The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  But then, instead of coming out with it, he looked and saw the open compartment door. He went toward it like a falling oak. As he disappeared from sight, the door was slid from within and the blinds pulled with a speed that seemed impossible.

  Louise moved to the closed door, head bent and listening, hand raised to knock.

  “Mister Caspar?” she said. A sound came from the other side of the door; more than coughing, not quite vomiting. The Silent Man and his wife exchanged a glance and started to back away.

  Louise turned to Sayers as he reached her.

  “I don’t know what to do for him,” she said helplessly.

  Sayers said, “Come away, Louise. Please.”

  From inside the compartment, Caspar’s audible exertions grew more major.

  “But what if he needs a doctor?” Louise said.

  “I do think that’s unlikely.”

  Something caught her eye as she glanced down. Sayers looked and saw something pooling under the door. It was a widening fan of red. It was thick and moving slowly.

  Sayers hardly knew what to say.

  But he did not need to say a thing for Louise’s eyes turned upward in her head and she fell against him in a dead faint. She turned as she fell, and her feet kicked up into the air; before he knew it, he was holding her in both arms as if to carry her to safety.

  He was too shocked to move. Her body was utterly relaxed and pressed against his, almost the full length of it; her weight in his arms, her head against his shoulder, the warm scent of her hair up close to his face. It was like the first time he had danced with a woman, only more so; the same overwhelming sense of forbidden physical contact, the same heady feeling of time slowing down. And the fact that his first dance had been with one of his aunts left him totally unprepared for this.

  “Bring her in here!” Whitlock’s voice rang down the corridor. Sayers looked over his shoulder and saw the boss in the doorway to his own compartment, beckoning. He turned around with extra care, swaying with the motion of the train. One of Louise’s shoes dropped, and he had to leave it where it fell. Moving sideways, holding tight to the weight and warmth of her, he shuffled along.

  “Mrs. Wrigglesworth!” Whitlock called again, and as Sayers carried Louise into the compartment the sewing woman appeared behind him.

  “Fetch smelling salts,” Whitlock said to her, and she quickly vanished again.

  Gussie was removed to his basket and Miss Porter was lowered onto the seat. The sewing woman patted Louise’s hand while Whitlock waved the bottle of ammonia salts under her nose. Sayers stood back, feeling awkward and embarrassed but not as unhappy as he might. The sense of Louise so entirely in his arms would take a long time to fade.

  “Easy, child,” Whitlock said as the ammonia brought her to her senses with a start. “All is well.”

  Louise blinked dazedly. Whitlock moved back as she pushed herself to sit upright. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Young Mister Caspar has rather disgraced himself.”

  “Is he not dying?”

  “By morning, I’ve no doubt he’ll think it preferable to the head that he’ll have.”

  “What about the blood?”

  “Blood?”

  “Under the door.”

  “Ah. Sayers?” Whitlock looked up at his acting manager.

  “Cheap red wine and ruby port,” Sayers suggested tersely. He was in no mood to offer excuses for Caspar. Let Louise see the man as he really was.

  Whitlock said, “Let us pursue this indelicate line no further. I have to ask for your understanding.” He looked around to include Tom Sayers and the sewing woman. “All of you,” he said. “This is not something of which I often speak. I knew Caspar’s father. I’ll go into no details, but they had been separated for some time. Caspar was a wild child and all but a lost soul then. His father had taken on the work of reclaiming him for God, but died with it barely begun. I swore to him that I would continue the work until its end. I pledged my own soul to the task.” At this point, he looked pointedly at Sayers. “Do not judge Caspar too harshly,” he said. “One day you will see the good in him, as I do. There has been much to overcome. There is yet some distance to go.”

  “That is a very noble story, Mister Whitlock,” Louise said, and Sayers felt his heart sink a little.

  Whitlock acknowledged her compliment with a slight and graceful nod. Sayers, tight-faced, was disinclined to believe a single word of it. He knew Whitlock’s technique too well, and was least persuaded when the old tragedian seemed at his most sincere. But he said nothing.

  A few minutes later, Louise was well enough to return to her own berth. Sayers would have stayed to present his argument to Whitlock, but a warning look told him that Whitlock would not have it. At least not here, and not now.

  Sayers stepped out of Whitlock’s compartment and closed the door behind him. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Louise would believe only the best of someone. Had Caspar been a worthier man, Sayers’ gloom would have been more profound; as it was, he had to have faith that she would see the wastrel’s true nature before too long, and reach the appropriate conclusion. By much the same token, Sayers hoped to have his own qualities understood.

  A woman would choose the steadfast man in the end. It was always so upon the stage.

  The corridor was empty now. The sewing woman had retrieved Louise’s fallen shoe. Everyone else in the company had retired.

  Except for one figure, down at the far end.

  The Mute Woman was there on her hands and knees outside Caspar’s compartment. She had several rags and a bucket of water, and she was cleaning up the stain from the floor.

  She looked up, and her eyes met Sayers’ own. Her expression did not change. She swayed a little with the movement of the train. Her face remained blank.

  And as Sayers turned to make his way to the berth that he was to share with the Low Comedian, the Mute Woman lowered her head and carried on with her task.

  SEVEN

  The next morning, about an hour before noon, a group of men passed through the gates of the cattle yard. Three were in police uniforms, and two were not. They were led by Superintendent Turner-Smith, a formidable figure with a broad white mustache, a war wound, and a walking stick. Despite his impediment, the others had to hasten to keep up with him.

  The group crossed the marshaling area to reach the slaughterhouse. There was a bellowing from the nearby pens, and a foul country smell in the air. The business of the cattle market had been under way since first light, but after the last arrivals the stones of the yard had been swept and most of the dung moved outside the walls. Turner-Smith spied an approaching figure and altered his course in order that the two of them should meet.

  The approaching figure was a man of less than thirty, brown-haired and black-suited. He’d a broad forehead and serious eyes, as brown as any Spanish girl’s.

  “Well then, Becker,” Turner-Smith said. “What do you have for me?”

  Sebastian Becker, the youngest inspector in the city police’s Detective Department, fell into step beside his superior and pointed the way.

  “It’s the head slaughterman we need to speak to, sir,” Becker said. “He’s waiting for us upstairs.”

  “They use stairs?” Turner-Smith said. “Who’d have imagined such talented animals?”

  “There’s a ramp, sir. Or I could have the evidence brought down. They slaughter the animals on one floor and butcher them on another.”

  “I think I can manage the ascent. We may be in a knacker’s yard, Sebastian, but I’m not quite ready to turn myself in for cats’ meat yet.”

  “No, sir.” Becker did not blush, but nor did he smile. He directed them into a whitewashed passage that would take the party away from the auction ring and into the heart of the abattoir.

  As they entered the passage, one of the other two detectives knocked him with a shoulder and almost bumped him into the wall.

  “Forgive me, brother,” the man said without lo
oking at him, and in a tone that did not suggest repentance.

  Sebastian knew that he was little liked by his fellow officers. In a force where promotion was mainly a matter of putting in the years and awaiting your turn, Sebastian’s appetite for the job seemed to be held against him.

  “No harm done,” said Sebastian.

  Nobody paid them any attention as they made their way through. The work here was hard, and conducted at speed because the killing floor set the pace for the rest of the workforce. The animals came unwillingly from the pens, usually having to be dragged with ropes and driven with sticks; one was in the loading enclosure as they went by, thrashing dangerously and surrounded by slaughtermen in caps and leather aprons. One swung a hammer and stunned the beast; another leaned in with a knife as it dropped, and slit its throat.

  In the time that it took the police party to reach the ramp, the others had shackled its back legs and its carcass was being lifted on a chain hoist. The blood came out of it as if poured from a bucket, steaming in the thick air and flooding into a collection trough.

  Elsewhere on the same floor, men stripped to the waist were pulling the lights out of carcasses while others flayed the hides off, adding them to a growing heap like bedsheets of bloodied rubber. Sebastian glanced back as they ascended the ramp, and noted that one of the uniformed men had taken out a handkerchief and was pressing it over his face. The sights were no doubt bearable to men as experienced as these, but the smell was unlike anything he’d encountered before. He looked at Turner-Smith, and saw that his superior seemed unperturbed.

  Sebastian could guess why he’d faced no competition when he’d picked up this case. Something questionable found in a charnel house—it was a dirty job with no promise of glory, and no doubt his fellow detectives had been amused to see him volunteer for it. If he hadn’t, they’d probably have steered it his way. It was their usual practice. If an indigent was found facedown in a sewer, Sebastian could expect to score a day in the muck followed by a week of barbed comments about some imagined stink that followed him around.

  He’d grown used to this. It was something that he could endure—if not easily, then at least without complaint. As far as Sebastian was concerned, the death of a pauper was still a tragedy, if only to the pauper. Everybody needed someone to establish their name, to record their passing, to draw out the story of their final moments on this earth. Including those who died unloved and without company.

  Especially those who died unloved.

  On this occasion, Sebastian was looking for something specific. Within a few minutes of his arrival, he’d known that there was more to this than a routine unpleasantness. After a first look at the evidence, he’d sent a message to the main police office, directly to the great Turner-Smith himself. Turner-Smith, more aware of Sebastian’s character and work record than even Sebastian knew, had laid aside all his other duties in order to respond. Eyebrows were raised. It was almost without precedent.

  The head slaughterman waited for them at the top of the ramp. He was bearded, with a scarf tied around his head like a pirate’s. There was a belt over his apron, and a long knife stuck through the belt. The blade of the knife had been worn down by repeated sharpening, almost to rapier width.

  Sebastian explained, “When the carcasses have been eviscerated and skinned, they’re brought up here to be butchered.”

  Lines of men and women worked at wooden butcher blocks. The men mostly hacked, the women mostly carved. The stench up here was worse than the stench below. The very air was misty and red; muslin had been hung to keep flies at bay, but to no great effect. The muslin had once been ivory-colored, but was now spattered and brown.

  “The offal is sorted into these vats,” Sebastian said, and nodded to the head slaughterman. They were now at the tripe tables, where the lowest of the workers had the job of scraping feces and worms from the animals’ intestines.

  The slaughterman ordered one of the tables cleared, whereupon he lifted up a bucket and dumped its contents onto the surface for the visitors to inspect. They landed and spread with a thick, slopping sound.

  There seemed little to distinguish this material from the guts, organs, and assorted entrails that lay all around them.

  “More offal?” said Turner-Smith.

  “Not quite,” said Sebastian. “The man knows his meat. And he tells me that these items are almost certainly human.”

  EIGHT

  Another day, another town, another playhouse. On their arrival, Whitlock and the actors had gone straight to their lodgings while Sayers had arranged the transfer of their stage properties to the Prince of Wales. They were to replace a show called Memories of Old Ireland, and when Sayers reached the theater, it was to find the sets only half struck and several members of the cast snoring loudly under the stage.

  Things went rather better at the lodging house, where Whitlock had taken the master bedroom. The room above the bay window went to Ricks and his wife, a former soprano who now played mother roles and Shakespearean dames. Everyone else set their bags down in the rooms that Mrs. Mack, the landlady, had chosen to assign to them. The stagehands, by their own choice, were billeted in rooms above a public house closer to the theater.

  There were several hours to be passed until the matinee, and the company chose to spend them in various ways. Some went out to look at the town. Some gathered in the sitting room for idle conversation, while others read alone. James Caspar, seemingly indifferent to his disgrace, went upstairs and threw himself on his bed and slept.

  A few minutes after noon, he awoke, changed into a large and threadbare Oriental dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen to beg some hot tea from Mrs. Mack. Mrs. Mack was not easily charmed, but Caspar seemed to manage. Gulliford, the Low Comedian, heard him on the stairs as he was taking the tea back to his room. He went out to accost Caspar, but he was too late; Caspar was back in his room with the door already closed.

  Gulliford went to the door and knocked. At Caspar’s response of “Come in, if you must,” he opened it and went inside.

  It was a bare room, with an iron bedstead and a table and not much of anything else. Caspar’s stage clothes had been hung up to dry on the front of the wardrobe, before which stood his cabin trunk. Caspar was rummaging inside this, and as Gulliford closed the door behind him came up with a glass preserving jar. He appeared to have wrapped it in a sock, for safety during transit.

  “She’s awake, then,” Gulliford said, as Caspar set his jar down on the table and pulled up a chair. He gave the Low Comedian a baleful glance and continued about his business, moving with painful slowness as if every part of him gave hurt. From the pocket of the dressing gown he took a fork, which he wiped up and down on his lapel.

  Gulliford said, “I’ve only got one question I want to ask you.” He placed his hands on the table and positioned himself in front of Caspar, where he couldn’t be ignored.

  “Why do you do it?” he said.

  The jar contained something pickled in murky liquid. Caspar sprang open the clips that sealed on the lid, and poked around inside with his fork.

  “Do what?” he said.

  “We’re a humble company,” Gulliford said. “I can understand if you despise your place in it. But you act as if you despise the very profession we’re in.”

  Caspar speared a morsel of something that resembled a small, dark sausage. “My head hurts,” he said. “Go away.”

  “You’re going to hear what I have to say.”

  “Great wisdom from the company’s Low Comedian?”

  “That’s a role, sonny boy, it’s not a rank. You don’t seem to know the difference. I’ve forgotten more about the stage than you will ever know. You never match your business and you pick up your cues the same way you catch your trains. Well, I’ve seen through you and I know what your game is.”

  Caspar stopped munching. He became very quiet and wary.

  Gulliford said, “We both know there’s no other occupation where you can rise from the gutter
to the very top of society. And from you, my friend, for all your French cologne and your high manners and your one good set of clothes, from you I get the definite whiff of the gutter. You’ve no love of the stage. You just like playacting.”

  Caspar sniffed. “If you’re unhappy with my work,” he said, “talk to Edmund.”

  “Edmund to you. Mister Whitlock to the rest of us. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed.”

  “There’s nothing to notice. No man has hold over me. Nor I on any man.”

  “No. But there’s something in it for both of you.” Gulliford reached over and took the new morsel from the end of Caspar’s fork, right under his nose.

  “I don’t know what the bargain is,” he said, “and I don’t care. What I want you to remember is this. The rest of us aren’t your steppingstones. This is more than our living. This is our life.”

  So saying, he flipped the morsel into his mouth.

  It was horrible. He was thrown. After trying to contend with it for a moment, he had to spit it into his hand and place it on the table.

  “Sack the chef,” he said and, still wincing at the taste, moved to the door.

  “Anything else?” Caspar said.

  “I’ve said my piece,” the Low Comedian said. “I’ll see you at the matinee.”

  Caspar was left contemplating the spat-out and abandoned morsel. He speared it with his fork.

  To the otherwise empty room he said, “I’m heading for places you can never imagine, my friend.”

  And then he popped the appalling pickle into his own mouth, crunching it up as if such was the most natural thing in the world.

  NINE

  Sebastian traveled back with Turner-Smith in the superintendent’s own carriage. Once the ride was under way, he was eager to explain his suspicions and to share some of the conclusions that he’d half-thought through.

  But Turner-Smith sat with his bad leg outstretched and his cane across his knees, looking out of the side window as the streets of the town unrolled past it, and said, “How is your mother these days, Sebastian? Is she well?”