The Equivoque Principle (3 page)

T
WINKLE’S CORPSE WAS
laid out on the simple mortuary table amidst the labyrinth of rooms in the basement beneath Crawditch police station. Cornelius Quaint and Butter stared at the small sheet-clad shape before them as if it were something of alien origin. Of all of Quaint’s charges, she was the most angelic, the most innocent. Her death would surely send a shock-wave throughout the whole circus. Quaint removed his top hat in respect, sensing a gnawing pain kicking at his insides like the mother of all indigestions. He didn’t need to pull away the sheet to know the awful truth. He needed no confirmation other than that which his heart was telling him. As if he were being coerced at gunpoint, he carefully held the corner of the sheet, and steeled himself to reveal what was underneath.

Constable Marsh suddenly placed his hand upon Quaint’s arm. ‘Mr Quaint…are you sure about this? You must understand…the lass was disfigured quite badly. Are you sure you want to
see
that? Perhaps…perhaps it would be best to remember her as she once was. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Constable Marsh, I thank you for your sensitivity, but she was under my care, so I must see her…one last time. I owe her that much at least, man.’ Quaint slowly pulled the white sheet away
from Twinkle’s body. No amount of focus prepared him for what he saw.

Twinkle was virtually unrecognisable without the vibrant spark of life that was her trademark. She was stripped naked; her face and neck covered with tiny specks of blood, and a long, crucifix-shaped gorge was cut deeply into her chest. Her mouth was frozen in a silent scream of horror. Quaint prayed she had not suffered long.

‘Your doctor made quite a mess of the body, didn’t he?’ Quaint asked, his eyes alight with anger. ‘The man’s a butcher! Was he doing the bloody post-mortem blindfolded?’

‘No, sir,’ said Marsh, shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t Dr Finch. He hasn’t arrived in yet. I’m sorry, but she…she was
found
like this. I did try and warn you.’

The onrush of grief was akin to a father losing his child, indeed, in many ways that is exactly what it was. Cornelius Quaint regarded all his employees as his family. The big man’s eyes glazed over as he stared down at Twinkle’s body, and the gnawing hole in his stomach grew wider, as if this void were trying to consume him from the inside out. Upon seeing Twinkle so lifeless, he almost wanted to let it do so.

Butter removed his anorak’s hood, and stepped closer. He looked to Quaint for some clue as to how he should feel, what he should do, but his employer and friend was as lost as he was. Grief has the ability to erase a man’s soul, and empty his heart until only pain remains.

‘My poor, dear, sweet girl…how ever will we carry on without you?’ Quaint whispered, as he placed a gentle kiss upon Twinkle’s brow. He glided his hand over her face, as if trying to feel the last vestiges of warmth from her body. ‘She was a good person, Constable. No good person should ever have to die this way.’

‘What was her name?’ Marsh asked.

‘Madeline,’ whispered Quaint, ‘Madeline Argyle. But we all called her Twinkle…because she was our little star.’ He paused, cupping his closed fist to his mouth to stifle his emotion. ‘Her life glowed just as brightly, and she would light up any room. Twinkle was no child, as you wrongly said earlier, Constable Marsh. She was a dwarf…a priceless, irreplaceable part of my circus, and she was Prometheus’s lover. I know that he loved her with all his heart, and she him. So you see, it’s impossible for me to believe that he’d ever harm a single hair on her head.’

‘She was…a
dwarf?
I don’t know what to say, Mr Quaint, I didn’t know, I’m so sorry. There was…so much blood, you see. But, you must understand…your friend Prometheus was found with her body by his side. Her blood was all over him, and with no other witnesses…we
had
to bring him in.’ Marsh rubbed at his jaw in contemplation. ‘But, you’re right, we
do
need to get to the bottom of all this mess, and with your friend being a mute…maybe it
is
for the best if you see him…for a short while at least.’

‘Thank you, Constable,’ Quaint nodded. ‘I would like that very much.’

‘But you have to keep a lid on this. You’re a civilian and if the Commissioner finds out, I’ll be for it, whether you’re an old pal of his or not.’

‘Understood. Lead the way, Constable.’

Constable Marsh led the way out of the mortuary, directing Quaint and Butter back upstairs, where they faced a massive iron door barring their way. ‘The Commissioner will hit the roof if he finds out about this,’ he whispered, turning a large metal key in the lock. He swung open the massive metal door, sending a resounding scream of metal against stone around the corridor.
‘But as long as you aren’t planning on staying for longer than five minutes, I don’t see it’ll do any harm.’

Leading from the narrow hall were four other dark-grey doors with tiny, metal grated slats three-quarters of the way up them, identical apart from painted letters daubed on them. Marsh paced down the long corridor, brushing his hand against the doors as he went. He tugged on his bottom lip, trying to remember in which cell Prometheus was being held, and then he stopped in his tracks outside one of the grey doors. A small blackboard was affixed to the wall outside, and the single word: ‘MILLER’ was written in chalk upon it. Marsh unlocked the cell door, and stepped to the side, allowing Quaint and Butter to enter the room.

As he entered the stillness of the cell, and spied the voluminous shadow sitting hunched in the corner, Cornelius Quaint was suddenly reminded of the many tombs and pyramids that he had explored in Egypt in his youth. Prometheus was hunched in the corner, unmoving and silent.

‘Prometheus? It’s me,’ Quaint said softly, approaching the giant as if he were a sleeping baby. His intense eyes searched the Irishman’s shadowed face for a flicker of recognition, but there was not so much as a twitch of the man’s beard. ‘My friend? Can you hear me? Are you all right? It’s Cornelius.’

At the mention of the name, the giant turned around slowly like a great prehistoric beast. His face was pale and withdrawn, his thick beard speckled with dust and grit, as well as the remains of his breakfast, and his eyes were red raw from incessant, merciless tears. In the space of only a few hours, Prometheus had seemed to age by ten years. He slowly lifted his arms and offered them towards Quaint, like a child to its parent. As if drawn by some powerful magnetic force, Quaint flung himself into the gaping abyss of his embrace. Prometheus sobbed heavily, and his body quaked as he let his pain flood out, as if his soul had been wiped
clean by the sight of Quaint. The circus owner could almost feel the giant’s heart breaking inside his chest, and he chewed at the inside of his cheek anxiously, uncertain what to say. For what words of comfort could he give, when he himself was in just as dire need of them?

‘Prometheus…Aiden…I know about Twinkle. I’m so, so sorry. We all feel your loss, and share your pain,’ Quaint said, as delicately as he could. Even though Prometheus was only fifteen years younger than he, Quaint regarded the man-mountain as a surrogate son. ‘Are they treating you well?’ he asked.

Prometheus nodded, resting his head against his chest, his neck without the strength to support it. He sniffed a lion’s roar of a sniff, and wiped a huge paw across his nose like a disobedient schoolboy.

‘What happened last night, Prometheus?’ Quaint asked. ‘What did you see?’

Prometheus twitched his bushy beard at the question, and shook his head. He held his hands across his eyes like the See-No-Evil monkey.

‘Nothing? You saw
nothing?’
Quaint translated. ‘Prometheus, you’re in a great deal of trouble here. I want to help, but you’ve got to tell me what happened, man. I need to know specifics. Was there more than one of them? Was there a struggle? Are you hurt?’

Prometheus clawed at his bald scalp in frustration, and let his arms flap down to his sides like dead flesh. The giant motioned for something to write with, and Butter produced a small pencil and notebook from one of the pockets of his oilskin coat. His nostrils flaring, his muscles finding renewed strength, Prometheus began scribbling away in the notebook frantically. He tore off the page and handed it to Quaint:

‘Drugged?’ demanded Quaint. ‘Drugged by whom?’ Prometheus took back the notepaper and wrote some more words, just as the loud crack of Constable Marsh’s key turned in the door’s lock. He handed the note back to Quaint with haste, eyeing the cell door. Constable Marsh poked his head around the door, and stared numbly at the huge man sitting on the bench next to Quaint. It was the first time he had seen the giant moving about since he was brought into the station. The man was a lot bigger than he recalled.

‘Are you nearly done, sir?’ asked Marsh. ‘It’s been five minutes.’ ‘Of course, Constable,’ Quaint said, leaning closer to Prometheus, who thrust the notepaper into his hand. Quaint’s eyes darted across the note:

‘Don’t be preposterous, Prometheus, of course I don’t believe them,’ said Quaint, trying hard to keep out of the constable’s earshot. ‘But they found you at the scene covered in Twinkle’s blood. As far as they’re concerned, they aren’t looking for anyone else. Listen, I can’t do anything right now to get you out of here. Just keep calm, and don’t do anything stupid…leave this to me.’

‘Come on now, Mr Quaint,’ said Marsh standing in the open doorway, making a point of jangling the cell keys loudly. ‘I hate to rush you, but it’s my job on the line here.’

‘Yes, yes, thank you, Constable, we’re finished,’ said Quaint. ‘Come on, Butter, let’s head back to the train.’

A few minutes later, Quaint and Butter were standing outside on the grimy steps of the police station. Quaint pulled his cloak tight against his chest, trying to shield himself from the cold wind. He was unusually quiet, and this fact made the Inuit at his side very uncomfortable. Butter stared up at Quaint’s weathered face.

‘We now wait and let police handle, yes?’ he asked.

‘We now wait and let police handle, no,’ replied Quaint.

‘But boss, we can do nothing until this Commissioner arrives.’

‘How long have you known me, Butter?’

‘Perhaps nine or ten in years, boss.’

‘And in all that time have you ever known me to stand idly by and do
nothing
when people I care for are in trouble? Do you really think I’d let that lot in there deal with this? Prometheus wouldn’t last an hour.’

‘But, boss…from here, where we go?’

‘From here, Butter?’ Quaint answered. ‘From here we go back to the train and try and form a plan of action. There’s something rotten going on in this district, and if members of our family have been caught up in it, I want it brought to an end sharpish. If that means we have to take steps ourselves, then so be it.’

‘And wise for us to be involved?’ the Inuit asked tentatively, eyeing the familiar steely determination in his employer’s eyes. ‘Could bring more trouble.’

‘It’s a little late for that, my friend,’ said Quaint. ‘Thanks to whoever drugged our strongman, I’m afraid we’re
already
involved.’

T
HE SKELETAL REYNOLDS
made his way down the thick-carpeted stairs and into a dingy, ornately decorated hallway. Dark-green curtains draped on either side of the front door, and faded oil paintings hung lifelessly on the walls, dusty and forgotten. The house didn’t suit Reynolds at all. It was far too sumptuous, far too exotic, but at the same time, he seemed very much at home there. His face was no longer strewn with dirty smudges as it had been the other night, and his ripped and stained clothes were gone, replaced by garments of an altogether different class and finery. Reynolds wore a long velvet indoor coat, and frilled cauliflower cuffs flourished from each sleeve. His dark hair was slicked back tightly against his skull, like the shell of a bullet, and his face was neatly clean shaven. All similarities to the man who previously met Bishop Courtney in the dimly-lit backstreets of Crawditch had vanished, replaced by a man very much in control of his own destiny, and with a devilish glint of mistrust in his eyes.

Reynolds’s thin cigar, quivering on his lower lip, stopped dead as the house’s doorbell rang throughout the ground floor hallway. His narrow eyes shot straight to the open drawing room door, to the lifeless body of the house’s true owner. Lying with his feet protruding
into the hall, the dead man’s face was grey, and purple-brown bruises marked his neck where Reynolds had squeezed the life out of him.

‘Sorry, old chap,’ Reynolds said as he picked up the old man under his armpits. The carpet ruffled under the dead body’s heels as Reynolds dragged him into the room out of sight. ‘Highly undignified, I know, but needs must.’ The man had been dead for two days by this time and carrying his rigid corpse was like dragging a wardrobe.

Reynolds stepped out of the drawing room, straightening his neckerchief in the hallway mirror. As he strode to the front door, through the misted glass panes, he could make out the unmistakable silhouette of a policeman standing on the doorstep. He checked the carriage clock on the nearby reception table, and pulled open the door swiftly.

‘Ah…Constable Jennings,’ Reynolds said. ‘You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you until lunchtime.’

‘Morning, sir, I ’ad a bit of business nearby, so I thought I’d kill two birds, like. Actually, I wasn’t sure I ’ad the right address. I mean…didn’t old Mr Lehman used to live ’ere? The old Polish chap?’ asked Constable Jennings, examining the number painted on a plaque affixed to the outside of the house.

‘He still does live here, Constable,’ said Reynolds hastily. ‘He’s my uncle. In a bad state of health though, bless him. The poor fellow is simply dead on his feet.’ Reynolds flattened down his hair. ‘So…you didn’t come all this way for a social visit, I trust? You have some news for me, as per our agreement?’

‘Yes, sir. Well, you see, we’ve ’ad some developments in town. There was another murder late last night. A young girl this time, down by the docks, it was. Real nasty stuff, I saw it myself. Folks at the station’re pretty worried, let me tell you.’

Reynolds’s cold face forced a brief smile. ‘Really? Well, thank
you for the information, Constable Jennings, here’s a little token of my appreciation,’ he said, as he pulled his wallet from his inside breast pocket. ‘Same fee as usual, I trust?’

‘Um, well, actually, sir…there’s something else,’ Jennings gulped, his young face as white as a sheet. ‘That other thing you wanted to know about—that circus magician? A strange looking fellow in a cloak and top-hat you said, right? Mop of curls on his head?’

‘Yes, yes! What of him, boy?’

‘Well, he’s been to the station, just like you figured he would. He left there with some weird little Eskimo geezer about ten minutes ago. Thought I’d come and tell you right away, sir.’

‘Did he indeed?’ said Reynolds, rubbing his finger over his top lip. ‘Thank you, Constable, thank you very much indeed. Now, I shan’t keep you any longer, I’m sure you’re busy. Good day to you,’ Reynolds said, closing the front door.

Once he had seen the outline of Jennings step away from the front of his house, Reynolds rested himself against the thick, oak door and slumped down onto the floor. He slid his tongue across his teeth as a broad smile manifested itself on his face.

‘Well, well, well. So…Cornelius Quaint has arrived in Crawditch, and is getting his hands dirty already, eh? That certainly makes things a little more interesting.’ He tapped his front teeth with his fingernails. ‘It will be such a great pleasure watching him die.’