“Did a man just go inside?” he said, and they stared at him as if he’d spoken in some foreign tongue.
Leaving the warehouses and the market behind, Sebastian found himself in an area of mean-looking dwellings of a much greater age. They stood three stories high, the holes in their windows stopped with all manner of devices—strips of blanket, brown paper, the crown of an old hat. The overall impression was that of buildings stuffed to bursting point, so that clothing and rags pushed out at every seam. The remaining glass was so filthy that it might as well have been painted wood.
By now, he had no idea where he was. But in the comparative quiet of the street, he could hear running footsteps somewhere ahead.
Sebastian put on a spurt. But it cost him, and he had to slow to a walk for a few strides before launching off again. He was no weakling, but he was unused to this kind of exertion for such a sustained period of time. The effort, combined with the excitement of the chase, was taking a steady toll. He was beginning to feel drained and light-headed. If he did manage to lay an arresting hand on Sayers, he could only hope to find him equally diminished.
The street ended in a bridge. Sayers was nowhere to be seen. Sebastian slowed to a walk. By now his lungs hurt and his saliva had become a corroding fire at the roots of his tongue. Even his teeth had begun to ache. His walk was unsteady.
Out on the bridge, Sebastian stopped to listen. All that he could hear was his own uneven breath, raging in his ears. He couldn’t calm it, so he held it for a moment.
Down below, a dog barking.
He went to the side of the bridge and looked over. Instead of the railway line he was expecting, he found himself looking down onto a canal basin. A hidden canal, cutting right through the middle of town. The canal and its towpath went off in a curve around the backs of the warehouses, brown water in a man-made canyon. Directly below him were the ends of a number of barges, poking out from under the bridge. Releasing his grip on the parapet, Sebastian turned to the other side. A wagon went by, its ironbound wheels vibrating the cobblestones under his feet.
As he crossed the bridge, he was beginning to think that he should perhaps go back and look more closely at the public house. He had not noted its name. Some of them were known for having stakes and ropes in their garrets where illegal fights could be staged. Older pugilists were remembered and revered while the young contenders pounded at each other. A man like Sayers might be a stranger in the town, yet still find himself welcome if he made himself known.
But then Sebastian reached the opposite parapet. The side of the bridge was a series of panels of riveted iron, a parody of classical architecture put together with the crude confidence of this industrial age. The top of the parapet was widened like a handrail and worn shiny by use.
He looked down into the larger part of the canal basin, where a veritable fleet of barges had been herded and tethered into one great floating raft. All ages, all sizes…Sebastian had no idea whether they were awaiting cargo (many were empty), or mustered here for repair (most appeared to need it), or simply as living space (no actual signs of life, but washing hung out on decks, and he could see several smoking chimney stacks).
The dog that he’d heard was tethered on a narrowboat’s deck. It was smallish and particolored, like a Punch-and-Judy man’s Toby dog. It danced at the end of its rope, still barking at the solitary passerby, who was now some yards on up the towpath.
It was Sayers.
The fighter was walking—limping, actually—with one arm held out from his side, as if it somehow pained him. He looked beaten and tired, but far from resigned; it was as if he’d only slowed because he believed he’d outrun the possibility of capture.
There was another road bridge about a hundred yards on, but the only way up to it was from a wharf by a lockkeeper’s house on the other side of the canal. As far as Sebastian could see, his quarry had trapped himself on the towpath. He looked around for the way down.
An iron gate led to a narrow stairway in dark gray brick. It was open to the sky but enclosed on all sides, and it brought him out into the shadows underneath the bridge.
It was strange. It was as if the town had vanished and he’d entered a different world. Something rumbled over the bridge, but all of the aboveground sounds of the city had faded away. There were birds on the water and wildflowers growing alongside the towpath. There ahead of him was Sayers, still plodding on, still oblivious. He’d seized his injured arm with his other, as if he might squeeze out the pain.
Sebastian’s confidence grew. He started forward, moving as quietly as he could. If he could surprise Sayers, so much the better. The man might have been a professional fighter, but he was damaged and had run a hard chase, and Sebastian was determined to come up with him at whatever risk to himself.
How had Sayers managed to escape the cells? Desperation could drive men to extreme deeds. Sebastian had once known a prisoner to leap from the dock and flee the courtroom after a drop of eight feet, flooring two officers of the court and a passing soldier who’d joined in the chase; then there had been the thief who’d climbed three stories up an air shaft so narrow that one would imagine a cat could barely slide through it, before crossing the courthouse roof to descend by a waterspout.
He would not be surprised to learn that Sayers had killed again to secure his freedom. He would have to take care. But he did not dare flinch.
Sayers continued to limp along, grimy and torn, clutching his arm, a sorry-looking spectacle. Sebastian closed the distance between them and continued to approach unnoticed, until the dog on the boat began to bark all over again.
Sayers looked back and saw him. Then the man’s energy seemed to return. As Sebastian started forward, Sayers took a second to check his options and then broke into a run.
Sebastian had been thinking that he had his man trapped on the towpath, but now he realized his mistake. There was, indeed, no access to the next road bridge from this side of the canal. But before the bridge there was a set of lock gates, and across the top of the gates there was a rampart just a few inches wide.
Sayers reached this walkway and started across. Sebastian was there only moments after, and he was on it before Sayers had made it to the other bank.
The gates were massive. On this side, only the top edges of them were visible above the water. But looking over, he could see that the level on the other side had fallen to reveal the deep trench of the lock. Below him was the sheer fifteen-foot drop of solid timber necessary to hold back the enormous weight of canal water behind them. Where the gates met in a V, jets were spouting through the slightest gaps under tremendous pressure.
The walkway was nothing more than a plank fixed just below the edge of each gate. There was a handrail, painted white. The crossing took some care, but it did not feel unsafe.
In the middle where the gates met, Sebastian missed his footing and fell.
He hit the canal without grace, and went under. The sudden plunge in temperature was the greatest shock. Sebastian had no fear of water, and he knew how to swim. But his topcoat tangled around him and grew heavy, and he took a long time to rise. The water around him was so dark that the play of light above the surface was all that he could see.
Just as he was beginning to wonder if it was the last thing he ever would see, his face broke the surface and he was able to draw breath. He was right up against the gate, and he reached out to pull himself up.
But something was wrong here. Something was holding his arms down. He couldn’t raise them more than halfway. He was held like a drowning sailor, being dragged back under by creatures from the deep.
He started to struggle. It was his coat, his damned topcoat. It was halfway down his arms and pulling him under. But surely even the coat plus the weight of water could not draw on him so hard. He fought to get free of it, but only seemed to become more entangled, and its pull on him, if anything, seemed to increase.
Then he realized. It was not merely the sodden weight of the material that was
drawing him down. His coat was being sucked through one of the gaps between the gates.
He braced his feet against the wood and tried to wrench himself free. He had to grab a breath as his face went back under, and hold it in while his efforts came to nothing. When he stopped trying, he did not bob up to the surface again. He stopped about an inch short of it.
And still the suction drew him down.
He started to fight. Not in an ordered way, but as a child in a panic might, frantically and without any thought-out purpose. The dead breath came out of him in a bubbling stream. It was a simple enough matter to get his arms out of the sleeves, but the harder he tried, the worse he seemed to make it. Without ever meaning to, he gulped in a lungful of water. The reflex of spluttering it out only caused him to draw in more. He realized with dismay that not only was he going to drown, but that his body was an eager participant in the process. His will no longer mattered.
Then something got a handful of his hair and yanked him upward. His body was racked with coughing, and he couldn’t see.
“I can’t hold you,” Sayers said. “Grab hold of something.”
Sebastian could not answer, nor could he free his hands. He shook his head. Which, under the circumstances, was a mistake.
“God Almighty,” Sayers swore, and released his grasp. Sebastian started to submerge again but it was only for as long as it took for Sayers to switch his grip to the detective’s shirt collar.
“Don’t just thrash around,” Sayers told him. “Think. Use your right hand to pull off the left sleeve.”
It was simple enough when someone said it. Not so simple to do. Sebastian felt around with fingers numbed by cold, and plucked at material he couldn’t take hold of. Even when he got it, it wouldn’t come. But Sayers was pulling him upward, and between that and the suction from below he suddenly felt his arms come out of the sleeves and found himself floating free.
Sayers was grasping his collar with one hand and holding on to the flimsy handrail with the other, leaning right out over the water in a dangerous way. Moving in a crouch along the narrow plank, he guided Sebastian to the canalside as if steering a log.
There was a short iron ladder fixed to the timber on the back of the gate. Sebastian had not even the strength to grasp its rungs. Sayers hung him on it, and he clung there.
Sayers leaned down to him and said, “I know what you think you see. You think I am running from the gallows. Well, you are right. I am. But that is not because I am guilty. I am not a guilty man, Inspector Becker. And somehow I swear I will convince you of it.”
Sebastian had not the power even to attempt a reply.
He went, then. Sebastian learned later that he’d knocked on the door of the lockkeeper’s house in passing, and told the keeper of a man in distress in his lock basin. The keeper had hauled Sebastian out with a boat hook, and given him an earful of abuse for his foolhardiness.
By then, Tom Sayers was nowhere to be seen.
SIXTEEN
Mrs. Mack did not provide an early evening meal, but would cook the guests’ own food if they brought it to her kitchen. At around five, she would lay on an afternoon tea in the dining room, consisting of bread and butter with the occasional slice of seedcake. Basic fare though it was, it was usually appreciated by a profession for whom there could be few things to recommend a job more than the inclusion of a practical pork pie in the third act.
Today, however, appetites were at a low. It would be hard to say which had shocked the company more—the violent death of their callboy, or Tom Sayers’ arrest for the deed. There had been some talk of canceling the matinee performance, but Whitlock would not hear of it. The show went on; all the cast performed efficiently but as if in a daze, and quietly returned to the lodging house afterward. Only Edmund Whitlock and James Caspar were to be found in the dining room at ten minutes after five o’clock. Whitlock was feeding pieces of seedcake to Gussie, and Caspar was pacing the carpet.
It could be an oppressive room, with its heavy lace curtains and dark furniture and Mrs. Mack’s collection of hideous ornaments in every available nook and on every imaginable surface. Enlivened by company and conversation, it would be transformed. But for the moment, the only sounds were the tick of the pendulum clock and the spitty working of the little dog’s jaws as one tidbit followed another.
Caspar stopped, and watched the spectacle for a while.
Then he said, “They eat dogs in China.”
Whitlock broke another piece off the seedcake and held it up between thumb and forefinger. The little dog froze, watching it intently, and then snapped it out of the air as Whitlock pitched it within reach.
The actor-manager’s moods had darkened considerably over the past few months. Everyone had noticed it, but no one knew the reason why. Except perhaps for Gulliford the Low Comedian, who reckoned he knew a sick man when he saw one.
“Contain yourself, James,” Whitlock said now.
“For how long? They can’t hang him if they don’t catch him.”
“We’ll be back in London in less than three weeks. If you don’t manage to conserve your appetites until then, you’ll as good as exonerate him.”
Caspar drew a chair out from under the table and sat. He placed an elbow onto Mrs. Mack’s best lace tablecloth and rested his chin on his hand.
After staring at the dog’s performance for a moment longer, he said, “I could join in the search.”
“No.”
“Well, I’ve got to do something, Edmund. I’ll go insane.”
“I really don’t believe so, James,” Whitlock said. “Don’t be such a child.”
Caspar made a face that could only be described as a smirk, and sat back in his chair.
“Miss Porter doesn’t think me a child,” he said.
“You have a child’s want of education,” Whitlock said with weary patience, his attention still on the dog as it throttled down the last of the cake. “A talent for darkness has brought you this far. But the deeper meaning of it all escapes you still.”
Caspar leaped back onto his feet in irritation. “Why is it,” he said, “that when I complain of anything, I always get a lecture?”
“Then stop complaining. And find yourself something useful to do.”
“How can I?” Caspar said. “You’ve just forbidden me the pursuit of any satisfaction.”
Dusting the crumbs from his hands, Whitlock looked up at Caspar and laid out his meaning.
“Learn subtlety, James,” he said. “It is perfectly possible to destroy something innocent, yet leave no public mark.”
The best daylight in the house was to be had in the sitting room, at the front of the building overlooking the street. This was the room where Mrs. Mack kept her piano polished and her damask cushions plumped—her showpiece room, with grand curtains gathered back like a theater of Varieties and enough memorabilia to stock a museum. There were framed prints on the walls and china figurines along the mantelpiece. A doily on every table, and a vase or statuette on every doily.
In a high-backed chair by the window sat Louise Porter, studying a playbook. More affected by the day’s events than almost anyone else in the company, she sought distraction in her craft.
She was distressed to think of the time that she’d spent in Tom Sayers’ presence, never suspecting any part of the true nature of her “devoted servant.” Those constant small services, the innocent-sounding banter…all now took on a new and sinister aspect. Little had she known of how closely she’d been consorting with danger. The very thought of it now was enough to turn her skin to gooseflesh.
Sayers was a monster, and she’d been an object of his attentions. She’d allowed this—encouraged him, even, in her innocent way. And to what terrible end might it have led her, had his crimes not been discovered in time? The convincing way in which he’d dissembled showed him to be a better actor than any in the troupe.
And yet it was a strange kind of distress. It quickened her pulse, but it did not make her timid. Far f
rom making her fearful, it seemed to increase her confident sense of her own existence. Yesterday, she’d known little of the world; today, she felt able to take on whatever else it might offer.
And some better acting parts would be a nice beginning.
She often felt at a disadvantage when she heard the conversations of the other players, offhandedly referring to this scene in “the Dream” or “the jewel scene in Faust.” Most of them had toured or played in stock for years. Unless she wanted to be locked into this one play until Whitlock had run it into the ground, her best chance of expanding her professional experience lay through reading.
She held the text up close, and wore a pair of small-lensed, wire-framed spectacles to aid her. They’d belonged to an aunt who had died; helping to go through her rooms after the funeral, Louise had given in to the temptation to try on the spectacles and had been startled at their improving effect. She’d meant only to study the look of herself wearing them in a mirror, having no notion until that point that her power of vision was less than it might be. Now they were a guilty secret. Not just for the fact that she needed them, but because of the embarrassing impulse that had led her to discover it.
At the faint sound of the door hinge creaking, she looked over the top of the book. Seeing Caspar standing in the doorway, she quickly snatched off the glasses and hid them behind the covers.
Caspar seemed not to notice. He was too busy looking downcast.
“Mister Caspar,” she said.
Caspar raised a hand. “I did not know there was anyone here,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“Please do not feel you have to leave.”
Caspar shook his sorry head. “I would not inflict my presence upon you,” he said, and he moved as if to leave and draw the sitting-room door closed after him.
“Wait!” Louise said, laying her book aside, and he stopped. “Please explain.”
He made as if to speak, and then sighed and shook his head. “What can I say to you, Louise?” he said. “I am ashamed to be of the same species as a man like Sayers.”
The Kingdom of Bones Page 10