to see as for Louise’s comfort.

His escort took his hesitation for rebellion. Seizing him by the arms, they ran him up the steps at the back of the wagon and propelled him inside before slamming and padlocking the door.