The Kingdom of Bones (11 page)

It was simple enough when someone said it. Not so simple to do. Sebastian felt around with fingers numbed by cold, and plucked at material he couldn’t take hold of. Even when he got it, it wouldn’t come. But Sayers was pulling him upward, and between that and the suction from below he suddenly felt his arms come out of the sleeves and found himself floating free.

Sayers was grasping his collar with one hand and holding on to the flimsy handrail with the other, leaning right out over the water in a dangerous way. Moving in a crouch along the narrow plank, he guided Sebastian to the canalside as if steering a log.

There was a short iron ladder fixed to the timber on the back of the gate. Sebastian had not even the strength to grasp its rungs. Sayers hung him on it, and he clung there.

Sayers leaned down to him and said, “I know what you think you see. You think I am running from the gallows. Well, you are right. I am. But that is not because I am guilty. I am not a guilty man, Inspector Becker. And somehow I swear I will convince you of it.”

Sebastian had not the power even to attempt a reply.

He went, then. Sebastian learned later that he’d knocked on the door of the lockkeeper’s house in passing, and told the keeper of a man in distress in his lock basin. The keeper had hauled Sebastian out with a boat hook, and given him an earful of abuse for his foolhardiness.

By then, Tom Sayers was nowhere to be seen.

SIXTEEN

M
rs. Mack did not provide an early evening meal, but would cook the guests’ own food if they brought it to her kitchen. At around five, she would lay on an afternoon tea in the dining room, consisting of bread and butter with the occasional slice of seedcake. Basic fare though it was, it was usually appreciated by a profession for whom there could be few things to recommend a job more than the inclusion of a practical pork pie in the third act.

Today, however, appetites were at a low. It would be hard to say which had shocked the company more—the violent death of their callboy, or Tom Sayers’ arrest for the deed. There had been some talk of canceling the matinee performance, but Whitlock would not hear of it. The show went on; all the cast performed efficiently but as if in a daze, and quietly returned to the lodging house afterward. Only Edmund Whitlock and James Caspar were to be found in the dining room at ten minutes after five o’clock. Whitlock was feeding pieces of seedcake to Gussie, and Caspar was pacing the carpet.

It could be an oppressive room, with its heavy lace curtains and dark furniture and Mrs. Mack’s collection of hideous ornaments in every available nook and on every imaginable surface. Enlivened by company and conversation, it would be transformed. But for the moment, the only sounds were the tick of the pendulum clock and the spitty working of the little dog’s jaws as one tidbit followed another.

Caspar stopped, and watched the spectacle for a while.

Then he said, “They eat dogs in China.”

Whitlock broke another piece off the seedcake and held it up between thumb and forefinger. The little dog froze, watching it intently, and then snapped it out of the air as Whitlock pitched it within reach.

The actor-manager’s moods had darkened considerably over the past few months. Everyone had noticed it, but no one knew the reason why. Except perhaps for Gulliford the Low Comedian, who reckoned he knew a sick man when he saw one.

“Contain yourself, James,” Whitlock said now.

“For how long? They can’t hang him if they don’t catch him.”

“We’ll be back in London in less than three weeks. If you don’t manage to conserve your appetites until then, you’ll as good as exonerate him.”

Caspar drew a chair out from under the table and sat. He placed an elbow onto Mrs. Mack’s best lace tablecloth and rested his chin on his hand.

After staring at the dog’s performance for a moment longer, he said, “I could join in the search.”

“No.”

“Well, I’ve got to do
something,
Edmund. I’ll go insane.”

“I really don’t believe so, James,” Whitlock said. “Don’t be such a child.”

Caspar made a face that could only be described as a smirk, and sat back in his chair.

“Miss Porter doesn’t think me a child,” he said.

“You have a child’s want of education,” Whitlock said with weary patience, his attention still on the dog as it throttled down the last of the cake. “A talent for darkness has brought you this far. But the deeper meaning of it all escapes you still.”

Caspar leaped back onto his feet in irritation. “Why is it,” he said, “that when I complain of anything, I always get a lecture?”

“Then stop complaining. And find yourself something useful to do.”

“How can I?” Caspar said. “You’ve just forbidden me the pursuit of any satisfaction.”

Dusting the crumbs from his hands, Whitlock looked up at Caspar and laid out his meaning.

“Learn subtlety, James,” he said. “It is perfectly possible to destroy something innocent, yet leave no public mark.”

The best daylight in the house was to be had in the sitting room, at the front of the building overlooking the street. This was the room where Mrs. Mack kept her piano polished and her damask cushions plumped—her showpiece room, with grand curtains gathered back like a theater of Varieties and enough memorabilia to stock a museum. There were framed prints on the walls and china figurines along the mantelpiece. A doily on every table, and a vase or statuette on every doily.

In a high-backed chair by the window sat Louise Porter, studying a playbook. More affected by the day’s events than almost anyone else in the company, she sought distraction in her craft.

She was distressed to think of the time that she’d spent in Tom Sayers’ presence, never suspecting any part of the true nature of her “devoted servant.” Those constant small services, the innocent-sounding banter…all now took on a new and sinister aspect. Little had she known of how closely she’d been consorting with danger. The very thought of it now was enough to turn her skin to gooseflesh.

Sayers was a monster, and she’d been an object of his attentions. She’d allowed this—encouraged him, even, in her innocent way. And to what terrible end might it have led her, had his crimes not been discovered in time? The convincing way in which he’d dissembled showed him to be a better actor than any in the troupe.

And yet it was a strange kind of distress. It quickened her pulse, but it did not make her timid. Far from making her fearful, it seemed to increase her confident sense of her own existence. Yesterday, she’d known little of the world; today, she felt able to take on whatever else it might offer.

And some better acting parts would be a nice beginning.

She often felt at a disadvantage when she heard the conversations of the other players, offhandedly referring to this scene in “the
Dream
” or “the jewel scene in
Faust.
” Most of them had toured or played in stock for years. Unless she wanted to be locked into this one play until Whitlock had run it into the ground, her best chance of expanding her professional experience lay through reading.

She held the text up close, and wore a pair of small-lensed, wire-framed spectacles to aid her. They’d belonged to an aunt who had died; helping to go through her rooms after the funeral, Louise had given in to the temptation to try on the spectacles and had been startled at their improving effect. She’d meant only to study the look of herself wearing them in a mirror, having no notion until that point that her power of vision was less than it might be. Now they were a guilty secret. Not just for the fact that she needed them, but because of the embarrassing impulse that had led her to discover it.

At the faint sound of the door hinge creaking, she looked over the top of the book. Seeing Caspar standing in the doorway, she quickly snatched off the glasses and hid them behind the covers.

Caspar seemed not to notice. He was too busy looking downcast.

“Mister Caspar,” she said.

Caspar raised a hand. “I did not know there was anyone here,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Please do not feel you have to leave.”

Caspar shook his sorry head. “I would not inflict my presence upon you,” he said, and he moved as if to leave and draw the sitting-room door closed after him.

“Wait!” Louise said, laying her book aside, and he stopped. “Please explain.”

He made as if to speak, and then sighed and shook his head. “What can I say to you, Louise?” he said. “I am ashamed to be of the same species as a man like Sayers.”

“His crimes are not yours.”

“But I despair.”

“Why?”

Caspar moved across the room to the chair that faced her own. As he lowered himself to sit on the edge of it, he said, “Because all is tainted by his base and perverted passions. What must you think when you look upon me now?”

Louise considered his words, and then chose her own with the greatest of care.

“That there are passions and appetites which are neither loathsome nor unnatural,” she said. “But which celebrate God and the way that he meant us to be.”

He gazed at her with a kind of growing wonder, as if she had shone an unexpected light into his personal darkness.

“I wish I could believe it,” he said.

She grew bold.

“I wish I could persuade you,” she said.

And at that, Caspar somehow managed to give her a fair impression of a man who might be open to persuasion.

Later that evening, high up in the ironwork under one of the town’s many railway bridges, Sayers found himself a spot to settle where no one could steal up on him, nor any bobby’s lantern seek him out. He could look out through the spans and girders across the rooftops of the city: its gaslit streets, its distant chimneys, the caul of smoke that covered its sky and forever blotted out the stars. He huddled there in a coat that stank of the beerhouse he’d stolen it from, and he tried to set aside all inclination to bewilderment or self-pity and address his thinking to the greater problems that faced him.

He was satisfied that nothing in his hand was broken. As far as he could tell, the pain in his arm did not represent a new injury but a reawakening of the old. As such, it ought to fade.

But what to do with himself? Where to go? He’d no friend in this town other than Lily Haynes, and he had no intention of blighting her new life with his problems. He knew that he ought to leave, make a run for London, perhaps, but for one good reason could not bring himself to go.

He feared for Louise. There was a madman in the troupe, and she was close within his orbit. Sayers had no doubt that it was James Caspar who should now be in shackles, not he. The man killed paupers for sport and gratification. It was obvious that young Arthur had spotted the series of fatal coincidences during the months that he’d spent combing local newspapers for notices, while at the same time enduring Caspar’s unremitting and casual abuse. Passing the information to the police had been his revenge. Alas, the act had rebounded upon him.

Becker had spoken of a note, sent backstage by Clive Turner-Smith. It had supposedly been returned to its sender with an inscription from Sayers—the inscription that had led the superintendent to his end. Sayers had seen no such note. Which meant that another had intercepted and responded to it in his name.

Could Caspar’s grip on the boss be such that Whitlock had chosen to hand the policeman’s note to his Leading Male Juvenile instead of his acting manager? There could only be one reason for making such a choice—Whitlock must have guessed the significance of Turner-Smith’s arrival. Which meant that he must already have been aware of James Caspar’s crimes. Thinking back to that tearful display in the lodging-house hallway, Sayers was inclined to think that he had underestimated his employer. Perhaps the man was a greater actor than could be imagined by anyone who only saw him perform upon the stage.

It would not have been impossible for Caspar to keep the appointment in Sayers’ place. He was offstage for most of the second act of
The Purple Diamond,
apart from one appearance as a mysterious hooded figure outside a window. This was always an occasion for screams from the audience, and cheers when the mystery was explained—but because his face was never seen at that point, almost anyone might have doubled for him. He could easily have left the theater for twenty minutes and returned to pick up his cue. And then later, back at Mrs. Mack’s, he’d need only to choose his moment to hide the slaughtered callboy in Sayers’ room.

The bridge began to shake. Up above, a mighty engine passed over. First came its thunder, filling the archway, and then an aftermath of clouds and cinder sparks falling outside like fairy rain. To the damp and soot of the archway it added a familiar smell, of coal and steam and long journeys and places to be, of schedules and order and purpose. Only a few yards above him was the life he had now lost.

Somewhere beyond his sight, the town hall clock was chiming. The second-house performance of
The Purple Diamond
would shortly be under way. Sayers leaned his head back against the stonework and closed his eyes.

He’d tried to approach the lodging house, but had managed to get no closer than the corner of the street. From there he’d seen that the police had left a man outside, and so he’d turned up his collar and walked on without stopping. It was the same on Liverpool Street; constables were all around the theater and when the matinee performance was over, cabs arrived to take the women home.

Somehow he had to warn her. She would not want to listen, but he had to make himself understood.

After all, he was, even in his supposed disgrace and enforced exile, the most dedicated of her devoted servants.

Although the matinee had been a strange and muted affair, by the evening word of that morning’s events had spread all over town. By seven, the house was packed and the atmosphere was electric. Clearly, the
Purple Diamond
company had become a major and morbid attraction.

During the opening turn, Gulliford hovered backstage in his Billy Danson makeup and seemed agitated and almost too distressed to go on. The resident stage manager all but had to give him a shove to propel him out of the wings when the band launched into his walking-on music, but he steeled himself and conjured the nerve, and then off he went.

He would later say that once he was out there, it was as if he’d been handed complete power over some gigantic thousand-headed entity; that he had never known an audience like it, or exercised such control from the stage. The same act that he’d done for twenty years, that had drawn polite applause in Whitehaven and with which he’d “died on his arse” in Glasgow, went over like bread to the starving. They were hungry, they were ready, and they would grab and shake and devour whatever he cared to throw at them.

“Better have your mop ready, Charlie,” he said to the SM as he came off after his comic song to a storm of applause. “They’re wetting the seats.” And then he skipped back on and took another call, more like a big-name headliner than a second-spot man.

The mood stayed up throughout the entire first half of the bill, and when the curtain rose on the opening scene of
The Purple Diamond,
the noisiest of welcomes was followed by the most tense of silences as all strained to follow every nuance and development in the unfolding story…although it would have to be said that this was a drama in which the nuances were very few, and very far between.

But while it may not have been great art, it was damned good carpentry. Primed by the day’s news, the night’s audience had perhaps come along anticipating a drama of shock and sensation rather than intrigue and mystery. If they did, it was of no matter, because they took to the play’s actual narrative with no less enthusiasm.