The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘The inspector wants to know if all British policemen carry such a case.’

  Cherry laughed. ‘I didn’t put this together till after I left the force. And then it was done because of stuff I read and the like. Birmingham police weren’t very daring—didn’t accept fingerprints yet, though Scotland Yard do—and the French, o’ course. But little by little, little by little.’

  ‘The inspector wants to know when you’re going to show us something.’

  ‘Oh, now, sir!’ Cherry looked unhappy. ‘I may not find anything! But remember—negative evidence is evidence. I often have to remind folk of that. Negative evidence is evidence. When you’ve found nothing, Mr Denton, you’ve found something!’

  Donati found that hard to translate, but when he’d got it, Gianaculo laughed and clapped Cherry on the shoulder and said, ‘D’accordo—d’accordo!’

  Cherry, who was readying his lamp, smiled a little feebly. He raised the lamp. ‘I’m going to look for blood.’ He took a magnifying glass from the case, then put it in front of one eye and said to them, ‘“The game’s afoot, Watson.”’ He laughed as if embarrassed, shrugged. Gianaculo looked at Denton for an explanation; he tried to translate, decided that humour was even harder to force through the veil of language than messages from the Other Side through the veil of death. He gave it up.

  Cherry had shone his light on the bottom stair. He handed the light to Maltby and bent over. ‘This dark spot at the bottom is of course the blood that everybody’s noticed. We know that’s blood. As for the rest…’ He scraped up a little of the long-dried blood with the scalpel and put it into a glass tube of the sort that doctors carried pills in, then wrote on a paper label and dropped it into a rack in the suitcase. ‘If I need more than six of those, I’m in trouble. That’s all the bottles I’ve got.’

  Cherry began to make his way up the staircase, slow step by slow step. He paused on the fourth, studied the stair with the magnifier, scraped with the scalpel and dropped the result into another phial, then drew a pencil line around the scraped square inch. He did the same on the seventh stair and again on one of the balusters that supported the handrail above. At the top, he went over the entire landing, pointing out to Maltby each place where he wanted light. Maltby sighed, groaned, rolled his eyes.

  ‘E alora,’ Gianaculo said while Cherry was down on his knees on the landing, ‘cosa a trovato? Di sangue?’

  Denton said that yes, he thought that Cherry had found blood in three places. ‘Miracolo,’ the inspector said in the voice of a man who does not believe in miracles.

  Cherry came down the stairs with his head down, an index finger shoved against his moustache. He took off his overcoat and threw it down on his suitcase, followed it with his hat. ‘Hot,’ he said. He took the light from Maltby and turned it off.

  ‘You found blood,’ Denton said.

  Cherry nodded. ‘Three places. But damned little of it.’

  Denton translated for the inspector: ‘How do you know it’s blood?’

  Cherry said, ‘I know blood when I see it. But I’ll show you—there’s a test, it isn’t what you’d call reliable, because it reacts with some other stuff, too, but it does react with blood.’ He selected a small bottle from his case, checked the label, and dipped in a sable brush from his collection in it. He stood over the large stain at the bottom of the stair. ‘We know this is the real thing, right?’ He knelt and painted a small area of the stain with the clear liquid from the bottle. A strong odour of acetic acid rose up. Where he had put the liquid, the surface bubbled and a pink froth appeared. ‘That’s what blood does.’

  They crowded in and bent close. The inspector growled something that Denton did his best to put into English: ‘What’s the liquid?’

  ‘Blessed if I know. Something and something in glacial acetic acid, if you know what that is. I don’t do the chemistry, I’m sorry; I just do what works.’ He went up several steps and sat next to the first place he had scraped and circled. They followed him. He shone his light and then dipped the brush and passed it over the small area. The old oak turned darker. A few bubbles rose along the lines of the grain, their surface shining faintly pink.

  ‘Del sangue,’ Gianaculo said. Blood.

  Cherry gave the same demonstration at the other two places. Denton was most interested in the stain on the baluster, which was apparently a smear rather than drops or a puddle, suggesting a collision at speed. He looked up and down the staircase.

  Cherry was watching him. He said, ‘I make it that he fell as much sideways as down at the first, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ Denton pointed. ‘Off the landing, maybe tried to catch himself—hit that post or whatever it is, which is as solid as a rock—then went on down. Face first?’

  ‘No way to be sure, but I’d think he was on his back when he hit the bottom, if that’s when the poor old chap broke his neck. Wouldn’t have done it if he’d been face down, would he?’

  ‘But he could have broken his neck when he hit the upright, the first thing he hit.’

  ‘He could of, but Maltby reported that the contusion was on his forehead. I’m not a medico; I guess you could break your neck that way, but…’ Cherry, who had been sitting on the step, got up, his knees cracking, the last few inches done slowly and as if painfully. ‘We’ll never know, sir.’

  ‘You’re satisfied, then?’

  ‘I’m not satisfied, no, sir. I told you right off the reel, I agreed with you that there should ought to of been more blood.’

  ‘You’ve found more blood.’

  ‘Ye-e-e-s, but…’

  As they went back down the stairs, Gianaculo murmured in Denton’s ear, ‘E di piu, è per certo il sangue umano?’ Denton thought it a good question: was it certain that what Cherry had found was human blood?

  ‘I don’t have a test for that, sir,’ Cherry said. He was putting his tools away. ‘If there is one, I don’t know of it, which isn’t saying much.’

  ‘We should have found that blood ourselves,’ Donati said.

  ‘Don’t go blaming yourself. There isn’t enough light on those stairs to see the shine on your own shoes. No wonder the old chap fell. Any of us’d have missed it, sir. You didn’t have a dark lantern or an electric torch that night, did you?’

  Denton said, ‘I had a pocket flash. Pretty feeble.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Cherry straightened, with the same noises and apparent pain. ‘Let’s have a look at the rest of the house.’ He stared down at his suitcase. ‘I’m not very pleased with the work I’ve done here, I don’t mind saying. I’d hoped to find something that would tie it all up nicely and allow His Lordship to say, “Good, that’s done, then.” And I haven’t.’

  ‘I’d say you did pretty well.’

  Cherry grunted. ‘“Pretty well’s” a bit of a frost, isn’t it?’ He led the way upstairs. Denton followed along; partway up, he almost collided with Donati, who was pattering down and who smiled and whispered, ‘WC,’ and went on. Up Denton went. The rest were in Fra Geraldo’s room, watching Cherry turn his light here and there. He got down on hands and knees to look under the bed.

  Maltby looked around and whispered to Denton, ‘Where’s that poof Donati?’

  ‘Call of nature.’

  Maltby frowned, suddenly went past Denton and out the door. This, too, seemed to be a call of nature, but Denton thought it odd enough that he turned away from Cherry’s performance and went as far as the door; then, hearing voices, he went to the balustrade overlooking the stairwell. He had stood here to look down at Gianaculo and the doctor the night that the old man had died. Now, looking down, he saw a foreshortened Donati standing next to Cherry’s investigative kit, and, a step above him, Maltby. Maltby, his voice breaking like an adolescent’s, said, ‘That was not the act of a gentleman, sir!’

  Denton heard Donati chuckle. The capitano stepped up and around Maltby, patting him on the shoulder as he did so, and, still chuckling, he came up the stairs, his cigar at a pleased angle. Denton
pulled back but didn’t try to hide, and Donati, coming to the top of the stairs, saw him and smiled and shrugged. ‘La giovenezza,’ he said. He went into the room.

  Denton moved to the top of the stairs. Maltby was coming up slowly, his face red. He looked up. He hissed, ‘That Dago bastard stole some of the detective’s chemical! And one of his phials!’ He was breathing heavily when he came even with Denton. ‘I’ve a mind to report him for theft.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  Maltby’s eyes swivelled to Denton’s face. Denton said, ‘He’s a captain of the Carabinieri. At the worst, he’s hoping to steal a secret that the Birmingham police have and he doesn’t. He’s very scientific.’

  ‘But it isn’t right!’

  ‘But it’s very sensible. You catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar, Maltby—tell him it was a good idea and ask him to share the results with you. Might stand you in good stead if you become a copper.’

  Denton let Maltby take the others through the rooms. Four were too many for most of them because of their size; most were empty; none, except for the one in which the old man had slept, had any reason to interest them. Denton had prowled the corridor, then gone on upstairs, looking into rooms he had seen before, stopping finally in the one that had the dilapidated chair. It was at least a place to sit down.

  The chair happened to be placed where it gave a pleasant view over rooftops towards the green heights above the coastal plain. The sun was slanting in over the house and brightening the walls facing him; it picked out the green of plants that somebody had put out on a roof. In the evening in summer, he thought, the last of the sunlight would just enter the room, then die, and the sky would darken to lavender and purple, showing pink and then orange before it went to brass and darkness. He closed his eyes, thinking of it.

  He could hear the others coming up the stairs. He dreaded showing them the chapel. He wanted to escape it, to make some excuse. He felt he was betraying the old man. He pinched the bridge of his nose and then pressed on his eyeballs. It was no good trying to postpone it.

  He tapped on the broad arm of the old chair. Head in hand, he looked down at it. For a chair without upholstery, it was quite comfortable. He picked at a gouge in the old wood’s surface, then traced another, ran his finger around a large ink stain. The shape was not unlike South America. He had thought once of going to South America when he had been looking for a place to start over.

  ‘Well, this is where you’ve been hiding.’ It was Maltby. Gianaculo and Cherry were pushing into the doorway behind him.

  ‘I was almost asleep. Are you ready to see the chapel?’

  ‘Just doing these last rooms…’ Cherry had come in, was looking around. ‘No closets, no cupboards, not much to look into, is there?’ He looked out of the window. ‘They don’t mind making a crazy quilt of their rooftops, do they?’

  They looked quickly into the other rooms and Denton led the way to the last door. Without any show, he opened the armoire and moved the upper moulding.

  ‘Bring your light.’

  In that darkness, Cherry’s big lamp was dazzling—blinding, as he had said. It moved over the nearby carving, picked out the work table, rested on a painting. Denton pushed past Cherry and stepped down into the chapel so as to light a gas lamp, then went from lamp to lamp until all six were lit.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not going to explain it?’ Maltby cried.

  ‘I think it explains itself.’

  Gianaculo was still standing in the armoire, staring into the chapel. ‘You knew this room?’

  ‘I was in it before.’

  Gianaculo was looking at something in the chapel, not at Denton. ‘Ma che sorpresa!’

  ‘It was—’ He didn’t know the word for ‘concealed’. He said, ‘Segreto.’

  ‘Maybe, signore, you…need…warn me. Before.’

  ‘The room was his—for praying. His chiesa.’

  ‘Chiesa strana. But he was… uomo strano. He was—’ Gianaculo shook his head and pushed past Denton into the chapel.

  Denton went back to the room with the chair. He felt as if he had done something ugly. He again put his head in his hand and studied the chair-arm, and it was only after he had been sitting there like that for several minutes that he came out of his funk and asked himself why an antique chair should have a recent-looking stain of black ink on it. And it wasn’t only the one stain: there were smaller ones on the arm, too, and at least one other on the chair’s seat below the arm. He strained to that side. He could see black spots of ink on the floor.

  He sat up. A chair in a room. The only chair in any room in the upper storeys of the house. Left by accident, or placed there because of…the view? Or the light? The chair stood where light from the window fell abundantly on the arm at which he had been looking. As if—

  Denton took out his notebook and his fountain pen and pretended to write. Yes, the light was good. Yes, he was sitting properly to put the notebook where a spill could easily have stained the chair arm. Yes, this would have been a fine place to come late in the day to sit and to be quiet and perhaps to write.

  Denton put away the notebook and the pen.

  To write? They had found nothing in the house to suggest that Fra Geraldo had kept any records. Certainly, he had found nothing in the chapel, unless there was a secret hiding place in there. But if he had wanted to write in this room, would the old man have gone to the trouble of hiding his writing materials in the chapel, bringing them here and taking them back every time he wanted to write? Denton thought not. The chapel was… saturated. It was complete, over-complete; it was sufficient unto itself several times over. This room, on the other hand, was spare, insufficient, deliberately colourless. The chapel was a place in which to pursue madness. This was a place in which to pursue sanity. A place of darkness and a place of light.

  He looked around the room. There was nothing, of course. He walked around the walls. He looked out of the window—nothing either above or below it in which to have hidden anything. He went to the door and looked at the room. There was nothing.

  Except, of course, the chair.

  He had finally to tip the chair on its back to find it. He knew Fra Geraldo’s skill now, however, and so he knew that the smoothness, the slight darkening on the hand-planed underside of the seat, had been made by fingers, and pressure there now depressed the false bottom and allowed the board to tilt down to reveal, nested in their own compartments, two steel-nibbed pens, a bottle of black ink, and a ledger.

  He stared at the ledger for seconds. He was reluctant to touch it. Janet had insisted to him that people had a right to their secrets; what they hide should be allowed to stay hidden. And to die with them. Yet—

  He took the ledger out and closed the false bottom. He tilted the chair upright. Sat in it.

  The ledger was one of those old ones that was tall and narrow and had been bound in three-quarter soft leather, the front and back mostly in marbled paper. The spine said only ‘Ledger’ and ‘1860’. Yet when he opened it at random, he saw a date in the year 1888, and the last entry—only two-thirds through the book, for Fra Geraldo had written little—was in December 1903: ‘They have come back, their shrill voices. The imps. I will go mad.’ It had been written three days before the old man had visited Denton to ask for his help.

  On the first page, he had written, ‘11 June 1860. In this book, I mean to write of my depravity and the salvation I hope to find, for it is written that even the worst of us can be saved if only he repent. Gerald Sommers.’

  Denton put his finger under the page to turn it, and he heard a voice calling his name.

  ‘Mr Denton—sir! Are you there?’

  Denton had time only to push the ledger inside his suit jacket and to stand, trying to hold his overcoat over his arm so as to hide the book. He started for the doorway as Cherry, red-faced, appeared in it.

  ‘I was just coming out to, mmm, go to the WC downstairs.’

  C
herry was shaking his head. ‘That room! That room, sir! He was fair yampy, wasn’t he, the old man!’

  ‘I think he was unhappy, yes.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. I don’t know what I’ll tell His Lordship.’

  Denton was edging towards the door. ‘Tell him the truth. The truth is always best, Mr Cherry—excuse me—we’ll talk in a minute—’

  He fled down the stairs.

  They gathered outside in what was now the late-afternoon gloom of the courtyard, the surrounding buildings casting it into deep shadow. Maltby locked the huge door and, coming close to Denton, said, ‘I’m done with this, thank God. Once I put Sergeant Buzzfuzz on the train tomorrow, I’m free of the entire mess.’

  ‘Who’s going to take care of the house?’

  ‘Apparently His Lordship has passed it into the hands of an estate agent. I suppose I wasn’t good enough for him.’ He settled himself, like a wet bird shaking off water. ‘I’m through with the whole business, anyway. I’ve given in my notice.’

  ‘To the consulate?’

  Maltby nodded. ‘I don’t know how I’ll tell my mother. Perhaps I won’t.’ He strode away towards the portiere’s cage.

  Cherry was standing by himself, his suitcase in both hands as if the added weight of the old man’s dried blood were pulling him down. Gianaculo and Donati stood together, neither seeming comfortable, as if they were performing for each other.

  Il poliziotto fa la commedia.

  But which poliziotto? And why?

  ‘We were speaking of the chapel,’ Gianaculo said in Italian. ‘What a madman!’ Donati looked amused, his head turned upward, a thin stream of cigar smoke escaping his mouth.

  Denton looked at Cherry. ‘What do you think? The inspector says the old man was mad.’