St. Ives stood looking at the dead man, at the bloody remnants of him, the shotgun blast ringing in his ears. There was a shocked silence among his companions. Finn had recovered from his exertions, but was looking away into the trees now, as if lost in thought. Uncle Gilbert stared at the fallen man, at what was left of his face, clearly surprised and aghast at the butchery that his weapon had wrought. St. Ives guessed that Gilbert hadn’t meant to fire it, that the weapon had surprised him. If that was so, then it might have been any of them that lay dead on the ground – something that a man like Gilbert Frobisher would have a difficult time sorting out. A small gust of wind picked up dry leaves that went skittering away down the path, a reminder that the world was still turning.
“Leave some of these vermin for the rest of us, Uncle,” Tubby said, attempting levity, but his uncle seemed shattered and simply worn out, and Tubby helped him to sit down on a fallen tree, where Gilbert mopped his face with a kerchief and shook his head.
Doyle stepped to his side, peering first into one eye and then into the other and then feeling his pulse. “You’ve had a shock, sir,” he said. “As a medical doctor I advise you to return to your camp. I tell you candidly to keep it in your mind that you stopped a man who was intent upon murdering a boy.”
Gilbert nodded, although his face revealed no alteration.
“This was one of the two from out of the sewer near Blackfriars Bridge this morning,” Hasbro said to St. Ives in a low voice. “I recognize his clothing.”
“Pity he can’t speak,” St. Ives muttered. “We might have persuaded him to tell us something.”
There were footsteps behind them now – old Hodgson, carrying his bird rifle and hurrying along. “I heard the report of a weapon,” he said, “and I knew you weren’t shooting partridge.” Gilbert nodded at him without any enthusiasm, and Hodgson looked at the dead body and recoiled.
“Here’s luck,” said Doyle. “The two of you can go back together. A good bottle of wine will set you up again directly, Mr. Frobisher. Whisky might be more to the point.”
“Just so,” said Hodgson, evidently having come to an understanding of things. “And we’ve cataloguing to attend to. Buck up, old boy.”
Tubby grasped the dead man by his ankles now and dragged him away, into the wood. He returned after a few minutes, dusting his hands. “I predict great celebration among the local vultures,” he said.
“Buteo buteo,” Gilbert muttered, stroking his chin now, his gaze unfocused.
Finn stepped across and put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I’d like to thank you, sir,” he said. “He meant to murder me, and worse, if you take my meaning. He swore to it, when he caught up with me back in the wood, and he would have had me, too, for I was worn out from running. You put an end to a right villain, sir. His name was the Crumpet, and he’s had his hand in miseries of all variety. I learned just yesterday that he took a dull-witted boy named Spry Jack out of Billingsgate Market, and the boy never came back. All what he done with him, no one knows, nor wants to, but the Crumpet was a black-hearted devil, sir, and no mistake.”
“I can vouch for it,” St. Ives said. “He exploded an infernal device in London early this morning to our certain knowledge. Blew a hole in the wall of the Fleet River, quite likely murdering people in Smithfield. He attempted to murder me some weeks back after he blew up the palm house at the Bayswater Club and killed poor Shorter, the botanist. The world’s a better place now that he’s gone from it, and Narbondo has lost a lieutenant.”
“Not Jensen Shorter of the Horticultural Society?” Gilbert asked. “We botanized together years ago. He was a great man for the lichens.”
“That he was,” St. Ives said. “You’ve avenged Shorter’s murder into the bargain.”
Gilbert shook his head sadly, the news of Shorter’s death adding weight to his unhappiness, although it also added something like anger, which improved his demeanor, for there was less self-revulsion in it now. He looked at Finn and said, “We haven’t met, young man. Gilbert Frobisher, at your service. I thank you for your kindness.”
“This is Finn Conrad, Uncle,” Tubby told him, “one of the most sensible coves I know. He’s got a good head on him, and is honest and brave to a fault.”
“Is that so?” Gilbert said. “Well met, then. I’m happy to have done you a service, although I’ll admit that it was rather abrupt.”
“We’ll just go along back, then,” Hodgson said to Gilbert, taking him by the arm. “Doctor’s orders, old man.”
Gilbert arose, and without a word handed his shotgun and a pouch of shells to Tubby, who took the lot of it.
“You go with them, Finn,” St. Ives said. “You’ve done your part and more.”
“Pardon me, sir, but I have not,” Finn said to him. “I know the trail where Eddie ran off, and I’ve been inside the inn and into the Doctor’s murder room, where there’s the tunnel door. You’ll need me alongside you.”
“I can’t persuade you to take a rest?” St. Ives asked, knowing that he was defeated.
“No, sir, you cannot.”
“So be it,” St. Ives said, knowing from experience that Finn rarely said anything that he didn’t mean. Unless he was tied into a chair, he would be commanded by his conscience.
“And I wanted to tell you about Eddie, sir,” Finn said. “When the Crumpet came for me in the wood, Eddie was already escaped, far down the path and out of sight. But he came back, Eddie did, to try to save me from the Crumpet. He had a branch off a tree, big as he was, and he beat the Crumpet with it. It would have done your heart good, sir, to see it. He ran off then, like I told him to, and I struck the Crumpet with a big stone to distract him and to give me a chance to run off myself. The Crumpet followed me, thank God, and not Eddie, but he was far enough behind so that I ran clear to this spot, where I found you. I’ll never forget Eddie coming on with that branch, sir, to beat the Crumpet. Ever. Not as long as I live.”
Finn stared at St. Ives for a moment, his chest heaving with the emotion of telling the story, but he turned away when he saw that St. Ives was weeping openly.
They set out again, the path leading back to the edge of the bay and around the swerve of the shore. Finn told them of the mill and the charcoal, of Narbondo eating it for breakfast, of Lord Moorgate and the woman named Helen, of George’s kindness and his death at the hands of McFee and the dwarf Sneed, and of Bill Kraken’s surprise appearance from the tunnel, leading to Finn’s escape with Eddie. St. Ives was amazed, although he listened to all of it with growing unease: Kraken shot, but perhaps still alive, God save him, and Eddie alone in the wood with the big pirate abroad.
That Narbondo seemed to have anticipated Kraken’s appearance was unsettling. The man was uncannily prescient. And the death of George struck him as particularly unfortunate – unfair, if there were any fairness in the world, which perhaps there was not. George had tried to redeem himself and was murdered for it. Certainly there was a lesson to be learned there, although it was an ugly one. He had brought violence down upon himself, but perhaps he had found an element of grace and an easier conscience in the end.
Perhaps they’d all of them find just deserts in the hereafter. At present, however, there was only the doing of things. St. Ives saw the inn through the trees now, the moment that Finn pointed it out. He heard nothing at all, however, no sounds of men at work, certainly not any sign of the industry that they’d viewed from the airship, only the cries of the gulls out over the bay.
From the old boathouse hidden in the trees a quarter mile away, there was a clear view of the path along the edge of the bay, which was nothing more than the low tide line, dried out in the sun. It was shrinking, however, with the incoming tide. Through his telescope, Narbondo watched the five men moving along the water’s edge. The vile boy was alive, which meant that the Crumpet hadn’t caught him, despite his spirited chase along the shore not thirty minutes past. The single gunshot that had sounded had quite possibly ended the Crumpet’s career in mid-stride, which was not entirely an unfortunate thing, from Narbondo’s point of view, since the Crumpet’s depredations had begun to lead the man into stupidities. He had been amusing in his time, but if his time had passed, then so be it.
Narbondo saw that the fat man was armed. St. Ives and his factotum would no doubt possess the pistols that they had had with them last night. They were meddlesome men, and dangerous; he would give them that. He had underestimated St. Ives before, but this time St. Ives had underestimated Narbondo. It would be amusing to destroy St. Ives’s airship as a parting gesture; it was a pity that they hadn’t the time.
He nodded to McFee, who fired the boiler, and a short time later the very serviceable engine developed the pressure needed to propel the freshly painted launch out onto Egypt Bay. The casks of coal dust were lashed tightly together in the stern and covered with canvas, and the craft was full of men who would do what was asked of them if they were well paid. George, alas, had been a rare exception to the rule. If Narbondo was a man of sentiment, he might actually have had a fondness for George, but he had been exclusively fond of George’s many talents, which the man had thrown away due to that feebleness of the mind known as kindness.
The narrow inlet of the bay lay dead ahead, the tide surging through it. He looked back across the expanse of water toward the aptly named Shade House, where he saw smoke rising above the trees. Of course. St. Ives and his cronies had burned the place. It was a futile gesture, mere anger at having once again come too late to the fair. The launch crossed into the moving water of the Thames now, and the narrow mouth of Egypt Bay closed behind them.
It was St. Ives and Tubby who entered the cellar room through the trapdoor in the cottage floor, Tubby lighting the Argand lamp in order to brighten the dim room. St. Ives saw the body lying on the table, the open door into a tunnel at their left, another door, this one shut, at their right, a barred window beside it through which the wind blew, carrying on it the smell of pond water and heather.
“Good Christ,” Tubby said, looking at the man, who lay on his back on the table, strapped down with leather-covered chains across his chest and ankles, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling. His silk top hat sat behind his head.
The slit in his neck appeared to be a second gaping mouth, his chin and chest bathed in dried blood. His arms lay at his sides, although the hands had been severed at the wrists, and they gripped the chains that bound his chest. A calling card had been slid between two of the fingers. A prodigious quantity of blood had run out of his wrists as well as out of his throat. He had died there upon the table, St. Ives thought, his heart pumping out blood, although the wound in his neck had been delivered nearer to the door, where there was yet more blood on the stones of the floor. Someone had walked through it – a woman, clearly – who had gone out through the door. A bloody butcher’s cleaver was fixed in the tabletop. Everything in the room argued that Narbondo practiced human vivisection. No mere anatomist needed to bind down a corpse, and certainly Narbondo was no surgeon. The debt St. Ives owed Finn and Bill Kraken couldn’t be calculated.
Tubby plucked the calling card from the hand of the corpse and held it in the lamplight. “Lord Moorgate,” he read aloud. “What does this mean, do you suppose?”
“A falling out, perhaps. Or perhaps that Narbondo has once again found it profitable to alter his plans.”
St. Ives thought about this. Now that de Groot’s identity was certain, it was clear that Lord Moorgate had purchased the miniaturized lamp from William Keeble. Moorgate was the Customer that George had mentioned, or had been, and no doubt about it. There was no evidence that Eddie had met with violence here. If Narbondo had carried out his threats to harm Eddie in order to profit from Moorgate, he wouldn’t have scrupled to leave evidence of it for St. Ives to find. Indeed, it would give him great joy. Moorgate was dead and Eddie was not. Finn had saved Eddie’s life. St. Ives scarcely allowed himself to believe it, but it seemed possible that Bill Kraken had done his part to turn the tide, that everything had changed when Bill had appeared and Finn and Eddie escaped into the wood.
“We’re finished here,” he said to Tubby.
“Almost,” Tubby said, unscrewing the lid from the oil receptacle on top of the Argand lamp. He smelled it. “Whale oil, I believe,” he said. And with that he upended it, pouring it over the edges of the table and onto the floor. “There lies a second lamp,” he said, pointing at the Argand lamp that sat on the shelf above the glass boxes. “What do you make of that?” he asked.
St. Ives studied the broken glass box for a moment, having overlooked it in the darkness, and then having been distracted by the corpse. Now he noted the thin, bent pieces of lead came within the box, the shards of glass heaped on its floor, the bellows. It was dead clear what he was looking at: the results of a small coal dust explosion, contained within a double box, contrived, no doubt, to impress Moorgate, since Narbondo had proven the effectiveness of his methods often enough to be personally satisfied. Unless, of course, there was more to the trial than that. He studied the magnifying lens, pulling it down and peering through it. Gilbert had told them that a very moderate source of heat might set off the hovering dust. Greek fire might be necessary within the confines of the Fleet Sewer, but not at all necessary in a glass building. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t the explosion alone that was of interest…
“Pity to waste this prime top hat,” Tubby said picking it up from the table to inspect it.
On the table lay a human skull that had been hidden under the hat. St. Ives stepped across to look into it, relieved to see that it was from an adult human, not a child. It had been trepanned – a three-inch diameter hole. A litter of small screws lay within, along with bits of copper and silver, beneath which lay a small photographic plate, cracked in half. He drew out the pieces, fitted them together, and peered at it in front of the window. The image of a woman looked back at him, the details very finely rendered, the wisps of hair, her rather coarse complexion, her cheeks rouged – wet plate collodion photography, certainly. She had a look of suspicion on her face, heartlessness, perhaps, which showed through the rouge and powder and paint. Perhaps she was a Dean Street prostitute, St. Ives thought, an easy victim who would scarcely be missed were she to disappear.
“I take it this is one of the fabled skulls,” Tubby said.
“Dismantled, yes. I believe that Narbondo called its ghost forth, if you’ll allow me to use equally fabulous language, imprisoned it within the glass box, and blew it to pieces. I very much hope that its spirit was released from bondage, if that’s the case.”
“Sheer lunacy, it seems to me,” Tubby said. “Do you have any objection to burning the entire lot of it?”
“None whatsoever,” St. Ives said, dropping the pieces of photographic plate back into the skull.
Tubby laid the top hat back over it and emptied the second receptacle, another quart of fresh oil over that which had by now soaked in.
St. Ives walked to the door and opened it, going out into the afternoon without a word. The place wanted badly to be burnt, and Lord Moorgate wouldn’t object. Tubby followed him, smoke already swirling out through the window. They left the door standing open, found their companions, and followed Finn into the wood and along the creek. It came into St. Ives’s mind to wonder how Lord Moorgate had found his way into the marsh. There had been no evidence of a coach, nor of a dead servant, had he brought one along. And the woman who had trodden through the blood? Was she the mysterious Helen? Clearly she had been safe from Narbondo’s depredations. There were mysteries unsolved, he thought, but much had become clear to him.
Some distance up the path they found George’s body in the brook, as Finn had described. There was no time to bury the man, and they could scarcely take the body along, for they were moving quickly now, bound for Cliffe Village, where Tubby, Jack, and Doyle would take the South Eastern Line back into London. In the village they could send someone to retrieve George’s body. It was their good luck that the path followed the stream, for there were enough footprints in the soft soil to tell a coherent story, or at least parts of the story. The big pirate had murdered George, but hadn’t gone on. The Crumpet’s fate was well known to them. There were no other tracks save Eddie’s for some little distance beyond where Finn and the Crumpet had turned back, but then Eddie had been met by someone coming along from the direction of the village – a woman. Who was she? Not the woman with the bloody shoes, surely. A stranger, then?
As for Narbondo, he had certainly removed himself and the coal to London. The emptiness of the inn, which had apparently been abandoned in haste, had spoken volumes. Finn had told them of a landau carriage in the barn, but the carriage and horses were gone. They had found a dead man in the tunnel. From the way the body lay, and from what Finn had told them, the man had almost certainly been shot while pursuing Kraken, which was heartening, unless there had been others involved in the pursuit who had been luckier than the dead man. Venturing deeper into the tunnel might have told the tale, but that wouldn’t do. They hadn’t the time. It was a difficult decision to make, since Bill might be lying in the darkness bleeding. The quicker they made their way into Cliffe Village, the quicker they could send someone into the tunnels to find him.
“Here now,” said Jack. “Someone’s joined. A man’s boot-prints.”
“A tall man,” Doyle said, given the size. “And staggering, too. Wounded perhaps.”
“Kraken!” St. Ives said, certain that he was right, yet worried that he would tempt fate with his certainty.
It took only a few minutes now to track him back to the tunnel in the limekilns, which settled the question. If these were the boot-prints of one of the pirates, the man would have gone off in the other direction, returning to the inn. Kraken was alive, or at least had been alive when he came out of the tunnel.
They hastened forward now, St. Ives calculating how long it would take for him and Hasbro to return to Uncle Gilbert’s bivouac for the airship. What they would find in London was uncertain. The only certainty was that speed was of the essence. If they were lucky, and Eddie were indeed safe, then they might do their part to stop the debacle at the cathedral. It suddenly seemed to St. Ives that his luck might perhaps be in again.