Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02

by Lord Kelvin's Machine

  "Him?" I asked.

  He gave me such a look that I thought I'd landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.

  "That. In your hand."

  The elephant. He blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. "I like that," he said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face, too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness, somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.

  I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth, and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I'll admit, that he'd give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard from him no more. I knocked once on the door. ''Go away," he said.

  So I did. He wanted the creature more than I wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That's the sort of thing I told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn't want to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into Godall's shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.

  I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn't the fellow in the truck; she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though, and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.

  She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling that I'd been cut, although you'd suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn't count for much—any more than having one's rubber elephant stolen by a madman counts for anything.

  "A man like that ought to be brought to justice," she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised his eyebrows at me.

  "This is Mr. Owlesby," he said to the woman. "You can speak freely in front of him."

  She paid me no attention at all, as if to say that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no one would stop her. I sat down.

  "Brought to justice," she said.

  "Justice," said St. Ives, "was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back. He died in Scandinavia. He fell into a lake where he without a doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I ... I saw him tumble into the lake myself. He didn't crawl out."

  "He did crawl out."

  "Impossible," said St. Ives—and it was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr. Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice's vegetable garden, but the effort had cost him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn this last into a metaphor of the great man's life over the last couple of years, but I won't. I promised to leave tragedy alone.

  "Look here," the woman said, handing across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years, in someone's pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the point, as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most disinterested way imaginable.

  She handed over a second letter, this one fresh from last week's post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside, including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the man who had written the first missive. It didn't take an expert to see that. There was a flourish in the 7"s, and the uppercase A, of which there were two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however, was different. ''H. Frost," it read, with a scattering of initials afterward that I don't recall.

  The text of this second letter was interesting. It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at Edinburgh University, a chemist, and had heard rumors that papers belonging to our madwoman's father were lost in the vicinity of the North Downs some forty years ago. He seemed to think that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved a certain notoriety that he'd never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so, in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, "H. Frost."

  St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the letters at all. "The doctor is dead, madam," was what he said finally.

  She shook her head. "Those letters were written with the same hand; anyone can see that."

  “In fact," said St. Ives, "the more elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it's the subtleties that are difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor's hand, I don't know. It's an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn't concern me. My suggestion is to ignore it utterly. Don't respond. Do nothing at all."

  "He ought to be brought to justice is what I'm saying."

  "He's dead," said St. Ives finally. And then, after a moment of silence, he said, "And if this mystery were worth anything to me at all, then I'd have to know a great deal more about the particulars, wouldn't I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were lost in the North Downs forty years ago?"

  Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a good deal that she wasn't saying. Bringing people to justice wasn't her only concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment, pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing anything at all. "My father's name was John Kenyon. He was . . . misguided when he was young," she said. "And then he was misused when he was older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding. He went over to Rome ..."

  "Moved to the Continent?" asked St. Ives.

  "No, he became a papist. He repented of all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn't have it. His manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I'm certain he didn
't, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing what he intended to do.

  "But my father was a weak man, a worm. He saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to London and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I remember, and penitent, and I married and moved away within the year and didn't see him again until he was an old man and dying. My mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself that killed her—and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by the Royal Academy. A man named Piper, who had a chair at Oxford, wanted the formulae for himself, and had got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my father said, so that he might rest in peace.

  "Well, the last thing I cared about, I'll say it right out, was him resting in peace. The less peace he got, the better, and amen. So I didn't do anything. I had a son, by then, and a drunk for a husband who was as pitiful as my father was and who I hadn't seen in a fortnight and hoped never to see again. But I was never a lucky one. That part don't matter, though. What matters is that there are these papers that he mentions, this notebook. And I know that it's him—the one you claim is dead up in Scandinavia—that wants the papers now. No one else knows about them, you see, except him and a couple of old hypocrites from the Royal Academy, and they wouldn't need to ask me about them, would they, having stolen the damned things themselves. He's got his methods, the doctor has, and this letter doesn't come as any surprise to me, no surprise at all. If you know him half as well as you claim to, gentlemen, then it won't come as any surprise to you either, no matter how many times you think you saw him die."

  And so ended her speech. It just rushed out of her, as if none of it were calculated, and yet I was fairly certain that every word had been considered and that half the story, as they say, hadn't been told. She had edited and euphemized the thing until there was nothing left but the surface, with the emotional nonsense put in to cover the detail that was left out.

  She had got to St. Ives, too. And Godall, it seemed to me, was weighing out the same bag of tobacco for the tenth time. Both of them were studying the issue hard. If she had come in through the door intending to address their weightiest fear, she could hardly have been more on the money than she was. Something monumental was brewing, and had been since the day of the explosion and the business down by the Embankment. No run-of-the-mill criminal was behind it; that weeks had gone by in the meantime was evidence only that it was brewing slowly, that it wouldn't be rushed, and was far more ominous as a result.

  "May we keep the letters?" asked St. Ives.

  ''No," she replied, snatching both of them off the counter where Godall had laid them. She turned smiling and stepped out onto the sidewalk, climbing into the waiting cab and driving away, just like that, without another word. She had got us, and that was the truth. St. Ives asking for the letters had told her as much.

  Her sudden departure left us just a little stunned, and it was Godall who brought us back around by saying to St. Ives, "I fancy that there is no Professor Frost at Edinburgh in any capacity at all."

  "Not a chemist, certainly. Not in any of the sciences. That much is a ruse."

  "And it's his handwriting, too, there at the end."

  "Of course it is." St. Ives shuddered. Here was an old wound opening up—Alice, Narbondo's death in Scandinavia, St. Ives once again grappling with weighty moral questions that had proven impossible to settle. All he could make out of it all was guilt—his own. And finally he had contrived, by setting himself adrift, simply to wipe it out of his mind. Now this— Narbondo returning like the ghost at the feast . . .

  "It's just the tiniest bit shaky, though," Godall said, "as if he were palsied or weak but was making a great effort to disguise it, so as to make the handwriting of this new letter as like the old as possible. I'd warrant that he wasn't well enough to write the whole thing, but could only manage a couple of sentences; the rest was written for him."

  "A particularly clever forger, perhaps . . .," began St. Ives. But Godall pointed out the puzzle:

  "Why forge another man's handwriting but not use his name? That's the key, isn't it? There's no point in such a forgery unless these are deeper waters than they appear to be."

  "Perhaps someone wanted the letter to get round to us, to make us believe Narbondo is alive ..."

  "Then it's a puzzling song and dance," said Godall, "and a dangerous one. We're marked men if she's right. It's Narbondo's way of calling us out. I rather believe, though, that this is his way of serving her a warning, of filling her with fear; he's come back, he means to say, and he wants that notebook."

  "I believe," said St. Ives, "that if I were her I'd tell him, if she knows where it is."

  "That's what frightens me about the woman," said Godall, sweeping tobacco off the counter. "She seems to see this as an opportunity of some sort, doesn't she? She means to tackle the monster herself. My suggestion is that we fmd out the whereabouts of this man Piper. He must be getting on in age, probably retired from Oxford long ago."

  Just then a lad came in through the door with the Standard, and news that the first of the ships had gone down off Dover. It was another piece to the puzzle, anyone could see that, or rather could sense it, even though there was no way to know how it fit.

  THE SHIP HAD been empty, its captain, crew, and few paying passengers having put out into wooden boats for the most curious reason. The captain had found a message in the ship's log—scrawled into it, he thought, by someone on board, either a passenger or someone who had come over the side. It hadn't been there when they'd left the dock at Gravesend; the captain was certain of it. They had got a false start, having to put in at Sterne Bay, and they lost a night there waiting for cargo that didn't arrive.

  Someone, of course, had sneaked on board and meddled with the log; there had never been any cargo.

  What the message said was that every man on board must get out into the boats when the ship was off Ramsgate on the way to Calais. They must watch for a sailing craft with crimson sails. This boat would give them a sign, and then every last one of them would take to the lifeboat and row for all he was worth until they'd put a quarter mile between themselves and the ship. Either that or they would die—all of them.

  It was a simple mystery, really, baffling, but with nothing grotesque about it. Until you thought about it—about what would have happened if the captain hadn't opened the logbook and those men hadn't got into the boat. The message was in earnest. The ship sank, pretty literally like a stone, and although the crew was safe, their safety was a matter of dumb luck. Whoever had engineered the disaster thought himself to be Destiny, and had played fast and high with the lives of the people on board. That had been the real message, and you can bank on it.

  The captain lost his post as well as his ship. Why hadn't he turned about and gone back to Dover? Because the note in the log didn't hint that the ship would be destroyed, did it? It was more than likely a hoax, a prank—one that would kill a couple of hours while they tossed in the lifeboat and then rowed back over to her and took possession again. He had never even expected to see the doubtful sailcraft. And they were already a day late because of the stopover at Sterne Bay. It was all just too damned unlikely to take seriously, except the part about getting into the boat. The captain wouldn't risk any lives, he said.

  But there it was: the ship had gone down. It hadn't been the least bit unlikely in the end. There were only two things about it that were unlikely, it seemed to us: one was that the crew, every man jack of them, had remained in Dover, and shipped out again at once. The word of the ca
ptain was all that the authorities had; and he, apparently, was a Yank, recently come over from San Francisco. The second unlikelihood was that this business with the ship was unrelated to the two London incidents.

  The Praetieing Detective at Sterne Bay

  WE HAD NO choice but to set out for the coast by way of Sterne Bay. It wasn't just the business of the downed ship; it was that St. Ives discovered that Dr. Piper, of the Academy, had retired years past to a cottage down the Thames, at Sterne Bay. Godall stayed behind. His business didn't allow for that sort of jaunt, and there was no reason to suppose that London would be devoid of mysteries just because this most recent one had developed a few miles to the east.

  St. Ives had put in at the Naval Office, too, in order to see if he couldn't discover something about this Captain Bowker, but the captain was what they call a shadowy figure, an American whose credentials weren't at all clear, but who had captained small merchant ships down to Calais for a year or so. There was no evidence that he was the sort to be bought off—no recorded trouble. That was the problem; nothing was known about the man, and so you couldn't help jumping to the conclusion that he was just the sort to be bought off. It seemed to stand to reason.

  We rattled out of Victoria Station in the early morning and arrived in time to breakfast at the Crown and Apple in Sterne

  Bay before setting about our business. Nothing seemed to be particularly pressing. We took over an hour at it, shoving down rashers and eggs, and St. Ives all the while in a rare good humor, chatting with the landlady about this and that—all of it entirely innocent—and then stumbling onto the subject of the ship going down and of Captain Bowker. Of course it was in all the papers, being the mystery that it was, and there was nothing at all to suggest that we had anything but a gossip's interest in it.

  Oh, she knew Captain Bowker right enough. He was a Yank, wasn't he, and the jolliest and maybe biggest man you'd meet in the bay. He hadn't an enemy, which is what made the business such a disaster, poor man, losing his ship like that, and now out of a situation. Well, not entirely; he had taken a position at the icehouse, tending the machinery—a good enough job in a fishing town like Sterne Bay. He was generally at it from dawn till bedtime, and sometimes took dinner at the Crown and Apple, since he didn't have a family. He slept at the icehouse too, now that his ship was gone and he hadn't got a new one. He was giving up the sea, he said, after the disaster, and was happy only that he hadn't lost any men. The ship be damned, he liked to say—it was his men that he cared about; that was ever the way of Captain Bowker.