The Harvest Man (18 page)

Puzzled, he drifted along in her wake.

T
he boys, Robert and Simon, had still been asleep on the daybed and Claire had cautioned him about waking them—
“After what they’ve been through, sleep is a blessing”—
so Day had returned to Scotland Yard, leaving Henry and his bird, Oliver, behind to help and amuse the new household staff. The corner of the main room that was reserved for use by the Murder Squad was empty, everyone else off their desks and out in the city, presumably investigating things. Everything had been removed from the walls and set aside, waiting for the movers to take it all away to the new Norman Shaw building. There was a sense about the place of an ending, of people moving away and leaving it empty, devoid of all but dust and shadows, a party hall after everyone had gone home to bed.

Inspector Wiggins had taken full advantage of Day’s new drudgery duties. He had left a stack of witness statements an inch thick on Day’s desk, all to be sorted and abridged. And there were other odds and ends of reportage and paperwork left behind by some of the other police for Day to organize. He sat and stared at it all for a few minutes, then got up and limped to the back wall, beneath the coat hooks, where boxes of old case reports were kept on shelves, three high and twenty across. The bottom queue of cartons, which represented the oldest cases, had already been moved over to the new location. Only the most recent files were left, as they might still be needed again soon. He hoisted the topmost box of archives from the end of the shelf and took it back to his desk, opened it, and began to shuffle through the reports inside, not entirely sure what he was looking for, just aware that something was tickling the back of his brain.

He had barely begun sifting through the stacks of paperwork in the box when the door of the commissioner’s office opened and Sir Edward Bradford stepped out. He was holding a box of his own, a large garment box, tucked under his arm. He was a thin man with a full white beard and friendly intelligent eyes under a high brow. He had lost his left arm, all the way to the shoulder, to a tiger in India and subsequently kept that sleeve neatly pinned up out of the way. He walked to Day’s desk and Day took the box from him, cleared some papers out of the way, and set it down. He lifted the lid and shook his head at Sir Edward.

“It’s a constable’s uniform.” His eyes went wide. “Oh, no, you aren’t—”

“Don’t worry, Walter. I’m not making you walk a beat. Take it out and give it a look.”

Relieved, Day lifted the jacket out, leaving the corresponding dark blue trousers in the bottom of the box, and unfolded it, held it up so the light from the window hit it. Two buttons were missing from the front and another from the left sleeve, a bit of thread left behind where the smaller button had been torn off. The cuff of the left sleeve was frayed and threadbare, a long irregular stain drizzled down the side from under the collar on the right-hand side, there was a rip in the lining in back, the seam had burst along the right shoulder, and there was a hole beneath the armpit.

Day smiled at Sir Edward. “This was Hammersmith’s?”

“Yes,” Sir Edward said. “He returned it two days ago. I almost let him keep it. It’s not good for anything but rags now. Except the hat. That we can use again. I can’t very well pass the rest of this on to another policeman.”

“Yet you took it from him.”

“Well, perhaps we’ll start a Sergeant Hammersmith museum one day. This will be the centerpiece.”

“I’m afraid to even look at the trousers,” Day said.

“Don’t. They’ve fared even worse than the jacket, if you can believe it.”

“He’d come back, if you’d have him. You could just give the whole shabby thing back to him. He’d come today if you sent for him.”

“I know,” Sir Edward said. The glint of amusement faded from his eyes. “He’d come back to work today, and tomorrow, given his reckless abandon, he might very well be dead. If not tomorrow, next week. I didn’t sack him because I wanted to. I did it to protect him.”

“Sir, he’d rather die doing his duty than live by any other means. He’s a born policeman.”

Sir Edward held his hand up and waved it, dismissing the subject. “I thought you’d be charmed by the state of his uniform, that’s all. I’m not ready to take up this discussion again. Let’s at least allow the poor boy to heal from his wounds. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all.”

Day put his head down to conceal his excitement. The commissioner hadn’t ruled out bringing Nevil Hammersmith back to the Murder Squad. He was still considering it as a possibility, at least, and Day knew better than to push him on it. He refolded the jacket, not taking any particular care with it. A few more wrinkles and creases weren’t going to harm it. He laid the jacket back in its box and closed the lid, but Sir Edward didn’t pick it up.

“You’ve heard about Inspector March.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir,” Day said.

“Swallowed his own tongue.”

“Or had it fed to him.”

Sir Edward shook his head. “Inspector . . .” He stopped and sighed and shook his head again. “You know, it’s not that I don’t believe you.”

“About Jack, you mean? Jack the Ripper, still at large, still a danger to everyone in London? Hell, a danger to everyone in the country.”

“About that, yes. I believe that
you
believe that. And I’m not in a position to prove you wrong. But we’ve searched those tunnels, scoured them, for days, looking for any sign of the person you claim you saw there. We found nothing. We even had Dr Kingsley down there with his finger-ridge powder, whatever he calls it, and you know what he found.”

“He found the marks of Inspector March’s fingers.”

“Everywhere. He found that Adrian March had been all over that dungeon where you were held, had handled the implements of torture we discovered there, had touched nearly every surface that was there to be touched.”

“Which doesn’t rule out the presence of someone else there, sir, all due respect.”

“No. No it doesn’t. But it doesn’t help us find that person, either. You yourself admit that you never saw this fiend who hurt you so badly.”

“He stayed in the shadows, but I heard his voice. So did Sergeant Hammer . . . Nevil heard it, too.”

“Yes. You heard a voice. And you were both in a great deal of pain. You’d lost a lot of blood. And Nevil had a scissors in his lung. He was practically unconscious.”

“That doesn’t change the fact . . .”

“You must see that the logical conclusion is that Inspector March was your tormentor. Whether he was Jack the Ripper or not . . . That’s not for us to know.”

“Did he ever tell you he was the Ripper?”

“He never told me much of anything, Walter. Nothing useful. And now he’s gone, and he’ll never have the chance. You know how much I respected him.”

“I know.”

“And I know that you respected him, too. It hurts me that he changed so much. It hurts me that he did these things to you, damaged you in your body and in your mind. And it’s on me now to give you what you need to recover. You and Nevil, both. You think I’m punishing you with all this . . .” He pointed at the file box full of papers. “But I’m not. And I’m not punishing Nevil by sending him away. I hope you’ll see that someday.”

Day nodded, but didn’t look up from the top of his desk.

“Anyway, we’ve discussed all this. I just wanted to make sure you knew about March. One day perhaps we’ll both forgive that man for what he did. As it stands, it doesn’t look like he was able to forgive himself.”

Sir Edward picked up the heavy garment box. Day was impressed by the strength in the commissioner’s fingers, to be able to hold the box closed and grip it so tightly. Sir Edward tucked it back under his arm and hesitated.

“And,” he said, “I thought you might get a chuckle out of seeing the state of Nevil’s kit. Lord knows we can all use a laugh round here.” He turned and walked back to his office, but paused with his hand on the knob. “I’m going to miss this place,” he said. He didn’t look at Day; his gaze wandered around the empty room, at the scuffed floor, the old gas fixtures, the grimy windowpanes, and the faded green paint on the walls. “It has character. I’m not likely to live long enough to see our new headquarters become so well used.” He shook his head and stepped into his office and closed the door.

Day stared at his box of archived files for a long minute, then went back to unpacking it, stacking the paperwork on his desk. The desk where he belonged.

F
iona sat across from him, but she stared resolutely out toward the front of the bus and refused to look at him. He had decided to give her time. Eventually she would either get over whatever was bothering her or she would tell him about it and he’d have a chance to smooth it over. Meanwhile, in the absence of any better clues, they jounced along in an omnibus headed for St James and Jermyn Street. Hammersmith turned his gaze from Fiona to the woman next to her, who cooed at a baby in her lap, her free arm wrapped around a little girl who was busy pretending she didn’t see Hammersmith. He grinned at her and looked away when he saw her trying not to smile back at him. On the other side of Fiona was an older gentleman, oblivious to everyone else, his nose in a newspaper.

Hammersmith closed his eyes and spread his legs wide, folded his arms over his chest, steadying himself as the bus swayed gently from side to side. He could hear the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the clamor of other vehicles. He wished he’d thought to bring a book along. He had begun Jerome Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)
and had just come to the bit in chapter three where Uncle Podger made a mess of things while trying to hang a picture frame. Hammersmith imagined the character as his own uncle, whose name was Bamford, not Podger, and who wasn’t anything like as clumsy as the uncle in the book, but who brought a form of benign chaos with him everywhere he went.

Hammersmith fell asleep while thinking fondly about Uncle Bamford’s cluttered cottage, where he had spent many long summer afternoons. But he sank immediately into a murky nightmare scenario in which the cottage housed a street fair populated by enormous exotic creatures that bustled to and fro without looking where they were going. Hammersmith was lost in the midst of the steady flowing traffic of these blurry pink beings. He looked down and was not surprised to see he was wearing his old uniform, but it was much too big for him. His hat fell down over his eyes and he pushed it up, turning in small circles, trying to find a way out through the strange shoppers in front of him no matter which direction he faced. At last he spotted a rabbit hopping away from him, dodging the creatures’ feet, its white tail bobbing up and down, swaying back and forth in a way that made him feel as if the floor he was standing on was moving. The tail was a beacon and he followed it, darting between giant legs, holding his hat up so he could see. The hems of his trousers tripped him and he used his free hand to hitch them up, bunching the extra fabric at his waist in his tiny fist. He seemed to be gaining on the rabbit, who grew larger as he drew closer to it. He now saw that it was much bigger than he was; its tail was the size of a two-wheeler and it was shiny, glowing. Then it disappeared and Hammersmith drew up short at the mouth of an enormous hole. He peered down into the dark, which he now realized was a mine shaft, and saw a glimpse of that giant rabbit’s tail before it was swallowed by the inky blackness at his feet, like a flare snuffing out. He heard people moving out of the rabbit’s way: people he somehow knew were miners working a vein of silver under the street.

Panicked, not sure whether he was meant to follow the rabbit down beneath the earth, Hammersmith looked all round him and saw that he was utterly alone. The strange creatures were gone and the sun was sinking on the horizon. All the booths and kiosks were shuttered. Bits of discarded newspaper blew along the empty avenue. One stuck to his chest and he grabbed it, held it up in the last rays of the setting sun, and read the headline:
INCOMPETENT POLICEMAN GETS OWN FLATMATE KILLED! PRINGLE REVEALS MURDER PLOT!
He threw it away and immediately felt another windblown page hit him, this one much heavier. He plucked it from his chest, but it was now too dark to read it and it was covered in blood anyway, and he dropped it. The blood was his own, seeping through the front of his chest, soaking his shirt, thick and clinging and sticky.

He wasn’t alone anymore. There was someone else nearby. A man-shaped hole in the darkness moved steadily toward him and then it was there,
he
was there, and he leaned in close to little Hammersmith, brushed his dead black lips against Hammersmith’s ear, and whispered a single word, then pressed something into Hammersmith’s hands, something cold and metal. And then the man shape was gone. Alone once more, Hammersmith hefted the metal thing in his hands and knew that it was a pair of scissors.

He jolted awake and was surprised to discover that he was still on the bus and that his hands were empty. No scissors. Fiona was staring at him, a strange look on her face. The older gentleman next to her glanced up, annoyed, from his newspaper, made a great show of refolding it to a different page, then went back to reading. The little family on Fiona’s other side had all fallen asleep, the baby held tight in the crook of its mother’s elbow, the little girl slack-jawed, drooling on her mother’s arm. Hammersmith motioned to Fiona and she got up, made her unsteady way across the aisle, and sat beside him.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Hammersmith said. “A bad dream, that’s all.”

“You shouted something just before you woke up,” Fiona said. She appeared to have forgotten that she was cross with him.

“What did I say?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t make it out.”

“Doesn’t matter. It came to me while I was asleep.”

“What came to you?”

“Listen, when we were separated at the bazaar . . .” Hammersmith hesitated.

“Yes?”

“You got ahead of me on the steps there and someone bumped into me.”

“Did he hurt you? Is it your chest?”

“No,” Hammersmith said. “No, nothing like that. It was a man, but I never saw him. I mean, I didn’t see his features. He was already moving away from me, going up the stairs as I was going down. But he said something to me. Sort of whispered it in my ear.”

“What did he say?”

“He just said one word and was gone, and I didn’t understand it when he said it to me, but I dreamed it just now. In the dream I heard what he said. And I think it’s true. I think it’s what he actually said to me there in the bazaar on the stairs.”

Fiona nodded impatiently. “Right. And what did he say?”

“What he said wasn’t as important as who he was. His voice was . . . I’d heard his voice before. You’ve heard it, too, back then, back when he stabbed me, but I didn’t realize who he was until he was gone. Actually, I didn’t realize it until just now when I dreamed him up.”

“Nevil, you’re frightening me. If you don’t explain yourself right now, I’m going to get off this bus and leave you here and never speak to you again.”

“Fiona, it was him. He must have followed us when we went to see Goodpenny.”

“Him.” She said it as a statement. He could see in her eyes that she understood exactly who he meant.

They said it together: “Jack.”

He nodded.

“You saw Jack?”

“No,” Hammersmith said. “I mean, yes, but I didn’t see him properly, you know. Just the back of one side of him and then he was gone amidst all the other people. I never would have found him, even if I’d realized who he was right away and given chase. I don’t know, maybe if I’d grabbed his arm before he could . . .”

“But he said something to you?”

“Just one word. He said, ‘Slowly.’”

Fiona slumped against the back of the seat and silently mouthed the word in the direction of the old man’s newspaper:

Slowly.