The Martian Ambassador (16 page)

‘You did a great service to your country,’ said Voronezh, ‘to your Empire, to your world. If the Sha’halloth eggs had hatched, it would have been the end of all of you. After reading your report, your Government decided to place an indefinite moratorium on Vril research. It was a wise decision. The people of Earth have much to thank you for. But we have digressed considerably. We were speaking of the Martian attitude to Earthmen. I repeat: we bear you no animosity whatsoever; we consider you as friends.’

‘But that attitude could change,’ said Blackwood, grateful that they had returned to the matter at hand.

‘Yes,’ replied Voronezh. ‘Of course it could change, given sufficient impetus.’

‘The Venusians
want
it to change. They want us to become enemies. Why?’

‘I do not know. But it does seem likely that they will continue with their agenda. Their activities, I think, will escalate in seriousness.’

‘I agree,’ said Blackwood with a sigh. ‘I think you’re right that these attacks by Spring-Heeled Jack, or Indrid Cold – whatever you want to call him – are only the first phase of some dark plan. The assassination of Lunan R’ondd was the second phase. He isn’t finished yet, not by a long way. But the question is: what does he intend to do next?’

‘The only thing that can be said with any certainty,’ replied Voronezh, ‘is that he will do
something
.’

While Blackwood was discussing Spring-Heeled Jack and his nefarious plans with Petrox Voronezh, Sophia’s carriage turned from Richmond Terrace onto Victoria Embankment and came to a halt outside New Scotland Temple. Beyond the Gothic ramparts, which were banded in red brick and white Portland stone, the elegant spire of the great Clock Tower rose from the Palace of Westminster in the growing murk of another London particular. Through the veil of dun-coloured fog, the Tower took on a sinister, spectral aspect, which Sophia found entirely in keeping with her present mission.

She asked her driver, John, to wait for her; then, gathering the collar of her coat tight about her neck to ward off the dank chill, which she found most inconvenient despite its aptness, she walked quickly to the main entrance and through the arched granite portico.

The desk sergeant smiled and nodded to her as she approached, for Sophia was well-known and respected by the Metropolitan Templar Police. ‘Good morning, your Ladyship,’ he said. ‘How may I be of assistance?’

Sophia returned his smile. ‘Good morning to you, sir. I wonder if I might speak with Detective de Chardin? Is he here?’

‘He’s in his office, I believe.’

Sophia indicated the door leading from the entrance lobby into the interior of the building. ‘May I?’

‘Of course, Lady Sophia,’ replied the sergeant. ‘I’m sure he’ll be very happy to see you.’ There was a subtle note of sadness or regret in the man’s voice, which suggested to Sophia that the Spring-Heeled Jack investigation was not going particularly well, and that de Chardin would indeed be pleased to see anyone who might shed further light upon it.

She nodded her thanks, went through the door and walked briskly along a series of corridors leading further into the warren-like depths of the building. Here and there, she passed police officers who recognised and greeted her cordially, and despite the sinister strangeness of the case upon which she was engaged, she felt a sudden, powerful sense of safety and wellbeing.

Along with all other decent, law-abiding citizens of the British Empire, Sophia believed the Metropolitan Templar Police to be one of its greatest assets. The organisation had changed frequently and radically in the nearly eight centuries since its creation in 1119, when a knight of Champagne named Hugh de Payens bound himself, along with eight trusted companions, in a perpetual vow to defend the Holy Land and the pilgrims who travelled there.

Within two hundred years, this knightly order, which became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or simply as the Knights Templar, became one of the richest and most powerful organisations in the world, possessing lands and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of most, together with a military power to rival that of many nations. Their success was not to last much longer, however, for it bred jealousy and animosity in the hearts of many, including Philip the Fair of France. Bankrupt, fearful and envious of the enormous power and wealth wielded by the Knights Templar, Philip contributed to the spreading of dark and terrible rumours about the Order: that they fought for no other reason than to swell their own coffers; that they were secretly in league with the Saracens against whom they had ostensibly sworn to fight; that they secretly worshipped the Devil, and so on, and so on.

Philip the Fair ordered the arrest of the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, along with sixty of his fellow knights, who had accepted Pope Clement V’s invitation to go to Paris to discuss a new Crusade with the kings of Armenia and Cyprus. While de Molay and the other Templars were suffering the most hideous tortures designed to elicit confessions of devil-worship and other blasphemies, Philip took possession of the Paris Temple and sent word to the English King Edward II, advising him to take similar action against the Order there. Edward replied that he had serious doubts as to the veracity of the charges levelled against the Templars and wrote to the kings of Portugal, Castile, Aragon and Sicily, asking if there were any truth to the accusations. Although the replies Edward received maintained the Templars’ innocence of all such charges, Pope Clement assured him that they were true and ordered him to suppress the Order.

In 1314, after years of imprisonment, Jacques de Molay was burned alive on a charcoal fire on the Ile-des-Javiaux in the Seine, and many of his fellow Templars fled their lands, seeking safe havens across Europe. One of these was western Scotland, where they allied themselves with Robert the Bruce in his war of independence against the English, contributing to his victory at the Battle of Bannockburn, in return for which they were allowed to remain in that country unmolested. Thus did the unhappy and unjustly victimised Order maintain its presence in the British Isles.

In the centuries that followed, the Knights Templar gradually re-established themselves as bankers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists in Britain, ever mindful of their betrayal by the Catholic Church, declaring themselves the enemies of social injustice and the oppression of the weak by the powerful.

Such was their reputation for decency and fairness that when Sir Robert Peel was appointed as Home Secretary in 1822, and put forward his plan to standardise the police and make it an official paid profession, his thoughts turned first to the Knights Templar. Until then, inefficiency and corruption, combined with the lack of proper organisation, had largely robbed the public of its faith in the volunteer parish constables, watchmen and Bow Street Runners who had hitherto policed London’s streets. The Knights Templar, Peel believed, were the perfect group from which to recruit his new force. Thus was the Metropolitan Templar Police Act passed in 1829, and the Order which had begun its life protecting pilgrims on their journeys through the Holy Land in the twelfth century, now protected law-abiding citizens going about their business in the heart of the British Empire in the nineteenth.

Sophia came to a halt at the door of de Chardin’s office and gave a knock.

A voice drifted out to her. ‘Come!’

Gerhard de Chardin was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands when Sophia entered. On seeing her, he sprang to his feet, a look of surprise on his finely-chiselled features. ‘Lady Sophia!’ he cried. ‘Do please come in.’

‘Thank you, Detective de Chardin,’ Sophia replied, watching in amusement as he hurriedly moved a small pile of papers from a chair and placed it before his desk, and then (with a rather charming self-consciousness) smoothed his neatly trimmed goatee.

‘Would you care for some refreshment?’ he asked, taking his own seat again. ‘A cup of tea, perhaps?’

‘Thank you, no.’

‘Well… to what do I owe the honour, your Ladyship?’

‘I have come to offer you my assistance in the case you are currently investigating.’

‘The Spring-Heeled Jack business?’ he asked, surprised.

‘The same.’

‘I see. May I ask what interest the SPR has in the affair?’

‘Our interest was piqued by the apparently supernatural abilities which he seems to possess,’ she explained. ‘As a result of my own investigations, I have come into possession of a piece of metal from one of the villain’s talons.’

De Chardin sat forward suddenly. ‘You have? May I see it?’

‘You may indeed, sir – but not now, for I do not have it with me; it is at present at the SPR headquarters, where it has been examined by our best chemists and psychometrists.’

‘And what were their conclusions?’ de Chardin asked.

When Sophia told him, the detective gazed at her, open-mouthed, for several moments. ‘Venus?’ he managed to say, presently.

‘Venus,’ she replied.

‘Good grief.’ De Chardin stroked his beard, contemplatively this time. ‘What does it mean?’

‘That is what I’m endeavouring to find out, along with Mr Thomas Blackwood of Her Majesty’s Bureau of Clandestine Affairs.’

De Chardin nodded. ‘I know Mr Blackwood. He’s a good man, a credit to the Empire.’

‘Indeed,’ Sophia replied, suppressing the smile which seemed to have begun to spring unbidden to her lips whenever she thought of the Special Investigator. As de Chardin listened with mounting interest, she related everything that had happened thus far in the affair of the Martian Ambassador’s assassination, and how it appeared to be intimately connected with the activities of the mysterious attacker. ‘I take it,’ she concluded, ‘that you will be interviewing witnesses to last night’s assaults.’

‘Certainly. In fact, I was about to make my way to the scene of the first incident. Would you care to accompany me?’

Sophia smiled. ‘I’d be delighted. We can use my carriage.’

*

In spite of the trust and esteem in which the Templar Police were held, Sophia and de Chardin found it surprisingly difficult to find witnesses, or to persuade them to talk when they did find them.

‘It’s as if they’re still terrified of the miscreant,’ the detective commented as they rode in Sophia’s carriage towards Bermondsey and the scene of the previous night’s murder of the young prostitute. ‘Terrified that if they talk, he will know and return to exact his vengeance upon them.’

‘One cannot blame them for being so afraid,’ Sophia replied. ‘They believe Spring-Heeled Jack to be possessed of supernormal powers – and they are right.’

‘Supernormal, yes,’ said de Chardin, ‘but not supernatural. If this Indrid Cold is from another world, then he is a physical being, and as such he is mortal and capable of being apprehended.’

Sophia glanced at her companion. ‘Let us hope so, Detective de Chardin… let us hope so.’

The carriage passed a line of warehouses and factories, established in recent years along the banks of the Thames in an effort to rescue the district from the filth and squalor that had afflicted it and its people. The project had only been partially successful, however, for there were still large areas of Bermondsey where human misery and despair maintained their grip, an incurable disease of body, mind and soul that seeped from the flaking, sagging buildings and rose like a hellish fume from the sewers that threaded cancerously through the area.

It seemed to Sophia, as she looked out at the newer buildings which hid the spiritual and material darkness beyond, that there were parts of the city that possessed their own peculiar evil, their own special degradation that no amount of regeneration would ever entirely banish or even ameliorate. Built by human beings, it had turned against them, in the manner of the creature assembled by Dr Frankenstein some years ago, which had cursed its creator for inflicting unwanted existence upon it.
Is it progress you want?
the city seemed to say.
Very well; behold your progress. Look upon it and weep!

The carriage left the warehouses and factories behind and entered a narrow street flanked by decrepit buildings that slumped as if in exhaustion, their time-worn bricks sweating and glistening in the fog’s dank caress. Here and there, figures moved in the gloom, each a sad Theseus wandering through a labyrinth from which there was no escape, for there was no Ariadne to offer a ball of string by which they might find their way into the light.

The carriage moved on, watched by dull, hooded eyes, until it came to the edge of the sewer where Indrid Cold’s victim had met her atrocious end.

As Sophia and de Chardin stepped down from the carriage, two rough figures approached from out of the shifting tendrils of fog.

‘Well well, what ’ave we ’ere?’ said one.

‘Looks like a fine lady an’ gentleman, come to pay us a visit,’ said his companion.

Sophia shuddered as she took in their appearance: their ragged, filthy clothes, their beady eyes glinting in hostile, hungry faces. One of them looked her up and down, grinned foully at her and licked his lips.

The first speaker chuckled and said, ‘If the gentleman will kindly hand over his valuables, which includes the young lady, we’ll be on our way. Ain’t that right, Bert?’

‘Oh yes, Alfie,’ said the other. ‘That’s right enough. You may rest assured, sir, that we’ll spend your money wisely… and spend ourselves on the young lady!’ They both chuckled lasciviously.

De Chardin unbuttoned both his Ulster and the grey coat beneath to reveal the large cross that was stitched in crimson silk upon the breast of his shirt. ‘Templar Police,’ he said in a quiet, measured tone which nevertheless hinted at great power and greater ruthlessness. ‘Begone, or suffer the consequences.’

The expressions on the two ruffians’ faces were transformed instantly from greed and lust to uncertainty and fear. One scratched his stubbly chin, clearly debating with himself whether to chance his arm against the stranger. The other, however, allowed himself no such equivocation, and tugged at his colleague’s sleeve, drawing him away into the murk from which they had emerged.

Sophia let out the breath she had been holding as de Chardin turned to her. ‘Are you all right, your Ladyship?’

‘Yes, I’m quite all right, Detective de Chardin,’ she replied, glancing up at her driver. John nodded to her as he put away the large revolver which he had withdrawn as soon as the ruffians appeared. ‘I don’t believe I was ever in any danger.’

De Chardin gave a wry smile, for he had also noticed John’s weapon. ‘Indeed not. In fact, I believe this abysmal stench offers more peril than any of Bermondsey’s denizens.’