The Solitary House (10 page)

Charles flushes, just as he did when his uncle caught him in his office all those years ago, but now it is from pleasure, not guilt. They sit in silence for a moment, feeling the old relationship returning, the old closeness reinstating.

“So was I right?” says Charles at length. “About the Ratcliffe Highway murders?”

Maddox sighs. “As correct as my own conclusions at the time, and just as likely to be disregarded. If you had finished reading my account you would have found that I was unable to persuade the authorities to pursue my theory of the case, and after the hapless Williams was found dead in his cell they were only too eager to draw a line under the whole unfortunate episode.”

“But you don’t believe he was the killer.”

“Certainly not at the King’s Arms, because he had a perfectly robust alibi. And when I examined his remains in the prison mortuary the corpse bore all the signs of a violent struggle. I suspect it was not suicide, as the turnkey claimed, but murder. Indeed, by that point I was firmly of the opinion that a large part of the evidence against Williams had been fabricated, and I had my own suspicions as to who might have done so. But given who those men were, and the public standing they enjoyed, I could not hope to convince Bow Street without concrete proof. Which I never found.”

Charles turns to the end of the case and finds a single final word. One he has never seen in these pages before:
Unresolved
.

“They buried him like a felon on the public highway,” says Maddox quietly. “With a stake through his heart.”

He looks away, his face troubled now. “It was my only other failure. That—and Elizabeth.”

Charles starts. He has not said her name since he left his father’s house for the last time six years before; has not heard it said since he was last in this house a twelvemonth ago. Hearing it now, so unexpectedly, he feels the iron close again about his heart. This is what he has been evading, all that time; this is what he feared, coming here again. And yes, there was some tiny, hidden, shameful part of his mind that saw his uncle’s madness as a relief. A guarantee that they would not—
could
not—ever speak of her again. Only Maddox is not mad. Not any more.

Charles takes a deep breath. “You did everything you could. You weren’t there when it happened, and by the time you arrived it was too late to—”

“That is no adequate excuse. If anyone could have found her,
I
should have been the one to do it. Taken like that, in the middle of the day, barely yards from where her mother was standing—”

Charles says nothing, knowing, just as Maddox does, that his mother never forgave herself for that moment’s distraction, those few minutes when her infant daughter was out of her sight.

Maddox strikes his hand against the arm of the chair. “I should have
found
her—what use are skills like mine if I cannot use them to spare my own family from a lifetime of regret and self-reproach?”

Charles shakes his head but the memory, so long stifled, will be suppressed no more. And as if in revenge for such long denial, the pictures in his head are more vivid now than the day it happened—the sounds more intense. He sees the soft curves of his sister’s face, and the tiny golden curls escaping—as they always did—from under the edge of her straw bonnet. Sees himself being told to watch her by his mother. Hears the taunts of the street-boys because he was holding her hand. Feels himself letting that little hand go, and turning away to play, his back to her all the while despite her tears. Hears then, and now, and ever after, his mother’s agonised cry. It was
his
fault. It had always been his fault. Not just what happened that day, but what it led to. It was all his doing. And he has never had the courage to confess it.

“Is that why you did it?” His uncle’s voice breaks into his thoughts and Charles looks up—not flushed now but white in the face. Maddox wasn’t even there that day—surely he cannot possibly suspect—

Maddox is watching him thoughtfully. “Is that why you took the Chadwick case? Because you hope to find not only a lost grand-child, but a lost sister too?”

Charles turns away and walks to the window. On the other side of the street two children are playing with a ball, and a little grey dog is racing around them, barking and wagging its tail.

“I took the case because I need the money. That’s all.”

Maddox turns, rather laboriously, to look at him. “I suspect, my dear Charles, that you are not being completely honest in that response. Not least to yourself. You know what I have always said—”

“—that a detective must never allow his own feelings to become engaged by an investigation, for they will only impede it. I know, I know, but I have never been as consummate a professional as you always were.”

It may be that Maddox himself has not always followed his own dictates as strictly as this might suggest, but of this the old thief taker gives no sign.

“Take care, Charles,” he says eventually. “I fear you will find neither child now, after all these years—”

“You’re not the first to say that—”

“—but you run a very grave risk of losing your
self
.”

The old man watches as the young man by the window stiffens, and then drops his head. Maddox has, in fact, long suspected what really happened the day Elizabeth Maddox disappeared, and is saddened that the boy has never felt able to confide in him. But he knows better
than to probe. His great-nephew resembles him in far more than merely name and intelligence; neither is adept at intimacy, and both are extremely well-practised in the evasion of emotion. It may even be—though Maddox has never considered this—that the
protégé
has patterned himself on the mentor in this, as in so much else. And with the past Maddox knows he has, and the secrets Maddox knows he keeps, is it any wonder Charles finds it easier to keep people at a distance—to investigate them as suspects, or study them as species, or even buy their bodies by the finite hour? Anything to avoid an equality of exchange.

All this while Charles is still at the window, but Maddox can see now how rigidly he’s gripping the window-frame, and he thinks again of the image that has come to him so many times in the presence of this young man—an image of a bright sheet of smooth paper, folded and folded and folded again until it is nothing more than a hard tight knot, closed into a fist.

A moment later Charles has turned to face him again. Their eyes meet, but the old man barely has time to register the look on the younger’s face before Charles turns quickly away and leaves the room. He can hear Maddox calling after him, but it’s only when Charles is half-way up to the attic that he hears the thud from below, and when he looks back down over the banisters he sees the old man sprawled on the lower landing, his stick flung from his grasp. And then pandemonium breaks loose. Molly with bandages, Billy with brandy, and—last, but worst—Abel Stornaway, who deciphers what has happened in an instant.

“What was he doing on the stairs all by his’sen?” he demands, as he lifts his master’s head. There’s a graze to Maddox’s cheek, and a wildness in his look now, that makes the eloquence of the last hour seem
like a distant dream. “He bain’t as steady as he was, Mr Charles—he needs watchin’ all the time.”

Charles has nothing to offer by way of excuse, and there’s an accusation in Abel’s eyes that he cannot counter. Between the four of them they eventually manage to get the old man to his feet, but by the time they get him back to the drawing-room he’s already starting to mutter and struggle.

“Should we send for the doctor?” asks Charles meekly, as Stornaway settles Maddox into his chair.

Stornaway tucks a rug over the old man’s knees and shakes his head. “The cut is not sae bad. And that doctor would only scare him the more. Leave him be, Mr Charles, just leave him be.”

Sunday morning, and all the bells in London are ringing. Some near, some distant, this from Christchurch, Endell Street, that from St Paul’s, Covent Garden; all marking a different moment for the passing of the hour. Charles is still asleep, despite the noise, one arm thrown back, his legs tangled up in his sheets much as we saw him once before, only this time someone else is managing his laundry, and the sheets are clean. There may have been a tap, there may even have been the sound of the door opening. Something of the sort there must have been, because when he opens his eyes he sees Molly standing at the end of his bed with a letter in her hand. He sits up with a start and feels, for a moment, absurdly embarrassed, as if she had caught him atop a whore. The girl sets the letter down on the table by the bed and leaves the room, her bare feet almost silent on the wooden boards. She does not smile; she merely delivers the message and is gone. Charles rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, aware, for the first time, of the smell of hot rolls and bacon that has drifted in through the open door. Letter first, then wash and breakfast.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Sunday morning, eight o’clock

Mr Maddox
,

If it does not interfere unduly with your devotions, I should like to see you this morning at your earliest convenience. I have the two letters that you requested at our last meeting
.

Your obedient servant
,
Edward Tulkinghorn
Attorney-at-Law

Charles looks at the note, and then sits back, his face thoughtful. The domestic demands of the last two days have not left him any time to set about the practical task of tracking Tulkinghorn’s culprit, but his mind has been hard at work all the same. Only what it’s finding for him so far, are not answers, but more questions.

Charles has, on the face of it, no obvious reason to be so sceptical about such an unexpected and well-paid commission, but sceptical he is, and even more so now. He’s always had an excellent instinct for a lie, and his time in the Detective has done nothing to dull it. And what that instinct is telling him now is that a man like Tulkinghorn would never deign to deal personally with such a mundane affair, even for a client as consequential as Cremorne. The fact that he
is
so doing—and that even such a trivial matter as the delivery of supposedly insignificant letters cannot be delegated—is as eloquent, to Charles’s mind, as Tulkinghorn is taciturn. Charles, of course, did not see what we saw, and cannot know what we know, but he’s certain all the same that there’s something the old lawyer is not telling him. But what that is, and how deep it goes, even we cannot yet fully imagine.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields looks particularly beautiful this morning, the trees frosty against a brilliant blue sky, and somewhere among the
branches, a blackbird singing. Charles presents himself as before, and as before he is shown upstairs, though progress is somewhat impeded by a little group of people in the hallway, gathered around a wizened and vociferous old man in a chair and a black skull-cap, attended by a lean female with a thin and wasted face. An angry altercation breaking out at just that moment, Charles leaves Knox to clear the house of such undesirable riff-raff and makes his own way upstairs. He arrives, as a result, rather sooner than his host seems to have anticipated, since Mr Tulkinghorn is not at his desk—is, in fact, still in a little ante-room Charles did not notice on his first visit, and from which come voices and the smell of fine tobacco. Charles catches sight—so briefly it is no more than an impression—of three men sitting round a table, and a fourth, older, grey-haired, standing upright with his back to the door. A moment later Tulkinghorn appears, closes the door firmly behind him, and moves, rather quickly for him, back to his wonted position of state behind the desk.

“Good morning, Mr Maddox.”

“Mr Tulkinghorn.”

As before, the lawyer takes the ring of keys from his waistcoat-pocket and unlocks the desk drawer. As before, the papers are placed on a plain brown sleeve. Two sheets. Tulkinghorn hands them to Charles.

“This arrived six weeks ago, the other some three months before that. As you will see, our anonymous correspondent seems to be lacking in either imagination or vocabulary. Or, indeed, both. It does not seem to me that they add a great deal to the evidence already at your disposal, but here they are.”

There is, indeed, a dogged persistence in the content of the letters:

   
I naw what yow did

You cannot hide from me

Yow sins will find ee out

   
I will make yow pay