I followed Miss Stoner into the drawing room, and Wood followed me. The instant the door had closed, I said, “I fear you may be in danger.”
“Danger? But he has no reason to kill me.”
“No, but listen,” I said, “because I think I have it. He does not know an autopsy has been performed—does he?”
“I have not told him.”
“Then if he kills you tonight, in the same ‘mysterious’ manner as Julia, it proves Miss Shirley’s innocence, and if he is friends with the gypsies, he cannot afford to get a vampire falsely convicted of murder.”
“No,” she agreed, “and he always likes to talk to the vagabond hunts if one is in the neighborhood.”
“I think he accused Miss Shirley because he was thinking of the bite mark, before he realized that he could actually keep there from being an autopsy at all. Who is the coroner?”
“Mayor Winthrop’s brother-in-law.”
“Then, yes, you die in the same mysterious manner as your sister, exonerating Miss Shirley, and I give you odds of ten to one that Dr. Roylott will announce that you and Julia have succumbed to the effects of some sort of poisonous miasma. The coroner directs the jury, Dr. Roylott closes that wing of the house, and he’s got everything he wants.”
“Dear God,” she said, her eyes wide. “He has been asking me if I’ve smelled anything strange in my bedroom. He even suggested I open a window tonight.”
“Yes,” I said, although I will admit I was a little taken aback to have my theory so abundantly confirmed. “Would he have any difficulty in obtaining a key to your room?”
She shook her head. “The locks in this house are so old that one key works in all of them—except his. That one he had replaced with a Yale lock.”
“Of course he did,” I said. “Then I apologize for the necessity, but we must search your bedroom, for there is every reason to believe there is a venomous snake hidden somewhere in it.”
“Name of God,” she said. “It does make sense, but is he truly going to kill me just to save a vampire?”
“He may have some view in mind that would require spending some of your mother’s capital; he may feel that you will leave the house in the wake of your sister’s death and go beyond his reach; he may simply have decided that he wants to. Or I may be wrong, although I don’t think I am.”
“No,” she said. “It makes too much sense of what has seemed senseless. Please, let us go search. But later—Harry, you and I have much to say to each other.”
“I know,” said Wood. “I won’t turn craven.”
Miss Stoner’s bedroom was in a wing of the house even gloomier and more dismal than the main rooms—also chilly and rather damp. I said, “This is just the sort of place to have a poisonous miasma.”
“I know,” said Miss Stoner. “Julia and I—that is, I spend all winter coughing.”
“Why haven’t you left?” said Wood, appalled.
“I have nowhere to go,” said Miss Stoner. “This is my bedroom.”
It was a plain room, simply furnished. Wood slung Teddy’s box off his back, careful again not to tip it too far or too hard, and said, “I suggest you leave this part to me.”
“Gladly,” said I.
“I’m no expert,” Wood said, “but I do know a little bit about where snakes like to hide.”
We watched as he searched, slowly and carefully, looking into all the dark corners and under every piece of furniture, using his stick to keep from having to get too close. Finally, he approached the bed.
“This may be the most likely spot,” he said, “but I don’t want to be doing anything in the middle of the room until I know there isn’t a snake in the corner.”
“You’ve hunted snakes before,” I said, as he looked cautiously under Miss Stoner’s narrow bed.
“You have to have more than one string to your bow when you live as precariously as Teddy and I do,” Wood said, straightening as much as he could. He looked carefully up and down the bed, then his eyes widened and he said, “God help me, I think I know where it is.”
He backed up as far as he could and began using his stick, very gingerly, to prod at the pillows.
“Oh dear God,” said Miss Stoner. When I glanced at her, her face was bone white and she had her teeth set in her lower lip.
We all heard the pillows hiss.
“That’s it, right enough,” said Wood. “Dr. Doyle, will you let Teddy out?”
The door to Teddy’s box was simple enough. I raised it, and Teddy shot out, straight for Wood.
“What is that?” said Miss Stoner in a strangled whisper.
“Teddy’s a mongoose,” said Wood, who seemed very calm now that he knew where the snake was. “Some people call them ichneumon, but most of the people I’ve met call them snake-catcher. That’s what Teddy does.”
He picked the mongoose up and set it gently on the bed, near the foot. Then he prodded the pillows again, making them hiss, and then—with the mongoose’s unwavering attention now fixed on the head of the bed—he used his stick to flip one pillow completely off the bed.
I think Miss Stoner and I were both too paralyzed to make a sound.
There was definitely a snake, and as it reared up, hood flaring, we could see it was definitely a cobra. Wood took a healthy step back.
“The speckled band,” Miss Stoner said, although her voice was barely audible, even to me. “If she didn’t see the head…”
The body of the snake was indeed irregularly colored, enough so that “speckled” was not inaccurate. And no one could say what Julia Stoner had actually seen, in the light of a single wavering match.
Teddy darted up the bed with blinding speed, then bounded aside just as fast. The snake struck and missed. Teddy bounced from foot to foot, darted in again, darted back. The snake struck and missed. It began to come forward, trying to reach the mongoose that danced and darted and made odd little noises that sounded like laughter. The snake struck and struck again, and Teddy somehow wasn’t there for either bite. He lured it farther and farther down the bed, until he could actually bound all the way around it. The snake hissed and struck and missed and Teddy darted in from behind and bit it just behind the head, shaking it like any rat-catching terrier.
“It’s dead,” said Wood. “Teddy doesn’t miss his grip.”
“Oh thank God,” said Miss Stoner on a tremulous exhale.
“Come sit down,” I said, knowing that her stays were probably keeping her from getting as much breath as she needed. There was one chair in the bedroom and I handed her into it. She might well choose never to sleep in that bed again, and I could not say that I would blame her.
“Teddy will carry off the body and stash it somewhere if we let him,” Wood said, “and I gather we’ll want it for—”
“Helen!” The same angry male voice I’d heard that afternoon. “What’s this nonsense about visitors? Who the Devil is coming to pay a call at this time of night?”
Dr. Grimsby Roylott, when I finally laid eyes on him, was well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, and with a dark brooding stare that promised ill for anyone who dared cross him. He loomed in the doorway of Miss Stoner’s room, taking everything in: Miss Stoner not slumped in the chair only because her stays would not allow it; me beside her; Wood (Roylott’s frown deepening) beside the bed; Teddy standing triumphantly over his enemy; and finally the long, limp body of the cobra, and his expression changed from anger to horror.
“My Naja naja! What have you done to her?”
“Kept her from killing Miss Stoner,” said Wood. “Do you remember me, Dr. Roylott? My name is Henry Wood.”
It took a moment for the import of that name to reach Dr. Roylott through his grief for the cobra, but then his face changed color, and if I hadn’t been certain of his guilt before, that would have convinced me.
He stood for a moment, his mouth working although no sounds emerged; then his nerve broke and he turned and fled in long strides.
“Where is he going
?” Wood said.
“I don’t know,” said Miss Stoner. “He must know he has no reason to fear. The Chief Constable will see to it that he is not arrested.”
“There are ways around that,” I said, thinking of Lestrade, “but nothing that we can do tonight.”
Wood caught Teddy off the bed, making him drop the cobra’s corpse, and put him firmly back in his box, despite Teddy’s protests and wiggling.
“He’s really a very handsome little animal,” said Miss Stoner. “What did you say his name is?”
“Teddy,” Wood said and added, almost shyly, “He has been my best friend for many years.”
“How lonely your life must be,” said Miss Stoner, then, inexorably, “Harry, we must talk.”
“I know,” Wood said, and I was just about to excuse myself, for I had no wish to be an audience for this reunion of Romeo and Juliet, when there came a bloodcurdling scream.
“What in the name of God?” said Wood, but I already knew.
“Moriarty,” I said, and started back for the main wing of the house.
Moriarty was not with the horse in the yard, and the groom was unable to tell me where he had gone. But a moment later, the question was moot, for Moriarty appeared, yellow eyes gleaming in the dark, and said, “Someone had better go check on Dr. Roylott. I’m afraid that he may have just accidentally killed himself.”
“And you happened to be a witness?”
“A cause,” he said apologetically. “I was walking on the lawn behind the house when someone flung a window open. Naturally I went to see what was going on, and I found a gentleman whom I presume to be Dr. Roylott, in the middle of moving a snake from a glass tank to a bag of the sort snake charmers use. I said, ‘Good evening,’ and I’m afraid he lost his grip on the snake, which immediately turned and struck. He screamed and fell to his knees and then full length on the floor.”
“In other words, you startled him to death.”
“You could put it that way,” Moriarty said. “Another reason for concern is that I don’t know what happened to the snake.”
“Oh dear,” I said.
From behind me, Wood said, “What happened? What was that terrible scream?”
He looked unfinished without Teddy’s box on his back.
I said, “Something unfortunate seems to have happened to Dr. Roylott.” I glanced at Moriarty, who repeated his story.
“I’d best get Teddy,” said Wood.
* * *
It was a grim sight that met our eyes when the butler and the groom between them finally managed to break down Dr. Roylott’s door. The room had been ransacked, as Dr. Roylott in his hurry had simply pulled drawers out and dumped their contents on the bed or on the floor. Mercifully, of the cages and tanks that ringed the room, only one was empty. Two macaques chattered at us, scolding and excited. The doctor himself lay full length on the floor, as Moriarty had said, motionless and with the fixed stare of a corpse.
Wood said, “Well, Teddy, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” and let the mongoose out to hunt.
I said to Miss Stoner, who had insisted on coming, “Is it true that there’s a tiger?”
She managed a noise that could almost pass for a laugh. “There was. It was an old beast, and ill, and it died last winter. He grieved more for that tiger than he did for my mother.”
“Any other creatures we need to worry about?”
“Not that I know of, but then, I didn’t know about the cobra. The hyaena is in the stable block, I do know that much.”
“Is there a will?”
“Somewhere in this room. I know he made one, because he told me about it. He left everything to Julia and me—it was the sort of joke that would amuse him.” She paused, thinking, then said almost to herself, “He must have been planning our murders for a very long time.”
I wondered again about Mrs. Roylott, and again held my tongue.
Teddy came streaking out from beneath the bureau, then turned and bounced and darted back again.
“He’s found the snake,” said Wood. “Let’s see if he can lure it out.”
Teddy advanced and retreated, darting in, bouncing back, and he was clearly maddening, for the snake, in its efforts to reach him, gradually emerged from beneath the bureau.
“That’s a krait,” I said, for I’d seen them in Afghanistan and seen what their bite could do. “Your stepfather had some odd tastes. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky he didn’t get his hands on a hamadryad.”
Miss Stoner shuddered. “When we were little girls, in India, he would sometimes take us along when he went to talk to the snake charmers. They knew all kinds of tricks and secrets. Julia and I were more afraid of them than of their snakes. Once I even saw the guardian of the temple, although my stepfather tried to avoid it.”
Teddy danced in a circle. The krait struck after him and missed again and again, Teddy always—sometimes miraculously—just out of reach.
“How long can he keep doing this?” I asked Wood.
Wood grinned his unexpected sunny grin. “Longer than the snake.”
As with the cobra, the end was abrupt: Teddy found the angle he wanted, darted in, and just like that, the snake was dead. This time he dragged it under the bureau before Wood could get to him.
“Oh blast,” said Wood. “He’s going to make a mess.”
“Let him,” said Miss Stoner. “There’s no one left who cares.”
* * *
There was a great deal of officialdom about the death of Dr. Grimsby Roylott; I ended up getting paid to do the autopsy on him, as there was no one in Stoke Moran who was qualified. My findings were not quite what I had expected. I found the snakebite—the creature had twisted around and bitten him just above the wrist, at the base of his thumb. But I found no trace of the poison’s work on his organs and concluded, with some bemusement, that Dr. Roylott had died of a heart attack, brought on by being bitten by the krait. “Death by misadventure” was the coroner’s ruling.
We then turned around and held the inquest on Julia Stoner, with the body of the cobra as Exhibit A. I confirmed that she had died as a result of being bitten by the cobra; Miss Stoner testified that she and her sister had not even known that their stepfather possessed an Indian cobra. The coroner, a walrus-mustached old man, made harrumphing noises of sympathy and ruled the death an accident—and nothing to do with the vampire Judith Shirley, who was therefore released.
Judith Shirley was a small woman, thick chestnut-brown hair in braids around her head, with the vampire’s eyes like golden coins in her face. She was brisk and forthright in her thanks, and it was clear that she and Moriarty were genuinely fond of each other; she called him “brother” just as he called her “sister,” and I have known actual siblings who valued each other less.
“What will you do now?” I asked her.
She sighed. “Continue vagabonding until I either find a weaker Master I can displace or an abandoned house I can claim by squatter’s rights and start working my way upward from there. There really is no good answer to being a Master without a hunt. I have not the money to do any of the more sensible things, like rent a room, and it is very hard for a vampire to find paying work except … as a vampire. No firm would hire me as a secretary, no mill would take me on even as a floor sweeper. I am not yet so desperate as to sink to prostitution, though some vagabond Masters do.”
“You don’t think keeping a vampiric house is prostitution?” I asked before I could catch myself.
Her eyebrows went up, but she laughed. “I see why James likes you. And, no, in keeping a vampiric house, we allow people to pay us for what we need. Prostitution is if anything the opposite. A woman engaged in prostitution must give away her body and hope the man pays her for it—rather than, for instance, carving her to bits. Do you see?”
“I’m not convinced it isn’t casuistry,” I said, “but I am no expert in such matters, and I accept that you are. I wish you luck, Miss Shirley.”
“Thank you,”
she said. “I will need it.”
* * *
I returned to London that afternoon. Moriarty and I parted ways in Paddington, and I used a portion of my fee to hire a hansom—an extravagance I didn’t usually allow myself when I was alone.
Indulging myself once was allowable, I decided. I had gotten less than four hours’ sleep between the matters that needed to be tidied away in what was now Miss Stoner’s house and the news that the coroner wanted an autopsy of Dr. Roylott, and I had that leaden, aching feeling that comes with too much action and too little sleep.
The hansom drew up in front of 221 Baker Street; I paid the cabbie and pulled myself together to climb the stairs. Crow was waiting on the landing by the time I opened the front door.
“You’re home!” he said. “Will you tell me everything?”
“I will,” said I.
PART NINE
THE LORD MAYOR’S DAY
32
No. 13, Miller’s Court
The ninth of November was the Lord Mayor’s Day, James Whitehead’s investiture as the Lord Mayor of London. Crow insisted that we attend. He had strong feelings about public ceremonies. I managed to persuade him that we did not have to go to Aldwych to see the swearing of the oath (although he was sorely disappointed in me), so that it was merely a matter of finding a suitable vantage point.
We were still arguing about that in an amiable fashion while I finished lacing my boots, when someone started pounding on the front door.
I finished my boots in a hurry and stood up just as Jennie said, “Mr. Crow, it’s a police officer. Should I let him come up?”
“By all means,” said Crow.
The police officer was young, long-faced, sweating profusely. “Inspector Lestrade says can you come right away? There’s been another one.”
Neither of us had to ask, Another what?
* * *
Dorset Street in Whitechapel was another street of doss-houses and pubs, the two places where London’s desperate poor would spend their money. Our guide said, “Here. Miller’s Court,” and we turned down a narrow, reeking alley into a cramped courtyard in which police officers and citizens seemed equally represented.
The Angel of the Crows Page 39