Black Sun Rising

by Mathew Carr

  “That was taken five years ago,” Mrs. Foulkes said. “The Excelsior expedition to Greenland. Randolph was sixty-three. I told him he was too old to go. He wouldn’t listen, of course. He never did.”

  “Was your husband interested in polar exploration, ma’am?”

  “He was more interested in the natives. He took his camera and his measuring instruments with him. Randolph was always measuring people and photographing them.”

  “I’ll need his photograph,” Lawton said. “And a copy of his signature.”

  “Mr. Pickering will give you whatever you need tomorrow. You will also need a passport. I assume you have one?”

  “No ma’am. We didn’t need one in the army.”

  “Well you need to get one. And you will also need francs and pesetas.” Mrs. Foulkes looked at him dubiously. “I hope you can cope with being abroad, Mr. Lawton. Chief Inspector Maitland seems to have great faith in you.”

  Lawton was tempted to tell her that he had fought in a war; that he had supported himself with his fists for nearly three years; that he had risen from street constable to detective in less than two years. He would have liked to sit down with her and tell about all the villains he had chased through Limehouse streets and rookeries that were as far removed from the world in which she lived as Africa or the jungles of Borneo. He could have told her how he had once dressed up as a priest in order to catch the Spitalfields confidence trickster who pretended to be a missionary in order to deceive rich women just like her. He could have described how he had used fingerprints and footprints to prove that Lizzie Hutten’s husband had cracked his wife’s skull with a metal bar and tried to blame it on a burglar—a case that had been featured in the Police Gazette. He could have thrilled her with tales of cat burglars he chased across the rooftops in his prime; of the days and even weeks he had spent stalking and following suspects without any of them knowing until it was too late, and all the other villains he had brought to justice and sent to prison or the gallows by using ingenuity, guile, and disguise as well as physical force.

  “I’ll do my best ma’am,” he said finally. “I’d also like to borrow one of your husband’s books. I’ll return it to his secretary tomorrow.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “It would be useful to have some idea of your husband’s interests.”

  Mrs. Foulkes told him to help himself and pointed out some of her husband’s works. There had been a time when Lawton had read books on criminal investigation methods and the law in the station or the public library. Since leaving the force, he read mostly for recreation and distraction. Foulkes’s books clearly did not belong to any of these categories. Titles such as Heredity and Nature, and Practical Eugenics held no appeal. Lawton briefly considered Narrative of a Traveler in Nyasaland and Children of the Sun: Travels in the Sami Arctic, before settling on The End of England, which Mrs. Foulkes said was his most recent book.

  Now he turned on the gas light and sat down to read it. Within a few pages the explanation for the title became obvious. The introduction was peppered with statistics about destitute aliens, paupers, drunkards, and moral imbeciles who were filling the nation’s slums, workhouses, and asylums. While the unfit continued to breed without any attempt at intervention or mitigation, the birth rate among the more productive sectors of the population continued to fall. According to Foulkes these developments posed a direct threat to the nation’s survival, and had left the greatest empire the world had ever seen increasingly vulnerable to its enemies.

  Lawton had never heard such ideas before, and he was wondering what Foulkes proposed to do about them, when he felt the familiar sharp pain in his head and he smelled the faint whiff of smoke. He knew immediately that there was no fire. He dropped the book and rushed over to the cupboard where he kept his medicines. He broke a vial of amyl nitrate into a cloth and pressed it against his nose and mouth. Immediately his head swelled up like a balloon as he tried to fill his mind with images of strength, youth, and vigor. He saw himself as a boy, climbing trees in Donegal. He heard the roar of the spectators from his fairground fights. He saw Corporal Lawton, First Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifles, running down Spion Kop with a soldier on his back and bullets whining past him. He saw Constable Harry Lawton sprinting through the streets of Limehouse at night. And then his hands began to tremble and the band around his head tightened once again. He dropped onto all fours and rammed the bit between his teeth, as the flame spread through him like the Holy Ghost descending, and he was no longer able to imagine anything at all.

  4

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Lawton knocked on the door of a white Georgian house in Goodge Street. He had not hurt himself during the seizure, but he felt raw and self-conscious as a little man in pince-nez glasses and a brown tweed suit opened the door and looked him up and down. He looked remarkably like a model from Madame Tussauds, Lawton thought, and he seemed barely more animated.

  “Mr. Pickering? I’m Harry Lawton.”

  “Ah yes. I’ve been expecting you.” The secretary ushered him into a large room with a bay window overlooking the street. Lawton took off his hat and looked around in amazement. He had never visited a scientific laboratory before, and this was not how he imagined such places to be. At first sight it reminded him of the classroom at the Christian Brothers school, where Father McGuire once kept pickled birds, reptiles, and animal fetuses in jars as examples of God’s creative genius.

  The shelves and cabinets in Foulkes’s laboratory were lined with glass jars containing what appeared to be brains and fetuses, but unlike Father McGuire’s collection, some of them appeared to be human. One wall was lined with rows of human skulls. Another was mostly taken up by a gallery of Bertillonage-style mugshots of criminals, whose wretched subjects stared back at the camera holding cards detailing their crimes. There were also photographs of men and women with Asiatic or Negroid features, taken at the front and the side. Other subjects bore signs of syphilis, cretinism, or other physical deformities.

  Lawton peered at the skulls and their explanatory labels: Orsini the Brigand 1884; Congolese pygmy 1865; Sami 1900; Herero 1907; Irishman: County Antrim 1847.

  “Quite a collection,” he said.

  “You’re familiar with phrenology?” Pickering asked.

  “You mean that bumps-in-your-head malarkey? As a matter of fact I did read one of Mr. Lombroso’s books once. I wasn’t much impressed by it, to be frank with you. But I hear 1847 was a good year for collecting Irish skulls.”

  Pickering blinked. “Dr. Foulkes was very enthused by Signore Lombroso’s findings—at least initially. But Lombroso’s central preoccupation was the elimination of criminal and deviant behavior. Dr. Foulkes was more concerned with heredity and the pursuit of perfection. What makes human beings the best they can be? How can these characteristics be preserved and extended?”

  “I read something about that yesterday.” Lawton handed him Foulkes’s book. “I told Mrs. Foulkes I’d give it back to you.”

  Pickering looked at the title. “Dr. Foulkes’s last book. It was an attempt to explain his theories in layman’s terms.”

  Lawton ignored the little secretary’s condescension. Just then his attention was caught by one of the skulls. He leaned forward and read the inscription. “Caucasian female 22 years old. Epileptic: Everdale 1898.”

  “Where did Dr. Foulkes get these exhibits?” he said, in a hard, clipped voice.

  The secretary looked taken aback by his change of tone. “From various sources. Some were collected by Dr. Foulkes during his travels or donated by researchers. Others were donated by hospitals and other institutions.”

  “From asylums like Everdale?”

  “Indeed. Dr. Foulkes was director there for three years, in the late 1890s.”

  “So this skull came from one of his patients?”

  “I assume so.”

  “With their permission?”

  Pickering gave him a pitying look. “The mad don’t generally
give much thought to what will happen to their bodies after their deaths, Mr. Lawton. But of course it would have been with the permission of the institution. Shall we conclude our business?”

  Lawton followed Pickering into another room lined with more glass cabinets, books, photographs. There were also a number of measuring instruments including a microscope, calipers, and a curved silver instrument that looked like a kind of brace. Lawton looked around at the large drawing of a human body with its arm extended, the close-up photographs of ears, lips, and eyes, and a framed weaving of the lightning flash he had seen on the Greenland expedition boxes, with the word EXCELSIOR sewn in beneath it.

  “What is that mark?” he asked.

  “It’s a runic symbol.”

  “A what?”

  “The runic script was used by some Germanic and Nordic language groups before Latin. This one is called the sig-rune—the sun or victory rune. Do have a seat.” Pickering handed him a small leather satchel. “You’ll find everything you need here. Photographs that Dr. Foulkes took of himself. Copies of his fingerprints. I’ve also included a fingerprint kit. I assume you know how to examine and compare prints?”

  Lawton stared back at him. “Mrs. Foulkes hired a detective not a chimney-sweep.”

  “Of course.” Pickering gave a thin smile and handed him an envelope. “Here’s your initial payment. Your expenses will be sent through the Western Union offices in Barcelona once a week. Do you need anything else?”

  “Yes. I’d be interested to know why you think Dr. Foulkes went to Barcelona.”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that the nation has lost a great man. The last of the Great Victorians.”

  “If he was so great why hasn’t he got a knighthood?”

  “Great men don’t always get the recognition they deserve, Mr. Lawton, at least not in their own time. Dr. Foulkes was consulted as an expert witness by the parliamentary Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. Like many of our politicians, he was very concerned about the quality of the national stock, after the Boer War. He thought something needed to be done to prepare us for the next one. Some of his proposals were considered… controversial.”

  “Such as?”

  “Dr. Foulkes believed that the morally defective and physically unfit should not be allowed to reproduce themselves. That certain marriages should be prevented, that in some cases compulsory sterilization might be required. He also believed that there were cases in which it might be necessary to terminate lives that were likely to be a burden to the state and society. These ideas were not well received—not by the government or by the national press.”

  “I’m not surprised. But I can tell you one thing—none of this would have made much difference against the Boers. We fought a war we weren’t prepared for. We were led by fools who had no idea what they were doing—at least at first. We fought men who were defending their land and their homes. Anybody will struggle to win a war like that, even the British Empire.”

  Pickering bridled. “And how would you know that?”

  “Because I fought in the war.”

  “I see.” Pickering looked unsure how to reply to this. “Well, sentimental moralists may disapprove. But I believe that posterity will view Dr. Foulkes in a very different light—as a genius and a visionary. And a patriot who loved his country.”

  “Did he love his wife?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “If I’m to find out what happened to him then everything about him is my business,” Lawton said. “They had no children, did they?”

  “I can assure you that Dr. Foulkes was a very solicitous husband. Despite his wife’s infertility.”

  “I’m sure he was. But husbands can be solicitous when they find consolation elsewhere, can’t they? And Dr. Foulkes was often away.”

  Mr. Pickering wiped his pince-nez. “Dr. Foulkes was not that kind of man.”

  “Yet there is he is in Barcelona, giving his money away to a woman who no one seems to know. It’s a curious thing, don’t you think?”

  “It is.” Pickering looked more perplexed than indignant now. “And I hope you can shed some light on it. Mrs. Foulkes wants you to leave as soon as possible. You’ll take the train to Dover for the ferry. From Paris you get the train to Perpignan and Barcelona. Mrs. Foulkes says you don’t have a passport. You should go to the Home Office immediately. I’ve already called them to expedite the process. I’ve arranged an appointment for you this afternoon.”

  Pickering got up to show him out. As they walked back into the laboratory, Lawton glanced once again at the skull of the epileptic from Everdale. Great man or not, he did not much like Randolph William Foulkes, and it occurred to him that there was one more place to visit before leaving the country to find out what had happened to him, and he saw no reason to tell Mrs. Foulkes or her secretary about it.

  * * *

  Even as a child Bernat Mata had despised the Montjuïc fortress. He had grown up with his grandparents’ accounts of the insurrections of 1842 and 1846 when the Bourbon cannons had bombarded the city from the castle. As a journalist he had witnessed the processions of anarchists and liberals escorted in chains up the hill. In 1896 he had spoken to innocent men who had been taken there to have their balls crushed with pliers or their fingernails pulled out. It was now nearly two hundred years since the Bourbons had crushed the Catalans and taken away their rights and their language, and even now in the twentieth century the fortress continued to loom over the city, the visible symbol of Bourbon power, domination, and corruption.

  Mata told the driver to wait for him. He stared bleakly at the waterless moat, the thick sloping walls, and the cannons that still pointed inward toward the city rather than the sea, and walked across the stone bridge to the main entrance, where two soldiers in olive green uniforms and puttees stood rigidly at attention. Mata informed them that he had come to speak to Lieutenant Ugarte from the Social Brigade, and one of the soldiers told him to wait and went inside. A few minutes later he returned to announce that the lieutenant was in his office. As always Mata felt his spirits sink as he walked across the cobbled courtyard and remembered the five blindfolded anarchists kneeling on the ground outside the fortress wall with their hands tied behind them on May 3, 1897, as the firing squad lined up in front of them.

  He remembered the soldiers standing in line like figures from a Goya painting, in their red striped trousers, boots, and black caps, while the officer raised his saber and gave the order to fire. He remembered the priests hovering in the background like weird black crows with their rosaries and crucifixes; the satisfaction on the faces of the city’s great and good as they watched the first volley; the officer who administered the coup de grâce with his revolver to two of the anarchists who were still alive.

  Even then Mata doubted whether any of the men had committed the crimes they were accused of. Esperanza Claramunt’s father was the last person who would have thrown a bomb, but he had been arrested and died under torture at the hands of men like Ugarte, for whom liberals were only one step removed from anarchists. It was Rafael Claramunt who had brought him back to the fortress, to carry out this act of charity on behalf of his daughter. Even as he descended the stone steps, he felt as if he were leaving the twentieth century behind and descending into a world where justice disappeared and only the brute power of the Restoration state prevailed, despite the trappings of parliamentary democracy.

  He walked down the dimly lit corridor and knocked on the door of the Brigada’s offices. Ugarte called him in, in his familiar growl. He was sitting in his chair with his feet up on his desk, reading a French erotic magazine called Jeunes Filles de la Campagne. He laid it down and looked at Mata with an expression of mild surprise. “Well, well, if it isn’t the voice of Catalonia! To what do we owe this honor? The last time we met you were working for ¡Cu-Cut! if I remember correctly.”

  Mata nodded as Ugarte gestured to the seat in front of his desk. Ugarte had been outside the
offices on the day the army smashed them up, and Mata knew that he had enjoyed the spectacle. It was not an acquaintance he had ever thought about renewing. Even now he felt faintly uneasy at the sight of the lifeless black eyes, the puffy cheeks with their smallpox scars, and the thick fingers that seemed to be faintly caressing the photograph of a naked woman posing on a haystack in the half-open magazine. “I came about the Luna Bar,” he said. “I wondered if the investigation had made any progress.”

  “If we had, we would have announced it. You know how these things work.”

  “I do. But I’ve heard that someone may have been arrested.”

  “Oh?” Ugarte clasped his hands and cracked his knuckles. “And who would that be?”

  “An anarchist named Pau Tosets. He works for the Soli. I thought I’d come here and find out if it was true.”

  “May I ask how you came by this information?”

  “On the street.”

  “The street.” Ugarte’s pineapple cheeks creased in the faintest of smiles. “Such diligence on your part—to come all the way up here on the basis of gossip and rumor.”

  “Well it is my job to separate rumors from facts,” Mata said apologetically.

  “And on this occasion you’ve wasted your time.”

  “So you still haven’t found the perpetrator?”

  “Not yet. But we will. And until then it might be better to wait for official announcements rather than listen to what foolish tongues are saying.”