The Lamplighter (5 page)

There were a couple of these learned gentlemen, rivals no doubt
,
whose attitudes I did not like, they tried to look upset, but I knew Smeaton was not popular, and I could read on their brows the word “deceit.”

“Any ideas, Inspector?” Pringle asked later.

“Nothing I am willing to admit at this stage.”

The professor of forensic medicine—“Whitty by name and nature”—accompanied them in a carriage to the mortuary. “A body in three pieces…” he mused, shaking his head. “A case, it would appear, in which the body is as much a puzzle as the murder.”

Groves frowned at the inappropriate mood. “A grand thing, sir, that you look upon this business in such a way. I assure you that this is no game.”

“I can only pray,” said the good professor, “that the culprit shares that sentiment.”

The preliminary death certificate had been signed by the police doctor, subject to amendment, the manner of death listed simply as “decapitation by means unknown.” An unusual “expression of feeling” had been appended to the bottom of the sheet: “Most Curious.”

“That barely begins to describe it,” said Professor Whitty, once he had peeled back the sheet and examined the pieced-together corpse under hissing gaslight. He pointed at the compressed head. “Observe the mandible…the way it's been all but forced through the upper jaw…the collapse of the septum…and the ragged character of the tears to the throat. It's difficult to conceive of this as having been perpetrated by a normal man.”

“How so?” Groves asked through a tightened throat. There was the penetrating odor of carbolic disinfectant in the air.

“It's as if the body were some sort of doll, made of rags and ceramic, picked up by a spiteful child, squeezed around the arms, bitten around the head…and torn simultaneously in three directions.”

“You're not suggesting this was done by a child, sir?”

“
Cum grano salis,
Inspector. But still…the enormous power it would take…” Whitty tapped a pencil against his chin. “And acts of unusual strength are invariably linked to passions of exceptional magnitude…”

“A madman?”

“I'm not certain,” Whitty admitted. “The intensity of this hatred…I find it difficult to attribute this to a human being.”

“You're saying it could have been an animal, then?”

“Did you find any evidence of an animal in the vicinity?”

“Only hoofprints.”

Whitty pursed his lips. “I was thinking more of a saber-toothed tiger.”

But Groves could not quite read his tone. “You can't make any conclusions, is that it?”

“Not on a superficial examination, no, and to go further I'd need a warrant from the Fiscal. Though it seems to remind me of another recent case.” He glanced at Pringle. “You remember that man brought in last month?”

Pringle nodded. “The lighthouse keeper?”

“Aye. The way his face had been gouged from his skull?”

Groves interjected. “What man was this?”

“A case of Chief Inspector Smith's,” Pringle told him. “You must remember, sir. The man walking his dog by Duddingston Loch?”

“He was a lighthouse keeper?”

“Retired.”

“A murder of profound savagery,” Whitty explained. “And like this requiring a formidable strength. As if a pitchfork had been inserted into the man's head and the face wrenched free. A most curious business indeed.”

Later, returning to the High Street Central Office, Groves quizzed Pringle for further details. “I thought that particular investigation was closed.”

“For all intents and purposes it was,” Pringle agreed uneasily, “but it could be reopened at any moment.”

“So there was no perpetrator found?”

“Chief Inspector Smith called it a robbery-based homicide committed by persons unknown.”

“And was the victim in fact robbed?”

“There were no valuables on him.”

Groves thought about it. “He was a retired lighthouse keeper. Walking his dog. What sort of valuables would you expect to be on him?”

Pringle looked sheepish about his peripheral involvement. “There seemed no better explanation at the time, sir.”

Inwardly, Groves felt exhilarated. Not only had the exasperating Professor Whitty failed to discover anything with his postmortem examination, but now the mystery had deepened with a possible connection to a failed murder investigation conducted by his illustrious comrade Chief Inspector Smith. It was widely known that the Wax Man was unorthodox and self-serving—that he would do anything to preserve his sterling record and was far more interested in grieving widows than murdered men—but official disapproval was mitigated by his frequent glories. Now Groves had a chance not only to emulate the man but to embarrass him by revisiting a case prematurely retired.

In the Central Office he felt the eyes fixed on him—the expectation, the aspect of deference—and in response he seemed to grow a foot taller. When he was approached by Douglas Macleod of the
Evening Dispatch
he was generous with the details. The
Dispatch
was already running off a special edition with several news columns headed “Respected Professor Killed in New Town.” Ideally the case would provide headlines for a further week and culminate in the triumphant “Respected Inspector Arrests Killer.” But there was still, Groves admitted to himself, a lot of work to be done.

He filed an initial report for Sheriff Fleming, checked the student and teacher rolls against criminal reports, fielded a variety of unsolicited theories and offers for assistance (there was a woman who claimed to have dreamed the murder in precise detail; he told Pringle to send her away), and before he left for the evening he was summoned to the office of the pumpkin-faced Chief Constable. “A sinister business, Carus.”

“Aye.”

“A man of God struck down in one of our finest streets. The Fiscal will be keen for answers. Do you think you can handle it with no assistance?”

“I have Pringle.”

“Aye, I mean Chief Inspector Smith, though. He returns from London in a day or two.”

Groves bristled. “I think there might be other matters occupying our Wax Man.”

“That's so,” the Chief Constable admitted. “I don't believe Smith would wish to get involved in an investigation already begun.”

“If,” Groves said meaningfully, “the investigation did not really begin a month ago.”

But if the Chief Constable understood he gave no hint. “I wish you all the luck you are not able to make for yourself, then,” he finished, dispatching the Inspector with a rare expression of sympathy.

At the end of the day,
Groves wrote presently,
it became clear that The Murderer from the Mews was a mystery daunting the finest minds in the city, and I alone had the strength to commit myself wholly to its solution.

He withdrew his pen, blotted the ink, folded the ledger book, and slid it away under the desk lid, retrieving as he did the gilt-edged “official” casebook, holding it lovingly in his hands and wondering how soon he might enter the complete episode in its sacred pages. Groves came from a particularly large family—his father, a godless Aberdeen whaler, had spent just enough time ashore harpooning his mother to produce a formidable litter—but he was certainly the first of the brood to attempt such an ambitious chronicle, and in this he felt an almost paternal responsibility. He had no children of his own. He could not foresee any progeny. He lived with two of his seven sisters and was married more devotedly to his vocation than a Jesuit missionary.

He flipped to the opening page and read with pride his carefully worded dedication.

 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

TO THE CLERGY OF CRIME FIGHTING

THE DETECTIVES EXCELSIOR

THE ADMINISTRATORS OF JUSTICE

WITHOUT THESE MEN THERE WOULD BE

BARBARITY!!

 

How long he had agonized over the phrasing! The simple analogy to the clergy! And the word
excelsior
(the exact meaning of which still eluded him)! And how perfectly noble it now seemed!

He sighed with satisfaction, put the book away, pried himself from the tiny desk, and worked the numbness out of his limbs. He made his toilet, changed into his nightshirt, laid out his braided inspector's tunic for the morning, loosed the curtain cords, and, to the sound of his sisters snoring musically in the adjoining room, slipped into his narrow bed with the excitement of a child awaiting Christmas.

In the darkness, sea mist kissed his windows and swept through the city like an Egyptian plague. Warm and tightly bound in his multitude of sheets and blankets, Groves was the victim of a roiled imagination, unable to rest for the feeling that the whole city was laid out before him waiting to be seized. He actually resented sleep, that it would disengage his conscious mind from more active service. And indeed, for all his overconfidence and childish excitement, he was about to venture down darker and more perplexing paths than any he had previously imagined.

A
STROLL
had become a march. McKnight had no pipe in his mouth, his cane was barely touching the ground, and his customary waxen pallor had surrendered to a ruddy tint. His blood was clearly pumping, his mind swarming with ideas, and he was moving with unusual zeal, as though impatient to be home. It was an incongruity that Joseph Canavan, to whom the harmony of their stride was as natural as breathing, could not fail to notice.

“You've heard by now, of course?” the Professor asked as soon as he encountered his walking companion at their nightly rendezvous point outside the Free Church on St. Leonard's Street.

“Smeaton?” Canavan nodded somberly, already struggling to keep pace. “An odd business.”

“What do you know?” McKnight asked. Canavan came from among the Irish of the Old Town, where tongues printed news more efficiently than any press.

“Probably not much more than yourself. It happened in the New Town somewhere—”

“Belgrave Crescent. At the junction with Dean Bridge.”

“—and it was extremely brutal. The body torn apart like a gingerbread man.”

“Aye—a colorful description.”

“How old was he?” Canavan asked. “Sixty-five? A terrible, terrible thing. But at least, by God's mercy, it was swift.”

“Swift, certainly.” McKnight knew that Canavan spoke sincerely, when others of his kind might be toasting the man's demise: Smeaton had had little tolerance for the Irish. “Savage, undoubtedly. But was it really a premeditated murder? Or just an arbitrary killing?”

“Has anyone suggested it was arbitrary?”

“There was no indication of theft, or of any identifiable weapon being employed. And the attack was positively bestial.”

“An animal hunting for prey,” Canavan mused. “Giving no thought to identity. Is that what you're saying?”

“Not quite. There were no signs of postmortem predation. A hungry beast would be inclined to take home some dinner, wouldn't you think?”

“Perhaps the beast was disturbed.”

“Of course. But still I wonder how many savage beasts there are loose on the streets of Edinburgh.”

“Those you would not regard as human, in any case.”

McKnight smiled. “Were I to include bipedals,” he said, “the field would be too vast to contemplate.”

The Professor's unusual humor, to Canavan, was as appreciable as his pace. It was not that McKnight was ever openly morose, or even self-pitying, but after two years of walking together the two men were capable of recognizing in each other the most minor fluctuations. This when ostensibly they had little in common. The Irishman was half the Professor's age and hewn by hard labor and emotional scarring. He was brawny and tall. He had never stepped inside a university. He was keenly religious and a sentimentalist. He was naturally poor—he had never known anything else—whereas the Professor had lost his inherited wealth through financial mismanagement in the wake of his wife's death.

“The search will begin for suspects, then.”

“The search has already commenced,” McKnight corrected. “At the University this very morning. And I'd be profoundly surprised if I have not already been considered as one of the suspects.”

“You?” Canavan snorted.

“Why not?” McKnight said, and made a show of glancing around, as though for pursuing detectives. “Consider the facts. Smeaton was an acknowledged nemesis. He was vocally disapproving of my teachings. He objected to all my proposals and tried to obstruct my funding. I had every reason to hate him.”

“But not to kill him. You couldn't.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn't mean I cannot be a suspect, if a motive is seen to exist.”

“And it doesn't mean you should enjoy the idea, either,” Canavan observed, “because it offers you some sense of urgency.”

McKnight chuckled guiltily. “Well…” he admitted, accepting that there was little he could hide from his friend.

Canavan was a night watchman at a crumbling cemetery three miles from central Edinburgh. McKnight lived in a sequestered cottage nearby, not far past Craigmillar Castle on the Old Dalkeith Road. Some years earlier he had first noticed the longhaired Irishman striding home ahead of him as he himself set off for the University. Depending on the season he would frequently see him again on his own way home, the younger man now carrying a small bag of victuals in preparation for the night ahead. But in those days, despite the fact that they moved at a pace so identical they might have been marching in formation, they never spoke, or even acknowledged each other's proximity. The morning walk, for McKnight, was a precious opportunity to marshal his thoughts, to take solace in the bracing air and stirring bird life, and arrive at the University, if not bursting with enthusiasm, then at least in a mood that was not acrimonious. On his journeys home, feasting vicariously on the waft of savory dinners, he found refuge from the need to orate, to reason and listen: a relief too precious to be invaded by company. He consistently spurned offers of transport from market gardeners and coal carters, even the occasional affluent student in a plush carriage. Besides, as much as he could not afford cabs, he equally could not afford to be seen as one deprived of them. He cultivated the air of one who favored a challenging constitutional, and it quickly became true.

But there was one week when his debt became so tyrannical that he could barely afford to eat at all. He was not even past Craigmillar Castle Road when a chilly sweat seized him, his vision filled with pinpricks of light, his chest constricted, and his cane slipped from beneath him; the next thing he knew he was on the ground, delirious, his nostrils filled with musty earth, and his stomach heaving but without anything significant enough to eject.

He might have resisted any offers of help, but before he could object he had been hoisted from the ground, slung like a lamb across some great wood-hewing shoulders, and carried, with no say in the matter, back toward his cottage. The indignity was heartbreaking. He tried to mumble a protest but his Good Samaritan was not listening. And inevitably he became aware that his savior was in fact the Irishman, his younger shadow, the very same man he had ignored so often on his walks—a man who surely would have little to say anyway, and clearly nothing worth hearing. But now, if he allowed this to go on, he would be indebted to the man permanently. He wished he were dead.

McKnight was not to know that such gratification was the farthest thing from Canavan's mind. Finding himself taken home by a circuitous series of back paths and then deposited gently on his comfortless bed, the Professor inexplicably lapsed into colloquialism—“You won't be hailing a sawbones now, lad?”—but apart from a token nod the Irishman was entirely unresponsive, as though refusing even to acknowledge his own presence. The younger man left the cottage for a while—impossible for McKnight to gauge how long, for he lapsed into unconsciousness—and returned with bacon rashers, a bread loaf, and a few sips of whisky. He administered these more or less forcibly to his patient, made sure he was well provided with blankets, and departed without a further word. Two days later, when he resumed his walks to the University, McKnight nodded gratefully in the man's direction and found a reciprocating nod so unassuming that he was suddenly convinced—he knew it instinctively—that the episode had been recounted to no one. It might never have happened. Canavan had gone out of his way to preserve a stranger's idiosyncratic sense of dignity. It was impossible not to feel trusting of such a man.

“You've read Smeaton's treatises, of course?” McKnight asked presently. They were passing the modern villas of Newington, where lamplight winked and flared in the freshly installed windows.

“A few of them. He was a passionate man.”

“Even passion must be disciplined, or it is prone to develop into zealotry.”

“It would be wrong, I think, to call Smeaton a zealot.”

“Dogmatic, then.”

“Dogmatic, perhaps,” Canavan agreed, “but not a madman. Even if you did not always agree with him.”

McKnight smiled, never tiring of the Irishman's magnanimity. “Not mad, or not entirely. But Smeaton was by nature a fighter, as you know. He challenged all sorts of reforms. To politics. To worship. To the very idea of hymnals and the installation of church organs. To the increasing prevalence of science in our educational institutions. Naturally he was disdainful of the geologists, the biologists, and most especially of Mr. Darwin. Everywhere he looked he saw a threat, and every threat drove him even deeper behind the barricades.”

“These are challenging times for theologists,” Canavan admitted, “and the strength of Smeaton's response shouldn't be unexpected.”

“Of course. When one's beliefs come under siege, the modest man questions his convictions and the stubborn one dons the breastplate of righteousness.”

“
Breastplate
is a little strong. Smeaton was a clergyman, not a centurion.”

“I use the phrase pointedly. ‘The Breastplate of Righteousness' is the title of one of his own published tracts.”

“Well…”

“Smeaton's opinions were as fixed as railway tracks,” McKnight insisted, “and the catechism as clear to him as gravity. He had cast himself as a prophet and was incessantly warning others of damnation. He wanted to redeem people. He needed it as a vocation. And such men almost actively generate enemies—for the very challenge of the fight.”

Canavan thought about it. “I think I can vouch for the Irish,” he said. “And I'm not aware of any other community where the hate might be murderous. I can offer no obvious suspect.”

“Nor do I believe that there will ever be an obvious suspect. And you know, for all the indignation Smeaton might have incited through his ideologies, for some unaccountable reason I suspect his death is unrelated.”

“It's not like you to be intuitive.”

McKnight grunted. “Admittedly I have no sound reasons. But the manner of the man's death is such that I cannot reconcile it with any regular grievance. A very bold statement was made, it seems to me, and I sense that is connected to some profound transgression.”

“Of what possible variety?”

“I'm not sure. Not at this stage.”

“At this stage?”

“I don't know,” McKnight protested uncomfortably. “We are truly in the streets of confusion.”

They crossed Peffermill Road into a lampless area of darkling meadows and windblown trees, the branches foiling and parrying overhead, and here McKnight decided to let the matter rest, embarrassed to admit that he had been truly confounded by hunches and irrational convictions. That he felt uniquely challenged by the mystery. That those same capacities of logic and reason—which only hours previously had seemed as empty as his bank accounts—had suddenly taken on the aspect of invaluable resources. But then Smeaton's death represented a beginning, he was strangely sure of it. He felt the tremors like an approaching thunderstorm, and it was only a matter of time before he would be specifically summoned.

Forging into the inky darkness in a pensive silence, both men now simultaneously discerned a spot of light ahead like a clouded lamp on an advancing carriage. But as they came closer they perceived that it was in fact a person's face perched atop garments of implacable blackness. And when they were near enough to distinguish features it became clear that the figure was an unaccompanied woman, staring dazedly ahead as though having returned from the scene of some tragedy. Gliding wraithlike up to the two men without seeming to register their presence, she breezed past on their left with the fluency of a black cat, and only when she was gone was McKnight struck by the strange conviction that it was the same ethereal lass he had glimpsed earlier that day in the lecture hall. But when he turned to verify this suspicion, she had already disappeared, swallowed by the night as though by the sea. Noticing that Canavan had also turned, similarly unsettled, he shook off an eerie presentiment, and a strange sense of self-consciousness, and quickly sought a digression.

“And how goes that lady friend of yours?” he asked. “That—what's her name—Evelyn?”

“Emily,” Canavan corrected stiffly. “Emily Harkins.”

“Emily, that's right. How is the lass?” Neither man was by nature inquisitive about the other's private life, but for a while Canavan's enthusiasm about a certain Welsh shop assistant had become uncontainable. She was an angel, he claimed, a vision of peerless beauty.

“I no longer see her,” Canavan admitted.

“Whatever happened?”

The Irishman seemed reticent. “We…parted.”

And then it struck McKnight in a flash, and he cursed his poor memory for such matters, and his compounding insensitivity. Because in fact he had heard of this same Miss Emily Harkins through the University grapevine: the comely miner's daughter who inadvertently had stolen the heart of the thrice-married Francis Purves, President of the Mercantile Insurance Company and benefactor of the Faculty of Law. The wealthy laird—an eminently disagreeable fellow—had squired the lass, beguiled her with gifts and blandishments, and quickly had her galloping through the lilies of his estate on his prize steeds, his partner in matrimony and stepmother to his impressive brood. It had certainly crossed McKnight's mind that this was the same lass who had been the object of his friend's infatuation, but he had simply not spared sufficient time to ponder the full consequences. Love, to him, was a foolish affliction bringing nourishment only to poets, narcissists, and the irremediably self-destructive.