Pastworld (16 page)

Her coat made a sharp black shape against the snow, and the tail of her spotted cat swished as she walked away. Catchpole walked back to his lodgings, head down, staring at the once pure snow, which was now all scuffed over with boot and shoe tracks.

Later Catchpole sat in a pool of soft light in the sitting room of his lodgings. He opened the envelope. It was brief and touchingly naive; the letters were large and perfectly formed on the page. He supposed it was to make them easier to read for someone with very little sight.

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Dearest Jack,

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Don’t worry about me. I am safe. I have found lodgings, and am embarked on a new life. Please don’t look for me. Stay safe too, as I promise I shall.

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Your loving Eve

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The official Buckland Corporation file on Lucius Brown had been sent across by Hudson. He turned to it. The file was marked:

S E C R E T

LUCIUS BROWN

This file is the property of the BUCKLAND CORPORATION and its contents are strictly confidential.

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Two documents were of particular interest to him. The first was a paper on the Prometheus Project. He started to read.

ATTACHED REPORT 1.

Prometheus Project

Dr Brown has requested an increase in funding for the above named project for another two-year period. The recent results of his and Dr Mulhearn’s work were demonstrated recently in the private facility to both Mr Buckland and myself, and it was an extraordinary experience. My personal view is that the funding should certainly be continued at the level requested by Brown and Mulhearn but on the proviso that personal secrecy clauses are added to the contracts. There is a definite need for a renewed exclusivity contract to cover the outcome of all the results of this line of research.

APPROVED

He turned to the second document that had caught his attention.

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Profile

Dr Lucius Brown studied Biological and Physical sciences at university, where he also received a Master’s degree in Architectural History. It was here that he met and studied alongside Mr Abel Buckland. Dr Brown’s particular brilliance can be seen in various places throughout the Pastworld complex. It was his genius that came up with the scheme to make the ghosts and apparitions for the haunted spaces of the city which caused such a sensation during the opening-night celebrations. This success gave Brown founder status within the Corporation.

Dr Brown and Dr Jack Mulhearn continued their collaboration on another special project which had absorbed an enormous amount of funding. The interim results were spectacular and very well received and a second and larger funding round was approved.

However, both Mr Brown and Dr Mulhearn reversed their opinion on the merits of the project, and near the end of the second phase lobbied to have the experiment closed down. The request was denied at the highest level. Shortly after there was an apparently accidental fire which destroyed the entire laboratory area and facility. Dr Mulhearn was officially listed as dead in the fire, along with all final experimental results. Now he is believed to have fled and is in hiding. Dr Lucius Brown retired shortly after these sad losses.

See Confidential Appendix A.

Appendix A was missing from the file. Catchpole looked up. There was a strange story unfolding, odd connections, secret experiments. Experiments with what though? He made a note to ask Hudson to send over anything more to do with Dr Mulhearn and if possible a copy of Appendix A.

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Chapter 28

FROM EVE’S JOURNAL

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‘The last place these people who are looking for you will expect you to be is walking and dancing on a rope in full view high above the heads of a crowd. We shall hide you in plain sight like a leaf on a tree. It’s an old trick. We’ll say you’re from Russia.’

I didn’t mind being ‘from Russia’ and so Jago began to introduce me after his trumpet tune as, ‘All the way from Russia, the dazzling Eve.’

Jago spent one afternoon working inside the wagon, sawing and hammering. He showed me later what he had done.

‘It’s an escape trap, a false floor, like the ones we use in conjuring,’ he said. ‘You can roll out of the wagon from here, and escape if you have to. You never know when this might be useful to you or perhaps to any of us. With the ragged men after you, we can’t be too careful.’

Every time I performed, every time I danced and spun on the rope in my white muslin dress, I noticed that the boy was there. He seemed to position himself at the front of the crowd every time. I would look for him and I could spot him easily enough. I always knew it was him and where he was in the crowd. I could sense his eyes following me across the rope. For some reason it was always his eyes out of all of the crowd that seemed to bore into me.

Jago said, ‘I think you are developing a following, Eve. There’s a young man who comes to see you again and again and I’m not sure that I would trust him.’

Out of all the people who came to watch me dance the high rope, he was the only one that I really noticed, the friendly-looking boy, with the wide smile and the dark eyes.

Finally one afternoon the boy came round after the show. He was hanging around near the horse, Pelaw, stroking her ears. He was trying to appear indifferent. He avoided looking at me when I went up the steps of the caravan. He didn’t try to speak to me, but I noticed him all the same and then Jago sent him away. He was very protective of me always.

‘Don’t worry, Jago,’ I said. ‘Let him come and talk to me next time.’

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The boy came round to the caravans again. Jago looked over at me with his friendly brown eyes as if to say, ‘Shall I get rid of him?’ I shook my head. I gestured for the boy to come nearer.

Close to he had such a friendly face, smiling eyes, a tousled mop of hair. He was an average-looking boy really, neither fair nor dark, neither tall nor short. He seemed shy standing there with his cap.

‘I think you are so clever on that rope, miss. I don’t know how you do it,’ he said awkwardly, looking down at my feet.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s practice, I think.’

‘I’m . . .’ He hesitated and then said his name with a grin. ‘I am Japhet McCreddie, at least where I work, but I’m Bible J to my friends.’ He extended his hand and I took it.

So the boy Bible J took to coming to see me (and also I think to pet the horse) after my shows. He came at least two or three times in one week. He said he was always ‘out and about’ for his employer, a Mr William Leighton, running errands and the like.

Jago knew of Mr Leighton. ‘He runs seances in his house, charges a fortune too. He’s a crook on the quiet, a thief,’ he said. ‘I should watch out for Bible J and Leighton.’

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Chapter 29

A long sheet of white cloth was hung against one wall, opposite a window with an iron grille over it. Caleb saw a brass clamp on a stand behind a high stool in front of the cloth. A policeman stood holding something square. The woman called out a series of numbers.

‘One, nine, two, four, eight.’

The police officer chalked the numbers on to a slate framed in wood, with a loop of rope attached. When he had finished, he held it up.

.

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The woman peered at it and then nodded. The police officer put the slate placard around Caleb’s neck so that it hung down on his chest. The starched nurse took her sharp metal comb and tugged at his thick hair, forcing it back from his forehead.

‘No nits at least,’ she said brusquely.

Caleb found himself staring eye to eye with an old-fashioned box camera which stood close by. ‘This won’t take a moment,’ said the man in the white coat.

Caleb was placed on the high stool. His neck was fixed into the brass bracket so that he couldn’t move it. He could feel his leg trembling. A group of Gawkers sat discreetly along the other side wall.

The slate placard was surprisingly heavy and he could feel the rope cut into his neck. The man in the white coat tucked his own head under a black shroud behind the camera.

‘Hold still,’ said the police officer. ‘The light.’

There was a sudden rise in the light levels.

‘And, one, two, three, all finished,’ said the man from under the cloth. The police officer placed a large brass disc over the blank glass eye of the camera. There was a loud click and the bright light faded down again.

Caleb blinked once and squirmed, tried to move his head, but the brass bracket held him firm. The woman eased his head out of the bracket. She took the placard from around his neck, and rubbed the number off the slate.

‘Follow me,’ she said. They went back down the noisy, dingy corridor, and out to the reception area. The bench along the tiled wall was filled now with beggars, swells, Gawkers and all sorts. Caleb was told to sit near the desk. He stared down at the scattered sawdust, heaped in a pile under the bench. Some of it was stained blood red. He half expected to see someone’s teeth mixed up in it. He was careful not to look up, not to catch the eye of any of the Gawkers, or indeed of anyone on the bench. He thought about his poor father. He would have given anything to hear him going on about anything. And yet he had run away from him. Caleb began to doubt himself now. When the ragged man stood and threw the knife, when he looked down and saw the blood, had his father really shouted, ‘Run’? Or had he just imagined he said it and then set off in fear?

Inspector Prinsep walked past the bench. He laid his hand briefly on Caleb’s shoulder.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘19248, so-called Brown, Caleb. I’ll be looking out for you especially, because I don’t like pickpockets and thieves.’ Caleb looked up, his blue eyes blazing.

‘I’m not a th—’ Caleb started to say, but realised he had already confessed to it, so he looked down quickly.

Prinsep swept on past him and out of the main doors. Caleb waited on the bench as the minutes ticked by. He sat staring down trying to count the blood-stained flecks of sawdust. He heard the clock hands ‘tock’ slowly round. A bell rang somewhere in the building. A uniformed police officer and the clerk at the desk had a quiet, muttered conversation.

Caleb sat alone on the long bench seat and waited in the gaslit vestibule. After hours of staring into nothing, of enduring the stares of visiting Gawkers, Caleb felt himself falling into a shallow sleep, when the door crashed open, and he woke with a start.

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Chapter 30

William Leighton was hiding behind the drawing-room door of his historic house in Spitalfields. He had left the door open by a tiny crack, just enough to watch Mrs Boulter his housekeeper. He was sure that she was up to something. The same ragged man had passed the house twice while he had been sitting in his upstairs front room. He had watched the man walk past once, pause and look at the front door, then move off. Then Mrs Boulter had appeared on the step outside. He had watched her scan the street. Then she went back inside, and a minute or so later the same ragged man had walked past again, hesitated near the door, then moved off.

Leighton went quickly, quietly, down the stairs to the ground floor, past the green panelling of his hallway, past the false ancestral portraits, and into his crowded front parlour, his cave of treasures. He waited. Sure enough Mrs Boulter appeared nervously in the hallway; she believed him to be upstairs in his seance room. She opened the front door and Leighton watched. It was then that Bible J burst in. Bible J grabbed Mrs Boulter and swung her out of the way.

‘Put me down you little rat,’ she said.

‘Don’t take on, Ma B. Where’s his nibs?’ Bible J said.

‘Upstairs,’ Mrs Boulter said, brushing at her pinafore apron, and straightening her black jet necklace.

‘Downstairs actually,’ said Leighton, poking his head out of the parlour door.

Mrs Boulter started. Her eye went immediately to the front door which stood open, and she shook her head firmly from side to side before she shut it. Leighton was meant to think that the gesture was aimed at Bible J, but he could see that it was sent out somewhere into the street.

‘In here, Mr McCreddie,’ he said. ‘Now!’

Once back in the parlour he put his finger to his lips to silence Bible J and looked out of the window. Sure enough he saw the back of that same ragged man walking back on the other side of the road towards the church.

‘She’s up to something,’ he said under his breath to Bible J.

Bible J looked like a startled rabbit. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘Not now. Where have you been anyway, and what have you got for me?’

Bible J took out the contents of his poacher’s pockets and scattered them across the parlour table. ‘There was more,’ he said, ‘but another boy had some of my stuff in his coat and he got caught by Prinsep and dragged off the bus.’

‘What other boy?’ said Leighton. ‘Oh, wait, let me guess, a new waif and stray.’

‘Could say that,’ said Bible J. ‘He’s a presentable lad, about my age, respectable Gawker. Dad got kidnapped. Another bloke got shivved and the ragged men blamed this boy and he took off. I found him wandering in Clapham. He was in a bit of a state.’

‘Kidnapped,’ said Leighton, his interest stirred. ‘Who was kidnapped?’

‘His dad. He was taken by ragged men. He told the kid to run.’

‘When I hear “kidnap”, I hear “ransom”, I hear “reward from a grateful Corporation”,’ said Leighton. ‘Where is this waif now?’

‘Wherever old Prinsep took him. Farringdon Road police station, I should think.’

‘Time to go and get him out. What was he taken away for?’

‘We were begging off Gawkers on the bus and Prinsep took him for that, but they’ll have found the loot in his pockets by now.’

‘Pickpocketing, then. A letter and a bribe should do it.’

Bible J hopped on a late omnibus back to Farringdon. He was dressed in his house uniform. He had bathed and shaved and looked altogether groomed and respectable. More Mr Japhet McCreddie now rather than good old charmer Bible J. He had money and a Buckland Corporation letter of authority, a genuine one that he’d found with several others in a bank safe in Marylebone once after a particularly good raid. The letters had proved useful many times.

Bible J knew just how to play this. He strode up the steps into the vestibule of the police station. He nodded at the cadet on duty, braced himself and walked forward through the double doors into the reception area.

He spotted Caleb straight away sitting half asleep slumped on his own on a wooden bench. A group of Gawkers were studying the Wanted poster gallery, and Bible J saw that one of the posters referred to Caleb.

The desk clerk looked up at Bible J with a weary expression. ‘Gawker side is over against that wall,’ he said gesturing with his pen. ‘Kindly do not approach the desk here except on business.’

‘I am not a Gawker, and I am on business,’ said Bible J, handing over the letter. The clerk scanned the contents. Bible J leaned over the edge of the desk and slipped four crisp white five-pound notes on to the clerk’s ledger. The desk clerk pushed the ledger across the desk. Bible J signed slowly across the ledger paper. He stood tall and looked around the room.

‘Where is he? Is that him?’ The desk clerk nodded and then shut the ledger with a snap, trapping the bank notes.

Bible J strode over and then crouched down near the dirty, bloodied sawdust on the floor in front of Caleb. He looked into Caleb’s face and winked deliberately slowly. ‘Caleb Brown, is it? My name is Japhet McCreddie, and I am here to take you away. I can only apologise for whatever may have happened to you in here.’

Caleb stood up and swayed unsteadily for a moment, and then collapsed back on to the bench and flopped forward like a broken doll. Bible J, the rescuer, the conjurer of pocket contents, supported him before his head struck the wood and then the last thing Caleb Brown heard in the police station was the clock chime out the hour on the wall above the desk.

Caleb’s photograph with the chalked number clear across his chest was developed, fixed and dry by six o’clock that evening. A clerk carefully noted the details in his best copperplate script on an index card and also transcribed them on to the front of an envelope. A copy was sent to the Office of Security, Pastworld Central, where it lay waiting to be discovered.