The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  I noticed something else about the little lamp man as we stuttered back through the lanes. He kept looking round at me. At first I assumed he was checking my progress, but since I was hard upon his shoulder the whole way, that seemed a misreading: I was breathing in his ear. No, it became clear he wasn’t looking at me, so much as past me, almost as if in search of some … pursuer. I said nothing, but fell subject to the fear that we were perhaps being followed. When I turned to check for myself though, I could of course see nothing beyond the meagre glow cast by our lantern, nor could I hear footsteps. The lanes were all but deserted at this hour; if anybody had really been following us, their progress would have written itself in echoes, would it not?

  We ferreted our way through the lanes as fast as the little man’s lungs would allow, and in the time it took us to reach Holt Court, my faith in the course I’d set out upon began to dwindle. Disclosing the handwritten notes to Justice Wheeler would mean explaining how I’d come to have them both, which was tantamount to admitting … what? That I’d tampered with a crime scene? Stolen evidence? Conspired to pervert the course of justice? Construed unfavourably, such accusations could prove at the very least problematical … perhaps even terminal … to my career.

  My career? Ha! For an instant I saw the thing as it was, a pebble upon a beach. What did my fledgling ambition matter set against a man strung up from the rafters and Carthy abducted, apparently by the same hand? But even as I saw, in a flash, the true scale of things, I was standing before the boarding house door, my under standing foundering upon the stoop, leaving me fearful of revealing Addison’s note to the Justice.

  I knocked.

  There was no immediate answer.

  I knocked again, then listened for the sound of footsteps clumping down the stairs within the house. Nothing. Yet as I leaned towards the door it swung open abruptly, revealing the landlady, whose powers of moving around the house inaudibly now left us a foot too close to one another. I stood back. Behind her, on the half landing, sat the sailor, Blue. From down here he appeared shrunken.

  ‘Well?’ the landlady said.

  ‘The Justice. Wheeler. I need to see him. If you’ll excuse …’ I made to go past her.

  She lowered her head but held her ground, the hump of fat between her shoulders now giving her a bailiff’s solidity.

  ‘He’s not here.’

  I rocked on the threshold. ‘But he must be. I gave him the address a good two hours ago. Something must have delayed him.’

  ‘No, he’s been and gone.’

  ‘What? Already?’

  Blue had advanced downstairs. ‘It’s true,’ he said, placing a hand on the newel post, which rocked uncertainly in its socket. ‘He was barely here ten minutes –’

  ‘It didn’t take a man of his experience long to determine the obvious,’ the landlady cut in, a triumphant note in her voice. ‘Disposing of a suicide is the undertaker’s concern, not a matter for the Justice.’

  Blue shook his head, looking at me from under his brows. ‘I explained your concerns –’

  ‘But the Justice Wheeler wasn’t impressed –’

  ‘He said, if I was disposed to complicate so open and shut a tragedy, to make a meal of it, those were his words, then I’d be throwing myself into the pot ahead of the dead Captain.’

  ‘He said what?’

  ‘His meaning was plain. Since I, or we, found the man dead, he said, we’d naturally be the first subjects of an investigation.’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’

  ‘No, he was highly serious,’ the landlady asserted. She’d grown defiant since the Justice’s visit. I ignored her and spoke to Blue.

  ‘Did he not look at the room, the furniture, the open window?’

  ‘He did. I pointed such things out to him as you instructed. It made no difference. He merely drew the window shut and righted the chair, and then he had me cut the Captain’s body free and lay him out on the bunk to await the undertaker.’

  ‘The coroner surely? Somebody to examine the …’ I trailed off. There was something sorrowful in Blue’s demeanour. He’d as good as been threatened by Wheeler, warned away, yet he was still here, awaiting the undertaker out of loyalty to his dead Captain. The landlady was kneading complacently at the back of her neck again; there was something sinister in her newfound composure. Who was going to pay for the undertaker’s services? Not her, I was sure of it. If anything, the look on her face suggested she’d lost a farthing and found sixpence.

  I paused, hand on chin, doing my best to give an impression of thoughtfulness. Then I nodded at the landlady, fought out a conciliatory smile, and turned to address Blue. I suggested that the Justice was no doubt correct, that his professional eye must, indeed, have made sharper sense of the tragedy, which had so disturbed us all. Then I bade the sailor come with me. A frown cut purple lines in the darkness of his forehead. He opened his mouth to tell me, no doubt, that he had a duty to Addison still, but I headed him off with some nonsense about how we owed a greater debt to his remaining crew members, including the Captain’s good friend Doctor Waring. We must inform them of the sad news. Though the prospect of starting out on such a chore after nightfall was little short of absurd, the big man caught my meaning and stepped forward. For a second I thought the landlady, unwilling to be left in the house alone with a corpse, might try to prevent us leaving, but when Blue moves he does so with something of a ship’s momentum, and the lady, clutching at her crucifix, thought better than to bar his way.

  Thirty-six

  The bow-legged lamp-bearer had vanished; when the door shut behind us Blue and I were enveloped in near darkness. We inched our way back down the alley, but I still managed to stumble into the noisome gully and splash unknown filth up the inside of my left leg. I heard myself growl out loud, and then felt the solidity of Blue’s hand upon my shoulder.

  ‘Steady as you go,’ he said.

  These simple words, and the dark, and the weight of events, conspired to pull me up short, my lungs tight in my chest. I sensed that despite it all I’d just had a lucky escape, been saved from myself, from making matters infinitely worse. Of course Wheeler would be in their thrall. They – the Venturers, the Dock Company, Bristol’s merchants – were the powers that be. Even if he’d dismissed this case out of personal lethargy – and that was, of course, more likely than some deeper conspiracy – sooner or later they’d get to him and call him away from any awkward investigation-making. The two notes, the fact of their being written by the same pen, they were like playing cards: in revealing them to Wheeler I would have shown my hand, and lost.

  Shoulder bumping shoulder, Blue and I made slow progress back into town. We exchanged no words. Not until Bristol Bridge, upon which the sailor stopped. The relative openness of the scene cast the stone and the sky and buildings either side of the river in lighter shades of black. The water itself stretching away beneath us was pricked with dots of light whose infrequency only served to emphasise the unreflecting surface of the rest.

  ‘Here’s where our ways part,’ Blue said.

  My feet felt suddenly sore within my boots. I hugged my coat to myself and shifted from heel to heel. ‘Of course. Well, thank you for –’

  ‘But … Waring,’ the sailor cut me off. ‘I heard the woman tell you he’d come from Bath. If you like, I’ll help you find him there. You’ll still be wanting his account of our cargo, and regardless of that he needs to hear what’s happened.’ He lowered his voice for these last words, I fancied, before raising it again to give the address of his own lodgings.

  I repeated this last back to him gratefully.

  We stood for a moment. The wind had picked up. It shivered the surface of the river and drew a low moan from the bridge.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ asked Blue.

  ‘I’d raised the Justice. I wanted to follow up with him.’

  ‘No. There was something else.’

  ‘I wanted to make sure the Justice investigated the case properly. I wan
ted him to be in possession of all the facts.’

  The sailor paused before replying.

  ‘There was a look upon your face, when the woman told you that he had left, which said something else.’

  Though the wind tugged at us both, his quiet voice had a depth which made his words solid as the stones beneath our feet. It took an effort of will not to reply with the whole truth, but for now I simply could not.

  ‘Soon,’ I said. ‘I’ll call upon your help, and when I do I’ll be in a position to add detail to the picture.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Thirty-seven

  If they wanted the case file, there had to be something in it worth having. On arriving home, by which I mean Carthy’s home, a fact made all the more emphatic by his absence, I first checked that Anne had been put to bed. She had, and she was asleep, her mouth open, snoring delicately: the way children sleep is the most convincing argument I know for the existence of God. Ignoring the chattering of her aunt, I asked after Anne’s mother; she, too, was in bed, pinned down by nervous exhaustion. I shut my office door behind me and prepared to spend the night sorting through the Dock Company document crates.

  It was a daunting task. I decided to narrow my endeavours. I set the Western Trading Company files aside from the others: these had to be where the cause for concern lay. I separated the various documents out according to type. Bills of lading, contracts, schedules of works, duty declarations, receipts from merchants far and wide, accounts … detailing investments in individual voyages, as well as summaries through time, even tables of expenditure on repairs to ships. Somewhere in all of this was something they didn’t want anyone to see. Not knowing what it was … was infuriating. I fell back on one of the first lessons Carthy taught me: when attempting to get to grips with complicated facts, sort them chronologically. I worked long into the night ordering the documents and then longer still making a list of what had happened when, and how it could be proven by reference to the evidence. Once under way, I have to admit there was something heartening about the exercise. It was at least manageable. The sound of my quill upon the pages of the ledger, the compact sureness of the letters and figures flowing from its crosscut tip, reassured me, temporarily masking the brutish truth, that I still had no idea of the significance of my annotations, or the wider, devilish plot they should be revealing. But as the slice of window pane above the shutters turned pale, and the first footsteps outside underscored the truth of the new day, I did have an account of the Western Trading Company’s doings before me in black and white. And although the lack of sleep, and lack of coffee, and the disorientating horror of the past few days’ events had worked to unsettle my stomach and make my scalp itch, I felt a sort of solace issuing from what I’d achieved.

  Carthy would have wanted me to make this note.

  He would want to refer to it upon being set free.

  There were still six hours or so before noon, and at noon I would fulfil the demand left by his kidnappers. Outwardly at least. The ledger I’d written in constituted damaging evidence of ‘failing to desist’ if discovered. I had more or less reached the end of practical thought, but had a sudden recollection, of myself and Carthy hauling livestock upstairs two years beforehand, and knew instantly where I could hide the book. Treading softly to Anne’s landing, I cracked her door and checked she was still asleep. Her rocking horse stood in the corner. I tiptoed to it and, putting my shoulder against its flank, tilted the pedestal upwards a hand-span or so. The heavy base – cast in back-breaking metal – is hollow. I slid the ledger inside and lowered the horse, its tail shivering gently, to the floor. Instantly, I was overcome with fatigue. I stumbled downstairs and collapsed upon my own bunk. As I fell asleep, I fancied I could hear the canary I’d given Anne tweeting at me through the floorboards.

  Thirty-eight

  I slept for no more than a couple of hours and woke with the giddy, jarred sensation of a man who has struck his head upon a beam. No time was afforded me to gather my wits. I had barely doused myself with cold water, and was half-heartedly attempting to claw my hair into something approaching an acceptable state, when the women of the house were upon me. They had been talking. By which I came to understand that Aunt Beatrice had whipped Mrs Carthy into further paroxysms of panic.

  I ignored the Aunt and told Mrs Carthy directly that the matter was in hand.

  ‘But the terrible threats!’ Beatrice exclaimed.

  I did my best not to respond to this, yet found I was blinking despite myself.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Carthy, more quietly. ‘The note.’

  I tried to give an understanding nod, but the effect, I fear, was mechanical: I felt wooden as a marionette.

  ‘As I say, I have the matter … including the demands made in the note … in hand. We’d all be best advised to carry on as normal for this morning.’

  Mrs Carthy shivered as I said this. It was the manifestation of her stoical attempt to pull herself together. Her sister, by contrast, felt it necessary to slump down upon a chair gasping.

  ‘Anne’s reading,’ I went on. ‘Adam would not want her to miss a morning’s practice. You should occupy yourselves with that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Carthy said.

  ‘Very good. I must get on.’

  Carthy’s wife advanced towards me and gripped both my forearms and squeezed them; the gesture suggested I was fooling nobody, and yet still I felt compelled to continue.

  ‘I must prepare myself for the meeting,’ I repeated. ‘If you’ll excuse me. All will be well … I’m … confident of …’

  There was no need to deliver this stillborn sentiment. Mrs Carthy was already ushering Beatrice from the room. I recognised in the way she did not meet my eye as she left that she intended to spare me further embarrassment, and this in turn was an expression of faith in me, that I might prevail, despite myself. The click of the door-latch made my knees feel weak.

  But I forced myself to do as I had promised and reassembled the WTC files slowly, taking care to double check I had not missed anything in my nocturnal study of the contents. Save for a note detailing an investment, made by the ship’s surgeon, Doctor Waring, in the voyage of the Belsize, which was unremarkable enough, nothing stood out. These documents were what they wanted, but I still didn’t know why. It had begun to drizzle outside. Before I set off on the long hike up Clifton Hill, I wrapped the folders in an oilskin cloth to protect them, and lastly thought to do the same for myself by way of a hat. It helped against the rain, but as I set out the hat was powerless to prevent the hot sensation of six eyes boring into me from the upstairs window of the house. Anne’s were hottest of all.

  Up I went, up. My last trip to Clifton had been at the point of a knife; this one felt less pleasant. I took my anger out on the incline of Park Street, buried my uncertainty with long strides, turned fear into a pair of aching lungs. Soon I was among the half-built hulks of ostentation that are the new borough’s speciality, with the biggest folly of all, that unbroken wave of stone that is the great crescent, rising in my sights.

  I made my way to the rear of this edifice and located the house. The lane was a mess of ruts, heaped earth, and puddles. I checked my pocket-watch: a quarter to twelve. The fifteen minutes were an ocean ahead of me; I clawed through them like a drowning man, and yet I did not, deep down, want to arrive at the other shore. Nobody came or went whilst I waited. I suspected this must mean they were inside already. Although it made no difference to who held the upper hand, the fact undermined me further, and I walked the final steps to the back of the house as if they were a pirate’s plank.

  The door swung open at my touch. I stepped into the gloom. It crossed my mind to call out, but I feared my voice would give more than my arrival away. Instead, I trod heavily across the loose floorboards and fairly stomped up the staircase, all the while clutching the parcel of wretched documents to my chest. There was a stillness in the stairwell. When I advanced to the threshold of the topmost room, it had deepened t
o an underwater roar. In fact, it was just the wind across the eyeless window sockets. By now I could no longer resist the urge to announce myself, and fairly bellowed my name and greeting.

  There was no response.

  I called out again and received no answer.

  I advanced into the centre of the room and looked around me. Alcove to un-plastered alcove, open chimney breast to gaping window, it was empty, empty and unchanged; the grey flat light and rushing sky visible through the window casement were exactly the same as when I’d last stood there. Was I here ahead of them, after all? Where should I put myself within this room to wait? There was nothing to sit down upon but the floorboards, and yet, standing up, I felt vulnerable, as if, whichever way I faced, I could not head off the dagger’s threat at my back.

  I waited.

  I eyed the door.

  I waited, and my gaze shifted around the room.

  The wind across the face of the building was driving rain in through the window hole. Unable to stay put any longer, I edged towards it, drawn ineluctably to the spot where I’d stood before. I put a hand on the rough brickwork either side of the aperture and looked down again at the smear of city tumbling up from the docks to the rubble-strewn footings beneath me. The rain was falling in swathes, curtains of gauzy grey, torn and re-stitched by seagulls. I opened my face to its coldness for a second, then dipped my hat-brim. Off to my right and a long way down two men were barrowing something or other through some scrub. I strained to follow their progress, and then there was a noise in the building behind me, a banging, and I was spinning on my heels, framed by the void, to face the door.