The Harvest Man

by Alex Grecian

  “Now walk to the stairs and down.” Jack’s voice was immediately behind Day, in his ear. Day hadn’t even heard the killer approach.

  Could he spin around fast enough to catch Jack off guard? No, his leg wasn’t trustworthy. The pain was too much. It would give out on him. If he fell, he’d be at a disadvantage, unable to use his hidden sword. So he did as he was told, limped to the top of the stairs and moved slowly down, one step at a time. He could not hear Jack behind him, but he was there somewhere close. How close? Was there time to unlock the top of the cane and unsheathe the blade?

  At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. Jack’s voice drifted down from somewhere above. “Outside there is a carriage. Get in and close the door. Do not speak to the driver.”

  Day hesitated.

  Now Jack’s voice was right behind him. “Go now, Walter Day.”

  “If I get in your carriage, you’ll have the advantage on me, Jack.”

  “I already have the advantage on you.” Somehow, Jack’s voice was far away again, somewhere on the staircase behind them. “Again, this isn’t about you. This is about your family, and about doing what’s needed to protect them. I know you’ll do the right thing now. For their sake. Otherwise, I’ll never give the word and little Winnie Day will never be returned to your dear wife. Of course, I’ll keep my word to protect her from harm, but she’ll never be seen again by anyone but me.”

  Day took a deep breath and looked around at his house for what he was afraid was the last time. He wondered what Claire would do if he never returned, where she would go or where her parents would take her. He wondered whether Winnie would, in fact, be brought back, as Jack had promised. Day thought once again of his daughters growing up without him, calling another man Father and never knowing Walter Day.

  He walked slowly out of the house and down the footpath, out by the garden gate. A black carriage was waiting at the curb, its windows covered by curtains, a midnight roan huffing up front. A driver sat above, immobile, his features obscured by a muffler and a tall hat. Far down the street, Day saw a fox run through the hazy circle cast by a gas globe. He wondered where it was going and what might be chasing it there. Day opened the carriage door and leveraged himself up and in, pushing off the street with his cane. He sat and the door closed behind him. He was plunged into utter darkness.

  Jack’s voice floated through the black from outside. “I gave you my word, Walter Day. Your daughter is now safe. You have done what any good father should do and insured that nothing will ever disturb Winnie Day again in her lifetime. Bravo, my friend.”

  Day heard the driver’s lash crack and the horse’s hooves clop against the cobblestones. The wagon lurched and Day was borne away forever from 184 Regent’s Park Road.

  54

  Hammersmith was standing outside the rented cottage with Leland Carlyle when Kingsley’s cab pulled up in front. There were smiles all round when the doctor emerged from the carriage, holding a healthy baby in his arms. Carlyle paid the driver and included a big tip, and the three of them—four with little Winnie—went inside.

  The governess, whose name Hammersmith had never learned, wept openly at the sight of the baby. She ran to Kingsley and took Winnie from him. Fiona had Henrietta in a chair by the fireplace. She stood and handed Henrietta over to the governess, who sat with a baby curled in the crook of each elbow and began to rock them. The twins cooed at each other and fell asleep, while the housekeeper hurried away to fetch two bottles of cream and a fresh nappy.

  “Henrietta’s been fussing since you left,” Fiona said. She smiled up at Hammersmith. “I suppose she must have missed her sister.”

  “Walter isn’t back yet?”

  “No. We haven’t heard from him.”

  Dr Kingsley got his bag and knelt by the daybed. He opened a capsule of smelling salts under Claire’s nose and she came awake instantly.

  “Winnie’s back home,” Kingsley said. “And none the worse for wear.”

  Once Claire had satisfied herself that both her daughters were safe, she settled back on the daybed and sighed. “Was she with Henry?”

  “Yes. He had her in his room on the square.”

  Hammersmith stepped closer so he could hear them speak.

  “Why did he do it? Why take her?”

  “He apparently thought she was in some danger. I honestly think he meant well. He wasn’t ever going to hurt her.”

  “I don’t care,” Claire said. “I never want to see him again.”

  “He said that someone told him to take her.”

  “Who told him?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “And he didn’t think to talk to me,” Claire said, “or Walter? He just enters my home and steals my baby?”

  “I think he’d like to talk to you now. He’s quite upset about it all.”

  “He should be. I won’t see him. At least not now.”

  “Well, give it time.”

  “We should find Walter and tell him,” Hammersmith said.

  “He’ll come back when he’s tired,” Leland Carlyle said. “Or when he runs out of brandy.”

  “Leland,” Eleanor Carlyle said. It sounded like a warning.

  Carlyle put his hands up and shook his head. “I apologize. These few days have been trying. Not at all the holiday in London we expected. Between the missing baby, the men murdered on my daughter’s front step, three of my close friends murdered besides. It’s too much.”

  Hammersmith ignored him. “Does anybody know where he went?”

  Nobody spoke right away. Everyone looked around the room, waiting for a response. Leland Carlyle looked down at the floor. At last Kingsley cleared his throat. “He went into the park. It’s the last I saw of him.”

  “Into the park or across it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If he’s in the park, he might be impossible to find,” Hammersmith said. “But across the park . . . Might he have gone to check the house? To see if Henry took the baby back home?”

  “It’s possible,” Kingsley said. “It’s not a bad assumption, that Henry might return there, might forget the girl’s parents are staying here now.”

  “Even though he took her from here.”

  “Exactly so. Henry’s forgetful.”

  “I’ll go look over there,” Hammersmith said. “Be right back.”

  Fiona caught up to him in the hallway as he was preparing to leave, his hat in his hand. “Before you go,” she said, “I have something . . . I keep meaning to give it to you, but the moment’s never right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I gave Mr Day a gift, you know, the sword stick to replace his broken cane, and I had one for you, too.”

  “But I don’t need a cane.”

  “It’s not . . . Oh, here.” She thrust a small wrapped package at him and ran away down the hall and back into the sitting room.

  He stared after her for a moment, then looked down at the parcel. He put his hat on, freeing his hands, and unwrapped the package. It was a leather case, shiny and new, exactly like the wares carried by Mr Goodpenny at the Marylebone bazaar. He opened it and counted twenty ivory-colored calling cards, each with a filigree design in the upper corner. He took one out and read it. Written in a clear and elegant hand, which he recognized as Fiona’s, it said: MR NEVIL HAMMERSMITH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE.

  He stood and stared at it and finally he smiled. He closed the case and put it away in his breast pocket, over the scar in his chest. He liked the weight of it there. It had the heft of a new chapter in his life.

  He adjusted his hat and opened the door and went out into the night in search of Walter Day.

  55

  He lay under the stage and listened. For an hour or two—he had no way of telling time—he drifted off. When he woke up, the house was quiet. He stayed where he was, in pitch black
and surrounded by the smells of paint and wood and dust. Spiders and silverfish crawled over his face and he ignored them. At last the grumbling of his stomach grew too loud. He worried that it would wake the household. He pushed open the small door in the side of the stage and held his breath, but heard nothing, no reaction. He opened the door all the way and pulled himself out. He reached back in and retrieved the length of slender rope he’d found. His skin was sticky with sweat and he got the sense that, if he took off the strap holding the mask to his face, it would stay where it was, a part of him now. He thought about the mask and it made him happy. He was smiling now, always smiling, and shiny. His mask was gold. He was his parents’ golden boy now, as he was meant to be. And they wouldn’t be afraid of him anymore when they woke up. They would see his happy laughing sparkling gold face and they would smile back at him. He used his fingers to brush the insects out of his hair and went to the room’s doorway. The hall beyond was silent and dark. He crept forward, close to the wall, the rope coiled in his hand. There were many openings all along the passage, but he couldn’t see or hear a single person. Mother and Father must be upstairs, he reasoned, sleeping. He hoped he’d be able to tie them down before they woke up. He had left his ether behind at the last false home, along with everything else. Near the front of the house was a receiving room of some kind, a sitting room or parlor, and the Harvest Man stepped inside to regroup and plan his next course of action. Should he find something to eat first or get right down to business? He was surprised to see a man there, sitting upright in a chair, his back to the window. Lamplight from somewhere outside streamed in and backlit the man’s body. The Harvest Man froze in place, one foot in the hallway, one foot in the room. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for the man to move. Finally, the man snorted and shifted position. He was asleep! The Harvest Man moved to the side of the chair without making a sound. He stood and looked down on the sleeping man. The man had a revolver, held loosely in his hand, and the Harvest Man took it carefully away, set it down on the floor behind the chair. The man did not have a kind face. He had a neatly trimmed mustache that made his features difficult to discern. Still, it was possible the bone structure was good, under the mask. Always under the mask.

  The Harvest Man got to work right away, wrapping his rope around and around the sleeping man in the chair.

  56

  Hammersmith left 184 Regent’s Park Road feeling vaguely unsettled. Day was not there, but Hammersmith had found his flask lying on the upper floor, still half full of brandy. It was enough to convince Hammersmith that the inspector had been there recently, but there was no other sign of him, nor was there a clue as to where he might have gone from there. Hammersmith took the flask with him.

  Hammersmith had told Kingsley and the others that he would return to the Carlyles’ cottage, but something was bothering him and he turned the opposite way from the cottage after leaving the house. Day might have accidentally dropped his flask, but he would have returned for it. He was fond of the flask and used it frequently. And it wasn’t as if the two houses were far from each other. Even if he’d made it halfway across the park, surely he would have turned back.

  But what if Day had been distracted or had found something else at the house? After all, why had Henry taken the baby? Had someone manipulated him? If so, who? And why? Henry wasn’t a madman. There were too many questions and it occurred to Hammersmith that Day might have come up with an answer or two while searching his abandoned house. If he had a new idea, he might have tried to reason out where Henry would be now.

  Day didn’t know his baby had been found, but he knew that Hammersmith was searching the canal for Winnie. He knew that Kingsley was looking for the baby at Trafalgar Square. Other logical places to look might include Kingsley’s office or laboratory, but University College Hospital was well staffed and Henry was known there. Someone would question why he was carrying a baby around. It was unlikely Henry would go there. The giant was a creature of habit and there were no other places he frequented. At least, no other places Hammersmith could think of. But what if Henry had been seeking help? Who would he have turned to? Dr Kingsley, of course, but Henry knew that Kingsley was working a murder scene. So maybe he would have sought out the baby’s father, Walter Day. Walter Day, who would also be working a murder scene if he hadn’t got the news about Winnie’s kidnapping.

  If, instead of returning to his home in the lamppost, Henry had tried to find the two men he trusted most in the world, he would have taken the baby to a crime scene. And, if that same thought had entered Walter Day’s mind, he might have gone back there, too, hoping to find Henry and Winnie there.

  It was all Hammersmith could think of. He saw a boy loitering near the edge of the park and tipped him a penny to run across to the cottage.

  “Find a doctor there named Kingsley. Tell him that Day may have returned to the house where the spider was. Tell him Hammersmith has gone there to look for him.”

  “I can’t remember all that for a penny.”

  Hammersmith snorted and gave the boy another penny, watched him run off into the dusk and disappear into the trees. Then he turned and hailed a passing cab. Walter Day had certainly not walked away from 184 Regent’s Park Road and Hammersmith didn’t want to fall even further behind if he could help it.

  57

  Inspector James Tiffany woke up confused and groggy, thinking he had heard something, someone yelling nearby. He felt mildly embarrassed to have napped in a chair while on duty, but it had been days since he’d had a proper night’s sleep. He shouldn’t have sat down at all, should have known he might doze off. He tried to sit forward, but something held him back. He blinked and looked down. He was tied to the chair, lengths of rope wrapped round and round his torso and legs, his arms pinned to his sides.

  Alarmed, he looked around the room, but he was alone. He couldn’t feel his fingers or toes and he worried that the circulation had been cut off from his limbs for too long. He tried to arch his back and, when he couldn’t do that, thrashed his upper body from side to side. But he only moved a fraction of an inch at a time. He was bound too tightly.

  He forced himself to be still then and listen. From somewhere above him, he heard a woman scream. It was the same sound that had awakened him. It sounded like poor Hatty Pitt, who had already survived so much. It was obvious to Tiffany what had happened. The Harvest Man must have come back for Hatty, must have followed her to this house. A third scream was cut off and the house went silent.

  Tiffany looked for something he could use to cut the ropes, but the closest thing was a fireplace poker and it was halfway across the room. There was no way to get it and no way to hold it. He was helpless.

  He closed his eyes and thought of his loved ones. Then he opened his eyes and cursed Day and Hammersmith for leaving him here. He wondered where Constable Bentley was. Was he still guarding the other house? Was he close enough to have heard Hatty scream? Or were there other neighbors who had heard and would come to investigate? Probably not. That woman who lived here, Eugenia Something-or-Other, was a performer. No doubt there was enough high drama that the neighbors simply ignored unusual sounds.

  Still. There was nothing else to do.

  “Help! I’m a police officer! Help!”

  He stopped and listened again. Footsteps on the stairs. Tiffany’s breath caught in his throat and he bit his lip. A moment later, something very much like a man entered the room, but he was the size of a child and his grinning face was colored gold. Lamplight from the window caught the planes of the face and shone brightly, cast the creature’s cheeks and brow in shadow. The grinning thing moved quickly across the room toward him—it scampered, loose-limbed and nimble.

  Up close, he could see the Harvest Man’s sparkling eyes behind the gold mask. Pure madness. Tiffany opened his mouth to scream, but the Harvest Man stuffed a wad of fabric into his mouth. It tasted like paint and rancid oil. Tiffany gagged and closed his ey
es, tried to work it out with his tongue, but the Harvest Man was pushing against it and Tiffany fought the urge to vomit. If he threw up, he knew, he would choke to death.

  He felt something brush against his cheek and he opened his eyes again. The Harvest Man was petting him, stroking his fingertips up and down Tiffany’s face. Tiffany concentrated on breathing evenly through his nose. The creature’s body odor was nearly a solid substance. Like invisible jelly.

  The Harvest Man cleared his throat and began to sing as it fondled him. Tiffany was surprised that his voice was so pleasant:

  He comes this way;

  Yes! ’Tis the night watch!

  Yes! ’Tis the night watch his glim’ring lamp I see!

  Hush! ’Tis the night watch, softly he comes,

  Hush, ’Tis the night watch, softly he comes,

  Hush ’Tis the night watch, softly he comes!

  Hush! Hush!

  And then Tiffany saw the straight razor in the Harvest Man’s other hand.

  No, by heaven! No, by heav’n! I am not mad.

  Oh, release me! Oh, release me!

  No, by heaven! No, by heav’n, I am not mad.

  The razor came down with a flash of lamplight as the Harvest Man began to cut.

  58

  Constable Bentley was still idling outside the murder scene, leaning against the garden gate and whistling something tuneless, so Hammersmith instructed the driver not to stop. They rolled past and turned the corner and went another five streets over. If Day had gone inside the Pitt house, Hammersmith felt certain Bentley would have followed him in, if only to relieve the boredom that came with guarding a crime scene. The only other likely possibility was that Day had gone to confer with Tiffany. Perhaps some new idea had occurred to him. Hammersmith hopped out and paid the driver and approached the door with its unhappy face hung above the lintel, a deserted golden twin. The house was dark, but as Hammersmith raised his hand to knock he heard a man singing somewhere within the house. The voice was fine, but had a stilted quality about it that sent shivers up and down Hammersmith’s spine. He pulled Day’s revolver from his belt and turned the knob. The door swung open and the lyrics of the song became clear.