Doktor Glass (19 page)

“Surely nobody would consider a police inspector with a distinguished war record beneath them?”

“Some might.”

“I’m sure she had a good life,” Sister Wright said.

“With her family? Yes, she did.”

“I didn’t mean with her family.”

Langton looked into Sister Wright’s open, smiling face and eyes. He felt as if he’d known her for years, not days. He went to speak.

“Ah, there you are.” Professor Caldwell Chivers strode out onto the terrace.

Sister Wright broke away from Langton, still smiling, and drew tight her shawl.

The Professor sniffed the air. “Bit chilly out here, Langton. I wanted to ask you about that chap Kepler’s case.”

“It becomes more complex with each day, Professor.” Langton hesitated, then said, “At least one other murder is a result of the first, and another two deaths may have a connection.”

The Professor moved closer. “And the Jar Boys?”

“They play a part, I’m sure.” Langton didn’t know how much to tell the Professor, who might not appreciate being considered as a possible suspect. Then again, he might have enjoyed the contradiction with the same enthusiasm he showed for everything else.

Langton said, “The strange neck burns appeared on Doctor Redfers’s body as well as on Kepler’s.”

The Professor clasped his hands in front as if ready to pray. “Ah, yes. Poor Redfers.”

“You knew him?”

“Very well. We met many times at the Infirmary, at symposiums, or over difficult cases he referred to us, and he must have dined at my house a score of times. A most sociable man; he seemed to know everybody.”

Another connection, but perhaps an innocent one. Redfers might have used the Professor to increase his group of contacts and the number of men who might buy his wares. For Langton couldn’t believe that women would want to collect the contents of Redfers’s jars; more likely, as with opiates and prostitutes, it would be the men who showed an interest. Men with too much time, too much money, and too little self-control.

As he thought this, Langton realized how far he’d traveled beyond disbelief. At the start of his investigation, the idea of souls trapped in containers of glass or clay had seemed impossible, risible, but too many people had died. Too much information supported the trade in jars. That meant that somewhere out there, Sarah’s essence lay trapped. Alone. Defenseless.

“Are you all right, Inspector?” Sister Wright asked.

“Just a chill,” he said, wondering if any of the Professor’s fine guests appeared in Redfers’s diary. One of those well-dressed, urbane men chatting and laughing. Did they have a secret basement room lined with innocuous-seeming containers? Perhaps one of them might return home that very evening and select Sarah’s jar to paw over, to lay his hands on the slick copper strips and—

Langton’s glass shattered on the terrace. “I’m sorry.”

The Professor waved over one of his maids. “Think nothing of it, Inspector. But perhaps we should return to the others.”

Sister Wright took Langton’s arm and stared up into his eyes. She didn’t speak. Just for a moment, Langton felt his own soul stripped bare and laid out for examination, as though Sister Wright could see every facet of his life, his memories. The thought did not scare him. Instead, he felt strangely comforted.

As they followed the Professor through the French doors and into
the drawing room, Langton said, “I feel guilty for monopolizing your company.”

She removed her hand from his arm. “You’d rather I bothered someone else?”

Langton, blushing, said, “No, not at all. It’s just that—”

“Don’t worry, Inspector,” she said, smiling. “I’ll return later. I’m sure you’ll want to meet as many of the Professor’s guests as you can. After all, that’s the main reason you’re here, isn’t it?”

Langton watched Sister Wright make her way through the groups clustered around the room. How much had she guessed? More than guessed; perhaps she
knew
that some of these men present were collectors. With her experience and position within the Infirmary, she must have watched over many final scenes and seen so much suffering. And seen those who might show too much interest in that suffering, just as the Resurrectionists showed an unhealthy interest in the dying.

Across the room, the smiling Professor moved from group to group, handshake to handshake. Sister Wright respected her mentor absolutely, Langton knew. And what if Professor Caldwell Chivers really was Doktor Glass? Would Sister Wright betray him?

Langton hoped she would never face that dilemma.

Now, as more and more guests poured into the room, Langton found himself pushed to the outer edges. Like a piece of beached driftwood carried on the tide, he settled near the flocked wall, between an enormous potted palm and a bookcase. He took another glass of wine from a passing tray and watched the movement of people, the black-and-white dinner suits, the pastel gowns. The scene resembled one of the Professor’s modern paintings hanging on the walls, a Manet or a Degas.

“Critical mass.”

Langton turned to the tall, stooped man who’d appeared beside him. “Pardon me?”

The man waved a hand toward the guests. “Watch them; a group of three becomes four, then five, then six, whatever. Eventually, the
group—unable to support itself—reaches its critical mass, explodes, and scatters its individuals like atoms, which, in turn, form their own compounds.”

Langton stared at his strange companion. The front of the man’s dinner jacket bore a collection of dotted food stains. His tie hung lopsided, and he’d shaved badly, leaving small clumps of grey beard beneath his jaw.

“You’re a scientist?”

“An atomicist, sir. And happy to celebrate the Span.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t see the connection.”

The atomicist stared at Langton like a teacher with an obtuse pupil. “No connection? No connection, sir?”

“I just—”

“How do you think the Span’s trains will journey all the way to America, sir?”

“I meant that—”

“How do you imagine that electricity appears? By magic?”

“If you let me—”

“The power of the atom, sir.” The scientist drew himself up. “Without the generators of the Llandudno station, without the mighty turbines driven by the precise fractioning of base atoms, there could be no electric trains to America. Why, steam trains would have no room for passengers—every carriage would have to carry coal for the journey. No connection indeed.”

Langton watched the atomicist stride away into the crowd. He shook his head and wondered if all scientists were so sensitive.

As more people entered the room, the press of bodies thickened. Langton eased along the wall and slipped through a door into a narrow passage. Cool and dim, lit by electric globes fixed to the old gaslight brackets, the passage seemed to descend. As Langton followed it he could hear music and conversation through the walls, or from behind closed doors. He paused a moment and sniffed. Hot dust and white flowers.

A door opened behind him to allow the sounds of laughter and a piano melody in, then slammed shut. Langton set his empty glass on a side table and continued down the passage. Ahead, golden light fanned out from under a door. Langton hesitated, listened, but heard only the echoes of the party behind him. The brass handle, cold and slick, turned in his hand. He threw the door wide.

A blaze of color: reds, blues, yellows, but above all, gold. Gold in the pharaohs’ headdresses, in the artifacts displayed within glass cases, in the chairs and statues, the ceremonial caskets. The electrolier overhead glinted off the precious metal and made the air shimmer.

The man standing in the center of the room turned from examining a glass display case and smiled. “I see you’ve discovered the Professor’s Egyptian obsession.”

Langton stepped forward. The room stretched at least half the width of the house; pillars of brick and steel supported the upper floors and opened up the space beneath. Against one wall stood the inner wooden covers of sarcophagi, richly painted with the stern faces of ancient pharaohs. Against another, glass display cases just like those in the center of the room, and just like those of a museum. Another wall contained brilliant hieroglyphs, apparently fresh and as yet unfinished.

The fourth wall held Langton’s attention. On deep shelves, row after row of squat clay jars: some decorated with faded colors, some inlaid with angular designs, some plain.

“He has an amazing collection,” the man said. “I haven’t seen pieces of this quality outside the British Museum.”

Approaching the man, Langton guessed his age at late thirties; quite short in stature but broad across the shoulders, with deep-set eyes and a jutting jaw. More than anything, he looked tired.

The man extended his hand. “Henry Marc Brunel.”

That explained the obvious fatigue: The Brunel partnership—grandfather Marc, father Isambard Kingdom, and son Henry Marc—had designed the Span and worked on it from its inception. Their
family had practically built the bridge and invented the vast floating city-ships that had enabled its construction.

Langton shook hands. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

Brunel smiled and waved away the compliment. He turned to the exhibits. “Truly remarkable, aren’t they? To think that craftsmen’s hands worked on these millennia ago. Look at the detail on these brooches.”

To Langton, the black-and-gold scarab brooches in the glass case looked too much like the cockroaches he’d found in Gloucester Road, or the translucent creatures that had spilled from the sewer tunnels.

Brunel leaned close to the artifacts behind the glass. “I can imagine those clay oil lamps flickering in some workman’s mud house by the Nile, while the same design in gold might have illuminated a pharaoh’s chamber or thrown their light onto a priest’s holy book at Karnak.”

Artifact after artifact lay behind glass on padded velvet. Worked in clay, gold, wood, bone. Some seemed almost recent, some so old they could have disintegrated under Langton’s gaze.

Langton realized that the Brunels shared the recent public fascination with all things Egyptian. Ever since Professor Maspero, young Howard Carter, and his colleagues had unearthed the Valley of the Kings, the great temple at Karnak, Thebes, and the Upper Nile Valley, Egypt had entered the public’s imagination. Touring exhibitions, readings, lantern shows, and many popular books had started a craze that showed no signs of abating.

When Brunel paused, Langton said, “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at your interest; the designs on the Span give it away.”

“You mean the bas-reliefs?” Brunel smiled. “They take the temple of Amun-Ra at Thebes as their inspiration. Hopefully the Span will last almost as long as the great temples; we like to imagine our descendants poring over the motifs just as we pore over the work of the ancients.”

As they spoke, Langton guided Brunel closer to the fourth wall.
He stopped before the shelves of jars and said, “I wonder what use these had.”

Brunel reached out to touch one of the clay jars but stopped at the last moment. “Canopic jars: the most sacred containers. During the mummification process, physicians removed the intestines, stomach, and liver and decanted them into these jars, then filled the body cavity with linen and cotton. Strangely enough, they did not remove the heart, which they believed housed the soul. They inserted a hook up the nose and pulled the subject’s brains out, again decanting them into jars.

“As the process continued, and attendants prepared the body with strips of linen soaked in embalming fluid, the sealed jars were placed within the final tomb, alongside the sarcophagi. They believed that through this process, the body would be reborn, complete, in the afterlife.”

Seeing the expression on Langton’s face, Brunel said, “Is it any more brutal than our own methods of interment? Whereas they used resins, we use formaldehyde. Just as they removed the organs, so do we, in the name of science or research. They treated their dead with as much dignity as we do. More, in fact.”

Langton closed his eyes and pushed down the scream that rose inside him. Brunel could not know his words cut deep.

“I say, are you all right?”

“Pardon me,” Langton said, forcing a smile. “I’m a little…tired. Overwork.”

Brunel stared at him. “You should take care, my friend. One must not concentrate so much on one’s work that it obscures all else. For proof of that, I need look no further than my own grandfather and father; their zeal almost finished them off.”

A fragment of a headline returned to Langton, and before he could stop himself, he said, “The Thames Tunneling Company.”

Brunel looked away. “Exactly. My father and grandfather almost
died during the Rotherhithe tunnel’s excavation. But their work on caissons, and Grandfather’s tunneling shield, gave us the knowledge we needed to build the Span. Sometimes I wonder if the sacrifice is worth it.”

Langton knew that almost the whole country, if not the world, believed that the Transatlantic Span would be a great monument; he went to reassure Brunel but at that moment another door opened beside the leaning sarcophagi. Professor Caldwell Chivers entered, preceded by two laughing girls in taffeta gowns. Upon seeing Brunel and Langton, the women stopped and gave tentative smiles.

The Professor stepped forward. “Brunel. I wondered where you might be hiding. You too, Langton. You’ve discovered my secret vice.”

Langton made a point of not looking at the shelves of jars. “You have quite a collection, Professor.”

“A passing fancy,” the Professor said, nevertheless smiling at the compliment. “Although I must admit I had a fascination with Egyptology even before the current fad started. To think that the ancients had such a well-developed society thousands of years before ours.”

Brunel said, “They set a fine example, Professor, but I have to thank you for your help on the Span’s bas-reliefs.”

The Professor bowed slightly. “It was nothing, sir. A pleasure. I’m honored to contribute even a minuscule part.”

Langton turned to Brunel. “The Professor helped in the design?”

“On the British side, we used his motifs on several of the towers, including the very first. They are very striking.”