The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  Outside, the wind was stripping leaves from the birch tree. I stared at them, streaks of dirty-silver. No matter how many tore past, the tree seemed undiminished. It had an endless supply. In the aftermath of the drink, I felt my exhaustion afresh.

  ‘And if this ship’, my father went on, ‘was indeed carrying slaves, then you have to admit that he or his kind are among those most likely to bear a grudge. That’s their common character, a sense of obstinate aggrievedness.’

  ‘As I say, I need to return to Carthy’s house.’

  He took a step towards me and grasped my wrist. I pulled away, but there was iron in his grip.

  ‘Think on my offer, Inigo. Your tenacity has stood you in good stead until now, but push this matter any further and I will not be able to help you. By joining the firm you will be saving face, not quitting.’

  ‘I thank you, but no. For now, I cannot.’

  His face was close enough for me to see the moisture glittering within the pores of his skin. I heard the grinding of his teeth before he said, ‘There’s the matter of your wedding to consider. It presents an opportunity to unite the Bright and Alexander cause. But if you refuse me now …’

  Unmistakably, this if was the precursor to a threat. But he pulled up short of explaining himself, and released my forearm, and patted my shoulder, and forced a smile.

  ‘The offer still stands,’ he repeated. ‘Think about it.’

  Fifty-eight

  The man comes for Oni again.

  She dreams of the three-legged lion which terrorised the village when she was a girl. It first broke through at night and stole a goat. Nobody saw or heard it but it left tracks, three massive paw prints, the gap between them longer than a man’s stride. A hunting party followed the trail, which disappeared in rocky ground. For a whole season the lion did not return. The village lost interest. But then it did come back and this time it stole a child. It walked into a hut and dragged a seven-year-old boy from where he lay. Hunters followed its trail again, back to the rock ledges. They found what was left of the boy’s body – a foot, the head – but the lion had vanished.

  The elders raised a thorn cordon around the village and set a watch which saw nothing from full moon to full moon.

  Then the lion came back and killed one of the watchmen at his post – the ground beneath his mat was sticky with blood – and again dragged the body away without being caught. The elders demanded a doubling of the guard, but the volunteers were scared and inattentive.

  As fear overran the village, the lion grew bolder. It killed another child the following week, and two days after that took an old man from his sickbed in daylight still capable of casting a shadow. A day later it returned to the village and killed a young woman carrying water, but this time the killing was different because the lion did not carry its victim away. Her torn body was discovered fifty paces from the well.

  In her dream Oni knows the lion is coming for her next. She is unafraid. The lion makes sense. It was wounded once and reduced to killing people and its addiction to the taste of human flesh has grown. Oni dreams it will be caught, as it was eventually caught in reality, and strung up from a pole by its three huge paws, the withered hind leg hanging wing-like at its side. The difference is that in the dream this won’t happen until the lion has taken her from her bed into the night.

  Fifty-nine

  The house no longer bore the false-hope smell of laundry and scones. I knew as I stood in the hallway removing my coat that Carthy still hadn’t returned. Mercifully, Aunt Beatrice wasn’t there either. Adam’s wife and young Anne were in the parlour together, but separately engaged: Anne was drawing and her mother was making alterations to a dress. Or at least she was pretending to do so. She had removed the garment’s arms, which lay outstretched at her feet. The bodice was crumpled in her lap. She made to get up as I entered, but slumped back down on registering my expression and said nothing. Anne, meanwhile, clapped her hands and began babbling at once. Something to do with the natural habitat of canaries and the drawing she was making to replicate it. I sat down on the floor next to her and we discussed how accurately to depict a coconut tree. I suggested it might have the broad leaves of a walnut, and she set about translating that into scribbles.

  There was a chill in the room. I banked up the fire. With my back to Mrs Carthy it was easier to suggest that I was still making investigations and expected to turn up answers yet.

  But I could not remain there long. I felt guilty. I had not asked to become involved in this case. That was Carthy’s doing. And yet the black heart of the thing seemed to beat within me now. I had poisoned this house and endangered its occupants; my presence now was just making things worse. I told Anne she should incorporate the coconut tree landscape into a map of her canary’s imagined island, and crossed the street to Thunderbolts. Coffee would help me take stock.

  With one hand fighting its way through the tangle of my hair, and the other brushing down the front of my coat, I crossed the threshold intent upon spotting the waitress before she saw me.

  Yet it wasn’t Mary who caught my eye upon entering Thunderbolts, but the poetess, Edie Dyer. She was sitting at a table reading a news-sheet, alone. She looked up as I entered and her face split into a genuine smile, the first such that I had seen in days. She stood and cocked the paper at me, indicating that I should join her, and at that precise moment, as I was lurching woodenly towards her, Mary intercepted me.

  She stood close enough for me to catch her honey and sweat smell above the coffee. I blinked and saw grey pillowslips. She, too, was smiling, but wryly.

  ‘I keep telling you. It’s no use pawing at hair like yours. Curls that thick have too much spring.’ Her gaze worked its way down my chest and for a moment I suspected she might reach out and touch me in plain view of everyone.

  ‘A bowl of coffee, please, Mary, as usual,’ I said, and made to pass her.

  She stepped sideways with me and our thighs collided and she smiled as she let me go.

  I therefore arrived at Edie’s table flushed hot under the collar and, at first, unable to concentrate upon what she was saying. It was all I could do to respond, when she stopped speaking, with an apology for not having sent thanks for the packet of quills she sent me.

  She looked at me curiously.

  ‘Of course. Have you tried them?’

  Something in me wanted to lie: it felt bad saying I hadn’t.

  ‘I’m looking forward to doing so. But I’ve been distracted.’

  ‘What by?’

  Her directness took me aback. There was something in the combination of her sharp openness which made it hard for me to dissemble. ‘A case I’m working on has taken an unexpected turn.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  I studied her face. The contradiction between the tautness of its harsh angles and that wide mouth. ‘Murder,’ I said.

  She swallowed, blinked, and said, ‘Goodness.’

  ‘It wasn’t to begin with. At the outset I was checking import duties, which was boring yet manageable. I wish that is how it had remained. But it has not.’ I looked at my fingertips and repeated simply, ‘It is about dead people now.’

  ‘Not this poor soul, I trust?’ she said, smoothing the news-sheet down on the tabletop.

  I bent to read the item she was pointing at, but my view was blotted out by a bowl of coffee which slopped upon the paper as Mary plonked it down.

  ‘Oh dear,’ the waitress said. ‘I am sorry.’

  I picked up the bowl and set it down next to the paper. ‘That’s all right, Mary.’

  She didn’t leave. Instead she leaned across me to dab at the spillage. I felt like a traitor, pressing back into my seat to avoid contact with her free arm. It brushed against me nevertheless. She stood up, stared levelly at Edie, and said, ‘How is Miss Lilly, Inigo?’

  ‘She’s well, thank you.’

  ‘The wedding preparations are not taxing her too much?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That
’s good to hear. Send her my best wishes.’ She gave me the same wry look and brushed her hip against me again as she turned away. When I glanced back up at Edie her smile had broadened – there’s no other way to put it – to an amused grin. She knew.

  I looked back down at the now blotchy news-sheet. There, at the top of the page, stood the story Edie had been referring to. It told of a recently discovered dead body. My first thought was Addison. Perhaps Justice Wheeler had come to his senses and determined that the Captain had not committed suicide. But the first line of the report made it clear that the body in question had been discovered in undergrowth on Brandon Hill, and dread immediately wormed oily in the pit of my stomach.

  Not Carthy, please, no.

  I forced myself to read on, and had to restrain myself from slapping the tabletop in relief on reaching the word woman. On I read. The unfortunate’s corpse had been discovered just the day before, in a clump of blackberry bushes, by an elderly lady out walking her dog. It was wrapped in a sack which the dog had torn free, and when the owner saw what was beneath it she had suffered a fainting fit. A passing stranger had helped her up. Rats, apparently, were thought responsible for at least some of the disfigurement to the dead woman’s face. Justice Wheeler was reported as having ‘no exact idea’ of how long the corpse had lain there undetected. Nobody had reported a missing person, after all. Perhaps, the article speculated, this death had to do with the terrible suicide of the other black woman found recently drowned in the Avon Gorge.

  Other black woman?

  The reporter had seen fit to omit this detail until the second column! He went on to report the Justice’s speculation that the woman may have been a vagabond. In all probability she had sought shelter within the bushes, her sack an inadequate covering, and died of cold. But no, the broad-minded detective conceded, it wasn’t possible to rule out foul play in this instance. He would be keeping an open mind.

  I took a mouthful of coffee, swilled it burning over my tongue, gulped the heat down whole.

  ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ said Edie simply.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘But nothing to do with your case I’m sure.’

  I caught the poetess’s penetrating gaze and held it a fraction too long. There was something shrewd in those close-set eyes which forced me to see the thing clearly myself. Though she had no notion of it, this death, this murder, had to be connected. They all did.

  What was it Blue had said before he left our cell? That there was ‘a grudge in the hold coming home, too’. The Belsize had carried a cargo of blacks across the Atlantic and sold them into slavery in the Indies. I had taken Blue to mean that somebody – himself perhaps – had objected to the clandestine slaving, and brought their grudge home to avenge. But just because the ship had been refitted – as Addison had been so keen to show me – for her homeward leg, during which she’d carried an innocuous cargo of sugar and rum, did not mean that she had brought nothing else home with her as well. Two unknown black women had been found dead in the city since she docked. A third charred corpse had been discovered as well. Were the poor women on board? Had the Belsize conveyed slaves – however few – to these shores, too?

  ‘The honest answer,’ I said, and I noticed that my fingertips were trembling, so pressed them into the oiled tabletop to keep them still, ‘is that I do not know. I have lost true north. The case has so shocked me that I am disorientated. Those closest to me are also, it seems, drawn in. I no longer know where the thing begins and ends; I never did, in truth, but I certainly don’t any more. And … I am unsure of what to do.’

  The poetess leaned forward and covered the rigid backs of my hands with her own fingers. They were cool and bony and she pressed down firmly with them, just as I was pressing down on the table. Gradually, she released the pressure.

  She said, ‘I don’t trust people who pretend they always know what to do.’

  I glanced back down at the news-sheet.

  ‘The shocking thing about this is that you can tell nobody minds much about it,’ she said. ‘They’re not even interested in finding out why she died.’

  ‘She was black.’

  ‘So?’

  I looked up at her. The question seemed genuine, which I found suddenly annoying.

  ‘The city has spent two hundred years trading blacks. Just because that’s supposed to have stopped hasn’t elevated the Negro race much above livestock in many people’s eyes. They aren’t predisposed to mourn them any more than they’re set up to grieve for the cow which gave them their roast beef.’

  She smiled at me again, and when she did so the teeth at the sides of her mouth revealed themselves whitely. ‘But some of us have never considered there was much of a difference between them and us,’ she said. ‘Have we?’

  I drained my coffee, felt grit from the crushed beans swill over the back of my tongue, and shrugged.

  ‘So why is it that you care about the Negroes, Inigo?’

  ‘I don’t, particularly.’

  ‘Yes, you do. I would go as far as to say you have an affinity for them, and that it was that aspect of this story,’ she tapped the paper again, ‘which so moved you.’

  ‘You’d be mistaken. If my family has had any undue affinity for the race, it’s because selling them has lined our pockets.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking after your family.’

  ‘No. But I spent the first years of my life in the Indies. Though I left when I was a child, they will have left their mark.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that. The question is what sort of mark they’ll have left. You’re uncomfortable on the subject. And this particular news story upsets you. You say you are lost within your case. It has to do with murder. There have been no other suspicious deaths reported, so I’m guessing that it’s the other black woman you’re talking about. This Justice fellow may be denying there’s anything afoot, claiming it’s all suicides and frozen vagabonds, but you’ve already concluded otherwise. And the fact that they’re blacks makes the matter worse for you, and it’s that which –’

  ‘Please!’ I said, with sufficient force to make heads turn round. I waited for the hubbub to reassert itself before continuing. ‘I’m sorry. The truth in what you’re saying doesn’t change anything. I still don’t know what to do. There are other factors which further complicate the thing, trust me. Matters even you are unable to guess at, despite your … preternatural … gift for divining the source of my troubles.’

  ‘There’s nothing preternatural about it. I’m observing and drawing conclusions. Given the impasse you’ve reached in your case you might want to fall back upon the same technique. With patience you can trace even the most tangled vine back to its roots.’

  Sixty

  The wind had risen again. I crossed Queen Square with the plane trees flashing the silvery undersides of their leaves above me, and those the gale had already torn free spinning about my feet. A vaulted cathedral sky ran with towering and prophetic clouds, their edges beginning to pulse sunset purple. Down at the harbour, still jumpy with the combined effect of strong coffee and Edie Dyer, I took stock. The wind was dragging its teeth across the broken surface of the water, jagged and brown. Even this breeze wasn’t enough to dispel the stench of bedsores turned green.

  Gulls, more gulls, lashed past slantwise. Black-tipped, grey wingbacks, and yet, seen from beneath, streaks of brilliant white.

  I could see no alternative, so cut back through town to Stratton Street and hammered on Justice Wheeler’s door. There was a glint in his eye when he saw it was me. It suggested that he’d been expecting my visit, looking forward to it even. He ushered me into an office with bare floorboards and whitewashed walls, in which a vast and empty desk confronted four spindly chairs. They looked guilty, rickety with admonishment.

  Wheeler made a great show of arranging himself behind that desk and inviting me to sit down as he planted his elbows on the expanse before him. No paper, no inkstand, no quills. He’d never done a stroke of paperwork in h
is life, I realised, and I did not know whether to fear that fact or draw strength from it.

  ‘I’ve come about Joseph Blue.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, cracking his meaty fingers.

  ‘You must release him. He has done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Hasn’t he?’ The corners of Wheeler’s lips betrayed his impulse to smile.

  ‘No, he has not. I’ve explained to you how he discovered Captain Addison’s body with me. My word must count for something. As you know I am an officer of the court, here in Bristol. You must heed that!’

  He nodded, and somehow his nod managed to convey the exact opposite of agreement. ‘Yes, yes, your word is important. That’s why I paid attention to it. You suggested there might be something untoward about Captain Addison’s death and I took note of your suspicion. There was something rum about it. As there was with the other one, that fellow Doctor Whatsisname, in Bath. And between us, Justice Pearce and myself, we have identified and contained the culprit.’

  ‘You’re not listening. Blue didn’t do it. He’s as innocent of these crimes as you and me.’

  The moment I said this I regretted the opportunity it gave Wheeler to raise an eyebrow and inspect his knuckles. He said nothing for a long while. I’d made his point for him: press the issue and he’d drag me into the fray, too. I looked around the room. There was no filing cabinet. A bookcase in the corner had slumped sideways into obtuse angles, its shelves grey with dust.

  ‘Please,’ I said levelly. ‘There was a note. Purportedly from Addison, declaring his suicidal intent. I took it from his coat pocket at the scene.’

  ‘You meddled with the evidence? You’re admitting it?’

  ‘Yes. I thought the note more necessary for our purposes than yours. It purports to be from Addison, his final words.’

  ‘You’re saying it was suicide now?’

  ‘No, no, no. It’s complicated. Here.’ I took the two pieces of paper from my pocket – the one I’d found on Addison and the one announcing Carthy’s abduction – and spread them on the empty desk. ‘My master, Adam Carthy, has been taken for a hostage by the very people who killed Addison. You see? The same hand. Both events have to do with the same case. Whoever attempted to frame Addison for his own murder also stole Mr Carthy away. Blue was with me at Addison’s precisely when my master went missing. He’s not responsible for either wrong. He cannot be.’