by Alex Grecian
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d better go check on her. I’ll leave you to it, Constable.”
“Sir? Is there anything . . . ? I mean, I wonder if there’s something I could do to make things easier for her. I know you said . . . Still, it seems like it might be going rough.”
Kingsley smiled at the boy. Rupert’s hair had escaped from under his hat and was plastered across his forehead with sweat, like the wet tail feather of some nervous tropical bird. Kingsley felt a momentary urge to reach up and pull off the constable’s hat and set the bird free. He could see that thirty seconds spent talking to Rupert Winthrop now would help calm the household. The last thing Claire needed was a frantic boy running about the place.
“How are you at fetching water?” Kingsley said.
“I can do that.”
“Very good. I’m going to need clean water and lots of it, in both cold and warm varieties, so you’ll need to heat some up for me at the fireplace. I’ll also need every basin you can find in the house.”
Constable Rupert Winthrop stood at attention and saluted, then turned and trotted off down the hall toward the kitchen.
“He seems like a nice boy,” Kingsley said.
“He’s a bit hopeless, isn’t he?” Fiona said.
“Give him time. He just needs a bit of seasoning. Now, it’s high time we looked in on our patient.” And he followed his daughter up the stairs toward the bedroom where he could already hear Claire Day moaning.
34
The sun was higher in the sky when Jack awoke, but he was sure he hadn’t slept for more than an hour. Sleep annoyed him. It smacked of weakness and mortality and inefficiency. But it was one of the many prices he had to pay in order to walk among his people as one of them.
He took a standing bath at the washbasin in Elizabeth’s bedroom, soaking a cloth in fresh water and wringing it out in the pail on the floor, using Elizabeth’s harsh soap, lye and ashes, scented with lavender. After, he pissed into the pail, watching the ripples spread across the surface of the dirty bathwater. There was a small tin of tooth powder that appeared to be brand-new and a toothbrush with a wooden handle behind the handbasin. He brushed his teeth hard, scrubbing them until his gums bled. Then he drank the rest of the water in the pitcher beside the basin and wiped his mouth on his bare arm.
Naked, he unlocked and opened the bedroom door and stepped over Cinderhouse’s body in the hallway. He crouched over the tailor, who was sound asleep, his eyelids fluttering, a smear of old blood on his chin. His mouth had not yet healed, and Jack resisted an urge to pry the tailor’s mouth open so he could see the stump of muscle that was left there. Cinderhouse was dressed very well in one of Elizabeth’s altered suits, and he was clutching a kitchen knife in his right hand, his knuckles white, his fingers rigid.
Jack smiled and clucked his whole and healthy tongue. Cinderhouse had been waiting for him, thought he would be able to kill his master and go free. He might even have succeeded had he not fallen asleep at his post. Silly little fly.
Jack gently opened Cinderhouse’s hand and took the knife from him. He stood and walked to the stairs and went down. He kept the knife with him, holding it loosely at his side. He liked the feel of it. He had always managed to find a use for knives.
He passed the open door to the parlor without glancing in and went into the kitchen. There was a heel of bread and a butt of ham on the butcher block by the back door. Jack used the knife he had taken from Cinderhouse to slice off a piece of the ham and made himself a sandwich. He stood at the back door in a beam of sunlight while he ate and watched honeybees flicker around the sweet purple flowers in the garden. When he had finished, he licked his fingers.
In the parlor was another of Elizabeth’s suits draped over the back of a chair, tailored and pressed and waiting for him. He set the knife down on the seat of the chair and took the trousers off their hanger. He held them up for Elizabeth to see. There was a subtle blue stripe in the black material and it shimmered in the light from the window. The homeowner, still tied tightly to a chair near the hearth, did not acknowledge Jack in any way. He stared into space, his eyes dead, his chest moving shallowly with each breath. Jack decided he would have to find a way to cheer Elizabeth up. He’d give it some thought when the other business of the day had been tended to.
He pulled the trousers on, thrilling at the feel of fabric against his skin, and left them unfastened, spreading his legs wide to keep the trousers from falling back down. He unbuttoned a dazzling white shirt, almost purple it was so pure and fresh, and he slipped his arms into the sleeves, shrugged the shirt up over his shoulders. He gathered the buttons in one hand and inserted them back into the holes, starting from the collar and working his way down his chest and abdomen, taking care not to drop any of them on the floor. Getting dressed was a thing so many took for granted, and yet he had not performed this simple daily operation in a very long time. He wanted to enjoy the process. He tucked the tail of the shirt into the top of the trousers and fastened the hooks on the fly. He wondered briefly why the front of a pair of trousers was called a fly, and he thought of his own stupid fly, his Peter, his rock, on the floor in the hallway upstairs, sleeping and missing the splendor of this ritual. He found the cufflinks, pretty chunks of silver with a blue porcelain inlay, and fixed his cuffs. He moved the knife and sat in the chair and pulled on a pair of sheer black hose that the tailor had left for him there. Elizabeth’s shoes were perhaps a bit loose, and Jack got up and went back to the kitchen, found a folded bit of butcher paper in the garbage that still smelled of meat. He took it back to the parlor, tore it in half, and stuffed the crumpled bits of it in the ends of the shoes. Elizabeth looked up at him when he heard the sound of tearing paper, but immediately lost interest and returned his gaze to the nothingness he saw in the middle of the room. The shoes were a better fit with the paper in them, so Jack tied them with a double knot, stood and put on the waistcoat and the jacket, went back to the kitchen, and gazed at himself in the mirror on the back of the pantry door.
He looked magnificent.
He smoothed his long hair and walked down the hall. He had seen a coin purse on the chimneypiece and he found it again. He weighed it in the palm of his hand before slipping it into his pocket. He picked up the knife from the chair in the parlor and took it with him. He did not say good-bye to Elizabeth. If the homeowner chose to be rude and uncommunicative, Jack could match him. He put the knife in his medical bag on the floor and took a tall hat from the rack by the front door. He quietly snicked back the latch and opened the door, stood for a moment in the stream of sunlight that rushed in to greet him, then stepped outside and pulled the red door almost shut behind him. He took the four steps along the path in the little front garden, swinging his black leather bag by the handle, and went out by the gate. He passed a little girl playing across the lane. She stuck her tongue out at him and he wondered how it would look lined up next to the other tongues he had nailed to the mantel in Elizabeth’s parlor. But he smiled at the ill-mannered little girl and tipped his hat to the old lady he saw peering out the window next door. He walked away down the lane and turned the corner, and was gone.
35
Day put his hands up. It was a universal gesture, an automatic reaction to the gun pointed at him. Adrian March moved backward a step. His foot brushed up against a skull, and it rolled across the ground toward Day, zigzagging as its cheekbones took its weight, first left, then right, then left again. It bumped against the toe of Day’s shoe and he looked down. It was very small, a child’s skull, two front teeth missing and an open hole at the top of the head. Some sort of crushing blow had shattered the bone, exposing the brain and ending a life much too early. Day looked back up at March and took a deep breath. The air was damp and musty.
“I don’t understand, Adrian. What is this?”
March smiled, a wry expression with no amusement in it. He glanced down at the revolver as if surprised to find it in his hand. “This isn’t, uh . . . Yes
, well.” He took his finger out of the trigger guard and slipped the revolver into the pocket of his jacket. “I’m not going to shoot you, Walter. That was never . . . Just didn’t want you to shoot me.”
Day lowered his hands but stayed where he was, his back to the empty alcove in the tunnel wall, the shiny new shackles waiting patiently in the darkness behind him. “Why would I shoot you?”
“Because it’s time I told you a thing or two, and I feel fairly sure you won’t like hearing about some of it. At least, not at first. But I want you to listen to me and weigh what I have to say. Weigh it carefully and consider who it is you’re talking to. You know me well.”
“And you should know that you can talk to me without a gun.”
“You might still try to arrest me,” March said. “That will be harder to do if I have your Colt.”
“Adrian? You know what’s going on down here, don’t you? These catacombs have been made over into a prison of some sort. A dungeon. You had something to do with that.” He kept his voice flat. It wasn’t a question.
Clearly Adrian March was involved in something terrible and dangerous.
“Not just me,” March said. “There are many of us.”
“All morning you’ve tried to stall the manhunt. You didn’t want me to come down here.”
“I did, but I wanted to prepare you for this first. I wish you’d listened to me.”
“Are those shackles for me, then? Are you going to lock me up down here?”
Day had a brief vision of his unborn child as an adult, squatting in a poorhouse somewhere, with no knowledge of his missing father. It was a surprising vision, and it awakened an emotion in Day that he didn’t recognize.
“If I were going to leave you down here, Walter, I wouldn’t have put the revolver away. I’d like you to listen to what I have to say and see what I have to show you. And then we’ll go up again, out of here, and you can arrest me if you want to. But I think you’ll choose to join us. I’ve always wanted you to join us. I’ve only been waiting for the right time to approach you, and I thought perhaps the prison escape might help me introduce the subject.”
“What subject? And why now?”
“Because you have a child on the way,” March said. “You are now responsible for the life of an innocent. It’s an experience that changes a man, changes the way a man thinks. If today had gone the way I’d planned, I would have told you about us over a good meal and a bottle of red wine. I even sent a gift to your home. I wanted you to have questions and to ask me about these things in an atmosphere of fellowship and trust. There are so many things I could have—”
“You said ‘us.’ Who do you mean? Wait. Never mind. First tell me what this is.” Day waved his hand to indicate the shallow cave behind him, then the entire length of the tunnel, all of the city, and everything that had happened over the past few hours.
“Come over here,” March said. He led the way down the tunnel and pointed to another alcove, marked only by a vague area of darker black. “Shine your candle in there.”
Day did as he was told and thrust his arm into the gloom of the recess, illuminating it with his fresh candle. It was identical to the one next to it: an iron ring in the floor, chains and shackles against the back wall. Day turned and approached the tunnel wall across from the alcove. There was another haphazard pile of bones, stacked high to a point under the ceiling, spreading out across the floor so that it all resembled some morbid pyramid.
March had already moved farther down the length of the tunnel. He pointed at another inky blotch on the wall.
“And there,” he said.
Day shone the candle’s flame into this third alcove. Again, the ring, the chains, the shackles. And across from it all, the pile of old bones.
“How many of these are there? What are they for?”
“There are eight of them,” March said. “Eight so far. There’s room here for more, but the work has been slow. Five of them are clustered here, and there are three more in another section of the catacombs.”
Day tipped his candle and let wax drip onto the shelf next to the shackles. He pushed the bottom of the candle into the wax and held it there for a moment until the wax had cooled enough to hold the candle upright. He turned back to March, his hands free, and began to calculate the distance between them. He was in the center of the makeshift cell and March was outside in the tunnel. There were perhaps six or seven feet between them. How quickly would March be able to get the revolver out of his pocket? How fast were the old man’s reflexes?
“Do you mind if I reach for my flask?” Day said. “It’s here in this pocket.”
“Of course. By all means.”
Day took out the flask and poured an ounce of brandy into his mouth. He swallowed and held the flask out to March, but his former mentor shook his head and smiled.
“No, thank you,” March said. “I believe I’ll stay right here, out of your reach.”
“Suit yourself.” Day corked the flask and slipped it back into his pocket.
“We are called the Karstphanomen,” March said. “And we have existed for many decades. This”—he held his hands out in the air, far apart from each other—“this is all ours. Miles and miles of tunnels and caverns and abandoned buildings, waterways and burial grounds and lost treasure troves. We own it all.”
“You live underground? Like rats?”
“Of course not. I live in my home in Acton. You’ve been there. You’ve supped with my wife and me. No, Walter, this place is where we do our work.”
“What kind of work is that?”
“The work of justice.”
“Justice?”
“Walter, you’ve spent the morning hours chasing prisoners. Why?”
“Because they escaped from prison.”
“But you have skills. Aren’t they better used to do something besides running round the city poking under rocks for villains?”
“You would rather let them be free?”
“Not at all,” March said. “But what good is a prison? If prisons worked, if that were a system that functioned properly, why then these men would already be reformed, would they not? You wouldn’t have to worry about where they are. You wouldn’t have to catch them again.”
“A prison is—”
“A prison is a cage,” March said. “That is all it is. A cage where we keep our most dangerous animals, those men we deem not fit to mingle with society. We keep them all in one place, where we can see them and feel safe. We do it for ourselves, for our peace of mind. But what of the men in that cage?”
“What of them?”
“Have we not done them a disservice?”
“How so?”
“If we’re to keep them in a cage, shouldn’t we teach them something? What do they learn there? It’s not a frivolous question. What do they learn by being caged? I believe the answer is nothing. They learn nothing.”
“One hopes some of them might reform their ways.”
“One hopes? Some of them? How often do you suppose that happens?”
“I wouldn’t know. Ask the head warder when we find Cinderhouse and return him to Bridewell.”
“Why would your Cinderhouse, or any of them, bother to reform at all? Listen, there’s no incentive to reform. We give them no reason. Criminals are such stupid people, Walter. They’re children, really. They must be taught. They must be shown the error of their ways. They must experience true justice.”
“A prison sentence is justice.”
“No, Walter, a prison sentence is law. Law and justice are very different concepts. How many people did Cinderhouse kill? Since you mentioned him by name, let’s use him as an example. How many were murdered by him?”
“I don’t know. Two policemen. There were children, certainly, but we don’t know how many over the years. We think he killed his wife and son. There were three small skeletons buried behind a carriage house.”
“Children.”
Day nodded. He had moved incrementall
y closer to March as they talked. He was now roughly four feet away from him, close enough to grab March’s arm before the retired detective inspector could get the revolver out of his pocket. He tensed, ready to spring at March, but the older man sensed the slight change in Day’s body language and stepped back, farther into the shadows of the tunnel. He snuffed his candle and became a disembodied voice in the darkness. Day relaxed visibly, but began to slowly inch toward March again.
“So,” March said, “this person killed children. What did he do to them? Did he hurt them first? Before he killed them?”
“I don’t know. I’d rather not . . .” Day sighed. “I think he probably did, yes.”
“Is it justice, then, that he be caged?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. Perhaps if we find him, I could ask him.”
“Don’t be crude. No, of course there’s no justice in it. Those children are gone. Those policemen are gone. And their killer hasn’t learned anything, has he? How much better would it be for him if he experienced everything that he did to those children? What if he were made to feel what they felt, to truly feel their fear and their pain? What do you think? Wouldn’t that be more likely to change a man than simply putting him away, out of sight, behind bars?”
“Perhaps.”
“No, not perhaps. I’m right, Walter. That’s justice. Make the man experience his crimes firsthand. It’s the only way.”
“The law is the only way.”
“The law is a failure.”
“The law is the law, Inspector March. You should know that. You were the best.”
“I was deluded.”
“And now? You’ve joined some secret club and you believe the scales have suddenly fallen from your eyes?”
“The Karstphanomen, Walter, is not a club. It’s a society. And it’s a great thing we’re undertaking here. We are the ones who set those prisoners free. We caused the train wreck. We had a man inside Bridewell, and he made sure the right prisoners escaped.”