by KJ Charles
He made himself say, “My father.”
“Thought I recognised you,” Mark said. “I grew up on Luxor Street. You were at Morris’s Preservation on the Loughborough Road for a while, maybe ten, twelve years back?”
“I was. I moved.”
“Don’t blame you, mate. I wouldn’t have stuck around either. My mother moved us here from Krakow to get out of trouble; I can understand you crossing the river.”
“I’ve told Clem,” Rowley said abruptly. “Some of it.”
“Good for you.” Mark took a mouthful of beer. “Well then. Nice to have you.”
“That’s it?” Rowley demanded.
Mark’s pale eyes were steady on his face. “For now. I never heard you were anything like your old man, and Clem certainly likes you, but then, he sees the good in people.” He said that as though it were a regrettable character flaw. “Like I say, we look out for each other. Don’t give me a reason to look out for Clem and we’ll get along.”
Rowley could feel the tremor in his nerves. Mark was bigger than him, but it wasn’t size that mattered so much as the willingness to act. Rowley was very familiar with that, and he could recognise it in the man opposite him.
“Do you think he’d appreciate you putting your tuppenceworth in?” he asked, as levelly as possible.
“Nope,” Mark said. “Wouldn’t be surprised, though. I’m an interfering so-and-so, it goes with the job. Look, mate, if Clem’s happy I’m not going to give you a hard time on your father’s account. There’s outstanding warrants for my old lady back there, if we’re talking about parents.” He jerked his thumb in what Rowley hoped was the direction of Poland rather than South London. “I like everyone to know where we stand, that’s all.”
“Fair enough,” Rowley said cautiously.
“All square, then. God help us, that’s Gregory starting at the piano. I hope you like operetta.”
—
The walk back was chilly but cheerful. Clem was bubbling over with good humour, and Rowley felt the same. It was good to be together, good to be alive, good to be walking arm in arm in the smoky dark, he gently tugging Clem to keep a straight line on the pavement. It was cold and damp, with wet fog wisping over their faces, but they were walking home to the promise of warmth, tea, and each other.
Home. Rowley hadn’t had a home since his mother had died when he was six; the room in which he’d grown up with his father had been a place of nothing but hunger, hostility, and fear. He’d left at twelve to live with Mr. Morris, but that had been master and apprentice for all Mr. Morris’s kindness, and after the old man’s death he’d only ever lived in lodgings. He’d always wanted to live alone, to have a room above a shop, but hadn’t yet been able to afford premises big enough. So he’d taken the place next door because it was convenient, and Clem had made it home.
Not his own room, of course. That was bare except for a few books and his dragon. But Clem’s cluttered, chaotic study, with the two armchairs in front of the fire, and Cat asleep: that had become more Rowley’s home in eight short months than anything in his life before.
He squeezed Clem’s arm. Clem looked down with a grin. “All right?”
“Very much so. How did you happen on that place?”
“Oh, pure luck. When I came to London I didn’t know anyone except my cousin Tim, so I went to an Asiatic association, a sort of club for Indian men, a few times. There wasn’t anyone who looked like me growing up, you see, nobody at school or home, and I thought it might be…I don’t know, that I might learn something. Find a place I belonged.” He made a face. “It wasn’t much fun. They were all very, very clever, political, ambitious people, and of course they’d all come from the other side of the world, and in the end I’m a lodging-house keeper from a village in Berkshire. So it turned out I didn’t really belong there either.”
Rowley could only guess at the depths of isolation under that statement, and it made his chest feel oddly hollow. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no, it was the wrong place for me, that’s all. I go to the Royal Sovereign now, have you heard of it? It’s a terribly dilapidated old public in Shadwell where lots of Indian people go. Lascars and travellers, but also people who live here and are just getting by, like me. There’s a sitar player and a tambour player. You could come one evening, if you wanted to hear them. And I don’t play but everyone says you get a good game of skittles out the back, only the betting can be fierce. Anyway, I was telling you about Ganendra.”
“You were?”
“I was getting around to it,” Clem said, with a rebuking nudge. “He was the only friend I made at the Association, a law student. Well, he was a lawyer already, but did you know that Indians can’t be barristers in Calcutta or Bombay unless they trained here? He came to get his English qualification and stayed to practice for a few years. Nathaniel was studying law then too, and he already knew the Jack through Greg because they went to school together, so he met Ganendra, and introduced him, and then Ganendra took me along, and that’s how I met that crowd. Ganendra brought us Polish Mark as well, after he represented Mark’s mother in court the first time.”
“The first time?”
“Oh, yes, he was her usual barrister for a few years. He always got her off, except once when she did three months for affray, but Mark was expecting her to get two years so it’s nearly the same thing. She was furious when he went back to India and she had to start staying out of trouble.”
“I thought Mark was in the police?” Rowley said faintly.
“Oh, no, his mother would hate that. She’s an anarchist. No, he’s a private enquiry agent, which is like a police detective only without the laws. People hire him to solve problems and find things.”
That sounded entirely plausible, from their conversation. “Why do you call him Polish Mark?”
“Well, we’ve got four Marks, and he’s Polish. Nobody uses his last name because it’s one of those complicated ones with cz at the end, although actually it’s only pronounced ‘Brag-le-vitch,’ which I can’t see is particularly hard, but people will make a fuss. Or if you’re asking why we don’t call him ‘One-Armed Mark’ or ‘Stumpy Mark,’ it’s because he punches people who do. Not that he goes around hitting people all the time,” Clem added with a hasty glance round. “Only, if anyone picks a fight, or tries to make fun, they usually wish they hadn’t.”
Rowley had had that impression strongly. “Fair enough.”
“I think so,” Clem said as they turned the corner into Wilderness Row. “People do make the same old jokes, like with you being a preserver, and I don’t…think…Rowley? What’s happening in the shop?”
Rowley was staring as well. The door of ROWLEY GREEN—PRESERVER was shut, but there was something inside, movement and light, or movement of light—
“Fire,” he said, and started running.
The door was locked and he hadn’t brought his keys on a night out. He shouldn’t have needed them; surely to Christ he’d extinguished the stove as carefully as he always did. He threw himself desperately against the door, bounced off.
Clem pulled him to one side, measured the distance with his foot, and kicked with startling force and accuracy, splintering wood round the newly repaired lock. He kicked again and hit the doorframe, cursed, lashed out a third time, and sent the door flying inward. Smoke billowed out.
“Get the fire brigade! Whitecross Street!” Rowley yelled. “And raise the alarm! Fire! Fire!”
Clem sprinted, shouting as he went. Rowley didn’t wait. A shopful of mounts might as well be a shopful of hay in terms of flammability. If he delayed, his worldly goods would go up in smoke and probably take the entire building with them. Maybe the lodging house next door, where Rowley kept everything of his that wasn’t here, and Clem had his whole living.
The thought was instantaneous and all too familiar, as one he had every time he used the stove. It was why he kept buckets of water waiting in the corners of every room. He ran straight for the nearest of those in the dim, flickeri
ng light of the fire that was, somehow, in the corner of the room nowhere near the stove, so focused on extinguishing the flames before they spread that he didn’t even see the man who was running out from behind the counter until they were perhaps a foot from each other.
Rowley stared up, the heat and smoke in the air already making his eyes water. The man—burly, round-headed—stared back. He had a long, burning taper in his hand.
“Fucker,” Rowley said.
The man growled and lunged. Rowley leapt sideways, ducking. He’d dodged plenty of blows in his time and the old instincts were still there. The door to the workroom was open and there were flames flickering in there too. Rowley turned toward it, expecting that the man, the arsonist, would take the chance to run from the building, and felt a shocking impact as a meaty fist hit the top of his shoulder. He went down to one knee with the force of it, pushed himself back up, and hurtled forward like a runner from the starting block, darting behind the counter. The arsonist was right after him. Rowley swung through the door to the workroom and slammed it, but not fast enough because the man was on the other side, pushing in, and his weight was a lot more significant than Rowley’s. He leaned desperately against the door, felt his feet sliding inexorably back.
The workroom was fired too, with a pile of his dried reeds, brush, and stuffing blazing merrily in front of the benches and another at the back of the room, illuminating the room with flickering orange. It was already smoky, the reeds crackling, and it was hot, and the whole room was full of dry skins, volatile spirits, and bags of powder. The man didn’t even have to get in, Rowley thought in a distant sort of way. If he stayed in here, he was going to die.
The back door seemed miles away. He’d have to get round the workbenches, take the key off its hook and unlock it, and it led only to a tiny enclosed yard. The arsonist could probably get over the walls easily; Rowley didn’t have any faith he could scale them before he was caught.
The door thumped, shoving him several inches further in. The arsonist’s beefy arm came through, and his reaching hand grabbed Rowley’s sleeve.
Rowley leapt away, in absolute terrified instinct, and realised too late what he’d done as the door swung fully open. He threw himself toward the back of the room. On the workbench, his array of tools glittered like a demon’s implements of torture in the hellish light of the blaze.
He lunged for the bench, snatched them up, and turned as the arsonist approached, both hands out, a bundle of gleaming sharpness in his left hand, and a long scraping blade in the right. The arsonist reared back, eyes widening.
“I am on my own ground!” Rowley shouted. He could imagine what he looked like, with firelight dancing off his spectacles and scalpels shining in his hand. “ ’I am surrounded by the trophies of my art, and my tools is very handy.’ ” He jabbed with the scraping blade as the arsonist made a movement, and amazingly, gloriously, the man recoiled. “ ’I like my art, and I know how to exercise my art,’ and I will stuff you and mount you and put you in a case, you fucking bastard!”
The arsonist hesitated, then his face hardened. He pulled a cosh from his pocket—
He’s trying to kill me. Oh Jesus, he’s really trying to kill me. I’m going to die and I don’t even know why.
—and swung it. It caught Rowley’s long blade and knocked it sideways, and the sheer force sent it spinning out of Rowley’s hand. He slashed desperately with the bundle of blades in his left hand, sending the man jumping back, then groped for another weapon on the bench and found something unwieldy but familiar to his fingers. The arsonist charged in and Rowley swiped upward, giving it everything he had with the lower mandible of Canis lupus, the grey wolf.
He’d separated the jawbone but hadn’t yet gone through the painstaking processes that would remove all the connective tissues lurking within the crevices. The wolf’s teeth were still firmly anchored, and when he smashed it into the arsonist’s face, he felt them bite. Skin ripped; the man screamed, a terrible sound. Rowley swung his arm back and hit him again, going for the eyes. The arsonist lurched away, clutching his face. Rowley flung the bundle of scalpels at him, then seized the first big, heavy thing to hand—a stoppered glass bottle—and threw that too. It hit him in the bloodied face, hard, liquid spraying everywhere, and the smell of turpentine hit Rowley’s nose at about the same time as the unwisdom of his course hit his brain.
The arsonist was screaming in earnest now, and no wonder, with turpentine in his eyes. He reeled away, tripped over a bench, and fell to the pile of burning materials, and there was a quiet whoomph as the volatile spirits on his clothes ignited. He bellowed in fear or pain. Rowley sprinted to the back of the room, grabbing the spare key from the hook and unlocking the back door ready, then seized the nearest bucket and poured it with shaky care over the blazing brush at the back. It got much of the fire down and he stamped on the embers, careless of heat. It was probably useless because the arsonist was rolling and yelling and Rowley could picture him running through the shop like a flaming brand, like that damned badger with its winged helmet. He sprinted to another bucket at the front of the workshop, and saw the man had pulled off his smouldering coat and was flinging it away.
He’s going to kill me now, Rowley thought with the detachment of terror as the man rose, his face a mask of blood and rage, and only then registered the noise from outside. Horses. Shouts. The rush and hiss of water, billowing steam, and Clem’s voice cutting through it all. “Rowley? Rowley!”
“Help!” Rowley screamed. “Murder!”
The arsonist looked out toward the shop, the fire brigade. He roared incoherent fury and frustration, lunged toward Rowley, and went down sideways as Clem, hurtling in, tackled him around the knees. There was a surge of movement Rowley couldn’t even follow as the arsonist heaved Clem off with a meaty blow, sending him sideways. Rowley shouted his name and lunged for some sort of weapon as the thug rose, but the man simply turned and fled, pounding to the back of the workroom, and Rowley dropped to his knees by Clem, not knowing if the tears on his face were from fear, gratitude, or simply smoke.
—
“We think he’s called Jim Spim,” Inspector Ellis said.
Rowley didn’t care. He wasn’t sure he cared about anything now. He huddled, cold and exhausted, in the parlour, with Clem by him, not nearly close enough, and his world in ruins.
The shop hadn’t burned to the ground, thanks to the proximity of the fire station and the brigade’s rapid response. The building’s fabric was basically undamaged. But it was smoke-blackened and stinking, sodden too. And most of the mounts were ruined, whether by fire or by water. The mounts. So much work, so much care and dedication and artistry. The lynx, his beautiful lynx that he’d twice refused to sell because it pleased him so, reduced to a bedraggled, worthless mass of fur and flax. Hundreds of birds, thousands of hours of work, his perfect, satisfying place of solitary safety, all gone.
The inspector coughed. “Mr. Green?” He waited till Rowley looked up. “The arsonist, sir. From the cosh and the description you gave, we believe he’s named, or at least known as, Jim Spim. A familiar face on Golden Lane, albeit one you seem to have played hob with last night. With that damage as evidence it shouldn’t be a problem to identify him once we find him, but he’s gone to ground now, and it’s a fair task to track down a man in that rookery. Do you know him at all?”
“He was the man who broke into my shop last week,” Rowley said drearily. “I’m sure of it.”
“Broke in last week, left his cosh behind, tried to burn it down this week. Seems he doesn’t like you very much. Any idea why not?”
“None. I never met the man in my life.” Rowley gripped his mug. He’d drunk enough tea to float a boat, but people kept making it for him, and putting in sugar, which he hated. His hands were still shaking. That was absurd. It had been hours. “I don’t know why anyone would do this to me. I never did anything to anyone. I don’t have enemies.”
“Well, that’s not true, is it, sir?
”
“Yes it is!” Rowley shouted. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s a damned sight more likely to have something to do with the dead man on the doorstep than me, wouldn’t you say? I just stuff birds! Or did. Oh God.”
“Do you have fire insurance, sir?”
Rowley nodded, sitting back. “I’d be a fool not to. It’s a risk of the profession. Lots of flammable things.”
“And sharp things, and dangerous things.” The inspector consulted his notebook, then flipped it shut. “Jim Spim burgled your shop and set fire to it, and he or someone tortured a man and dumped him on the doorstep of this house. And you still have no idea why?” His voice reeked of incredulity.
“None,” Rowley said. “If I knew, I’d tell you. I’ve lost my shop; someone tried to kill me; I thought I was going to burn to death if he didn’t beat me to death first. I’m not hiding things for fun.”
“Mmm. The thing is, Mr. Green, Mr. Talleyfer, most people don’t get dead bodies and arson happening around them by accident. You can see why I wonder what’s going on here.”
“Oh, so do I,” Clem said wholeheartedly. “It’s absolutely baffling.”
The inspector gave him the kind of look people often gave Clem. Rowley glared at him. “Mr. Talleyfer and I have no more idea of what’s going on than the man in the moon. There’s no point asking the same question a dozen ways. I don’t know. I thought the detective police were meant to find these things out.”
“We have to ask questions to do that, sir.”
Rowley hunched his shoulders. Clem shot him a worried glance. “Inspector, is there anything else? Mr. Green’s been answering your questions for hours now, and he’s been up all night and nearly killed, so can he have a rest, please?”
“Just a few more things.”
The few more things took at least another hour, until the clocks were chiming three in the afternoon, but finally the inspector left. Clem took Rowley’s arm and pulled him up. “You should have a lie-down.”
“I’m not tired.” He was, he was exhausted, but he didn’t think he’d sleep, and if he did, he’d be terrified as to what he’d dream. He could still smell nothing but smoke.