The Black Book of Secrets (18 page)

Jeremiah’s dying word had shattered my world. When I
looked into his eyes I could see no lie. I walked slowly back
up the hill and my heart was leaden. I was torn up inside.
All this time I had thought Joe was better than the rest of
us, better than I could ever hope to be, but in the end he
was as bad as my own Ma and Pa, if not worse; to my knowledge
they at least had never wilfully killed anyone. Yes, like
everyone else, I had wanted Joe to stand up to Jeremiah
Ratchet. But I had never thought it would end like this.
There was no other way to say it. Joe Zabbidou was a murderer.

But how did he do it?

I went over and over in my head the last meeting
between the two of them, searching for clues. There was
no weapon and Jeremiah wasn’t injured in any way. Perhaps
he was poisoned. But how was it administered? It could
have been the brandy. But both had drunk from the same
bottle. Maybe it was in the glass.

That was it! Joe had put poison in Jeremiah’s glass before
pouring the brandy. Jeremiah had drunk it in one gulp and
then, presumably to Joe’s delight, he had washed it down
with more.

Joe was waiting for me by the fire, a glass in his hand, and
he looked as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
He had even straightened out the room.

‘Did you get it?’

I handed it over.

‘Good work. I knew I could trust you.’

I wanted to say something but I was still too shocked to
speak. Then I noticed his satchel on the table. It was buckled
and bursting at the seams. A small drawstring bag sat
beside it. Icy fear ran in my veins. I found my voice.

‘You’re not going, are you?’

He put his hand up to silence me.

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

Something was happening outside. I could hear the
murmur of voices and the sound of feet breaking through
the frozen snow. I crept to the door and looked into the
shop. Cloaked shapes moved on the other side of the
window with faces like devils lit up in the light of flaming
torches. And among them I could see the stooped outline
of Obadiah Strang and beside him the tiny figure of Perigoe
Leafbinder and beside her the thickness of Horatio Cleaver.

‘Come out, Joe Zabbidou,’ chanted the shadows, a
hundred strong, ‘or we’ll burn you out.’

At the sight of this demonic throng my legs went weak
and I staggered back to Joe in terror. ‘They’re out there, all
of them,’ I hissed. ‘They’ve come for us, like Polly said.
They’re going to kill us.’

But Joe stayed where he was and took a long slow
draught of his drink.

‘Just be patient,’ he said. ‘Just be patient.’

‘There’s no time for patience,’ I snapped in a panic,
clutching at his cloak.

He took me by the wrists and held me away from him.
‘Not yet.’

‘Come out, Joe Zabbidou, come out!’ The voices
swelled into a menacing chorus. Then with a tremendous
crash the shopfront window shattered and the counter was
sprayed with splintered glass and the room was filled with
smoke and the smell of burning oil and the sharp crackle of
flames. Outside on the street they were kicking at the door
and beating it down with cudgels. The noise was deafening,
the smoke black and choking, the heat intensifying.

‘Come out, Joe Zabbidou,’ they cried. ‘Come out!’

Still he wouldn’t move and he wouldn’t let go. I tried to
pull away, but his grip was like a vice. ‘Are you going to let
me die too?’ I shouted, but he didn’t hear me. His head was
cocked to one side and he was listening intently.

I began to scream and yell. The abominable cacophony
outside rose to an inhuman pitch. Clouds of smoke rolled
into the back room until I could barely see my own hand in
front of my face. At last, out of all this madness there came
another voice. A shrill voice that carried above the confusion.
Polly’s voice.

‘Ratchet’s dead! Jeremiah Ratchet’s dead.’

Joe released my wrists and raised his arms in triumph
above his head.

‘
Acta est fabula
,’ he said. ‘It is over.’

Polly had woken in the night but she didn’t know why. Now
that she was awake she felt hungry. Certain that Jeremiah
would be in bed she took a candle and crept down the stairs.
On her way to the kitchen she noticed that the front door
was open and she closed it. So he had gone out after all. ‘I
suppose he’ll be back soon enough, drunk as a lord,’ she
muttered. Then she saw the light in the study and went in.

The dinner tray from the previous evening was on the
desk and Polly shook her head in irritation. She hated to see
good food go to waste. A slice of pie sat on the plate
untouched. She nibbled at a piece of crust and immediately
spat out what she took to be a bit of grit and wrinkled her
nose.

‘That’s one of Horatio Cleaver’s pies,’ she said to herself.
The butcher had brought it to the house personally
only that evening. She made a mental note to tell Horatio
what she thought of it next time she saw him. Then she
noticed damp footprints on the rug that led to the fire, the
hat and scarf tossed on the floor.

‘Lord above,’ she exclaimed, hastily wiping any telltale
crumbs from her mouth. ‘Mr Ratchet, what are you doing
here?’

Polly could see the top of his head – instantly identifiable
by the shiny bald patch in the middle – above the back of
the chair and his remaining hair, grey and white in colour,
sticking out defiantly over his ears despite daily applications
of expensive hair lotion. She rounded the chair cautiously
to meet Jeremiah’s open-eyed stony gaze of death and
screamed.

Nobody would ever claim that Jeremiah Ratchet was an
attractive man. He had all the appearance of a toad about to
burst. In death he was little changed, just less flexible, sitting
stiffly in the chair. In his hand he still had the loose page,
held fast between his rigid fingers. Polly wasn’t interested
in what he had been reading (though she was struck by the
beauty of the picture), she was mesmerized by the expression
on his face. His mouth was fixed open in a sort of
grimacing yawn and his eyes were unnaturally wide. It
was as if he had just been told something truly shocking.

Poor Polly had never encountered a corpse at such close
quarters and it took some moments for her to gather her
wits. Once gathered, however, she proved to be a practical
girl. With trembling fingers she reached into Jeremiah’s
waistcoat and found his purse, which she stuffed down the
front of her apron. For a moment she beheld poor Jeremiah
for the last time. Then she stepped back and hit her foot
against something hard behind her. She looked down to see
the coal scuttle.

‘Only the flames of hell will warm your cold soul,’ she
mumbled before running out to the street and announcing
to the village in her shrill voice:

‘Ratchet’s dead! Jeremiah Ratchet’s dead.’

During his lifetime Jeremiah had successfully kept the villagers
at bay; within minutes of his death, however, his
house was swarming with them. They ran up and down the
stairs, opening and closing doors and pocketing what they
could conceal beneath their coats. For one reason or
another they all felt they deserved something.

‘I heard that his bathtub was pure gold,’ whispered one
as he crammed a polished spittoon into his breast pocket.

‘And that he ate only from silver platters and drank from
the finest crystal,’ said his companion, wrenching a fine
brass sconce from the wall.

A third man was very busy tapping the stair panels with
his hairy knuckles. He was looking for secret passages that
led to underground cellars where jewellery and treasure
and, more importantly, ale and wine were said to be stored.

‘’Ere ’e is,’ came the youngest Sourdough’s cry from
below. ‘Oooh, ’e’s gorn black and blue.’

With a great rushing noise the crowd arrived at the
study and poured in to gather around Ratchet’s chair like
water meeting a rock in a stream. It was quite true; Jeremiah’s
skin had taken on a rather strange mottled hue. This,
combined with the yellowish foam at the corners of his
mouth and his repulsive grimace, was too much for Lily
Weaver. With a deep sigh she swooned and would have
fallen to the floor except the crush was so great she
remained standing, coming to some moments later supported
on all sides by her fellow Pagus Parvians. Then she
was lifted up and passed over the sea of heads, as a bottle
taken by the tide, only to be dropped unceremoniously into
the corridor.

A voice cried out above the hubbub and, with much
pushing and shoving and elbowing, Dr Samuel Mouldered
managed to enter the room.

‘Thank the ’eavens above yore ’ere,’ said Elias Sourdough.
‘Ratchet’s kicked the bucket at last.’

The room quietened in anticipation of Mouldered’s
assessment of the case. Few of the villagers were acquainted
with the fad of self-diagnosis (with the aid of Dr Moriarti’s
Simplified Medical Dictionary for the Common Man
, available at
a small discount from Perigoe Leafbinder’s bookshop).
They preferred to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Mouldered walked around the chair several times
stroking his sparsely whiskered chin. It was not often he got
to hold centre stage in this way and his nerves, tightly
wound these past few days, were getting the better of him.
Sweat squeezed out of the furrows of his brow and he licked
his dry lips with a pale pink tongue. Finally he cleared his
throat and announced hoarsely, ‘I believe that Jeremiah
Ratchet has suffered some sort of fit, or apoplexy, of the
heart which has caused his untimely death.’

The crowd sighed and an air of disappointment was
quite apparent. They had been expecting foul play. Certainly
it would not have been undeserved.

‘’E looks sort of smothered to me. And ’is ’ands don’t
look right. Are you sure?’

That Jeremiah might have been smothered was little
more than wishful thinking but, upon closer inspection,
Mouldered could not deny that his palms were quite red and
blistered, as if they had been severely burned.

‘I’m sure,’ he said, with all the conviction of a man who
isn’t. ‘Sometimes heart attacks make people’s hands, er –’
he fumbled in his pockets as if searching for the correct
medical term, but gave up and finished lamely – ‘look like
this.’

Eyebrows were raised, sniggers were barely suppressed
and heads were shaken, but Mouldered refused to say any
more and, the excitement over, the villagers shuffled out,
jingling and jangling with their hidden spoils. In the silence
they left behind them Mouldered closed Jeremiah’s eyes
with quivering fingers. He took the sheet of paper from his
hand, glanced at it briefly, then folded it and was about to
pocket it when Perigoe appeared.

‘That belongs to Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s from a book of mine
he bought about amphibians.’

‘Ah, Perigoe,’ said Mouldered, handing it to her, ‘perhaps
you could see to it that he gets it.’

She nodded and left quickly, clutching a single tatty
maroon book under her arm.

‘Just one?’ thought Mouldered. ‘How very restrained.’