Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  Beauregard was shocked. Kate was habitually forward, but he’d never heard her voice such an extreme sentiment.

  She softened, and rested her elbows on her desk. Her hair had come undone.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t rail at you. It’s not your fault.”

  Beauregard pulled the paper from the typewriter. Kate had been typing a nursery rhyme.

  “Mr. Stead won’t publish anything more about Wilcox,” she admitted, referring to the editor. “He’s a crusading soul, hot on exposing the ‘maiden tribute of modern Babylon’, but to be frank our solicitors aren’t up to the level Wilcox can afford. Stead wants to stay in business.”

  Kate took the sheet of paper, crumpled it into a ball, and missed a wicker basket.

  Beauregard wondered how best to broach the subject.

  “What are your plans for the Jubilee?” he asked.

  “Are you offering to escort me to that little ceremony at the Tower I’m not supposed to know you’re arranging? If you were, I’d suspect you were only luring me there so I could be clapped in irons and penned in the deepest dungeon.”

  “As a reporter, I thought you might be interested.”

  “She’s a nice enough old girl, the Queen. But I don’t think she ought to be ruling over my stretch of the world. Or quite a few other patches of red on the map. I was imagining I’d celebrate the Jubilee by cosily chaining myself to some nice railings and being spat on by patriotic crowds.”

  Beauregard couldn’t miss the seam of self-doubt in Kate’s calculated outrageousness.

  “Can I depend on your discretion?”

  She looked at him with comical pity.

  “Of course I can’t,” he said, smiling. “However, needs must when the Devil drives. What do you know about Declan Mountmain?”

  Anything comical was wiped from Kate’s face.

  “Charles, don’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Whatever involves Mountmain, don’t pursue it. There are fools and blackguards and rogues and monsters. He’s all of them. Beside Mountmain’s sins, Henry Wilcox’s are mere errors of judgement.”

  “His name has come up.”

  “I want nothing to do with it. Whatever it is.”

  “Then you won’t want to be my guest at the Tower. To see the Jewel of Seven Stars.”

  “That’s different. I accept that invitation. Thank you, kind sir.”

  She stood up and leaned over the desk to kiss his cheek.

  “What shall I wear? Something green?”

  He laughed. “Don’t you dare.”

  She giggled.

  The deepness of her feelings about Mountmain shadowed their gaiety. Uncomfortably, Beauregard suspected Mycroft had set him on the right road, and that he would not like where it was leading.

  *

  There were policemen in the courtyard of the British Museum. And a light burning behind one set of tall windows. Beauregard realised that the illuminated room was the Hall of Egyptian Antiquities.

  He had been summoned from his house in Chelsea by a cryptic message. Before being shaken awake by his manservant, Bairstow, he had been dreaming an Egyptian dream, floating down the Nile on a barge, pursued by the hordes of the Mahdi—which had actually happened to him in this life—and of the Pharaoh of Exodus—which certainly hadn’t.

  In the Hall, caped constables stood over a sheeted form. A small, whiskered man in a bowler hat, fretted.

  “Good morning, Lestrade.”

  “Is it?” the policeman asked. Dawn was pinking the windows. “Seems like the start of another long bloody day to me.”

  There was a lot of damage about. The case of the mummy he had looked at earlier was smashed in, broken shards of glass strewn over the Egyptian girl. Other exhibits were knocked over and scattered.

  “I needn’t tell you how unpleasant this is,” Lestrade said, nodding to a constable, who lifted the sheet.

  It was Jenks, throat torn away.

  “We thought he was just a keeper,” Lestrade said. “Then we found his papers, and it seems he was one of your mob.”

  “Indeed,” Beauregard said, not committing.

  “Doubtless poking around into the last business. The Whemple murder. Behind the backs of the hardworking police.”

  “Jenks was just watching over things. There’s a crown jewel in the basement, you know.”

  “There was.”

  The phrase was like a hammer.

  “The vault was broken into. Nothing subtle or clever. Looks like dynamite to me. The blast woke up every guard in the building. The ones who slept through this.”

  “The Jewel of Seven Stars is gone?”

  “I should say so.”

  Beauregard looked at Jenks’s wound.

  “Is this what Whemple looked like?”

  Lestrade nodded. “Ripped from ear to ear, with something serrated and not too sharp.”

  Beauregard had seen tiger-marks in India, crocodile attacks in Egypt, lion maulings in the Transvaal, wolf victims in Siberia and the Canadian Northwoods.

  “Could have been an animal,” he said.

  “We thought of that. With Whemple, there was nothing missing, if you get my drift. Ripped this way and that, but not chewed, torn off, or eaten. Animals don’t do that. They always at least try to eat what they’ve killed.”

  For some reason, he thought of the woman in smoked glasses, who had been here when last he saw Jenks. In his memory, she had teeth like a dainty cannibal, filed to points.

  “It’s unusual.”

  “I don’t like the unusual ones, sir. They always mean that poor old coppers like me get pushed aside and clever fellows like you or the chap from Baker Street are let loose on my patch. What I like is a murderer who gets drunk and takes a cudgel to his wife, then sits down blubbing until the police turn up. That’s a proper murder. This is just fiendishness.”

  “Your murderer has made two bad mistakes tonight, Lestrade. In taking the Seven Stars, he has robbed the Queen. And in killing Jenks, he has aroused the ire of the Diogenes Club. I should not care to exchange places with him.”

  *

  Declan Mountmain’s London address was a Georgian mansion in Wimpole Street. Just the lair for a viper who wished to nestle close to the bosom of Empire.

  Beauregard deemed it best to make a direct approach. It would be interesting, considering last night’s business at the Museum, to gauge Mountmain’s condition this morning. Were his ears ringing, as if he had been in the vicinity of an explosion in a confined space?

  He knocked on Mountmain’s sturdy front door, and waited on the step for the butler to open up.

  “Mr. Mountmain isn’t receiving visitors, sir,” said the sharp-faced servant. “He has taken to his bed.”

  “He’ll see me,” Beauregard said, confidently.

  The butler hesitated.

  “Are you the doctor, sir? The confidential doctor?”

  Beauregard looked up and down the street, as if suspecting he was being followed. As it happens, there was a suspiciously human-sized bundle in a doorway a dozen houses distant. This was not a district in which gentlemen of the road sleeping under the stars were much tolerated.

  “Do you think you should mention such matters out on the street where anyone might hear you?” The butler was chastened, and—unless Beauregard wildly missed his guess—terrified.

  The door was pulled open wide, and Beauregard allowed in. He tried to project from within the impression that he was a disgraced physician on a hush-hush mission of dark mercy. Such impersonations were surprisingly easy, especially if one didn’t actually claim to be who one was pretending to be but merely let others make assumptions one did not contradict.

  Mountmain’s hallway was dark. The windows were still curtained. A line of wavering light under a door revealed that one of the rooms was occupied, and low voices could be made out. The butler did not lead Beauregard to that door, but to another, which he opened.

  A single lamp burned,
a dark lantern set upon a table. A man lay on a divan, a sheet thrown over him. He was groaning, and a black-red stain covered a full quarter of the sheet.

  The butler turned up the lamp and Beauregard looked at the man. He was deathly pale beneath grime, teeth gritted, pellets of sweat on his forehead.

  Beauregard lifted the sheet.

  A gouge had been taken out of the man, ripping through his shirt, exposing ribs.

  The wounded man gripped Beaureagard’s arm.

  “A priest,” he said. “Get a priest.”

  “Come now, Bacon,” boomed a voice. “Have you so easily turned apostate and reverted to the poor faith of your feeble fathers?”

  Beauregard turned.

  In the doorway stood the man he knew to be Declan Mountmain. Short and stout, with a high forehead growing higher as his black hair receded away from the point of his widow’s peak, Mountmain was somehow an impressive presence. He wore a Norfolk jacket and riding boots, unmistakably blooded. Not the sort of outfit for lounging around the house before breakfast, but ideal wear for an after-midnight adventure in larceny and murder.

  Bacon’s wound was irresistibly reminiscent of the fatal injuries suffered by Jenks and Whemple.

  “Who might you be, sir?” Mountmain asked. “And what business have you poking around in young Bacon’s open wound? You’re no damned doctor, that’s certain.”

  Beauregard handed over his card. “I wished to consult you in your capacity as an expert on occult matters.”

  Mountmain looked at the card, cocked a quizzical eyebrow, then landed a slap across the face of his butler, slamming him against the wall.

  “You’re a worthless fool,” he told his servant.

  “This man needs medical attention,” Beauregard said. “And, by his admission, spiritual attention too.”

  Mountmain strode over.

  Beauregard felt Bacon’s grip strengthen as Mountmain neared. Then it was suddenly limp.

  “No, he needs funerary attention,” Mountmain said.

  Bacon’s dead hand fell. There was blood on Beauregard’s sleeve.

  “Very tragic,” Mountmain said, deliberate despite his rage. “A carriage accident.”

  According to Mycroft, people who volunteer explanations as yet unasked for are certain to be lying. Beauregard realised Mountmain’s contempt for others was such that he did not even take the trouble to concoct a believable story.

  Mountmain’s jacket was dusty and odiferous. He recognised the Guy Fawkes Night smell that lingers after a dynamite blast.

  “There will now be tedious complications as a result of my charitable taking in of this stranger. I should be grateful if you quit this house so I can make the proper, ruinously costly, arrangements.”

  Beauregard looked at the dead man’s face. It was still stamped with fear.

  “If I can be of assistance,” he ventured, “I shall report the matter to the police. I am in a small way officially connected.”

  Mountmain looked up at Beauregard, calculating.

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “The young man’s name was, what did you say, Bacon?”

  “He blurted it as he was carried into the house.”

  Mountmain spread his arms and looked down at his blood-and dirt-smeared clothes. He did not say so outright, but implied he was in this condition because he had hauled an injured passerby off the street. Now his rage was cooling, he showed something of the canniness Beauregard expected of such a dangerous man.

  “The business upon which I called …”

  “I can’t be expected to think of that,” Mountmain said. “There’s a corpse ruining the furniture. Put your concerns in writing and send them to my secretary. Now, if you will be so kind as to leave …”

  *

  Mountmain’s door slammed behind Beauregard. He stood outside the house, mind swarming around the problem.

  He glanced at the doorway where the vagrant had been earlier but it was unoccupied. He half-thought the bundle might have been Kate, pursuing a story. She was certainly not above disguising herself as an urchin.

  A man had died in his presence.

  No matter how often it happened, it was shocking. Death struck deep in him, reaching that portion of his heart he thought buried with Pamela. All death took him back to the hill country, to his wife bathed in blood and their stillborn son. Then, he had wept and raged and had to be restrained from taking a sabre to the drunken doctor. Now, it was his duty to show nothing, to pretend he felt as little as Mountmain evidently did. Death was at worst a rude inconvenience.

  He concentrated. His hands did not shake. He walked away from the house with even steps. An observer would not think he was about business of great moment.

  Mountmain and Bacon, and who knows how many confederates, had been at the Museum last night, and had certainly set the charges that blew the safe. The man had a habit of meddling with dynamite. He must be after the Seven Stars, though it was not yet clear whether Mountmain’s interest in the stone was down to its monetary value, its political import, or an as yet unknown occult significance.

  He paused casually and took a cigar from his case. He stepped into the shelter of a doorway to light the cigar, turning and hunching a little to keep the match-flame out of the wind. He paused to let the flame grow the length of the match, and lit up the doorway. A scrap of rag wound around the boot-scraper, some grey stuff brittle with dust.

  He puffed on his fine cigar and picked up the rag, as if he had dropped it when taking his matches from his pocket. It almost crumbled in his hands and he carefully folded it into his silver cigar case.

  A hansom cab trundled by, looking for custom. Beauregard hailed it.

  *

  Trelawny was in shock at the loss of the Seven Stars. His room was turned upside down, and the corridor outside blackened by the blast. Beauregard had the impression Mountmain had overdone the dynamite. Lestrade’s men were still pottering around.

  “Ever since the Valley of the Sorcerer, it’s been like this,” Trelawny said. “Blood and shot and death. In Egypt, you expect that sort of thing. But not here, in London, in the British Museum.”

  “Do you know a man named Mountmain?”

  “Declan Mountmain? The worst sort of occult busybody. Half-baked theories and disgusting personal habits.”

  “Were you not close to him at Oxford? In the Order of the Ram?”

  Trelawny was surprised to have that brought up. “I wouldn’t say ‘close’. I took a passing interest in such concerns. It’s impossible to get far in Egyptology without trying to understand occult practices. Mountmain and I quarrelled without relief and I broke with him long ago. To him, it’s all about power, not knowledge.”

  “I believe that last night Mountmain stole the Seven Stars.”

  Trelawny sat down, astonished.

  “He has many low associations. He would know the cutters and fences who could deal with such booty.”

  Trelawny shook his head.

  “If it’s Mountmain, it’s not for the money. I believe I mentioned that the Seven Stars was as hard as diamond. Actually, it is far harder. I doubt if it could be broken into smaller stones for disposal. It would probably be a blessing if that were possible, though the process might well merely disperse the ill fortune throughout the world.”

  “If not the money …?”

  “The magic, Beauregard. Mountmain believes in such things. For him, they seem to work. At Oxford, he had a fearful row with one of the professors and cast an enchantment on the fellow. It was a terrible thing to see.”

  “He sickened and died?”

  “Eventually. First, he lost his position, his standing, his reputation. He was found guilty of unholy acts, and claimed that voices compelled him.”

  “The Seven Stars?”

  “… would be of incalculable use to Mountmain. There are references in certain books, the sort we keep under lock and key and don’t allow in the index. Though lost since the time of Meneptah, there
are references to the Jewel of Seven Stars. It has a shadowy reputation.”

  “Mountmain would know this?”

  “Of course.”

  “He would wish to employ the stone in some species of ritual?”

  “Indubitably.”

  “To what end?”

  Trelawny shook his head.

  “Something on a cyclopean scale, Beauregard. According to the Al Azif of the mad Arab Al-Hazred, the last time the jewel was the focus of occult power was in the thick of the Plagues of Egypt.”

  Beauregard took out his cigar case.

  “What do you make of this?”

  Trelawny looked at the scrap of cloth.

  “Is this part of the debris?”

  Beauregard said nothing.

  “I’d heard one of the mummies upstairs was damaged. This looks like a funerary binding. It’s certainly ancient. I say, you shouldn’t just have picked it up as a souvenir.”

  Beauregard took the rag back and folded it again.

  “I think I’ll hang on to it for the moment.”

  *

  Kate hadn’t got all of the story out of him, but he had doled her a few of the less arcane facts.

  They were in Covent Garden, at a café. The awning was draped with flags. A portrait of the Queen hung proudly in prime position.

  “You believe Mountmain has this gem? In his town house? And he has a dead man on the premises?”

  Beauregard sipped his tea and nodded.

  “If Ireland and dynamite are involved, such niceties as due process and search warrants usually go out the window. So why hasn’t Lestrade descended on the scene with a dozen flatfeet and torn the house apart?”

  “It’s not quite that simple.”

  “Yes it is, Charles. And you know it.”

  “I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t much care for your countryman.”

  Kate almost laughed.

  “‘My countryman’. I suppose you wouldn’t mind at all if I habitually referred to Blackbeard, Charley Peace, Jonathan Wild and Burke and Hare as ‘your countrymen’.”