The Lamplighter (18 page)

“He plucked out his eyes?”

“More simple than that.” The minister smiled. “He smashed the mirror.”

This was the first I had heard of the Mirror Society, and the first hint I had of its activities. It was a peculiar story, and as such was exactly in line with the whole case, so that I could not help but sense a connection, and swoop on it like a hawk.

“Who were the members of this Mirror Society?”

“It was more or less a secret gathering, as I say. Though I believe they met in a room in Atholl Crescent Lane.”

Groves knew the area well, having once been posted at the nearby West Port Station. “And what did they discuss there?”

The minister seemed uncomfortable. “Again, Inspector, it would be presumptuous of me to be critical, but I believe they were united in their opposition to the new philosophies, and the trends in science and theology, which they thought were potentially dangerous and even destructive.”

“Is it possible that Colonel Munnoch was a member?”

“Based on what I know of the Colonel, I would agree that is entirely possible.”

“And theatrical types? Lighthouse keepers?”

“Less likely, I would think.”

“Other clergymen, then?”

“Possibly, but Professor Smeaton was not—how can I phrase this?—not the most tolerant of clerics. Although…now that I think of it…” The minister's face contorted as he battled to retrieve a memory.

“Aye?”

“Yes,” the minister said. “I think I do recall him saying…and this was many years ago, mind, so you'll appreciate that my memory of the exchange is hazy…”

“Aye…”

“I do remember him saying he had been meeting with a Roman Catholic monsignor. And this of course surprised me, because he was not that fond of Papists, as he called them.”

“And this monsignor was part of the Mirror Society?”

“Possibly…” The minister shrugged, remembering how strange it had all seemed. “I simply recall Professor Smeaton availing me of this information for no apparent purpose. It was as if he simply felt uneasy, or even guilty, about the association and needed to unburden himself. He certainly had not been in the brightest of moods, and when he revealed this…I'm not sure, but I had the distinct impression that he was fighting the urge to say more.”

Groves thought about it. A secret society. Covert meetings in Atholl Crescent Lane. A strange association between usually antagonistic clergymen.
There was no certainty that it was all related to the current crimes,
he later wrote,
but I sniffed it like a bloodhound.

“I believe I can smell some more scones on the way,” the minister said. “Are you quite certain I can't offer you one?”

“Aye—I mean, no,” Groves said distractedly. “But one more question before I take my leave. And I ask you this as a simple policeman to a man of God.”

“Of course,” the minister said, with appropriate solemnity.

“With the nature of these murders in mind—the way in which the men were killed, and the way in which the murderer has so far escaped justice—with all this in its proper place, do you think it possible that some dark force has been employed?”

It was suddenly the minister's turn to frown. “Dark force?”

And now it was Groves who had to force himself on. “I mean some manner of power…beyond that which is normally at the disposal of man…”

“You mean,” the minister said steadily, “the art of witches and warlocks?”

Groves cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking, aye.”

The minister thought about it, decided the Inspector was not entirely serious, and judged it not improper to chuckle. “Well,” he said, “I would not like to see us venture down such paths again.”

But then, seeing from Groves's expression that he had little inkling what he was talking about: “The days are long past, Inspector, when one could judge a woman a witch, bundle her up in a sack, and hurl her into the Nor' Loch….”

Groves contemplated the idea, it seemed to the minister, with a conspicuous aura of disappointment.

“Which is not to say it is beyond the realms of possibility,” the minister now added expediently, to his everlasting shame. “I mean…if there is one area where even the most orthodox clergyman will find himself in accord with the most modern philosopher, it is in the acknowledgment that what we know about our powers is but a microscopic fraction of what is yet to be discovered.”

He laughed feebly, cursing his own weakness, and ultimately was saved by his grandchildren, who now ran in and swarmed about him, staring at Groves with disapproving abandon.

I might have pressed on and inquired what he meant by these mysterious words, only his imps had come bundling in again, and I did not want to sting their minds with frightening notions, though if truth be told they seemed willful little rascals, with more than enough demon in them already, and little inclination to fear.

Their number had swelled to just on seventy, and the lamps themselves to more than ten thousand. Now employed by the Town Council at three shillings a day, they formerly had fallen under the direct jurisdiction of the police and were still prone to being hauled out of bed by officious patrolmen to replace panes of glass or reignite extinguished flames, the brightness of the streets being in direct relation to the propensity for mayhem. In his days as a night watchman Groves had been especially officious, recording any dereliction of duty in his notebook with great assiduity, and thus he was not fondly remembered by the lamplighters, for whom he in turn accorded little respect: they were a clannish lot, clearly without the aptitude to hold down a job of any responsibility, and to him they always seemed a wee bit vacant of mind, which he attributed to the inhaling of so much effluvium from the lamps themselves.

Lean and hollow-cheeked, and on their feet for hours (lighting the lamps through the evening, extinguishing them partly at midnight, partly at dawn, and repairing them through the day), they now filed into the Central Office Muster Room (where they reported every day and were fined severely if late), and Groves watched them sag onto benches and slouch against walls, grateful for any opportunity to rest. He recognized Angus Norton, the ancient and unofficial chief of the tribe; Pat Kemplay, who sang arias on his beat with the authority of a celebrated tenor; and even Herbert Cieslak, the little Polish lamplighter who once had helped him apprehend a thief (“The Courtesan's Music Box”). With the others he was less familiar, though he recognized some of them by appearance and sensed that they had stiffened defensively under his gaze. Raggedly dressed in sooty overalls, holland jackets, waterproof capes, and threadbare trousers and caps, and pale to a man, they possessed, for all their lowly status, a curious tribal dignity, which they brandished like an impenetrable shield. These were men practically unblemished by scandal, for all their noctambulations; men who cherished their work, for all its miseries; men who were in temperament seemingly incapable of rash anger, for all their sleepless nights; and men who were almost universally regarded with affection, especially by the children, who hugged at their heels trilling, “Leerie, Leerie, light the lamps, long legs and crooked shanks!”

As such Groves found it difficult to believe they might be guilty of murder, or indeed much of anything sinister. Physically they did not seem powerful enough to inflict bestial blows, and in intellect they lacked the facility to escape with preternatural guile. On the other hand, he had been in little direct contact with them for many years, and certainly he had been informed of a stewing tension in their ranks. These were, after all, increasingly uncertain times for leeries. The evil electric light—which already blazed through the boulevards of Paris and the theater districts of London—was incrementally creeping north. In Birmingham factory workers toiled through the night under suspended arc lamps. In Sheffield a sporting club had conducted a football match in its horrendous glare. At the Edinburgh International Exhibition some months earlier a display of Jablochkoff candles had the ladies unfurling parasols to shield their eyes. There were seventeen electric lights already suspended over the platforms of Waverley Station, and Princes Street itself—where gaslamps were spaced in such proximity that a man could read a newspaper as he strolled—had been strung, for a three-month trial in 1881, with electric lamps so radiant that Edinburgh had been proclaimed “the land of the midnight sun.” The advantages of such light, as those of a “progressive bent” were apt to point out, were manifest: it was more powerful, more reliable, cheaper, and less polluting. The gasworks required to feed the old lamps were themselves considered dangerous, with suggestions in alarmist newspaper editorials that a single explosion in Holyrood might level the entire city like some latter-day Pompeii. In the hunger for change, for some sort of perceived advance, no one seemed to acknowledge that the new light, even shaded in alabaster globes and mounted on gallowslike brackets, was severe to the point of offensive and offered no hint of the fluttering flame that had warmed the heart of man since the days of the Neanderthals. And now, in its annihilating glare, the cheerfully whistling leerie, patroling his well-worn paths with aplomb, for the first time was forced to contemplate his own extinction.

Groves watched Leonard Claypole, the Town Council's formally dressed Inspector of Lighting, call the assembly to order and solicit reports on breakages and the installation of new lamps. One of the leeries reported troublemaking near the iron foundry on Salisbury Street, the panes smashed with well-targeted stones. Another suggested the gas supply in the vicinity of the Royal Horse Bazaar was becoming dangerously unreliable, and with the winter now hardening, and with it an inclination to heavy frost, the pipes might require cleaning or even replacing. There was a general grumbling about the new move, advanced by some of the papers, to have the residences of all the city's Knights of the Realm signposted with ornamental lamps, as already existed outside the residences of the Lord Provost, the bailies and police judges (ornamental lamps were more delicate, difficult to clean, and a magnet for vandals). And there was much pugnacious chatter about the inequitable designation of beats since the introduction of the newer, diamond-headed lamps, serviced with a smoldering pole, in which the younger leeries had taken to specializing, without acknowledging that they took altogether far less time to light than the whale-oil globes that had been around since the dawn of streetlamps. With these lamp types frequently intersecting, and the beats accordingly, it had been openly recognized by the Town Council, forever seeking to cut expenses, that the younger leeries were more efficient in their duties, and this provocative acknowledgment had in turn raised the hackles of the more senior lamplighters. The speed of lighting patrols had always been regulated by a tacit consensus, and it was considered insurgent to execute one's duties with a swiftness that threw the rest of the tribe into unflattering contrast. But now, with the specter of electricity bringing with it the prospect of a dwindling population, some of the more cavalier leeries seemed to be going out of their way to impress the lighting inspector with their productivity.

Ornamental lamps, the threat of electricity, and the inevitable emergence of self-interest: these were what constituted seething tensions in the tribe of lamplighters. But were they enough to turn one of them into a brutal murderer of professors, colonels, lighthouse keepers, and entrepreneurs? Groves had no idea why Evelyn might indict one of their trade, but he suspected some manner of hoodwinkery, generated for reasons best known to the waif herself.

When Leonard Claypole turned the floor over to him he stepped forward to a ripple of murmurs. “Good day to you, gentlemen,” he said, standing before a large ordinance survey map with beats marked in loops and circles. “I have no intention of detaining you as I see it is already darkening outside”—near the winter solstice, streetlamps were lit as early as two-thirty—“but it has often been the case that your type has proved helpful in assisting the forces of justice in their duties, and you must have heard of the terror that has blighted this city in recent days. I ask you now to consider if you have seen any person or beast roaming the night streets who in some way might have raised your suspicions?”

He narrowed his pale eyes and conducted a sweeping gaze of the room.