The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “Worked it out, ’ave yer? Took you long enough.”

  His voice is of a piece with all the rest—high-pitched, nasal, whining. Easy to mock were it not for the knife in his hand, and the pictures in Charles’s head.

  “Think you’re so clever, with all yer fancy methods—you ’aven’t got a bloody clue. I’d been following yer for days before that, but someone like me, we’re beneath the notice of the likes of you. I could have ’ad you there and then if I chose”—he draws the knife across his own throat in an arc so perfect, a gesture so practised, as to be almost beautiful—“but that weren’t what I was being paid for. Not then.”

  “Whereas now?”

  “Ah, well now it’s different. Then you was just making a nuisance of yerself. Now you know. Or soon will, unless someone puts a stop to you.” He smiles, and turns the knife so it catches the light. “Guess that’d be me then.”

  They stand facing each other, little more than a yard apart now, both knowing that the first move will in all probability be decisive. Charles has the advantage of height and size but he has no illusions—and, more important, no gun. It’s not the first occasion he’s had cause to rail at Bucket, but never before with such a perilously good reason. His fingers tighten imperceptibly around the candlestick. It’s the only other weapon at his disposal, but it will give him one chance, and one alone, and like as not he’ll destroy the only evidence he’s ever likely to get in the process—evidence he hasn’t even got to the bottom of yet—evidence that’s cost him so much time and pain to find, and for which others have paid an even higher price. But what other choice does he have?

  A second later—and without ever taking his eyes from his opponent’s gaze—he drops the candle into the box of paper and the parched leaves leap up like bushfire. Before the boy can move or react, Charles flings the blazing box in his direction and dashes for the door, to a howl of burning curses. He’s half-way down the stairs before he hears footsteps start after him on the floor above and realises that even if he makes it back through the kitchens and into the courtyard he’ll be tracked down long before he can scale the six-foot fence. But even as that thought takes shape, his fingers stub blindly against a crack in the plaster. No—not a crack—Tulkinghorn tolerated no such faults in this flawless house—it’s the edge of a door, the hidden entrance to the hidden gallery, the frame so perfectly crafted as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Charles turns and fumbles up and down the jamb until he hears a soft click and the door swings heavily open. It’s as black as death at the top of the stairs, but he knows from experience that it will be lighter lower down. And there is a full moon.

  He pulls the door closed behind him and takes the stone steps as fast as he dares, the sound of his own blood beating in his chest and a new ache in his mutilated hand, as if, by some sort of sympathetic magic, it can sense the presence of its old aggressor. At the bottom of the stairs he stops, listening, hoping that he hasn’t shut himself into a trap of his own making. But silence reigns still above. He makes his way—slower now, in all this priceless clutter—to the galleried room, hoping frantically that his memory holds true and he can remember how to find the mirrored alcove. The busts and marbles stare at him from their blind stone eyes as he turns the corner and a dim and distorted version of himself looms momentarily from the glass. He seizes a statuette from the nearest shelf and slides into the narrow space behind the god of panic and irrational terror, aware, in a small and remote part of his brain, of the aptness of that irony, and filing it away to entertain Maddox with over the drawing-room fire. If he ever makes it that far.

  A heartbeat, two, three. Charles is still holding his breath, his ears straining against the fizzing silence, and after what seems an age there’s the dull distant thud of a door somewhere closing. I’m not sure how long he leaves it after that. Perhaps five minutes, perhaps a lot more, but eventually even Charles decides it must be safe to emerge. But as he moves quickly back around the gallery he catches sight of a light beneath him in the darkness, and pauses, his heart drilling again in his chest until he realises that it’s only the candle in the niche by the Egyptian sarcophagus, burning still in the room below. Despite himself, despite the danger, he cannot resist the urge to look down again at the unravellable mystery of that majestic piece of stone, knowing that this will no doubt be the last time he will ever see it, and wondering in passing where all these astounding artefacts will end up now.

  And that’s when it happens. The blade against his neck. The voice in his ear. Someone else’s sweat against his skin. It seems this eerie man-boy had a point when he said Charles was far too clever by half, and surely now he is indeed caught in his own cunning snare. His reactions are quick, though—maybe just quick enough, because he has his hands round the boy’s wrists before the knife makes blood and is pushing backwards against him with all his strength. The right instinct, as it proves, because the boy cannot hope to match him for weight. Charles can smell the tobacco and the cheap cologne as he forces the boy down onto the floor and tries to get enough purchase on the stone figure to aim a decent blow. They roll over and over, kicking and clawing, and suddenly the statue has slipped from his grasp and the boy is staggering up and away. Charles catches at the long coat but it pulls away in his hands and the boy is on his feet, stumbling, aiming for what he thinks are the stairs. But now it’s Charles who has the advantage—Charles who commands the terrain—Charles who knows that the staircase at the corner of the gallery is mere trompe l’oeil—a mural that’s hallucinatorily realistic, even in daylight, and fatally deceptive now. As the boy clatters into brick wall Charles is on his back before he even realises what’s happened. They fall backwards and the knife spins away across the floor and over the side of the balustrade, clattering onto the stone floor twenty feet below. Charles straightens and they stand, face-to-face, just as they did in Tulkinghorn’s chamber. The only difference now is the thin streak of blood running down the boy’s face.

  “Think you’ve got me, do ya?” he gasps, his pale eyes even stranger in the glimmering dark. “Think you have the balls to finish me off? ’Cause that’s what it’ll take, Maddox. If you don’t kill me now you’ll spend the rest of your life looking over yer shoulder. Never knowing if it’s you I’ll come after, or someone close—someone you care about. Someone you don’t want me takin’ me time over. Like that black whore of yours—what’s ’er name? Molly—that’s right. Did she like ’er little present?” He leers at Charles and runs his tongue over his cracked lips. “Lovely-looking girl, though—I’ll give you that. Ones like ’er—they always take longest. Once you’ve got ’em gagged you can do what you like with ’em—cut ’em, fuck ’em, watch ’em die—”

  Charles may know, somewhere in his brain, that the boy is deliberately using Molly to provoke him. But that knowledge is not enough—never has been enough—to prevent him from being seized with such a boiling fury that he hurls himself forwards and the two of them hammer backwards against a table of terracotta figurines, sending emperors and divinities crashing to smithereens. And now the boy has the advantage not of weight but speed, and is the first to reach out for something—anything—that could strike a final blow. But even he’s not fast enough to get the grip he needs and the two of them writhe on the floor like serpents—much like the model of Laocoön that they are even now crushing into splinters on the ground beneath them. Hard to tell who has the upper hand now, but as the table rocks and begins to fall, it’s the boy who is lurching to his feet and Charles who is still on the floor—Charles whose injured hand is crushed without mercy beneath the other’s boot, Charles who lets out an animal cry of pain. The blood is pouring from a new cut on the back of his head as the boy half reels, half crawls to where the statuette lies on the floor but as he bends to reach it Charles is on him again and they struggle, first one then the other crushed back against the stone balustrade, until sheer momentum takes over and they plunge, still locked fast together, head-first down, to where the ancient vessel of
the dead awaits them.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Pursuit

  THE CHOP-HOUSE on the corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is unusually busy for such a late-night hour. There’s a card-game under way in the corner, and amid the smell of sawdust and beer and tobacco-smoke, you can hear the clink of browns being laid as bets and a constant patter of gaming slang. So only the most curious customer, or those who have particular reasons of their own—as we do—would cast anything other than the briefest of glances in the direction of the stout black-suited man occupying the window-seat, who is, to all appearances, a very commonplace sample of the human species. He’s taking his time over his coffee, this ordinary little man, and he drinks it very strong, but he seems on a second glance to be far more interested in what’s going on outside, than what’s contained in his cup. His sharp little eyes have, in fact, scarcely left the windows of the large and darkened residence on the opposite side of the square, which is clearly visible from where he sits. Indeed the shop’s proximity to this house might explain his otherwise rather unaccountable choice of late-evening venue, since he must surely have a homely hearth and an equally homely wife, who keeps both his slippers and his supper warm and whose society he surely appreciates more than he does this noisy draughty corner. But then—he is gone. As sudden and unseen as he came. And if you look across the square now you will be too late to see what he saw—too late to observe that in all that tall forbidding façade, there was, just for a moment, a flicker of life.

  Less than a minute later the same little man can be observed on the steps of that same house in the company of two young police constables who are—extraordinary though it sounds—in the process of taking a crowbar to the metal bolt nailed across the door. Once inside, the air in the great hall is thick with dark, but the little man is unperturbed—indeed, we can now see that he has a small bull’s-eye lantern with him, which he must surely have brought with this very purpose in mind. Leaving the two constables wheezing in his wake he takes the broad marble steps at a sharp pace, and comes to the door of Tulkinghorn’s chamber. And now it’s clear from the light reflecting up onto his face that he has not found what he expected. He stoops and inspects a pile of half-burnt papers on the floor, reading a line here, and a word or two there, and then turns over the iron box to inspect the name emblazoned on the front. Then he lifts the lantern a little higher and looks about the room, throwing a pallid gleam on the blood-red walls. If there are clues that will tell him what has happened here, it will take a deductive genius to read them. But this, after all, is Mr Bucket of the Detective. And yet when he retraces his steps towards the stairs you can see that his expression is grave—graver, in fact, than we have ever yet seen it. In the last few days he has searched every inch of these chambers, and thought there was no secret in all this house of secrets that he had not laid bare. But there, it seems, he was wrong. For now, as he looks back down the way he came, he sees the pale outline of a door against the smooth plaster—the merest shadow of a shadow it is and easily missed, but it is there. Perhaps fifteen minutes have now passed since he saw the light in the window, and when he pushes open the hidden door and stands at the top of the stairs leading down to Tulkinghorn’s private museum there is no sound or movement below. He beckons to the constables—one of whom, we can now see, is none other than Sam Wheeler—and the three of them descend into the maze, the stout Bucket with his eagle eyes, and the others struck with wild surmise, as the arc of the lantern beam reveals shelf after shelf, and wall after crowded wall, one artefact after another emerging from the dark sharp-edged in the glare and shimmering like the monstrous spectres in a travelling phantasmagoria. Mr Bucket is not a man easily or needlessly impressed, but he comprehends in a moment what a task it would have been to fashion this place. And likewise, even if he has neither the eye nor the mind for art, deception in all its forms is something of a speciality of his, and he perceives at once that whatever this place is, it is most certainly not what it first appears to be.

  “Look sharp now, my lads,” he warns over his shoulder. “Don’t be breaking anything by your clumsiness, and mind you be watching where you put your feet.”

  Knowing what we do about what has just happened here, it’s yet more agonisingly slow minutes before they reach the inner gallery, and turn the glower of the bull’s-eye on the wreck of Tulkinghorn’s treasured trove. Pieces of priceless antiquity lie in fragments about the floor and grind into red dust beneath their feet, and as the lantern beam swings round the younger constable suddenly starts and cries out as a ghostly reflection of himself rears up before his eyes. Bucket stops and turns, but even as he does so Wheeler has reached the balustrade and seen what lies below.

  “Mr Bucket, sir—over here! Quick!”

  In an instant the Inspector is by his side, looking down into the stone sarcophagus, and if his face was grave before, it is lined with apprehension now. Apprehension that only increases when he realises that in this hall of mirrors and distortions even the staircases are an elaborate hoax. Every corner they turn leads nowhere, and there’s a note of panic even in Bucket’s normally unruffled manner by the time they discover the hidden steps and penetrate to the lower level. Bucket rushes to the plinth where the sarcophagus lies and lifts the lantern. In the bottom of the trough, face-down in a layer of blood, is the body of a young man. There’s a deep gash on the back of his head, but he’s breathing—he’s alive. And when he stirs slightly and raises his head, we can see that it’s Charles, and Bucket can see that it’s Charles, and there’s a look on the older man’s face now that seems to spring not just from relief but a deep affection. Something that might also explain the gruffness of his voice when he calls to the constable and tells him to fetch a doctor and be quick about it.

  “There’s a reputable man lodging at Portugal Street, no more than a step from here,” he calls after him, then turns to Charles. “Hold up, my lad,” he says kindly. “Hold up. I will stay with you until the doctor comes. Now you grip tight to me, there now, and we shall see if we can sit you up. Because that’s what a strong lad like you will want to do, of that I’m sure.”

  His plump arms go round the young man’s shoulders with an almost fatherly tenderness, and eventually, slowly, Charles is not only upright, but able, holding hard to Bucket’s hand, to climb out of the coffin and sit heavily on the floor. By some miracle there seems to be nothing more wrong with him than bruises and cuts. But his speech is slurring slightly, and Bucket begins to wonder whether the injury to his head isn’t rather worse than it appears.

  “Did you see him?” demands Charles, his chest heaving as if he’s struggling to breathe. “Did you see that boy? Tulkinghorn’s groom. He was here. He must be here. There’s no other way out.”

  Bucket nods. That much he has guessed already. And indeed it is not so very difficult to deduce that there has been a desperate struggle in this place, and that Charles did not hurl himself over the balustrade on the whim of the moment.

  “Take the bull’s-eye, Wheeler,” he says, beckoning to him, “and have a good look hereabouts. We’re after a stable-lad. Small and lean and pale-haired he is, but don’t you be under-estimating him for all that.

  “There now,” he says amiably to Charles, after Sam has gone. “There’s no need to fret yourself over that lad of Tulkinghorn’s. We will find him, and we will discover what is at the bottom of all this.”

  “I had it there,” says Charles. “In my hand. In the box. The letters. What Tulkinghorn’s been doing. What they’ve all been doing. I was piecing it together. And then—and now—”

  He strikes his hand against the floor, angry and impotent, tears starting in his eyes as they have not done since he was a little boy.

  Bucket watches him for a moment. “Two heads are often better than one. That’s my experience. How’s about you tell me what you found?”

  “That’s the whole point. I didn’t find anything—there wasn’t enough time. There were some references to an address in Hampstead, and
to money being sent there, but I don’t know why, or even what sort of place it was. That box I had, the papers related to a baronet—I saw him tonight. His arms are a black swan—”

  “I know him,” interrupts Bucket quietly. “I know him.”

  “Whatever Tulkinghorn did for him, he appears to have done exactly the same for Cremorne, some time before. God knows what—those damn lawyers seem to practise to deceive, but I do remember a letter from Tulkinghorn that said something like based on both my own experience and that of my clients over many years, I can confirm that the establishment in question is ideally suited to dealing with delicate cases such as yours. But as to what that delicate case actually was, I am none the wiser. Though I do know that there is something vile at the bottom of all this. Vile, and far-reaching, and of long standing. There is no other explanation.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” says Bucket, in that careful way of his. “And yet I agree there would be no call for any of this—no need to have Boscawen done away with, or employ a villain like Robbie Mann, if there were not more to it than we have yet discovered.”

  “The stable-lad—is that his name? You know him?”

  “Aye,” replies Bucket, “I’ve had my eye on Robbie Mann for a good while. Abandoned in the Whitechapel workhouse he was, by a mother no better than she should be. I first came upon him when he was taken on suspicion of setting fire to a warehouse, down at Essex Wharf.”

  “Like at the rag-and-bottle shop.”

  Bucket nods. “And from what I heard, the exact same method was employed on both occasions. After all, even a lad can lay his hand to a flagon of camphene, and no questions asked.” He sighs. “No more than ten years old, Mann was, when he first crossed my path.”