The Immorality Engine nahi-3

by George Mann

  “Good God! I take it you’re unhurt, Miss Hobbes?” There was real concern in Bainbridge’s voice.

  “Just a few scratches, Sir Charles. Nothing to concern yourself with.” She tried to sound dismissive, even though the large gouge in her forearm had been causing her to wince in pain all morning.

  “Excellent, excellent. Wouldn’t do to have you in the path of danger, Miss Hobbes. Not at all.” Bainbridge straightened his back, as though signifying that was an end to the matter.

  Veronica rolled her eyes.

  “I gather from your outburst, Newbury, that these events occurred earlier in the evening than our robbery and suspected murder?”

  Newbury was animated again. “Indeed they did, Charles. Around eight. And that can only mean-”

  “-there’s more than one spider,” Bainbridge finished.

  “Precisely!” said Newbury.

  Veronica sighed. “The more pertinent point, however, is that multiple spiders suggests multiple criminals. Perhaps Sykes was just one of a number of individuals all operating with the same equipment. Could he have been part of a criminal gang? A network of jewellery thieves?”

  “You make an excellent point, Miss Hobbes.” Bainbridge pondered her words for a moment, and then shook his head. “And you might yet be right, but the evidence at the crime scenes was always- is always-the same: a man of about Sykes’s height, with the same shoe size and consistent habits. It seems unlikely that a criminal gang would go to the lengths of recruiting only men of the same height and shoe size and teaching them to behave according to identical patterns, though it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”

  “I wonder how many of the men named in those files would match that profile,” Newbury ventured.

  “We may yet need to find out. But for now, I have a crime scene to attend to and another body to identify,” Bainbridge replied. “I’m heading there now. Can you come?”

  Veronica looked to Newbury for his answer.

  “Of course we’ll come. Lead on!” Newbury clapped his hand on Bainbridge’s shoulder. He lowered his voice. “And don’t think for a minute, old man, that I’m going to let you get away with planting your spy in my house. As soon as I can make other arrangements, I’ll be sending him back.”

  “Quite right, too,” Bainbridge replied, grinning. “Damn good cook, though, isn’t he?”

  “Sublime,” Newbury said, pushing the chief inspector out the door.

  ***

  The scene of the second robbery was a residence. A house on Cromer Street, set back from the road, nestled behind a pretty garden brimming with evergreens and late spring blooms. Veronica filled her nostrils with the heady scents as the three investigators walked the path up to the big house.

  It was an imposing two-storey building, erected sometime in the preceding fifty years. It was not stately, but had a more homely appeal-clearly the dwelling of a large and well-to-do family, probably of a similar station to her own parents. The thought of them made her heart sink, so Veronica pushed the notion to one side.

  No, this family was clearly different-they were interested in more than just status. She could tell from the large wooden playhouse that someone had built in the garden that whoever lived here showed an actual interest in their children. She hoped those children had been spared the horror of the corpse that Bainbridge had warned them waited at the foot of the stairs inside.

  She was pleased to find, a moment later, that this was indeed the case. A bobby on the door explained that the family had been escorted from the premises first thing that morning, after one of the servants had discovered the body and alerted the police. That was a small mercy, at least.

  Inspector Foulkes, who had secured the scene, was there to greet their little party when they stepped over the threshold and into the cavernous hallway inside. He looked as serious and professional as ever in his grey woollen suit and bowler hat. His full, black beard had grown since Veronica had last seen him, a few months earlier, and he was stroking it ponderously, as if trying to decide what his next move might be.

  He looked up when he saw them approaching. “A fine mess we have here, I’m afraid,” he said with an exasperated tone, reaching out to shake hands with the men. “I’d recommend, Miss Hobbes, that you don’t come any closer, but I know from experience you’ll pay me no heed.” His sea green eyes flashed with amusement.

  “Indeed not, Inspector,” she replied, secretly bracing herself for whatever horrors she might have to face. “I rarely pay anyone any heed. I find it’s the only way to form an opinion of my own.” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but Newbury nudged her gently with his elbow, as if simultaneously joining in with her ribbing of the inspector and warning her to stand down.

  Veronica tried to get a measure of the situation, taking in the scene. The hallway was spacious and central to the property, with extensive wings to the left and right and a grand staircase directly opposite the main entrance. Ornate banisters curled upwards in sweeping lines of gleaming hardwood. A few uniformed policemen were milling around, and a man in a brown suit-a doctor, she supposed-was standing over the corpse on the floor. For the time being, she averted her eyes. She wouldn’t look at it until she had to.

  “Tell us what you’ve found,” Bainbridge asked Foulkes with little or no ceremony.

  “It’s a baffling one, sir,” Foulkes said, lifting his bowler and scratching his head. “It seems the perpetrator came in through the back door. There’s a hole in one of the panels, about so big-” He made a gesture with his hands. “-that looks just like the hole we found up at Flitcroft and Sons over on Regent Street, and the scenes before that.”

  “You think the same man is responsible?” asked Newbury.

  “I’m not a betting man, Sir Maurice, but I’d put my life on it.” Foulkes seemed to consider this for a minute. “Only difference this time is the body. And it’s not a pretty sight. It seems that whatever miraculous device the burglar has been using to cut his way in can also be used as a weapon. And a pretty damn effective one at that.” He sniffed, as if demonstrating his disapproval of such visceral things. “As I see it, one of three things occurred: Either the burglar interrupted another man trying to steal the loot and finished him off, or he had a partner along with him and they fell out over the share of the proceeds. Only other explanation is that the miraculous device I was talking about suddenly turned on him, but that seems unlikely.”

  “Have we been able to identify him yet?” Veronica realised she was about to get a look at what might have become of her or Newbury, had the incident in her apartment not turned out as well as it did.

  “Not yet. He’s… well, let’s just say that identification is not an easy matter in this instance.” Foulkes screwed up his face in distaste, and Veronica gave an involuntary shudder.

  Newbury was removing his jacket. He handed it to Charles. “Better take a look, then.” He edged past Foulkes, heading toward the doctor in the brown coat.

  “I hope you haven’t had a big breakfast,” Foulkes called behind him. But he was not smiling. He took a step closer to Veronica and lowered his voice to a whisper. His breath smelled of peppermint. “Seriously, Miss Hobbes. I should consider giving this one a miss. I won’t think any less of you if you take my advice. If I’m truthful, I wish I hadn’t seen it myself.” He smiled kindly, and she knew he was only looking after her best interests-or at least what he considered to be her best interests.

  She hesitated, unsure now what to do. “Well, I-”

  “Charles!” Newbury’s voice, raised in alarm, suddenly echoed throughout the hall. “You’d better get over here quickly.”

  Veronica smiled weakly at Foulkes and moved past him, heading towards Newbury and the body.

  She almost baulked at what she saw. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere she looked: sprayed up the staircase, spattered and pooling on the floor, even dripping-drip by ponderous drip-from the glass chandelier high above them. Jewels lay scattered all around the
body, in all manner of colours, shapes, and sizes; tiny flecks of beauty in the midst of utter, devastating violence.

  The corpse itself-or what was left of it-was splayed out upon the tiled floor facedown, its head and right arm thrown up onto the bottom stair. And there was a hole right through the middle of it, a ragged-edged void where the spider thing had chewed through the meat and bone and cartilage, burrowing through the man’s chest and bursting out through his back. Ribbons of shredded intestine hung like pink drapes from around the edges of the hole.

  Newbury knelt beside the body, cradling the man’s head in his hands. The face was covered in a series of ferocious gouges, and the hair was matted with dark arterial blood.

  She heard Bainbridge beside her, but couldn’t look away from the obscenity before her, couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sheer horror of what she was seeing.

  “My god!” Bainbridge exclaimed. She surmised he was experiencing a very similar response to her own.

  “There’s more,” Newbury said, shifting the body around so they could see.

  “What? What is it?” Veronica just wanted to get out of there, to get outside and away from the stink and the blood. She had no time for games.

  Newbury pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to smear the blood away from around the dead man’s face. “There. Do you see it now?”

  Veronica studied the man’s face. The expression was one of sheer terror, the lips curled back in a frightened scream. But beneath the blood and the webwork of scratches, one thing was suddenly clear: The dead man in Newbury’s arms was none other than the enigmatic Mr. Edwin Sykes.

  CHAPTER

  11

  “It’s extraordinary! They’re identical!” Bainbridge exclaimed loudly. He looked terribly confused by the whole affair.

  “Hmmm,” said Newbury, without looking up.

  Much to Veronica’s unease, the three of them had returned to the police morgue. They had driven convoy across town from the house on Cromer Street, following the police wagon bearing the corpse. The journey had been arduous, conducted at a funereal pace, and now she was back at this most distasteful of establishments for the second day in a row, and starting to regret ever getting herself mixed up in the affair.

  The body had been one of the most horrendous things she had ever seen, comparable to when she and Newbury had discovered the violated body of James Purefoy, the young reporter, or-perhaps worse-the shriveled, exsanguinated husks of former village folk at Huntington Manor earlier that year. It was the sheer violence of the attack, the utter disregard for life that disturbed her so. Seen like this, people became nothing but shreds of meat and bone, and she hated it. Perhaps it was also the understanding that, if not for Newbury, she might well have been discovered that morning in much the same condition. Either way, she didn’t wish to spend any longer in the company of the dead than was strictly necessary.

  As it was, they had been at the morgue for an hour. It had taken the police surgeon only ten minutes to complete his assessment and ready the corpse on the mortician’s slab. For the rest of that time, Newbury had been examining the body in minute detail. Not only that, but he had recalled the corpse they had seen on their previous visit, which now lay uncovered on a second slab beside the new arrival.

  It had been a few days since that first corpse had been found in the gutter, and the flesh had taken on a bruised, sickly hue. It had also begun to smell. Badly. As a consequence, Veronica had covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief, which had the dual purpose of suppressing the smell and keeping her grimace hidden from the others.

  Newbury was currently comparing the left hand of the new body with the identical hand of its double. He was stooped low, circling the marble slabs, a looking glass clutched in his right hand.

  Veronica lowered the handkerchief. “Couldn’t this be a simple matter of identical twins?” she ventured. She’d read about cases such as this, where a long-lost or previously unheard-of relative had made a sudden reappearance, capitalizing on their likeness to their more successful kin. In some cases, they’d gone so far as to attempt to assume the identity of their brother or sister, even murdering them as a means of keeping them out of the picture.

  Bainbridge, however, was shaking his head. “I don’t believe so, Miss Hobbes. We checked the birth records. Sykes was an only child. It was a complicated birth and his mother died during delivery. If there had been twins, the doctor would have recorded them as such at the hospital.”

  Newbury stepped back from the slab and looked up at them, bleary eyed. “There’s far more to it than that,” he said enigmatically. “There are sinister forces at work.”

  “Sinister forces! Whatever are you going on about, Newbury?” said Bainbridge. Veronica could tell by the way he was tapping his foot on the tiles that he was growing steadily more impatient. He’d been standing there, just as she had, for the best part of an hour. Now, it seemed, he wanted answers.

  For a moment, Veronica thought that Newbury was going to ignore the question, but then he folded his arms and smiled. “One of these corpses,” he said, “is a doppelganger. A copy.”

  “A what?”

  “A copy, Charles. It’s really quite remarkable. I don’t know how it was done. But the first corpse you found, this one-” He gestured towards the body on his right, the one that was beginning to putrefy. “-is not the original Edwin Sykes.”

  Bainbridge glowered at the body, as if willing it to disappear, or else to sit up and reveal all its secrets. “I don’t understand, Newbury. A copy, you say?”

  Newbury nodded. “I know it’s hard to take in, Charles, but this isn’t another case of familial secrets and long-lost twins. What we have here are two Edwin Sykeses.”

  Bainbridge shook his head. He looked lost, as if he simply couldn’t comprehend what Newbury was telling him.

  “But that’s impossible,” Veronica said, feeling as unsure about what she was hearing as Bainbridge looked. She covered her face with her handkerchief once again. The stench of the corpses was like rancid meat.

  Newbury shrugged. “Who’s to say what’s possible and impossible in this world? I can only judge the evidence placed before me, what I see before my eyes. And the facts are that this-” He pointed to the eviscerated corpse they had pulled from the house on Cromer Street that morning. “-is the real Edwin Sykes. And this-” He pointed back at the other. “-is a duplicate.”

  “How can you tell?” she replied, trying not to sound too skeptical.

  “The forensic evidence speaks for itself,” he argued. “For a start, the facial structures, the sizes and shapes of the bodies-they’re in every way identical. Absolutely identical. But this Sykes’s skin has been lived in. There are laughter lines around the mouth, tiny creases and imperfections, scars. Whereas this one-” He crossed to the other slab. “-well, the skin is almost perfect. No scars, no sign that it’s ever been worn. I mean, look at the colour of it. It’s never even been exposed to the sun! It’s pale, soft, and new.”

  “New? I’m having trouble following you, Newbury,” said Bainbridge.

  “Then there are the hands,” Newbury pressed on, ignoring him. “Look here.” He grabbed the left wrist of the first body, showing them the hand he’d been examining earlier. He spread the fingers so they could see them. “Here. These hands are clean. Perfectly clean and unblemished.” He carefully lowered the hand, placing it gently on the chest of the corpse, and then ran around to the other slab. He was bursting with energy, filled with the ebullience of the hunt. “Now, look at this. Identical in almost every way, except here.”

  Veronica gasped. “Calluses.”

  “Very good, Miss Hobbes!” Newbury beamed at her. “And lots of them. Look at the ingrained filth, too. These hands have seen work, and recently.” Newbury looked at Bainbridge. “The evidence is compelling, Charles. I could list more: the teeth, the eyes… I’d wager if you sliced him open, the organs would tell a similar tale. I tell you: We’re dealing with mor
e than one Edwin Sykes.”

  Bainbridge was staring at him. “So you’re telling me there could be an army of them out there? Any number of Edwin Sykeses? He could have set that spider device on you last night at Miss Hobbes’s apartment?”

  Newbury nodded slowly. “Once you accept the facts, Charles, anything is possible.”

  “It’s unbelievable. Too outlandish, Newbury, even for you.” Bainbridge tapped his cane on the floor to hammer his point home. The sound echoed out around the tiled walls. “I’m more inclined to go along with what Miss Hobbes intimated back at the Yard, about there being other men involved…”

  “Charles. Charles! The evidence is here before your eyes! Can’t you see it?” Veronica thought Newbury was about to start hopping from foot to foot with impatience.

  “I don’t know what to believe.” Bainbridge gave a hearty sigh. “It’s a damn mess of an investigation. We can’t build a case on speculation alone. I mean, how the devil would Sykes even go about starting to copy himself?”

  Newbury moved round the slab to stand before him. “ Think, Charles. The mechanical spiders. He didn’t build them himself! He must have a sponsor, someone with the wherewithal, with the right technology. Someone who trusted him to handle the spiders on their behalf. Edwin Sykes didn’t mastermind the operation.”

  “But really, Newbury…”

  “Charles, we’ve seen all sorts of bizarre things during our many cases together. Why is this any different?”

  “Because we’re talking about something as fundamental as the ability to copy a living person!”

  “That doesn’t make it any more outlandish than automata with human organs, or poltergeists, or any of the other bizarre things we’ve seen before.” Newbury gesticulated at Bainbridge, imploring him to understand.