by Sam Thompson
That evening, when Dawn arrived home from her afternoon’s work at the school, Andie mentioned that her train left in forty-five minutes’ time and it had been so kind of Dawn to have her to stay. Dawn wanted to ask what about the plan of staying for the rest of the month, but she could find no tactful way to do so when apparently it had been forgotten. As Andie collected up her things she chattered brightly about the next city she was going to see, sharing highlights from the guidebook.
Dawn walked with her towards the station, but only part of the way. Possibly she had eaten a bad mussel the other night, and she had certainly swallowed several bits of grit: all through today she’d thought she could feel tremblings of food poisoning, and she wanted to go back to her apartment and address them in private.
They paused on the promenade before separating. The remains of the feast had been cleared away, and an older woman was sluicing down the flagstones with a bucket.
Andie shifted her feet, her legs braced against the weight of her rucksack. She looked down at the pavement and across at the sky which was growing deeper over the sea. Fine strands of hair at her temples were filled with the light. She said she would see Dawn back home. They should stay in touch. Dawn agreed, her attention drifting into the silver floss. Andie was saying something else, her voice low, and too late Dawn realised that she had not been listening. Andie’s face was fretful as she waited for a reply.
‘All right,’ Dawn said, and she imagined that the pieces of grit were fragments of a precious material, specks of pearl. ‘I’ll let him know.’
The Significant City of Lazarus Glass
Exquisite enigmas, mysteries sinister and bizarre: for Peregrine Fetch these were at once a vocation and the keenest happiness in life. As an archive of the gruesome and the perplexing his casebook is without peer and yet, even there, the details of his final adventure must strike the interpreter as anomalous. It may be that we have yet to grasp the whole pattern of the crimes. Which of us can hope to explain the events of the night on which the most gifted investigator of our time met his match? Peregrine Fetch was the man who solved the Theft of the Paper Orchid, and who exposed the trickeries at work in the affair of the Nightmare Gallery; it was he who brought to its denoument the sanguinary chronicle of the Revenge of the Trelawneys, and who won the horrified applause of every citizen by unravelling the case of the Riddle in Brass. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation whose narrative it is my task now to set down, I count myself privileged to have been his assistant, his apprentice and his friend.
In the small hours of one night in March last year, I was at work in the consulting rooms where, by day, Peregrine Fetch received his clients, heard their tales and meditated on their problems. I myself often puzzled late over the files of our ongoing investigations, doing my best to follow my mentor’s ratiocinatory principles as far as they could lead – far enough, perhaps, to tease out whichever snarl of human evil lay before me on the desk. When on occasion I accomplished some small success in this regard, Peregrine’s features would crinkle and his grey eyes would release the spark of warmth which at other times they hid so well.
All night I had worked alone amid columns of case notes, kept company by the raindrops that flung themselves at the windows, but now I heard hurried footsteps in the street below. Moments later I was joined by Inspector Nimrod of the City Watch.
The Inspector’s greeting was gruff as usual, but he was evidently in a state of some agitation, short of breath and sweating in spite of the cold. Beads of moisture clung to his leather car-jacket. He looked around the clutter of the office.
‘Dr Fetch not here? You don’t know his whereabouts?’
He swallowed, the point of his throat leaping.
‘Then I fear the worst.’
Having witnessed several investigations in which the constabulary, reaching the limit of their own wit, had begged Peregrine’s assistance, I had learnt to set but modest store by Inspector Nimrod’s deductions. But there was a grim note in his voice tonight which I did not find easy to dismiss.
‘What do you mean, inspector?’
‘I’ve never known a night like it,’ he said. ‘It’s beyond me, I don’t mind telling you, Ms Byrd. I thought I was losing my marbles back there and I’m still not sure I was wrong. Bleeding Lord, if they’ve got him too …’
But before he could continue, a soft voice wished us good morning and we turned to see, standing in the doorway, the slight figure of Peregrine Fetch. The inspector sagged with relief. Peregrine’s hair, I noted, was disordered and dirtied, his left cheekbone and right knuckles sticky with fresh blood, and the sleeve of his raincoat torn, but he met us with a half-smile.
‘They used to say that, in the city, as many deaths await you as there are windows open above your head.’ His diction was light and precise. ‘I can fairly claim that since you saw me last I have tried the truth of that proposition.’
‘You were attacked?’
‘Yes,’ he said, sounding as if he had not quite thought of it in those terms. ‘Certainly, I have been attacked.’
I began to ask him what had happened, but he raised a punctilious finger.
‘Never fear: in due course I will unfold this further. But first, perhaps, the inspector has his own story to tell?’
Nimrod, who had been listening open-mouthed, found his tongue.
‘I wish it wasn’t so,’ he said, and drew a deep breath. ‘But yes. I’m certain of that, if of nothing else I’ve seen.’
It had been a punishing night for the inspector. He had been called from his bed to the scene of a murder. This in itself was not so unusual an occurrence; but no sooner had he laid eyes on the corpse than news arrived of another killing, a second ugly spectacle which he had barely surveyed when he was summoned away to the aftermath of yet a third homicide. Three murders. Death, it appeared to Nimrod, was opening its grisly blooms across the city as if its season had arrived. There was nothing in their manner or location to link the killings, but when he realised what they did have in common, the inspector, gripped by fresh dread, had turned on his heel and made all haste to the consulting rooms of Peregrine Fetch.
‘The victims,’ said the inspector, ‘were all –’
‘Please,’ said Peregrine. ‘Allow me. They were all of my profession. The murdered individuals were my fellow private consulting detectives.’
He said three names: the names of the three foremost investigators in the city, besides Peregrine himself. He gave Nimrod an inquiring look; the inspector’s shake of the head was a gesture not of negation but of bafflement.
‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘Hyperion Weill, Electra Cavendish-Peake, Brutus Thorne. Three of the leading private detectives in the city have been murdered tonight. How did you know?’
Without removing his raincoat, Peregrine dropped on to the Chesterfield and stretched out full length, adopting the position in which, motionless, with eyes closed, ankles crossed and fingers laced on his sternum, he had solved many of his more arduous cases.
‘It is as I anticipated,’ he said. ‘To begin with: you are both familiar, of course, with the name of Lazarus Glass.’
We were. For anyone concerned with the city’s criminal element, Lazarus Glass moved in the mind like a shadow, never quite absent. Such was his reputation that he seemed not so much a man as a fable, a splendid monster: his infinite hunger for malfeasance, his genius for cruelty, his mastery of disguise and misdirection, the patience with which he executed his stratagems, all of these were recounted in whispers by common criminals and ordinary policemen alike – and they spoke, too, of the man’s consuming hatred for his enemy, the detective who so often stood in his way, Peregrine Fetch.
No street or house was safe from Lazarus Glass, and not one citizen, bad or good, rich or poor. His tendrils linked the city’s lowest robbery with its most grandiose jewel theft or political assassination. His name seldom appeared in the news, his face never, but Peregrine had many times assured me that Glass, thro
ugh his manifold indirections, was behind the greater portion of the crimes it had fallen to my mentor to combat. And however often Peregrine thwarted the particular villainies which betrayed the presence of that hand on the strings, he had never come close to apprehending the puppeteer.
Never, until now. Lying on the sofa Peregrine resembled a recumbent statue on the tomb of a crusader. Without opening his eyes, he explained that, after months and years of hunting, of feint and counterfeint and invisible chessplay, he had at last found a route into the maze of defences with which Lazarus Glass surrounded himself, and had taken up the chase. He could not have hoped to succeed alone: he had joined forces with three other investigators, the bravest and most brilliant of the profession. Together they had closed the net around Glass by slow degrees, and tonight they had been on the point of drawing it fast. But the man was tenfold a devil when cornered, and it was no surprise that, in spite of all their precautions, he had struck against his pursuers with a violence testified by the sickly shade of the inspector’s face.
‘You’re telling me it’s Glass,’ said Nimrod. ‘In a single night he’s wiped out three of the best private detectives in the city, and come close as dammit to doing the same to you too?’
‘This would appear to be the reasonable inference,’ said Peregrine. Only the soft voice showed that he was not asleep. ‘Nor is there reason to suppose that the attempt is at an end, given that I remain –’ he opened one eye ‘– active.’
‘Then there’s no time to waste. I’m placing you under police protection. We call for reinforcements.’
Peregrine sprang to his feet in a single movement.
‘By no means, inspector. Do you think it is beyond the powers of Lazarus Glass to infiltrate the ranks of the law? Tonight I trust three people only and they are in this room. We will do well to move fast and inform no one of our plans. Cassandra, I must ask you to come with me. Nowhere is safe for any of us with Lazarus Glass so close behind, and I feel I may have need of your help in this affair.’
I rose.
‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘three murders have been committed tonight. Our place is at the scenes of the crimes: there, if anywhere, we will find clues to the intention of our adversary.’
‘It’s against my better judgement,’ said Nimrod, shaking his head in acquiesence.
‘Think how many of our shared triumphs have been accomplished in just such a mode, inspector, and lead on.’
As we were leaving the consulting rooms, Peregrine moved to the mantelpiece and opened the old cigar box that stood there. Inside it, I knew, was a revolver. He stored it in the box as a matter of habit, keeping it cleaned and loaded but never taking it with him on investigations. I had never known him to use it, nor any other weapon. He kept the gun accessible, I believed, as a daily reminder that he had no need of it – that he chose to face the dangers of the city armed with reason alone. Now his hand lingered over the box, but he did not touch the weapon. Instead he closed the lid and turned to me. He seemed to search for words.
‘When I am gone, Cassandra, it will be for you to carry on my work,’ he said. ‘We have a number of intriguing investigations in progress.’
He was looking at me strangely.
‘It would be a matter for regret, for instance, if the case of the Apples of Madness were not brought to a satisfactory conclusion, or the affair of the Chanting Leopard.’
‘But you’ll solve those cases yourself, Dr Fetch,’ I said, faltering. ‘You’ll outwit Lazarus Glass, I’m sure of it.’
‘Well, perhaps I shall, at that,’ he said. ‘It is in any case a nice knot, this business with poor Lazarus, not without certain points of interest.’
As I followed him down the staircase to the street, he added:
‘We were friends, once, long ago, Lazarus and I.’
In Professor Hyperion Weill’s study, the gloom was relieved only by the glow from a tasselled lampshade which hung, askew, next to what was left of the wingback chair in which the professor had been seated in his final moments. Bookshelves lined the walls, the floor was thick with rugs, and around us crowded keepsakes enough to fill a museum of criminology: pistols, blowpipes, jezail rifles and blackened daggers, chinoiserie caskets, bottles of chemicals, specimen jars in which pale forms floated, a human skull wearing a tiara of paste diamonds. The inspector assured us that nothing had been moved since the discovery of the scene by a porter investigating reports of an isolated nocturnal shriek.
The curtains were open, and through the windows I made out the branches of oak trees printed black against the night sky. Hyperion Weill had been a tall old man, and his arms and legs, broomstick-thin inside their sheaths of tweed, overhung the sides of the chair. The book lying open in his lap was glistening and darkly sodden. Evidently, no attempt had been made to free the corpse from the position in which it had been left.
I felt a shiver of outrage at this ugly end to so honourable a career. Hyperion Weill had been peerless among the investigators of his generation, but in due course he had retired from full-time detection to take up a post as Professor of Ratiocination at the university. That should have meant well-deserved years of reflection, writing and passing on the fruits of his experience to the respectful young – not this night of butchery.
Peregrine gazed at the scene for a long time, his features neutral.
‘Perhaps I should not have drawn him back into active investigation. But he knew our enemy well. He shaped both of us, Lazarus and me. We were so determined to impress him.’
As he scrutinised the object comprised of the remains of the professor and those of his favourite chair, Peregrine spoke in an undertone. Many years ago, he explained, he and Glass had studied together under the tuition of Hyperion Weill.
Callow as they had been in those days, young Peregrine Fetch and young Lazarus Glass were each intent, already, on surpassing even their teacher and becoming the single greatest detective the city had ever seen. In talent and ambition there had been little to distinguish the two youths, and for a time they had been as close as only devoted rivals can be. Only later had Lazarus chosen a different path.
Peregrine fell silent for a minute. I heard a droplet hit the floor beneath dangling fingertips.
‘I remember one of the earliest tutorials we had with him,’ he went on. ‘Lazarus had written an essay proposing an entirely new interpretation of one of Professor Weill’s own classic investigations: the case of the Nine Surgeons, if memory serves. The essay was a remarkable piece of work for an undergraduate, bold and original, and, as he read it aloud before the attentively bowed cranium of our tutor, Lazarus trembled with delight at the unfurling of his analytical faculties, at the excitement of elucidating through sheer deductive prowess aspects of the case which even the great detective himself had not previously understood.
‘Unfortunately, the argument was flawed. It was a small oversight, but crucial: if you recall, the Nine Surgeons affair involved a number of deadly weapons, and Lazarus’s interpretation was founded on a failure to distinguish between the types of wound that may be inflicted by a duelling rapier, a tachi sword and a cavalry sabre.’
Inspector Nimrod, standing back in the shadows of the study, muttered a heartfelt oath.
‘When Lazarus’s essay had reached its ringing conclusion, Professor Weill pointed out this simple error and methodically dismantled the entire deductive edifice constructed upon it. Lazarus received the lesson badly. I believed at the time that it took him an entire term to shake off his mortification.’
Peregrine, who was now squatting very close to the object of his inspection, looked up at me.
‘It appears, however, that he may have nursed the resentment for longer.’
He indicated the three dissimilar sword-hilts protruding from the chest of the corpse of Hyperion Weill, their steel blades crossed at the point where they emerged through the back of the chair.
‘These are, I notice, the very implements which formed the crux of Lazarus’s earl
y academic misstep. Our killer entered Professor Weill’s study and perhaps engaged him in conversation. Then he snatched the first of these weapons from where it hung on the wall among the mementos of the professor’s long career – note the three sword-shaped patches of unfaded wallpaper – and, with it, struck the first blow. The others followed, rapier and tachi, as if in excess of revenge for that distant humbling. As if to impart his own lesson in the varieties of possible harm.’
Peregrine looked into his old tutor’s face, which was not peaceful.
‘We begin to perceive the contours of a dreadful logic. Those who have thwarted Lazarus Glass would do well to beware tonight.’
The gothic apartment blocks of Juno Square showed a handful of lit windows, but the streets were empty as we followed Inspector Nimrod through Belltown. Few had business in the university district at this time of night. Black reflections slicked ahead of us in the pavements and great weeping globes clung about the head of each lamp post.
Of those who had studied the arts of detection under Hyperion Weill, the most promising of all had been Electra Cavendish-Peake. She was a few years older than Peregrine and Lazarus, and the two friends had in their early days regarded her with envy and awe. She appeared far closer to the mastery they desired, with her sharp scholarly manners and hermetic turn of mind, her knowledge of esoteric casebooks and the furthest reaches of ratiocinatory theory, and the chilly style in which, while still a graduate student, she had solved the case of the Liars’ League: it had been as if she fixed that conspiracy in a block of ice which, with one smart tap of the intellect, she shattered, breaching all its secrets.
But she had shown small inclination to pursue the life of investigative adventure which beckoned. She preferred more regular habits, haunting the reading rooms of the university and city libraries, spending part of each afternoon at her club, and dining each evening at the same bistro, alone, with a book of abstruse criminology propped open before her. She devoted herself to research and correspondence, very occasionally publishing a monograph putting forward some revision to the fundamental theoretical postulates of detection, or an article resolving beyond question a cold case which had stumped the best minds of a century ago. The previous year, when after months of inquiry Peregrine had been all but ready to admit defeat in the matter of the Doubting Child, Electra had provided the key to the problem in a two-minute telephone conversation.