The scene changes.
The camera, closer now, looks onto a muddy foreshore where two figures stand.
The scene changes.
The camera, closer still, reveals the image of a young woman. Tall. Slender. Dressed in a light summer dress. She has peeled off her black stockings and kicked aside her shoes and now she wades in the shallows. Her shoes and stockings, along with her hat, sit neatly piled on the dry shore. The young woman’s hair is so blond it burns luminous as a white flame. The camera delights in her image, one of the Graces caught by human eyes, idling in a moment of unawareness.
The hand ceases turning. The image freezes. The viewer draws in a deep breath and exhales raggedly. The hand resumes its cranking, and the figure in the viewfinder squeezes up from two-dimensions into three. She strolls toward the viewer in dreamy slow motion. When she notices the camera, her coy smile suggests embarrassment and she lowers her eyes demurely. Her hair has come unpinned and her slender fingers sweep back a stray lock that has fallen over one eye. She paddles through water so shallow it scarcely covers her bare feet. Her hitched skirts are gathered up in one hand, revealing to the lascivious camera slender calves and shapely ankles. Distracted by something behind her, she turns to look over her shoulder.
The scene changes.
A little boy stands calf-deep in the loch. He is togged out in a sailor’s suit and knee britches. The boy, perhaps four years of age, has the same white-blond hair spilling from beneath the sailor’s cap and is almost certainly her child. He holds a toy boat in hands chubby with baby fat. The toy boat—a tin-plate warship—sports a huge key protruding from the top deck and now he winds it, the young face taut with concentration. He lowers the battleship to the water, aims, and releases. The windup ship motors off, trailing a wake churned by a whirling propeller. The large tin rudder has been bent so that the warship sails in a tight circle about the boy’s legs. He silently claps his hands and mimes laughter. It is a wonderful moment of childish innocence.
The hand turning the crank stops and the riffling cards cease their tumble, arresting time. The moment hangs frozen. The watching eyes blink tears from their corners, peer deeper, harder, greedy to absorb every last detail. A noise escapes the hunched-over viewer: a sound halfway between a sob of mourning and a keening wail that is a premonition of something dreadful yet to come.
Slowly, reluctantly, the hand tightens upon the crank and begins to turn. Photographs spill from the drum.
The scene changes again.
A long view of the loch. The camera pans to reveal the foreshore and a reviewing stand erected on the loch side. A crowd mills before it.
The scene changes.
Uniformed naval men in plumed hats mingle with bureaucrats in tight suits and top hats. They puff cigars, releasing wisps of smoke. Gesticulate jerkily.
The scene changes.
The crowd parts as a carriage arrives. Dignitaries scuttle to form an honor guard. Bewigged pages snatch open the carriage door and she clambers out—the namesake of the age: Victoria Regina. Her image is unmistakable: Short. Squat. Stumpy and obese in her black mourning dress and headdress of white lace. A bearded man in a uniform bedecked with medals and an admiral’s plumed hat bows and kisses her hand. He escorts her through silent applause to where a throne-like chair awaits beneath an awning. She acknowledges the crowd with a regal wave.
The scene changes.
A stack of wicker baskets. A hand fumbles a latch and white doves spill out in a blur of fluttering wings. The doves scatter into the skies above.
The scene changes.
Out on the loch, a steam launch cruises swiftly over the flat water. White smoke billows from the chimney. At the tiller is a man in a black topcoat and a stovepipe hat. Something with the shape of a slender metal sardine is strapped to the side of the launch.
The scene changes.
A mighty warship lies at anchor. But no, a camera affixed the gunwale of a boat drifts past revealing that it is a sham: a barn-sized wooden cutout lashed to a raft of barrels. It looks uncannily similar to the child’s windup battleship.
The scene changes.
The man at the wheel of the steam launch yanks a lever. A propeller at the rear of the torpedo spins up and the iron fish, steam spouting from a blowhole, drops heavily from the side of the boat. Relieved of its massy weight, the steamer heels alarmingly.
The scene changes.
Churning a bubbling wake, the torpedo streaks toward the battleship target anchored in the distance.
The scene changes.
The crowd in the viewing stands surges to its feet. Men remove top hats, jostle shoulders, craning to see.
The scene changes.
The torpedo speeds unerringly toward its target. It is only seconds away when it abruptly veers left. In the skies above the loch, the flock of doves wheels in an inward tightening circle. Suddenly, the torpedo goes into a wild, tail-chasing spin. Then the lead dove turns and heads for shore, and the cloud of flapping wings follows. The torpedo suddenly straightens. It swooshes past the anchored target, missing by yards and heads straight for the shore. From this distance, the tiny figures of the wading woman and her child can be seen running. Running away. Running for shelter in the viewing stand. But too late. Moving at tremendous speed, the torpedo skims through the shallows and hurtles onto the land, the spinning propeller flinging up a rooster tail of sand and mud. It overtakes the running figures and the young woman and her child vanish in a cloud of steam. Carried by its dread inertia, the torpedo crashes into the viewing stand and explodes.
Although the Mutoscope has no sound, the mind supplies the concussive roar. Bodies and debris tumble high into the sky. The blast hits the camera and the world upends and tilts onto its side.
Feet run past the toppled camera. A top hat falls sideways to the ground and rolls uphill until a trampling foot crushes it. Black smoke swirls and the world dims to darkness.
The scene changes.
Daylight returns. The camera, once again upright, pans across a scene of devastation. Nothing remains of the reviewing stand but jagged splinters of wood, rows of toppled seats, and entangled within, the grotesquely sprawled bodies of the dead.
The scene changes.
Victoria sags in the arms of two men who support her by the armpits and drag her toward the waiting coach. But they must pick their way through wreckage, stepping over fallen bodies and severed limbs. The queen is loaded aboard the carriage, which jerks away.
The scene changes.
A final look at the devastated shore. Hatless and disheveled survivors stumble aimlessly, faces streaked with blood and dirt, eyes spilling shock. A handsome bearded man in a stovepipe hat shambles past the camera, craning to scan the foreshore where the young woman and her child were wading. He calls out for them, his face contorted in a mask of horror. And then his silent shouts become voiceless screams. His face darkens with the rush of blood. Whipcord veins pop from his neck and forehead. He turns away and stares blindly into the camera lens. But then the Mutoscope reaches the end of the drum and the final photograph falls. The coin drops into a metal box with a monetary ka-chunk, the bulb extinguishes, and the viewfinder goes black.
As the cooling filament fades, the viewer draws back from the Mutoscope. His is the same face glimpsed in the final frame, although the once-dark beard is now shock white, the trimmed and pomaded hair is a shoulder-length tangle of gray dishevelment and the handsome face now lined and haggard beyond the normal passage of years. The only thing unchanged is the haunted look of the eyes, which are tunnels receding into an empty, echoing darkness … swarmed by ghosts.
CHAPTER 6
AN ILL-TIMED LETTER
“Kiss me,” Miss Jean Leckie breathed in a husky voice. “Kiss me!” She and Conan Doyle were seated at a quiet table amongst the potted plants in the Tivoli’s fern room. All eyes in the restaurant turned toward them, watching. And yet, Conan Doyle did not care. Miss Leckie was leaning forward in her chair, so that her h
azel-green eyes were all that filled his vision. She tugged insistently at his sleeve. “Kiss me, Daddy!” she breathed and Conan Doyle no longer resisted, but leaned into her face and pressed his lips against hers.
“Daddy! Dad-dee!”
Conan Doyle pried open his eyes and groggily dragged himself up from the pit of sleep. He was slouched in his writing chair, the Tivoli dining room jarringly replaced by his study and a desk strewn with pens and notebooks, the delicious dream still evaporating from the surface of his mind while an insistent hand jerked at his sleeve from below.
“Dad-dee. My soldier’s broken.”
He looked down to see Kingsley, his five-year-old son, yanking at his sleeve. The little boy was holding his very favorite toy: a windup soldier. Conan Doyle could tell from the gleaming red pout of the boy’s lip and eyes pooled to overflowing that his child teetered on the verge of hysteria.
“What is it, Kingsley?”
“My soldier’s broken Dad-dee. He won’t drum.”
Conan Doyle sighed and took the mechanical soldier from his son’s small hands. It was a tinplate guardsman with a painted red uniform and a black bearskin. When wound with the key in the middle of his back, the soldier would march forward in a grind of gears while a blur of mechanical arms pounded upon a tin drum.
“You haven’t overwound him again, have you?”
The little boy shook his blond head emphatically, but Conan Doyle suspected quite the opposite.
“Come, climb upon Papa’s knee and we’ll see if we can’t heal your poor wounded soldier.” The small boy clambered into his father’s lap. Conan Doyle gripped the key and gave it a gentle, experimental twist. It turned a few degrees, hit a hard stop, and sprang back when released.
Overwound.
“I’m afraid you have wound it too tightly, Kingsley. Daddy has told you before, you have to be careful winding it.”
“I need my drummer, Daddy! He beats his drum to scare away the monster who lives under my bed.”
Conan Doyle swallowed a grimace. The monster again. As a writer, he was all for encouraging a child’s imagination, but “the monster” was the cause of much bedwetting.
“Kingsley, I have told you there are no monsters under your bed. Monsters cannot enter our house. Daddy has expressly forbidden them.”
“Can you fix my drummer, Daddy? Can you?”
He hugged the little boy and said, “Well, let’s see. Papa will try his best, but I cannot promise.”
Conan Doyle rummaged a hand in his pants pocket and withdrew the small silver penknife he kept tucked there. The tinplate soldier was constructed in two halves held together by bent metal tabs. He worked the sharp knife blade under each tab in turn and levered them open. But when he eased the two halves of the soldier apart, there was a sproinnnnggggg as the tightly wound spring spat out like a metal tongue, uncoiling a spool of black spring steel that whiplashed across the floor.
“Oh, dear,” Conan Doyle said, struggling to push the spring back into the metal body.
“Is it broken, Daddy?”
“I’m afraid it is, Kingsley. But you’ve got lots of other toys to play with—”
“But I want my drummer!” Kingsley shrieked, his voice ripping on each syllable.
“Shush! Shush! Calm yourself. Daddy will take it to a shop when he goes to London and have it mended.”
During this exchange, Conan Doyle failed to hear the door open or footsteps until his wife spoke. “Arthur, I see you decided to return home at long last.”
He looked up in surprise. These days, his wife, Louise Doyle, or “Touie” as he affectionately called her, did not leave her bedroom very often. Five years earlier, she had been diagnosed with galloping consumption, the dread disease of the age, which carried off most of its victims within a matter of months. But thanks to Conan Doyle’s diligence, moving the family from Switzerland to Egypt to the rural climes of Sussex to find the most beneficent air, Touie had endured, although mostly as an invalid, bedridden and sickly. At times she hovered on the precipice of death, and Conan Doyle made sure his funeral clothes were cleaned and pressed. But at other times, she rallied. Touie had not left her room for a full month, so Conan Doyle was surprised to see her downstairs and dressed, although the apple-cheeked girl he had married was now emaciated, and her gaunt, hollow-eyed features held the deathly pallor of a consumptive. Even now, despite the efforts of her toilet, the smell of the sick room hovered about her.
“Touie, darling! You’re up.”
“I was concerned when the servants told me you had not slept in your bed last night.”
He caught the recrimination frosting her words and quickly replied, “I stayed at Oscar’s club. Had to sleep in a chair. Trains weren’t running because of the blasted fog.”
“Fog? Really?” his wife said, deepening the incrimination with a pause before adding, “We had no such fog.”
“Well, the house is in Sussex, darling. It’s precisely for the healthful air that I chose to move the family here—”
“Did you attend your meeting? The Society for Psychical Research, wasn’t it? The first Monday of the month?”
“Yes, I did, and it was most edifying.”
“I am quite sure.” She eyed his apparel pointedly. “You do not normally dress in your finery to attend a Society meeting.”
Kingsley began to squirm and so did Conan Doyle. “Kingsley, get down. Daddy is trying to talk to Mama.” He slid the boy off his lap.
“Daddy, what about my soldier?”
Conan Doyle irritatedly snatched the toy from his little boy’s grip and set it down on his writing desk. “Daddy will have it mended. Now go and find out what your sister’s up to. Go on.” He chivvied the boy from the room with a wave and a paternal look.
Louise Doyle sank wearily onto the edge of a leather armchair. From the look on her face it was clear the interrogation was only just beginning.
“After the meeting, did you go for supper with one of the members?”
“Ahhhh, let me think. Um, yes … yes I did.”
“A gentleman … or a lady?”
At that moment, Florence, the maid, entered the study bearing a letter on a silver salver.
“A letter arrived for you, sir. By first post.”
“Thank you, Florence.” He bade her to place it on the desk with an impatient wave, but she obstinately remained hovering by the door. “A-a-a lady, as a matter of fact. A medium. Yes, quite fascinating. Our conversation, that is. We discussed séances and—”
“She must be a very pretty lady for you to wear your best suit and take the time to wax your moustaches.”
“Pretty? I-I didn’t really notice. I—no, I’d say she was, if anything, a little … frowsy. You know, the spinsterly type.”
“A spinster, indeed? I know many of the members of the Society. Might I recognize the unmarried lady’s name?”
“No, ah, no. Probably not. She only recently joined. Ah, I believe her name was Jean. Yes, Jean … Leckie, or something like that.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” Florence interrupted. She held up the envelope. “That’s who the letter is from, a Miss Jean Leckie.”
Something deeply wounded flashed across Louise Doyle’s face, but she reined it in behind a tight smile. “How interesting. You two had dinner just last evening and here she has already sent you a billet-doux. She sounds very keen.”
“Hardly a billet-doux, darling,” Conan Doyle said with an uneasy chuckle. “What ever must Florence think? A billet-doux, indeed!”
To make matters worse, the letter had arrived in a lilac envelope, an incriminatingly feminine color. But even as he waffled, Conan Doyle realized he had a possible bolt-hole: he could reveal the fact that he’d been called in to consult on a murder. But then this was no ordinary murder—it was an assassination, and one he had been officially proscribed from speaking about—to anyone. A logjam of sentences crowded Conan Doyle’s throat and suffocated there.
Louise Doyle rose unstea
dily from her chair, eyes gleaming, her pale features cinched in a broken smile. “Well, Arthur. I’ll leave you to read your letter in private. I think I can guess exactly what kind of message it is.”
And with that, his wife tottered from the study, helping herself along the way by leaning on every piece of furniture that came to hand.
The maid flushed and fidgeted. She handed the letter to her master, bounced a quick curtsy, and muttered, “I’d best be getting on with the ironing” and fled the room.
That had been a disaster. But now it was over, Conan Doyle felt his spine unratchet a cog or two. Still, his hands shook with excitement as he slashed a letter opener beneath the flap and tore open the envelope. At the sight of exquisite feminine handwriting, his heart quickened and he fought to focus his mind as he read the short missive.
Dearest Arthur,
I so enjoyed our little tête-à-tête last evening. I was sorry to see it cut short. If you are free today, perhaps we may luncheon together. My train arrives at Waterloo Station at 12:30 p.m., Platform 2. If you are unable to make it on such short notice, I shall understand, although I will be sad not to see your handsome face again.
Yours fondly,
Miss Jean Leckie
As his eyes tripped over the elegant flourish of her signature, a thrill surged through him. It seemed shockingly forward, but then Conan Doyle reasoned, times were changing and Miss Leckie was of a generation where the old rules of chaste female decorum seemed laughably twee. He rose to his feet, dithering. If he left now, so suddenly, it would be clear that his departure was in response to the letter. But then the image swam up in his mind of Jean’s graceful neck, the doeish eyes, and the baying hound of desire slipped free of its leash. Suddenly energized, he rushed from the study and galumphed up the staircase to his room. If he hurried, he might just catch the 10:45 train back to London.
Minutes later, Conan Doyle was pedaling his three-wheeler bicycle along the tree-lined lane that ascended in a long, sweeping curve into Haslemere. He was standing on the pedals, thighs burning, as he muscled up the final hill before the train station, when he was snatched from his reverie by a wisssshthump … wisssssshthump …
The Dead Assassin Page 5