The Solitary House (18 page)

T
HE GREAT BELL
of St Paul’s strikes midnight, and one by one the towers and spires of the city go through their hourly catechism of answer and reply, making the night air hum and jangle, so that at last, when all is still, the silence that descends is electric with after-echo. The fog came on again just before dusk, but it is clear now, and from where we are, we can look down upon the clustered roofs of Bell Yard, and the ramshackle huddle of its dilapidated buildings. But even as we watch, a sudden shadow darkens the moon, a skein of cloud carried on currents so high and distant they have no power to stir the dark slow flakes that are settling soundlessly on these slates and window-ledges and chimney-stacks. For some reason the atmosphere seems denser than usual, the falling soot blacker and more sulphurous. Come closer, come with me down into the rag-and-bottle shop, and your breath will thicken with every pace, until we penetrate the heart of this unnerving ticking silence and push open the door at the top of the stairs. The desk is as we left it, the grate still empty, and the papers scattered as before. But this time, on the bed, there is a man. His head is thrown back at an odd angle so that you
cannot see his face, but there, on the coarse and yellowing coverlet, there is a dark and spreading stain.

When the dawn starts to seep through the half-shuttered windows of Charles’s room the following morning, he turns over drowsily to shut out the light and wakes with a hammer jolt of pain. The ache in his right side has sharpened to a howl, and his face feels twice its usual size. He puts out a hand tentatively and feels along his jaw. He was worried last night that it was broken, but it seems not. That’s something, at least. He hauls himself up and over to the wash-stand, thankful that it has no mirror to reproach him; he doesn’t even want to imagine what he looks like. The water is cold and stings, but somehow that helps and he’s got to the point of slowly pulling on his clothes when there’s a commotion on the stairs and the door flies open without a knock. It’s Stornaway, heaving for breath, his face red.

“Mr Charles!” he gasps before he’s even in the room. “Something’s gone off. Ye have to come.”

Charles feels his way back to the bed and sits down heavily; he can barely see out of one eye. It’s only now that Stornaway gets a proper look at him.

“The good Lord save us—whatever have ye done to ye’sen?”

Charles takes a deep breath. “I got into a—disagreement. That man I’ve been looking for took quite unreasonable umbrage at discovering me snooping through his things, and decided to make his displeasure known in concrete form. At least that’s what it felt like.”

Stornaway is not deceived by the lightness of his tone. “Ye ought to get a doctor to look at that face.”

Charles shakes his head—once only, when he finds how much it hurts. “No need. I’ve had worse.”

Stornaway smiles. “Aye, so have I, but it dinna make ’em smart
any the less. Let me at least send up Molly with some hot water and bandages.”

“I don’t need coddling. I need a drink.”

“I’m not sure as that’s such a good idea—”

“And what were you saying just then? When you came in?”

Stornaway hesitates. “Well—”

“Come on, man—you don’t drag that old body of yours up three flights of stairs on a mere whim. You must have thought it was important.”

Stornaway suddenly looks a little abashed. “The other night when ye were talking to the guv’nor, I heard ye say—that is I weren’t eavesdropping, but I couldna help but overhear—”

“For heaven’s sake, get on with it, man!” snaps Charles. “You may take it as read that if I was concerned about privacy I’d have locked the damn door.”

“Ye said ye were looking for a tanner.”

Charles snorts and opens his arms. “And as you can see, I have found him!”

But Stornaway isn’t laughing. “I heard it from the post-boy this mornin’. There’s been a fire. In Bell Yard—”

Charles is out of the room before he has even finished his sentence.

When he gets to the rag-and-bottle shop there’s little left to see, but from what there is Charles deduces at once that the fire started in the corner of the shop, then ran up the walls with sickening speed and into the shrivelled hovels on either side. There are at least twelve dead. So far. Among them a family of six caught in their sleep in the attic next door, and an old woman who seems to have been sheltering in the lee of the shop door. In the centre of the blackened rubble there’s another corpse still slumped in its chair, the skull mouth gaping, and shreds of cloth soldered into the cracked bone. The stinking air is still fluttering with the scorched remains of old withered paper
as Charles picks his way carefully through the smouldering embers towards the constable standing on the farther side. “Good morning, Ainsworth. Any idea what happened?”

“Not difficult to guess, Mr Maddox. Look at this place—’ard to think of better tinder. And I gather from the neighbours that the proprietor was in the ’abit of taking liquor. Was—to put not too fine a point on it—a notorious drunkard. Easy to see a candle overturned by a drunken ’and, sir. We’ve both seen that enough times. Even easier to see this lot going up like a Roman candle. Must ’ave been like bloody Guy Fawkes ’ere last night.”

“Where’s the lodger? The one upstairs—is there any sign of him?”

Ainsworth gestures towards the back of the shop. “See there—that pile of wood and timber? Part of the roof fell in. Compacted two whole storeys together like a stack a playing cards. If your man was upstairs, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

Charles starts in the same direction but Ainsworth holds him back. “I wouldn’t go no nearer, Mr Maddox, sir. Too dangerous by ’alf. The rest of that roof could come down at any minute. And it looks like you’ve ’ad one too many close shaves already.”

Charles shoots the man a glance but ignores his protests. It takes a few minutes to clamber across the deathtrap floor but it’s worth it, when he gets there. Under the rubble of singed joists and boards he can see a foot. A man’s foot. Blistered red by the fire but essentially intact. As is the body, when he hauls the planks off it. He crouches down and looks more closely. The back is broken but that could be the result of the fall; no way of telling either way. But not even the fiercest fire, in Charles’s experience, ever left its victims with their throats cut. And not just cut—scored so deep that the head is all but severed from the shoulders. He sits back on his heels. There’s only one conclusion he can draw: Boscawen was dead long before the fire started. Charles stands up and moves back towards the source of the fire. There’s no mistake here either—the tang is unmistakable. Sharp, woody, slightly resinous. Camphene. Notoriously—even dangerously—combustible, but still used to light lamps by half the householders in
London. Half the householders, yes, but not, as Charles well knows, by this one. This fire was no accident; it was arson.

Back at Buckingham Street, he sits for a while with his great-uncle. The room is quiet and Maddox is sleeping in his chair, his breath coming in soft erratic lifts and grunts. Somewhere in the house Billy is whistling. Charles reaches for the notebook in his pocket and his fingers brush the package of Cremorne letters. Apparently Knox called at the house in his absence, and will call again later. Tulkinghorn is clearly concerned to retrieve his client’s property, though why there should be such urgency, especially now that—

But that, of course, is the crux of the matter. Not only why Tulkinghorn should have involved himself in such an apparently banal business in the first place, but why a man like Boscawen had to be eliminated in so brutal and permanent a manner. For there is, to Charles’s mind, no possibility of coincidence in this affair. Within hours of Boscawen’s name becoming known in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the man was dead.

Maddox stirs and comes slowly to, blinking.

“Charles!” he says after a few moments. “You have returned, I see.” He stops and screws up his eyes, peering at his great-nephew. “I hope the deplorable condition of your physiognomy is not mirrored in the state of your investigation?”

Charles smiles; it’s obviously one of his uncle’s good days. “Quite the opposite. The investigation has closed and you were right. On both counts, in fact. He was a tanner, and he was a Cornishman.”

“Ha!” says the old man, snapping his fingers. “Exactly so! So did you find out the truth of it? Such behaviour, from such a class of man, can hardly be a random act of gratuitous malice.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Uncle, but I am unlikely to get to the bottom of it now.”

“Ah, I gather your suspect was not forthcoming.”

“Certainly not when I last saw him, but even less so now. He’s dead.” Charles’s tone is sardonic.

Maddox raises his eyebrows, trimmed now, regularly, by the ever-diligent Billy. “Now, that puts quite another complexion on the affair. You are not, I take it, about to inform me the demise was accidental?”

Charles shakes his head, and gives his great-uncle a short résumé of the morning’s events. The old man sits listening quietly, nodding occasionally, and now and then asking a question: timing, physical evidence, sequence of events. At length he sits back in his chair. “You did not tell me that it was Tulkinghorn who had commissioned you. Had you done so, I would have advised you in the strongest terms not to accept the case. I have had dealings with Tulkinghorn of the Fields myself, though it was some years ago, and we were on opposite sides of the matter in question. He was a formidable opponent, even then, and utterly merciless in the defence of even the most insignificant interests of his clients.”

“But you were successful—you prevailed?”

Maddox laughs drily. “We came, shall we say, to an accommodation acceptable to all parties. I think each man knew he had met his match, and neither was willing to pursue a confrontation that would assuredly have been the ruin of one of us, if not both. He has since paid me the ultimate compliment of one practitioner to another, and avoided me. As I have him. But you should know that even in so-called compromise he was utterly implacable. I am not, therefore, as surprised as some might be that this pillar of the law employed you to find a man solely for the purpose of having him killed. Nor is this the only time I have seen our profession made use of in such a fashion. Indeed, I can remember half a dozen similar incidents in my own career. In my case, however, I do not think I can recall a single instance where the culprit in question did not amply deserve his fate—indeed most of them would have received precisely the same adjudication at the hands of the law, could an adequate case ever have been brought.
But you know next to nothing about this Boscawen, and there is, as far as we know, no such accusation to be made against
him
.”

Charles leans forward and puts his head in his hands. His jaw aches with a deadened throb, and he cannot rid himself of the uneasy conviction that he has been royally duped. After everything he sacrificed in the name of principle in the Boone case, despite the suspicions he’s had from the first that there was something darker driving Tulkinghorn’s demands, he’s still allowed himself to be lured straight into the trap the lawyer laid before him. He looks up and sees Maddox watching him.

“I was just thinking about another case. The one that got me dismissed from the Detective.”

Maddox’s eyes narrow. “I believe I warned you at the time that you had nothing to gain from setting yourself in conflict with Bucket. I know the man, if any does, and he does not take kindly to opposition from any quarter, and even less from his subordinates.”

“But I was right—you
know
I was right—Boone wore a heavy ring on his right hand—if he really had strangled that man there would have been the marks to prove it—”

Maddox nods. “I agree, I agree. But that changes nothing. All the other evidence pointed the other way, even if most of it was at best circumstantial, and at worst trumped-up. Boone was doomed long before he took the dock. As were you, the moment you submitted that report to Superintendent Mason. It was a noble sacrifice, but a futile one. Do not do the same thing now.”

The two of them sit silently for a moment, then Maddox leans across and puts his dry and freckled hand on his nephew’s shoulder.

“Something tells me that once again my advice is not going to be taken.” He says it softly, though there is no resentment in his voice.

Charles looks up. “I’m sorry, Uncle, but I can’t just leave it at that. Tulkinghorn has lied to me from the start. There was never anything gratuitous or random about those letters. I couldn’t work out what was behind it before, but I know now—this Boscawen clearly had
something on Sir Julius Cremorne—something so dangerous that they had to kill him for it.”

There’s a brief knock and Billy appears in the doorway. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr Charles, but that man Knox is here again. To collect a package, he says. Seems to think you’ll know what he means.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

“But I already—”

“I don’t care. Tell him I’m not here.”

Billy’s cheeks are rather pink, but he makes no further protest. He backs out of the room, closing the door behind him.