The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  “’Tis Groves?” he asked in his imposing voice.

  “It is,” replied Groves, vaguely unsettled.

  “Five thousand welcomes,” Hogarth boomed. “Pray, take a seat.”

  Groves perceived an imperative tone and ordinarily might have resisted on principle. But he was uneasy enough in the environment, and now on top of that disconcerted by Hogarth’s manner, and so he found himself settling almost against his will into the provided chair. It was not the first time he had set eyes on the actor—he had arrived late in the performance and endured the final “interpretation” impatiently, privately rueing the fact that he had missed the donkey—but he found the man even more fearsome in person than he had appeared onstage.

  “Have you visited the theater before, Inspector?” the actor inquired. He had not offered his hand, but his eyes blazed with warmth.

  “This is the first time I’ve been,” Groves admitted. “But it has not been open too long, in any event.”

  “I mean any theater. Theater, the father of dreams. Have you never slipped into a play to ease the pain of a torturing hour?”

  “I went as a young ’un. And got a headache from the houselights.”

  “We use electric filaments in glass globes now,” Hogarth said proudly. “Only the backup footlights are gas. The naked flame is truly the theater’s nemesis.” He did not have to mention the Theatre Royal in Broughton Street, which had a nasty habit of burning down every ten years.

  “A policeman has little time for such trifles,” Groves observed.

  “Though I caught you before in the guise of the Negro.”

  Hogarth, as though on cue, affected a theatrical flourish. “‘By heaven, thou echoest me…as if there were some monster in my thought…too hideous to be shown…!’” He projected his gilded voice to some imaginary audience and let the words hang in the air and dissipate, his hands still curled, and Groves got the impression that he was meant to applaud, or express some manner of approval. But he only grunted.

  “You’ve heard of the murder at Waverley Station, sir?” he asked, eager to waste no time.

  “Unsavory news,” said Hogarth, lowering his head, “which truly has turned my countenance.”

  “What do you know of it?”

  “Murder most foul, strange, and unnatural. People’s hearts are brimful of fear, and Edinburgh is spoken as a term of terror.”

  Groves was baffled by the actor’s grandiloquence, but he had always suspected that actors were mad. “It is said by more than one that you were a close friend of the deceased, Mr. James Ainslie.”

  “Pish,” Hogarth snorted. “A small acquaintance, hollow friends at best.”

  “So he was not a friend, you claim?”

  “He was a close friend of no one, Inspector. Disgrace knocked often at his door, and I always suspected wrath or craft would get him in the end. Still, to give the devil his due, he could play the gentleman well enough, with those requisites that green minds look after.”

  Groves decided to register his impatience. “This is a most serious investigation, sir. You would do well to cooperate.”

  “It is my duty, Inspector, and I hold my duty as I hold my soul.”

  Groves sniffed. “I would like to know how you met him.”

  Hogarth again dispensed with his histrionics, if only briefly. “I was appearing as Richelieu at the Royal, coming off my great success as Mr. Tollaway in My Black Eye. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, Inspector?”

  Groves shook his head.

  “An aching farce. Punch called it better than Who Speaks First? But you weary of my tedious prattle, I see. Let me rouse my tired memory. Ah, yes—it was twenty years ago or more. Mr. Ainslie was introduced to me as a most worldly financier.”

  “Had he been to France?”

  “There was little Gaul in him, but a great stain of the soldier. Yes, that was it—he had in uniform seen the world. Though more of his soldiership I know not.”

  This much Groves had already established: a dishonorable discharge from the Royal Rifle Corps and a swift retreat to his city of birth. “Did he speak of his service?”

  “Of most disastrous chances, hairbreadth escapes, and insolent foes. But he was an infinite and endless liar, and his heart was clearly set on some future mischief.”

  “Yet you mixed with him?”

  Hogarth sighed heartily. “Limelight brings forth the adder, Inspector. I associate with such serpents, and seek to dodge their fangs when they strike.”

  “What was his business, then?”

  “In the theater?” Hogarth shifted posture. “I believe at first it was simply a bounteous madam by the name of Annabelle, who was appearing with me in Richelieu, but had most successfully played the Royal in Manchester in The Belle’s Strategem. I was Doricourt.”

  “A harlot?” Groves had little regard for actresses.

  “A shallow, changing woman, whom I once considered my own, but who was drawn away by Mr. Ainslie’s revels. The man played many a strumpet in his bed, Inspector, though at the time I believe he had commissioned her for something more. There was some evil plan he had hatched, and she was to play a prominent role.”

  Groves stiffened. “What sort of evil plan?”

  “I remember a mist of things, but nothing distinct. There was some orphan involved—some unfathered fruit. And he seemed to be visiting the churches.”

  “The churches?” Groves thought of Professor Smeaton. “Did you ask why?”

  “I did not. But he appeared one day shivering and looking pale, almost beside himself with fear. I took it that he had dared damnation, and elected not to pry.”

  “He did not tell you anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He was tight-lipped, then?”

  “I was tight-eared.”

  “Had you spoken to him recently? This is important.”

  “Not in many a season,” Hogarth said, “though of course he orbited the theater like a wandering moon.”

  Groves now began to wonder about the actor himself. There was no question he was a cultured man, after all, of the sort identified by Evelyn. And certainly he had traveled far…

  “The company was dining late that night,” Hogarth suddenly offered, as though reading his mind, “a fruitful meal at the lodgings of Oliphant Bentley, the tea merchant, when some caddy did arrive with the news. We all did pale, and lamented Mr. Ainslie’s passing like Christians. A rascal he may have been, but at heart we’re all bastards. Disguised, was he not, in some odd semblance?”

  Groves nodded, making a note to verify the alibi later. “A rough job,” he said, “done without expertise.” He glanced pointedly at Hogarth’s sponges and blending powders. “You’ve not heard of him, perhaps, prowling around for brushes and pastes?”

  “Alas, no, but it would not be unlike the man to improvise. Lead paint, perhaps, which causes the eyes to swell and the skin to shrivel.”

  “Can you think of any reason for such a mask?”

  “Well, as I say, Mr. Ainslie had kept an evil diet long, and might have known his hour of reckoning was nigh. Is there as yet any clue to the identity of the beast responsible?”

  Groves shifted. “I am closing in on the killer.”

  “I warrant that the beast now shivers, knowing such a man has his scent. I pray that when his cue is called, he says the proper lines, and goes to his maker with humility.”

  “Aye,” Groves agreed, though he still was not certain if the man was mocking him.

  “Some tea cake, Inspector?” the actor asked, gesturing with a flourish to an ornate tin. “’Tis as luscious as locusts.”

  But Groves decided that he had already had enough of trying to comprehend Hogarth’s ornate jargon. “Kind of you,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, “but I fear I have too much to do.”

  “Pish!” Hogarth exclaimed. “We have scarce begun! I beseech you for more of the theatrical expedition of your sapling years! Which play did you enjoy, and who did perform that day?”


  Groves smoothed the brim of his hat. “I don’t rightly remember who performed,” he said, “though I remember the play well enough.” In fact, his dear mother had taken them in the interests of patriotism, and if he recalled it so vividly now it was only because of the sacrifices she had made to do so.

  Hogarth’s eyes sparkled. “A tragedy? A comedy? A tragicomedy? A history, pastoral, comical-pastoral?”

  “A depressing piece,” Groves said. “Macbeth.”

  The actor grimaced visibly, but swiftly collected himself. “And did you enjoy it,” he asked, swallowing, “for all your tender age?”

  The man must surely have had some poor review in the role of Macbeth, for every time I mentioned the play he blanched and spluttered, and in the end, for all his noises of hospitality, he wanted to evict me like a heckler, and I would have protested had I not myself wished to be free of the place, the theatre I say again being no place for the man of practical mind.

  “Soft you, a word or two before you go,” said a pained Hogarth, seizing Groves’s arm at the door. “I have done the state some service, and you know it.” Beads of perspiration had materialized on his blackened forehead and he was panting like a heated dog. “No more of that. I pray you, in your letter, speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, or set down aught in malice. Speak of me as one who loved not wisely, of one not easily jealous, of one whose hand threw a pearl away, and one who dropped tears as fast as Arabian trees their medicinable gum! I dispatch you to your mystery!”

  And he released a confounded Groves and shut the door with an audible gasp.

  I have here attempted to record his words with some exactitude, but I fear they are of a brand that one does not easily recall, and speak of one whose salad days are well behind him, and one who has sunk to the level of a blinking idiot.

  Absurd though Hogarth was, Groves nevertheless came away deeply impressed by his physical command of the enclosed space, which had him briefly starved of air, and so when Pringle entered the Squad Room late in the afternoon to inform him that Evelyn Todd had returned and most earnestly desired to speak to him, he immediately resolved to make the most of the lesson. He repaired to the neighboring room, the claustrophobic office of the Chief Constable, and quickly set up a chair to face him, dimmed the gaslight, inflated his chest, and stood to his full height, so that he might subjugate her in the style of the Moor.

  He cleared his throat gravely. “Fetch her,” he said to Pringle, tightening his muscles. “And then set yourself in the hall outside. If you hear me raise the alarm, run in at once with truncheon ready.”

  Leaving the Royal Lyceum with Hogarth’s mention of an orphan fresh in his mind, Groves had made a visit to the New Register House to locate the birth certificate of one Evelyn Todd, specifying the years 1856–65. The search had yielded no immediate results, but the curator reminded him that prior to 1855 all civil registration was in the domain of parish ministers and session clerks; was it possible the woman he sought was of an older vintage? Groves paused to recall Evelyn’s delicate features and agreed that, for all her maidenly aspects, it was just possible that she was in the region of her early thirties. But the curator warned him that, without further details, it would take time—hours, at least—to track down the right entry, for the parochial registers were many and voluminous. Groves told him to issue a message when he had succeeded, and returned to Central Office with oddly magisterial steps.

  “Enter,” he now said when there was a light knock on the door. He was standing in front of the narrow window, his arms folded imperiously and lamplight from Fishmarket Close forming a blazing aureole around him.

  Evelyn oozed in like a mist. She was wearing mourning black again, and with a high, faintly clerical collar she looked eerily nunlike.

  “Be seated,” Groves intoned, nodding at the seat, but she did not even seem to hear him. She slid into his shadow and gripped the back of the chair.

  “I beg your forgiveness,” she said hoarsely. “I know I was rude, uncommonly rude, but…I cannot explain it…I have these episodes…you must not hold it against me!”

  Her face had twisted into creases of long-carved anguish, and she looked every minute of a woman in her thirties. Groves might have been relieved at this rediscovery of her submissive aspect—and indeed his muscles loosened of their own accord—but he was still not certain what to make of it: the contrast was again inexplicable. “Calm yourself, woman,” he said loudly, so that his words might be overheard by Pringle, “and make good your account.”

  “You will not believe me…I cannot blame you if you think the less of me, that I am some vile creature, some duplicitous thing. But I ask you to consider that what I say must have some merit, for I would not dare to show my face before you if it were not so! And in truth I am not a liar, and I leave it to my conviction to prove it to you!”

  Groves narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about, woman?”

  She looked at him directly for one galvanizing second. “The murder at Waverley Station,” she said, and gulped and gasped. “I dreamed it all in great detail…exactly as it happened…and I saw the message—Ce Grand Trompeur!”

  This was a feeble boast, for the message was well known, and Groves now wondered if he was witnessing a performance as contrived as that of Seth Hogarth. “Take a seat,” he commanded again, but she only gripped the back of the chair more tightly.

  “I saw it!” she insisted. “I saw it as I slept! The murder! The note!”

  “You might have read about it. Or heard about it, for it is no secret now.”

  “No, no—” She shook her head vigorously. “The train departing, the man leaving his cab, the great shape striking him down—I saw it all in my dream, and the message also, in rough black ink splashed across a page—‘This Great Deceiver.’”

  There had been no details in the newspapers about the precise form of the message—the “rough black ink”—but then again it would be easy enough to guess. Groves tightened his arms and stared down his nose.

  “What else do you claim to have seen?”

  “Just what I have mentioned—but most clearly! I might have been there, it was so clear!”

  “Perhaps you were there.”

  “I was asleep—the nightmare woke me!”

  “At what point?”

  “As soon as the man was cut down.”

  “But again you did not see the killer, I suppose?”

  “Only steam, and a dark shape. I swear it’s true, in God’s name!”

  Groves grunted. “In the washhouse you told me you had been sleeping until just before I arrived.”

  “I was not entirely truthful,” she admitted, “but you must believe me now!”

  For a moment Groves was almost swayed by her performance—and certainly her contrition made him feel deliciously powerful—but ultimately he rejected it all with an unsympathetic sigh. “This is all very grand,” he said, unfolding his arms and clasping his hands behind his back. “One moment the shallow strumpet with nary a thing to say, the next calling upon God and whiter than snow. Which is it to be, woman? Settle on your true face so that I can be sure of you.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “I was dismayed that you did not believe me earlier, that is the truth of it. When it had pained me so much to come to your office and lay myself bare.”

  He snorted. “Pain? Why should it be painful to tell the truth?”

  “It hurts to look back,” she said.

  “Into your dreams?”

  “Into anything.”

  Groves shifted sideways and a shaft of lamplight struck her like a blade. She winced and drew back into the security of his shadow.

  “When were you born, woman?” he asked, remembering his failure at Register House.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You must have been told.”

  “That part of my life is…not clear.”

  “Who was your father? Your mother?”

  She struggled. “I don’t remember.
But—”

  “Where does the name Todd come from?”

  “Someone…someone told me that was my name. But please—”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Someone,” she managed, “at the orphanage.”

  The orphanage. Groves felt his muscles tighten again. “You came from an orphanage?”

  She looked disconcerted. “I…I believe so.”

  Groves retained his composure. “Which one?”

  “A place in F-Fountainbridge. But please, this is not—”

  “The Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls?” Groves knew of the place from his days on the beat, an ugly black building mysteriously incinerated sometime in the late 1860s.

  “Aye. But—”

  “When did you leave there?”

  She was visibly uneasy. “My…my family claimed me.”

  “What family? You said you were an orphan.”

  “My family.”

  He detected some manner of evasiveness, or dishonesty, and he rose several inches on his feet before settling back. “Do you never tell the truth, woman?”

  “I am not a liar,” she said.

  “When did you return to Edinburgh?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “It seemed I should.”

  “Why?”

  She was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “It’s my home.”

  “What did you do when you returned?”

  “I was a match dipper. I washed dishes at the Bell and Candle. But—”

  “Anything else?”

  “I did needlework. Then Arthur Stark gave me work and—”

  “What about Professor Smeaton? Did you ever work for him?”

  “No—”

  “What about Colonel Munnoch?”

  “No, no—”

  “Do you know of a lighthouse keeper called—”

  “No!” she cried. Suddenly the washhouse witch had returned in force, and she seemed ready to snap the chair with her hands. “I know of no lighthouse keepers!” she said through gritted teeth. “And that is not why I am here!”