The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  I glared at the woman, knowing she was right.

  She blinked consternation back at me and went on. ‘In which case, if you’ve nothing sensible in the alternative, we should take Adam’s disappearance to the proper authorities. An investigation must be launched by those with power!’

  I felt my shoulders tense and had to hold back an urge to force the woman bodily from my sight. ‘Trust me. Involving others would only make the situation worse.’

  ‘Well!’ she huffed. ‘I can’t for the life of me fathom why.’

  Mrs Carthy, I noted, was wiping her face with the back of her wrist. Stray flour, tears? I could not be sure. Her wrist was plump and homely and induced a stab of guilt in me.

  ‘I know what Father will say when he returns,’ Anne said absently.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked her mother.

  The little girl didn’t answer at once. We three adults all watched her fingers hooking and twisting at the pale dough on the counter top, a miniature sea eagle tearing the belly out of a fish.

  ‘He’ll ask Inigo why he still hasn’t attended to his funny hair. It looks like he’s just got out of bed, all sticking out at angles, but it’s nearly tea time already.’ She giggled triumphantly and pulled the dough-fish apart.

  ‘A gale outside. I’ve lost my hat,’ I managed to say. Some things, the wind for example, and the embarrassment-inducing-embarrassment of blushing, are impossible to fight against. Others are not. I would not do nothing so long as there was something … anything … I could do. Orton. He had set us on this infernal path in the first place. I would force him to point out a way through this impasse. I took a deep breath and steeled myself to mollify Beatrice, determined not to rise to her bait. ‘No. Before we risk the involvement of a third party,’ I said softly, ‘there are yet one or two avenues I must pursue.’ I turned towards the door, adding, ‘I say this in the knowledge that it is what Adam would want me to do.’

  Forty-four

  I hurried back out into the street and set off at a trot, determined to make it to the Dock Company offices before Orton left for the day; from the little I knew of the man, he was prone to shirk work in favour of fiddling with his fossils. Rounding the corner of Marsh Street, I rushed headlong into a pair of squabbling gulls. They rose as one, still joined by the scrap they were battling over, four blue-white wings whumping about my ears as I bowled through them. For all the apparent panic, their flapping seemed half-hearted, suggesting I was an inconvenience rather than a threat. I hurried on my way.

  As it was, I only just made it in time. The porter who answered my knock raised an accusing eyebrow and told me he doubted whether Mr Orton would be able to squeeze me in. I pressed the urgency of my visit upon him in the shape of a coin, which worked. He gave another little bow and led me through to wait in the same meeting room in which Carthy and I had had the pleasure of Orton’s desiccated company on our previous visit. The Dock Company official joined me a few minutes later, his coat pointedly buttoned.

  ‘Blight, wasn’t it?’ he said, without offering me his hand.

  ‘Inigo Bright.’

  ‘Of course. Well, I was just –’

  ‘Adam Carthy has been abducted,’ I said simply.

  Then I took hold of one of the legion of chairs surrounding the vast polished lake of the table, pulled it out, and sat down uninvited. The cat-piss smell of the room was stronger than before; they had not had time to mask it with spices.

  ‘Abducted,’ I repeated.

  Orton sat down reluctantly. He placed his hands on the polished surface between us. They appeared, even in this dull, shadowless light, to have been scalded. His fingers interlocked and then began picking at one another, and in so doing they gave away more than the man’s face. And yet, now that I dwelt upon it, I could see that the same dry rash had spread above the line of his collar, too. Like paper laid across embers, his skin appeared to be cracking, scorching, holing itself from within.

  ‘What do you mean? Where’s he been taken?’

  ‘If we knew that … I’m here in the expectation that you will be able to answer that question.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. His disappearance has to do with your case. Somebody objected to it, and decided to voice that objection by terrorising him.’

  ‘What case?’

  I stared at the man.

  ‘There was a note, left at Carthy’s offices, which cited the matter we were working on for you as the root cause of his abduction.’

  ‘But the matter we instructed you on … ended. I terminated our instructions, as you know.’

  He pushed himself back from the table in a half-hearted attempt at suggesting the meeting was over, but did not stand up.

  ‘You suggested we pause in our endeavours on your behalf. Scale down. That was the phrase, if I recall.’

  ‘No, no, no! I said no such thing! I told Adam he must stop!’ The man was collapsing in front of me. ‘You have no idea,’ he went on, ‘no notion of what it is you’ve stirred up. And neither do I, and that’s the whole point! Christ, man! Why did you not listen? Why did you not cease when I instructed you to do so? And he’s been taken, has he? They’ve got to him. This means it’s only a matter of time …’

  The wrinkles of concern across Orton’s brow looked as if they had been cut there with a blunt knife. His hands! They were like a pair of fighting ferrets now. Had there been any blood in the man, it would surely have been running at me across the table. I almost felt sorry for him. And yet, he was still culpable. I leaned forwards across the table and fairly shouted at him.

  ‘Who in the name of God are they? What have they done? What’s in their records to damn them? Those cursed files, which you so casually passed our way! Why did you lose interest in the case so soon after instructing us upon it? Who got to you? What did they threaten? You should have told us the whole truth. Who is behind all this? Tell me! Who?’

  Orton was shaking his head, as if by doing so he might physically evade my questions, or butt them away. I wanted to tear him in two. Before I could stop myself I had one knee on the polished tabletop and was lunging at him. The ferrets were slow to react. I grabbed a fistful of fingers and hauled them towards me across the expanse. Orton came trailing in their wake. Next to the peeled rawness of his hands mine looked as if it had been hewn from mahogany.

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ I growled, twisting his fingers until I was sure they were about to break.

  ‘I cannot!’ he whimpered. ‘I know no more than you do. Beyond … the Belsize … I know nothing for sure!’ The whites of his eyes were the colour of rancid milk. They were curdling before me with unmanly fear.

  I stared at Orton and hissed, ‘Then guess!’

  Forty-five

  Threatening the man was pointless, of course. It shook no useful information from him. But it was circuitously instructive nevertheless. Orton’s silence meant one of two things: either he really did have nothing further to tell me, or any fear he felt before me was as nothing compared to the deeper dread which our mutual enemy had instilled in him.

  On balance I suspected the latter was most likely.

  Instructive did not mean heartening.

  I returned to Thunderbolt Street beneath an inky early evening sky; what light remained snuck in upon the scene cross-hatched. The sensation I’d had before, of being followed, stole over me again; in Wine Street I felt so observed I could not resist the urge to turn around and check for eyes in the gloom. None were discernible. A sketchbook image flashed to mind: upturned eye-whites, gleaming at me through a grate.

  Beatrice intercepted me before I’d crossed the hall. Her flushed cheeks spoke of a continuing excitement. Weariness passed through me, heavy as nausea: Carthy still had not returned. I hadn’t dared to hope otherwise, yet this woman’s jostling and jiggling still managed to crush something inside of me.

  ‘Another note!’ she exclaimed. ‘Like the last one, slipped through the door!’ She handed me a long brown envelope, conti
nuing, ‘Only this one is addressed to you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her obviousness continued. ‘There’s something in it!’

  ‘I can feel that, as well as I can read my name.’

  ‘Well? What does it say? Open it!’

  ‘I will,’ I said, and turned into my office to do so.

  False hope being worse than none at all, I stared balefully at this new envelope, defying it to raise my spirits. When I did try to open the flap, the letter had worked upon my fingers to produce in them the sensation of having endured a gloveless journey through snow. I tore at the paper, the envelope ripped apart, and a flurry of … feathers … tumbled to the floor.

  Quills, to be exact.

  The note inside read: I will be keen to hear how you find these hawk quills, when you have a chance to try them out, and I look forward to working with your gull points, in time. Let me know when it’s convenient to call in person. E.D.

  I had quite forgotten the poetess, yet I am ashamed to say that for the second time that day Carthy’s predicament was blotted out by thoughts of a woman other than my fiancée. The handwriting was as bold as the message it conveyed. Gawky almost, slashing angles and plunging tails. It brought the poetess’s raw fingers and aquiline nose to mind. E.D. Using her initials like that was at once distancing and … familiar. I gathered the quills up, and fought an absurd urge to test one there and then. The Merchant Venturers’ crane, that’s what I would have drawn, stark and upright and trailing its great hook. But I did not have the chance to uncork my ink, because Beatrice had become audible outside my office door, her huffing quickly blossoming into, ‘It really won’t do’. I set the quills carefully in a drawer. The poetess’s note emboldened me. Desist the ransom note had ordered. But they had not kept to their side of the bargain; I had handed over their precious documents, but they had not given me back my mentor. That being the case, why should I do as they say? I framed this question not out of petulance, but coolly. What guarantee did I have that Carthy would return unharmed now? None. I could not simply sit back and hope. I let Beatrice into my room, even patting her shoulder as she bustled past me.

  ‘Well? What did it say?’

  ‘It was from a friend.’

  ‘But it … can’t have been. A friend would surely have announced himself.’

  ‘And yet,’ I paused to consider. ‘It was useful. My friend has given me encouragement to take the next step.’

  ‘The Justice then,’ Beatrice said, her frown tipping into a told-you-so smirk.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why ever not? Such obstinacy is … absurd.’

  I sat back on the edge of my bureau and crossed my arms. ‘When you lose a thing, and have looked everywhere for it to no avail, where should you refocus your search?’

  ‘What new perversity is this?’

  ‘As a little girl I’m sure your mother taught you this lesson.’

  ‘Have you lost your mind, Mr Bright? What has my mother to do with anything?’

  ‘One should go back to the beginning, look again in the spot where your search first began. True?’

  ‘I shall suggest that Mrs Carthy contacts the authorities if you persist with this frippery,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Adam himself pointed to a ship called the Belsize as the root of this case. Meaning it is where he would want me to look.’

  ‘I will go to the Justice myself if I have to,’ she replied.

  ‘No, you won’t. You’ll stay here and offer comfort,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘Mr Carthy’s life is in danger. You must trust me. By involving the authorities you will only succeed in putting him in greater peril.’

  Forty-six

  I was at Blue’s lodgings early the following morning. Very early: Thunderbolts had not yet opened; I counted just one ferryboat at work in the dock, and there was as yet a pinkness in the sky which brought cuticles and seashells to mind. I half expected to find that the sailor still hadn’t risen from bed. But he was up and dressed and, when his landlady announced that he had a visitor by name, he replied ‘Good’ in such a matter-of-fact tone that I almost suspected he had been sitting waiting for me to arrive.

  ‘To Bath, then,’ he said once we had shaken hands.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The quack shouldn’t be too hard to find. Rumour had it on board that it was his last voyage. He’d been salting his takings away, and was set to invest in his own practice. If that’s true, then Bath would make sense. There’s no end of sick folk there for the waters. Better than just sick, in fact. Sick and rich. Waring’s not the sort to have wasted time.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning he’ll have been taking premises, advertising his so-called services, putting himself about in all the right circles.’

  ‘You don’t sound fond of the man.’

  Blue shrugged his sideboard-wide shoulders. ‘You be the judge.’

  In Redcliffe we found a stagecoach, destined for Bath that morning, with seats yet available. Though he was young, the left side of the driver’s face was set in a rictus frown, and his left arm also appeared frozen. Half a driver does not inspire confidence. Yet he was battling on to make himself understood, and when I handed him a note his one-handed method of magicking change from his purse into my palm was mesmerising. The sensible side of his face smiled. We took our seats.

  And shortly afterwards the stage took off along the interminable Bath road. Though the two cities are as close together as any others in the kingdom, each insists on looking at the other through the wrong end of a telescope. The road connecting them plays its part in this, co-opting every rut, runnel and pothole to keep the adversaries apart. Our fellow passengers included a young mother whose baby took to wailing with a mechanical intensity before we’d set off. The stagecoach’s motion over the appalling road amounted to a cavorting, reeling, buffeting progress. It was a case of hanging on to the doorframe to avoid being juddered apart.

  We passed a newly ploughed field in which labourers were occupied collecting stones. A mineral smell, cut with decay, rose on the breeze. The sight of the men, stooped, drawn out in a line, working their way infinitesimally up the lay of the field to where it struck the sky: they could toil for a thousand years and never finish what they’d begun! The turned earth had attracted birds. A spattering of crows off up to the left were strutting and pecking arrogance at the raggedy red earth. They looked like black sparks. Then, out of the brightening sky, gulls swung down. They wheeled lazily above the field and speared into the crows, assassins amongst muggers, spurring the crows to flap up and away like litter blown down a lane. There were caws of protest; the gulls shrieked defiance in return; and the baby’s wailing, a steady drilling insistence, underscored it all.

  It wasn’t yet noon, but the other of our fellow passengers, a short fat man with a leather case clutched protectively on his lap, now dug inside his coat for a silver hip flask. He unscrewed the cap.

  ‘You look like I feel,’ he said.

  I declined the offered flask with thanks, but he thrust it at me again.

  ‘You need fortifying. I understand. This journey always depresses my spirits too. Bath. A silver spoon sticking out of every arse …’

  ‘Why are you making the trip?’ I asked.

  He tapped his nose and took a swig from his flask. When I refused it again he cranked the cap back on viciously without offering it to Blue. ‘Because people foolish enough to poke silver up their britches will spend it soon enough.’ He patted his case conspiratorially and said, ‘Needs must.’

  It was obvious the man wanted me to ask him what was in the portmanteau, and – his rudeness to Blue aside – this blatancy made me determined to resist humouring him.

  So I returned my gaze to the window, to see that we were approaching two men on horseback coming the other way. The lead horse shied as we passed, its hooves skittering into a bright-surfaced puddle, which exploded in flowers and tendrils of red mud. The rider regained control. I shut my eye
s and steeled myself for what was to come.

  Forty-seven

  We split up on our arrival. By making separate enquiries we would cover more ground before reconvening to share what, if anything, we’d managed to find out.

  Accosting strangers is the sort of work I shy away from; if I’ve a streak of salesman in me, it’s buried deep. I fortified myself with coffee, which I took standing by the coffee shop window. The Bath crowds ambled past with the same lack of intent that the walkers up Ladies’ Mile back home in Bristol display. But this was the city centre. Nobody here, it seemed, had anything pressing to do. The men walked with their hands clasped behind their backs; the ladies held the fingers of one hand in the other before them at waist height. After ten minutes of this I was battling the urge to rush outside and yell ‘swing your arms!’ at all and sundry.

  Then I spied the same little flask-wielding man with whom we’d shared carriage-space, scuttling along the walkway, his grip upon his portmanteau unchanged and ridiculous, and it struck me that if a man such as he could hawk his wares in this city of loafers, I, too, should feel no compunction about troubling them for little more than the time of day.

  Bath has more than its share of trinket-shops. I ducked into one, reasoning that gossip would be quickest to circulate amongst the purveyors of pointlessness. The shop was busy: I had to wait ten minutes to interrupt the proprietor, who was doing a thundering trade in lace whatnots, Toby jugs, bits of coloured glass, shells, etcetera. Little Anne would have loved the place, but the shopkeeper was of no use to me. Neither did I have any luck in the Fiddler’s Arms next door, and nor had the florist heard of a new doctor’s arrival in town. The woman there was chopping rose stems on a big wooden block stained green with plant juice. She slapped it in excitement at my news, reasoning, I don’t doubt, that more doctors would mean more patients, who warrant visiting, by visitors bearing flowers.