The Aylesford Skull (7 page)

“But who struck whom?” asked St. Ives.

“The man who fled into the wood was evidently the same man who had poisoned the fish.”

“Did his footprints put you in mind of Narbondo?”

“Quite possibly, or a man of similar size. Nothing certain in that, however.”

St. Ives stood silently for a moment, listening to the buzzing of an unseen fly. He heard Eddie’s laughter from the direction of the house. “The first man, the poisoner, might have been pursued surreptitiously by the second, I assume?”

“More likely it was mere happenstance,” said Hasbro. “If the second man had followed the first with some fell purpose, he wouldn’t have tarried near the weir, it would seem. His prey might simply have continued along the river and got away.”

“There’s no indication that they were companions?”

“No, sir, to the contrary. Their separate tracks led back to the village, where I discovered that they had started out by different routes – one of them from behind the Chequers Inn and the other from the path that runs up into what’s known as Hereafter Farm, or so I’m told by the publican at the Chequers.”

“Isn’t that a spiritualist commune?”

“Indeed, sir. Owned by a woman named Mother Laswell, who, I gather, is widely considered to harbor dark secrets. She has apparently lived in Aylesford these past forty years and is known by everyone, largely because of her reputation for speaking to the dead, and also her public disapproval of the industrial debris created by the paper mills. She’s considered to be ‘the bane of industry,’ according to our publican.”

“So the man from Hereafter Farm followed the other?”

“In some sense of that word,” said Hasbro. “I wonder if it’s conceivable that he observed the other doctoring the pike and took offense to it.”

“Knock the man on the head, but leave the poisoned fish lying in the creel?” asked St. Ives. “He would be a tolerably strange guardian angel.”

“Indeed he would,” Hasbro said. “We’re none the wiser, I’m afraid. There’s no evident motive for the poisoning, or for our man to be laid out with a stick.”

“The lack of motive suggests Narbondo,” St. Ives said. “And of course motives invariably exist. We’ll find them out in due time, although it would suit me down to the ground if the whole business simply went away. I’m not keen on tumult, Hasbro. I’ve had too much of it lately. I’m content to live the life of the gentleman farmer and let the planets revolve as they will. Indeed, I’ve promised Alice as much. But we’ll keep our eyes open, certainly.”

The two men parted company, Hasbro toward the house and St. Ives toward the barn. Ahead of him he saw the filled-in pit that Mr. Binger, the groundskeeper, had dug to bury the pike, the white quicklime visible in the dirt. His mind began to dwell on the poisoned fish once again, and he found that he was angry, despite the gentleman farmer talk. He had suppressed the anger in front of Alice, and just moments ago, when speaking to Hasbro, he had bid it disappear, but here it was again, returning with a vengeance. Anger, he was certain, was almost always a toxicant, worthy of being buried beneath quicklime. Still, he would know the identity of the poisoner before he was done, which possibly meant a visit to Hereafter Farm and a chat with Mother Laswell.

It was often the case that he saw things more clearly when his mind was occupied elsewhere, and he forced himself now to think about the hiatus in the barn roof – the combination of pulleys and line that he would design to draw back sections of roof along a greased track on behalf of the airship. The undertaking wouldn’t be simple, regardless of what he had told Alice. Hasbro, however, had served in the Royal Navy in his youth and was a wizard of tackle. And St. Ives would call on Keeble to help, once the air vessel was fit to take aloft. Together, the three of them would prevail. It occurred to him now that it would require a considerable force to move the sections of roof, given the necessary size of the outlet. A steam engine would do, but he abhorred the noise and the vapors, and certainly it would poison the livestock in the enclosed barn. The inscrutable Mother Laswell would condemn him publicly.

A capstan, perhaps? Surely it would take no more power to shift a section of the roof than it would to lift a large anchor aboard a ship. Cleo’s siege engine came into his mind, and he pictured an elephant hauling on the capstan bars, the roof sliding open effortlessly. He let the image stay there, taking a good look at it, and he found that he was attracted to the idea despite its superficial gaudiness. Keeble could no doubt fabricate an automaton, an immense reproduction of Cleo’s elephant, but it would cost them the farm to have it built. It occurred to him then that Finn Conrad had grown up in the circus and claimed experience in the training of pachyderms. Finn Conrad, it was true, claimed a number of things, some of them moderately implausible, but in the time that St. Ives had known the boy, he had seen no actual evidence that Finn exaggerated. He would no doubt be overjoyed to train an elephant. The barn would easily accommodate the creature and with room to spare, and, unlike a steam engine, an elephant’s vapors would be harmless. Its dung, in fact, might be efficacious as a fertilizer. Eddie and Cleo could ride into Aylesford atop it as if it were a pony.

St. Ives pictured Alice’s likely response to the idea, and his smile waned. Convincing Alice to approve of the elephant might be more complicated than engineering the opening of the roof. Perhaps if the elephant weren’t mentioned until the work was finished? But that would be a variety of untruth. Alice would see that immediately. She had solid ideas about right behavior, and if St. Ives flew in the face of those ideas, the elephant wouldn’t materialize, and he would look like a scrub into the bargain.

It might be simple enough, he thought, if he took Finn into his confidence from the outset. Finn was effortlessly persuasive, sometimes dangerously so. St. Ives wouldn’t have to coerce him into prevailing upon Alice; Finn would see the sense in the elephant himself. If St. Ives could contrive a way to make it seem like the boy’s idea from the outset...

The barn loomed in front of him now. The sun hung above the horizon, shining into the open door, which would have to be enlarged in order to admit the craft in the first place, since it would arrive long before they’d tackled the roof and found a convenient elephant. Tomorrow he would hire workmen to do the job if Alice had no objection. He walked into the interior, where it was nearly dark beyond the sunlit ground immediately inside the doorway. The dark hill of a haystack lay to his right, and to his left stood the wagon and the two-horse chaise. It was only recently that they had been able to set up in quite such a grand style, courtesy of Aunt Agatha again, who had been a generous old bird, seeing to the well-being of several nieces and nephews in her considerable will. Alice owed her passion for fishing to the old woman, who had claimed a kinship to Izaak Walton and who had traveled through Scotland and Ireland, often alone, relieving the streams of their burden of salmon and trout.

He stood still now, listening hard in the evening quiet and squinting into the deep shadows along the wall. He had seen something moving just now – a renegade sheep, perhaps, having come along home by itself...? He watched the darkness, seeing nothing for a long moment. Then there was firefly sort of flickering, a bit of witch light, dying away on the instant that he saw it, but leaving the shadow of what appeared to be a human image behind, which quickly evaporated into the darkness. It reoccurred, more brightly, the resulting shadow larger, taking on an even more decidedly human shape that was surrounded by an aura of soft, steady light. St. Ives took a tentative step forward, craning his neck to see, the hair standing up on the back of his neck. There was a boy – quite clearly a boy – sitting atop the vinegar keg. He was leaning forward, easily visible now, and no longer merely a shadow.

The sight of him, suffused in the orb of misty light, confounded St. Ives, who was apparently either suffering from impaired vision or some variety of swiftly moving madness. The boy – clearly not Finn Conrad, but more or less the same age – held a stick in his hand. Bent forward at the waist, he was apparently drawing or digging with the stick in the dirt of the barn floor. St. Ives realized with an unsettling shock that he was looking
through
the figure. He could see the slats in the barn wall behind him and the vinegar keg through the boy’s legs.

There was no rational explanation for what he thought he saw, and St. Ives despised the irrational. A boy sat on the vinegar keg, right enough, he told himself, and his transparency was evidently an illusion contrived of sunlight and shadow, no doubt easily explainable, if only he could bring his mind to bear on the problem.

“Well, young sir,” St. Ives began, finding his voice at last, but the boy did not apparently hear him, and instead of responding he began to fade away, evaporating like steam on a warm day. After a few seconds only a vague, boy-shaped aura remained, the stick evidently holding itself aloft, still marking in the dirt. Abruptly the aura vanished, and the stick fell to the ground.

St. Ives stood blinking, unable to accept what he had clearly seen. His mind denied it. It came to him that he had perhaps been poisoned by the hemlock after all, ingested it somehow, breathed a corruptive waft of the vapor that was only now making itself felt. What next? Paralysis, loss of speech, nausea, the mind remaining clear. He felt none of the symptoms except the clarity of mind. He stepped forward, intent on examining the stick, telling himself that it might yet be warm from the boy’s grip – if there had been a boy, which there could not have been. The stick lay at the base of the keg. It hadn’t been an illusion. He picked it up, but it told him nothing. It was neither warm nor cold. It was simply inert. He fetched a lantern from a hook in the wall, lit it, adjusted the wick, and held it over the keg. The name “Mary,” was scratched very faintly into the hard-packed dirt of the floor.

He crushed his eyes closed, his mind revolving around useless explanations. He thought again of the hemlock, considering the possibility that in his poison-induced madness he himself had unconsciously wielded the stick, scratching the name in the dirt. He thought of women whom he knew with the name “Mary.” Surely there were several of them, but he couldn’t recall that any of them had passed through his mind in recent weeks or months. Why would he have written that particular name? Further madness?

His ignorance terrified him, and suddenly he very much wanted Alice’s company. He turned his back on the vinegar barrel, squinting into the vast glow of the setting sun, which now filled the barn door. In the midst of that light stood the figure of a man, black as tar against the bright sunlight – a tall, narrow shadow with its arms to its sides. St. Ives stifled a surprised shout and stood gaping at the apparition in horror. The sun, blessedly, descended another fathom through the sky, lost a modicum of its brilliance, and the silhouette became a flesh and blood human being – a man whom St. Ives knew well enough, and he also knew that the man had been dead these eight years past.

SIX

THE RETURN OF BILL KRAKEN

“I
’ve come back,” the man in the doorway said in a living voice – the voice of Bill Kraken, an old friend.

“From the dead?” asked St. Ives, his mind still swimming from the ghostly figure on the vinegar barrel, trying to equate the phenomenon of the transparent boy with the ghost of Bill Kraken, but having no luck.

“That’s not far off, sir. I’ve been good as dead six times over, and I despaired of coming home. But the fates is strange bedfellows, as they say, even when they’re sober, which ain’t often.”

With an effort St. Ives yanked his mind back on course, forced some dignity into his demeanor, and stepped forward, putting out his hand. The hand that met his was solid enough. Kraken had aged, to be sure, but there was something steady about him now, not so much of the cockeyed slope to his features which had lent him the visage of a resident of Bedlam back in the days when he was selling peapods on the streets of London and was known as “Mad Bill.” He was tall and narrow and walked with a tilt, his shock of hair angled away in the opposite direction.