The Lamplighter (7 page)

At Central Office he was again told of a mad Irishwoman who was claiming to have dreamed major revelations. And Pringle, failing to read his sudden exasperation and wishing to be as helpful as possible, informed him of a recent trip he had made from Carlisle in which the train had stopped to allow a broken-down Gypsy circus to board. He had shared his own carriage, he said, with the infamous Pink-Faced Lady, who he discovered was actually a shaved bear. The lady now resided with other Lawnmarket Gypsies and frequently shuffled through the streets in their company. Was it possible, he suggested brightly, that she had reverted to her original bestial state and killed Smeaton indiscriminately before being hauled off and spirited away?

Rather than answering, however, Groves was wondering just how Pringle had become apprised of this particular aspect of his investigation, when it had been his intention to be as secretive as possible about anything that had the potential to embarrass him. He was indeed painfully sensitive to his inadequacies, fearful of committing error, and countering such insecurities with manufactured surges of confidence that recoiled at the slightest hurdle, only to regroup later and build up into even greater and more reckless forces.

He had been saved by a summons to the office of the Procurator Fiscal—the chief prosecutor—where he was informed of the new scandal, the brutal exhumation of Colonel Munnoch. On the surface there seemed no definite link to the murder of Professor Smeaton—or indeed to that of the lighthouse keeper, which Groves had to restrain himself from mentioning—but it was rumored that in life the two men had been acquaintances, despite age and denominational differences, and, more to the point, both had connections with Henry Bolan, the current Lord Provost. So the coincidence was striking, and the pressure steadily mounting.

“We are currently treating Smeaton's death as a willful murder committed by person or persons unknown,” the Fiscal informed him.

“It's the right thing, at this stage,” Groves said, as though asked for approval.

“Have you made any progress that might alleviate us of this verdict?”

“The investigation,” Groves said steadily, “is progressing according to plan.”

The Fiscal seemed unconvinced. “You could do a lot worse than to settle this matter promptly, Carus. This is no time for the circus.”

Startled by the last mysterious comment, Groves set off distractedly for Warriston Cemetery, where Pringle had already arrived with the Stockbridge constables. And here they were now, wondering what to make of it all, as the blackbirds hopped onto closer branches so as not to lose sight of them in the thickening fog.

“You say you have no idea when the crime took place?” Groves asked the grizzled superintendent.

“None, sir, and that's the truth.”

“When did you discover it?”

“Just after dawn, sir, on my rounds.”

“And before that, when was the last time you saw the grave?”

The man was working his cap around his hands and looked bleary eyed and evasive. “I think it were last night, roughly midnight, but I canna rightly say.”

Groves sniffed. “Have you no schedule, man, to which you apply yourself?”

The superintendent shook his head. “None, sir. It always seems best not to work to a timetable.”

“And why would that be?”

“So that the ghouls canna plot their activities around ye.”

Groves frowned. The man seemed almost old enough to have been around in the resurrectionist days, but was he really suggesting the body had been dug up for the purposes of theft?

“You think they might have aimed to sell the body for medical research, is that it?”

The superintendent took a puzzled glance at the decomposed corpse. “Not in its current state, no, sir.”

“Then what is this talk of ghouls?”

“I only mean the standard troublemakers, sir. Larking young 'uns and the like. This part of the yard, with the railway embankment, is 'specially popular with such types.”

Groves sighed with disgust. He did not trust the superintendent, who smelled of gin and incompetence, but he relished the feeling of intimidating the man, a precious moment of mastery in the midst of all the confusion. “All the more reason, I would have thought,” he said, “to make this the area of more frequent patrols.”

The superintendent gulped, genuinely fearful for his job.

“Never mind, man. You heard nothing, in any event?”

“The embankment…” the superintendent said feebly.

“Makes it difficult to hear, all right. How long do you calculate it might have taken to dig, then?” He looked at the roughly gouged pit. The top half of the casket had been pried from the earth just enough to allow the lid to be smashed open—wood lay in shards and splinters—and the body dragged out by its shoulders.

“With a pick and a shovel,” the superintendent said, “and a man or two…”

“How long?”

The superintendent did not answer directly. “It's more the way the pit's been dug, sir. It don't look like a shovel's been used, or any other form of implement.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…a man'd be more likely to dig a roughly square hole, separating the grave boards and turning the earth on either side of the plot.”

Groves looked behind him at the disturbed earth, sprayed out in a great fan. “Are you trying to say this pit was dug by hand?”

The superintendent looked reticent. “Seems…seems something like that, sir.”

“By a beast?”

The superintendent shrugged. “A beast would have no interest in meat as rotten as this, sir, with all respects to the deceased.”

“Then it's a man?”

“A man wouldn't punch open a lid like that, but use a lever.”

“So which is it—man or beast?”

But the superintendent could not answer.

Again the specter of bestial strength had been raised, leaving Groves to wonder if his tour of the city's circuses had been so foolish after all. A man and a beast—or a number of beasts—in combination. He remembered the hoofprints in Belgrave Crescent and scanned the area around the grave for more clues, but whereas most of Warriston Cemetery had been planted with evergreens—cedars and cypresses artfully distributed—here in the lost corner there was an abundance of deciduous varieties, so that the ground was carpeted with decaying leaves and no prints or tracks were apparent.

He watched the photographer curse and splutter at his apparatus, unable to get a clear shot through the fog. Pringle spoke up. “Should we take the body back to the mortuary, sir? I'm not sure if we'd need a warrant, what with the body already exhumed.”

But Groves disliked the prospect of Professor Whitty or his ilk poking around again and making equivocal observations. “There's nothing this body can tell us,” he decided. “And it's against the law to exhume a body after ten years.”

“Twenty years, sir.”

“Aye.” Groves felt flustered. “That's very well, but all we can do now is return the Colonel to his box and seal him up as best we can. If the family wants a new casket they can make their own arrangements.”

But as Pringle and the others bent over to gingerly raise the corpse it became apparent that the head had fallen loose. Pringle stood at the edge of the pit and held the jawless skull up, Hamlet-like, looking into the face and frowning.

Groves took the opportunity to chastise him. “This is no time for morbid gestures, laddie.”

“There's something here, sir,” Pringle explained. “In the eye socket.”

Groves frowned. “What is it?”

Pringle pincered his fingers, inserted them into the cavity, and withdrew a crumpled ball of paper, which he handed across.

Groves unfurled it distastefully. It was a page torn raggedly from a Bible, “ST. JOHN CHAP. VIII” printed across the top. He flipped it over. And saw that a particular phrase of Verse 44 had been crudely underlined in pencil.

“‘He was a murderer from the beginning,'” he recited blankly, then looked up from the page, gathering his senses. “Is that all there is?”

Pringle took another look inside the skull. “That's all, sir.”

Groves turned to the superintendent, holding up the page. “Could this have been buried with the body?”

The superintendent looked uneasy. “I don't believe it common for the dead to have pages stuffed in their heads, sir.”

“I ask not for your opinion. I merely asked if it was possible.”

Pringle interjected: “If the page were inside the body for fourteen years, sir, it surely would be more brittle.”

“Fourteen years?”

“The length the Colonel has been buried, sir.”

Groves nodded. “So it's a message, then?”

“Seems that way, sir.”

A message.
And, notwithstanding the bodies themselves, their first tangible lead. Somebody human, with or without the aid of beasts, had worked Colonel Munnoch's body to the surface for perhaps the sole purpose of inserting this sinister libel in the dead man's skull.

He was a murderer from the beginning.

Groves looked from the decapitated body to the head still poised in Pringle's hands, wondering what secrets the illustrious Colonel could possibly harbor to warrant such a belated accusation. His eyes wandered to the spartan stone and the man's epitaph—“A Christian and a Soldier”—and he had a brief, Godlike vision of his place in the scheme of this mystery, the simple whaler's son flung into the cauldron of Scotland's capital and, at the end of his worthy career, sent to do battle with unimaginable forces. He felt the palpable presence of evil, too, its very sanguine taste, like nothing he had previously experienced, and he looked again at the page of Gospel in his hand as though it might actually spell out what his heart already knew—he was on a divine errand.

Then, lurching out of these thoughts, he became aware of the others staring at him expectantly, and he frowned at them crossly.

“Just get that body put together and laid to rest,” he snapped. “We'll need to prowl the area for more evidence.”

Then he turned, as the others repeatedly tried to restore the Colonel's head to his body, and, looking into the rolling fog, became aware of a peculiar tension in the air, the song of shuddering steel, and a monstrous panting sound, building in force and proximity. And he stiffened, momentarily wondering if the murderer might be returning expressly to rip him apart—the others had paused, too, with the corpse still in their hands, and the blackbirds had launched into the air—before, with great explosive puffs of steam and smoke, a red and black locomotive of the Edinburgh and Leith Railway surged out of the fog and thundered along the embankment in front of them, hauling behind it a string of first-class carriages, at the windows of which, staring through the mist at the grotesque tableau, sat a line of bonneted society ladies on their way to a Newhaven seaside banquet.

M
C
K
NIGHT EXAMINED
the plundered Bible in the golden glow of the firelight, fingering the ragged remnant of page still clinging to the binding. “Remarkable…” he breathed, and when he looked up his emerald eyes were sparkling. “A beating sound, you say, like the wings of a demon?”

Canavan crossed his legs. “It was surely the bats I heard.”

“But bats don't tear pages from Bibles.”

“No…”

“And you saw no signs of human intrusion? The gates are locked, are they not?”

“They are.”

“The fences are barbed?”

“Aye.”

“Then to tear a page from a book and escape without leaving a trace, a man would have to be unnaturally—dare I say supernaturally—adroit?”

“The mist was unnaturally—dare I say supernaturally—thick. He could easily have hid behind a gravestone and escaped at his own pace.”

McKnight chortled. “And then there is the destination of the page itself,” he said, for the full details of Colonel Munnoch's exhumation, and the deposit in his eye socket, had already been disseminated through the city's press. “How might you explain that little mystery?”

“It could have been from any Bible.”

“Naturally,” McKnight said with a wry smile, and he examined the book as though the missing page were still present. “‘He was a murderer from the beginning,'” he quoted, and looked up at his friend quizzically. “Can you recall the King James Version?”

“‘He was a murderer from the beginning,'” Canavan replied.

“The English Revised Version?”

“The same. The King James, the Douai, the Challoner revision—all the translations offer no variation in that particular line. And knowing it's a page of a Douai translation wouldn't prove, in any case, that it came from your particular Bible.”

“True, but it would add a pinch of coincidence to an already significant mound, you'll admit that?” And when the Irishman still looked reticent: “Come now, is the devil's advocate in you so unwilling to accept a miracle?”

“It's not the miracle that bothers me,” Canavan said, “but the fact that you seem so hungry for a personal invitation.”

“The invitation has already been delivered,” McKnight corrected, with barely concealed relish. “And it's now just a matter of composing the acceptance.”

Canavan scoffed. The paradox of their current debate—that he had somehow assumed the role of skeptic—did not strike him as anomalous, for both men often arbitrarily adopted extremes as a means of establishing the parameters and locating the quickest path to the truth. What troubled him was that on his way home from Drumgate that morning he had for the first time in many months not encountered McKnight, and indeed, passing the man's huddled little cottage—a place that seemed moored to the earth by a spidery net of ivy, and like its owner permanently wreathed in mist—he had discerned a thick line of smoke issuing from the chimney; this when the Professor had come to apply logs to his hearth with the same thrift with which he applied beef to his tongue. So, as eager as he was to return the ravaged Bible and to apologize for its condition, Canavan had elected to pass on by, convinced that his friend was not ill but—even more worrisome—was simply filching a day from the University's calendar to apply his mind to his own burgeoning interest: the mystery of Professor Smeaton's murder.

Canavan was aware that as a lecturer McKnight had grown distracted, even irascible, and that his increasing failure as a teacher only exacerbated his financial insecurity. Pending annual salaries, the professors were paid by the students themselves at the opening of each seasonal session, meaning that, in the manner of a popularity contest, it was those most charismatic and accommodating who consulted the finest timepieces and were swept home in the swiftest broughams. The choleric were rewarded with classes small and inherently self-punishing, and the distracted—such as Professor Piazzi Smyth of Astronomy, who had developed an inordinate fascination with the Great Pyramid of Cheops—were incrementally ostracized and ushered in the direction of premature retirement.

But if McKnight was now troubled by the implication, or even perceived it, he gave little indication. From a leather pouch he produced what appeared to be genuine shag tobacco and filled the bowl of his pipe, tamping it without a trace of self-consciousness. He leaned into the fire to light a match and chuckled when he singed his fingers. He ignited the tobacco with a flourish and, employing some previously hidden skill, blew out a flawless smoke ring. And all with such a gleam in his eye, and such an electricity in his spirit, that Canavan wondered idly if God might accept the current mayhem as an acceptable trade for the revival of a worthy man's enthusiasm.

“But let us first examine the story so far,” McKnight went on. “Beginning with the lighthouse keeper.”

“The lighthouse keeper?” Canavan frowned.

“You must have heard of it?” McKnight settled back into his armchair. “A month or so ago, before the current dramas, a retired lighthouse keeper was savaged to death while walking his dog.”

“I remember the murder. But I wasn't aware of the man's former profession.”

“I did some research,” the Professor admitted. “The similarities to the two more recent incidents, take my word, are more than simply striking.”

“And you claim it's the work of the same murderer?”

“I claim nothing. I observe, examine, and try to prevent further tragedy.”

“I think,” Canavan submitted, “that this is most certainly a task for the police.”

“The police, as fine as they are, sometimes need assistance, don't you think?”

“They certainly don't need meddlers.”

“I have no intention of meddling. The police are welcome to their legwork. The investigation I propose—for both of us—will be conducted on a separate but equally arduous plane. That of logical and spiritual deduction.”

“Aye?” Canavan smirked. “And what makes us suited to the task?”

“A talent. A vocation.” McKnight puffed out an aromatic cloud. “In my case, a predilection for unraveling layers, which I fear to this point has been unhappily squandered. In your case, assuming you're willing to join me, an enslaving propensity for good deeds.”

Canavan snorted his amusement but did not commit himself, for it was part of a foil's duty not to be too accommodating. “Let me first hear those supposed similarities,” he said, with a strange feeling he would regret it.

McKnight did not hesitate. “Three men,” he said, “not one younger than sixty. Two dispatched with inhuman force. One disinterred with, from all accounts, a similar force—and surely the only reason Colonel Munnoch was not himself killed was the rather inconvenient fact that he was already dead. No apparent motive. No mutilation of the bodies apart from the initial injuries. No attempt to conceal them or deposit them in a place where there might be more certainty of their being discovered. Unless the police are hiding something, and at this point I have no reason to believe that they are, the appointed investigators are most likely exasperated.”

“And since you seem to have given it a fair deal of thought,” Canavan noted, “what might you be able to tell them?”

“At this stage, what they should already know. The motive is almost certainly revenge, and for some injury that in some way extends back farther than fourteen years.”

“How so?”

“Colonel Munnoch was buried in 1872.”

“A long time to hold a grudge.”

“The injury is no doubt fitting.”

“But why now? And not any other time in the past fourteen years?”

McKnight smiled enigmatically. “Take a look at this fire,” he said, and he gestured to the hearth. “So vaporous and yet so powerful. The fundamental stuff of the universe, Heraclitus called it. And yet, as elemental and powerful as it may be…and as quickly as it can burn flesh…fire still takes time to forge steel.”

Canavan was confused. “You think the killer is a kettle that has just come to the boil, is that it?”

McKnight chuckled. “Only that he might have spent the intervening years changing his very mettle. Building to a point where he can kill like a lion, soar like a bat, and vanish like an apparition.”

Canavan was about to protest—this seemed more madness than metaphysics—but at just that moment a fierce wind buffeted the cottage, whistled down the chimney, and harassed the flames into fleeing spirits and serpents. He shot a glance at the stammering window and for one unsettling moment thought he saw a woman's face staring in at them, before deciding it was just a distorted reflection of the fire.

“And the message?” he asked, to distract himself. “The biblical verse?”

“Curious and invaluable. For what reason would Munnoch be labeled a murderer?”

“Munnoch was a soldier,” Canavan said. “Perhaps the revenge has a political bent?”

“No, I have an indefinable feeling about this. I'm convinced—I see it as if written in stone—that these men were intimately embroiled in some unspeakable crime prior to 1872.”

“Involving murder?”

“The biblical verse certainly implies it. And it could well be the case that they have just been identified by the killer—accounting for the delay.”

“A professor of ecclesiastical law, a distinguished colonel, and a lighthouse keeper.” Canavan shook his head. “There seems no obvious link.”

“If seeking a connection, one should think of them as they were fourteen years ago.”

“And how was that?”

“Smeaton had just been appointed to the University. Prior to that he had been minister in the parish of Corstorphine. The lighthouse keeper had retired five years previously. I checked the records today at the Northern Lighthouse Board in Queen Street.”

“Very thorough,” Canavan said, vaguely disturbed that his friend, for all his insistence that their investigation would be a strictly cerebral one, had gone to such practical lengths.

“For Colonel Munnoch I did not have to travel quite so far. His memoir was published in 1864. At six hundred pages it's what might be called a rather meticulous chronicle.”

“You have a copy?” Canavan asked, unsurprised.

“Naturally.” McKnight nodded. “A very illuminating text. Would you permit me to read you a passage?”

“I have just enough time,” the Irishman said, for he was due shortly at Drumgate.

McKnight clamped his pipe between his teeth and reached down beside his chair for the volume, which he had already retrieved from his redoubtable library.

Through the direst financial straits, McKnight had never been able to part with his books. He had stripped the cottage bare of just about everything else—every article of disposable furniture, from his pianoforte to his shaving mirror—and now slept on a monastic pallet, bathed in a laundry tub, and grilled his food in the fireplace beside Canavan's crossed legs. But of his magnificent library, which contained many of his most financially valuable items, he could not select even a single fragment for sacrifice. He had started assembling the titles almost as soon as he could read (using money, in some cases, intended for the church plate), and before he graduated from university he was actually evicted from his student lodgings, because the landlord feared the weight of his collection might threaten the foundations. And he still had every one of them, squeezed into cheap shelves that groaned and creaked like ship timbers in a mysteriously sizable cavern in the cellar of his cottage, the strangely elastic walls of which seemed to expand and contract in direct response to the rarity of the text being hunted. It was a surreal chamber, dark and cobwebbed, where McKnight would lead the way bearing only a slush lamp filled with train oil, and the disorientated visitor was forever bumping his head against haphazard projections or stumbling over orphaned piles of manuscripts.

“
A Christian and a Soldier
,
Volume One,
” McKnight announced, holding up a thick book bound in green morocco leather. “I refer to page two hundred and forty.” He had already donned his rather severe spectacles, the lenses of which Canavan suspected were well past sufficiency, and he now opened the volume at a bookmarked leaf.

“‘There was the islet of Inchcaid,'” he read, “‘a frowning reef of phonolitic rock past Bell Rock north of the firth. A dreich place, where Covenanters were once imprisoned and smugglers roamed, and which was now given over to razorbills and seals. I had no inclination to visit it, believing it to be real estate of no particular value, but it was drawn to my attention that sailing ships had a propensity for imperiling themselves on its serrated edges, and was informed that a lighthouse would need to be constructed on the easternmost shelf. To this I gave my permission without a second thought, and upon its completion in 1846, I felt my interest sufficiently prevailed upon to make a visit, in the company of the proud engineers, and I found here a grand Pharos, a pillar of dovetailed granite slabs pounded by foaming waters. I spent a day meeting the obliging keepers, inspecting their quarters and storerooms, and examining the immense polished lenses and angled prisms of the great lamp itself, and from the heights surveying the ungodly huddle of rock, dusted with hardy gulls, that my family had acquired through some convoluted transaction or ancient gambling debt.'”