Communion Town

by Sam Thompson

  Peregrine had recounted this much by the time we arrived at a restaurant with a handwritten menu tacked inside its grubby window. A pair of police uniforms moved aside to admit us, and we found ourselves among a jumble of tables on which suppers lay half-finished. Wine from overturned carafes had stained the checked tablecloths deep red. In the far corner of the room, the body of Electra Cavendish-Peake leant across the table at which she had begun, but not concluded, her last meal.

  ‘Cassandra,’ said Peregrine, ‘perhaps you would care to reconstruct what has taken place?’

  I nodded, and for some minutes I studied the scene in silence. At last I straightened and exhaled.

  ‘The sequence of events is apparent,’ I said. ‘Dr Cavendish-Peake was dining by herself, as we know was her practice. Her demise was sudden and dramatic. The restaurant was full and the other diners vacated the room rapidly, as we can see from these overturned chairs. Coats hang abandoned on the hooks beside the exit.

  ‘How did she die? The puncture mark near the victim’s mouth, and the colour and contortion of the face, give evidence enough of the cause. But if we wish for more, we have it. Note, first, the book which lies closed on her left hand, as if she wishes even now to keep her place: a new academic hardback from Bloodstone Press. Looking closer, we can identify it as a recently issued collection of essays by various contributors, offering new interpretations of the case of the Double Sun – a case in which, as it happens, Dr Cavendish-Peake herself played a part some dozen years ago. In solving it, by the way, she sank a blackmail operation as profitable as it was cruel, and behind which the influence of Lazarus Glass was, if not demonstrable, perceptible.’

  Peregrine lowered his head a few affirmative degrees.

  ‘Beside the book lies a padded envelope addressed to Dr Cavendish-Peake. We can hypothesise that, having received the package earlier in the day, she in all probability delayed opening it and examining the book until she was sitting at the table. Perhaps she was not paying attention as she opened the seal since, for a theoretician of her distinction, deliveries from academic publishers were surely a common occurrence. Closer examination, however, reveals that this was no gift sent in hopes of a favourable review. Peering into the book’s interior where it is held open by her stiffened hand, we notice that a cuboid section has been excised from the central pages with a razor or sharp knife, creating a hollow cell within. When she opened the book, she released what had been imprisoned in this space.’

  ‘Fiendish,’ said Inspector Nimrod to himself.

  ‘It sprang at her face, inflicting the injury we see here. She would have begun to feel the effects of the venom at once, and, given her quick perceptions and full acquaintance with the relevant arachnological data, she must have understood the severity of her situation. But she remained alert, and, observing that the instrument of her decease was now scuttling across the floor towards the restaurant’s panicking patrons, she picked up a piece of cutlery and flung it with the necessary force and accuracy to impale the creature that we see here.’

  I indicated the point, some distance away, where a pale brown tropical spider the size of my hand was fixed to the floorboards by a obliquely angled steel fork.

  ‘Alongside her more sedentary accomplishments she was always superb with a throwing-knife,’ said Peregrine.

  ‘Phoneutria mortifera,’ I said. ‘Commonly known as the poison pen spider. Its neurotoxin takes effect with atrocious speed and potency. She would have known that her own case was hopeless, and that protecting the other diners was to be her final action.’

  ‘This is sound work, Cassandra.’

  ‘But incomplete. I see what has happened but I cannot tell why.’

  ‘True. And there I must assist you, because to uncover the why of this scene we must plunge further into those lost times when Electra, like Lazarus and myself, was a precocious neophyte.’

  He plunged his hands into his raincoat pockets and contemplated the disarrayed restaurant as he spoke.

  ‘I have indicated that the nature of Electra’s gifts led her into the abstract and obscure reaches of our discipline. What you must also know is how profoundly Lazarus Glass, at that moment in his development as a young investigator, was influenced by her, this exceptional deductive intellect whom he saw as being always one step ahead on the path to mastery.

  ‘He would follow her from lecture hall to library, clutching the work of whichever theorist he had discovered most recently, pouring out his latest ideas, always wanting an argument – wanting, too, new ways to gain the advantage in his rivalry with me. Electra, for her part, found in Lazarus a keen interlocutor, and soon realised that while he shared her taste for arcana, in his case this mingled with an impatient pragmatism. He loved strange notions not for themselves but for what they might enable him to accomplish.’

  Electra Cavendish-Peake had been developing an unusual theory of detection, Peregrine explained. Instead of the standard casebooks, she was spending days and nights in neglected reading rooms deep in the library, surrounded by heavy, crumbling volumes: Anacratus, Raymond Lully, Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Döhl, Robert Fludd. It was clear to Lazarus that she was pursuing some curious line of research, but he had to importune her for some time before she consented to share her ideas; perhaps she intuited, even then, that not she but Lazarus was the person to bring her theory to fruition. She told him that she was exploring what had once been known as the Art of Memory.

  At that time, Lazarus had no more than a layman’s understanding of the principles of memoria artificialis: the secret, well known to the ancients, that the human memory could be understood as a physical place, a spatial structure. The long-ago practitioners of the Art had discovered that it was possible to build, in the mind, houses of memory – temples and palaces of memory.

  So, for instance, Electra explained, she had already succeeded in constructing a complete mental replica of the Green Stairs townhouse where she had spent her early childhood, recreated in such detail that, although the original building had been destroyed in a fire a decade ago, she could now close her eyes and walk its rooms and corridors just as if she were there once more: and inside her memory house she could store what she wished to remember. She had framed a certain afternoon on the riverbank seven summers past, and hung it in the hallway to be admired whenever she liked. In the garden behind this house of the mind, she had laid out in formal flowerbeds her plans for her career, some of them strong and bright, others no more than frail shoots. Before the sitting-room fireplace lay a Turkish carpet whose pattern she knew by heart, and into its symmetrical figures she had encoded the names of all her personal and professional acquaintances, so that, as she traced the relationships between them, their faces winked up at her from the nodes and buds of the design. And in the glass-fronted bookcases of her father’s study she had arranged every book she had read in her time at the university. She demonstrated this to Lazarus, reeling off the authors’ names alphabetically, then the titles in reverse alphabetical order. She pulled down one or two volumes and read from their opening pages as fluently as if she actually held them in her hands.

  Which was a nice trick, said Lazarus, and useful enough as a tool for the busy scholar. But he failed to see how any of this was likely to advance the science of detection. He was missing the point, Electra replied; and, with that, he found he had to persuade her all over again to take him into her confidence. She had no patience with those who did not keep up. She refused to discuss the matter further until he had, at the very least, ameliorated his ignorance of mnemotechnics by reading the essential modern treatises by Yates, Hawksquill and Carruthers.

  When he had done so, she relented. To convey to him what she had in mind, she read aloud the passage from the Confessions in which Augustine speaks of the ‘spacious palaces of memory where countless images are hoarded, brought in from all the diverse objects perceived by the senses’, and adds: ‘There too are hidden the altered images we create in our minds by en
larging or diminishing or otherwise transforming the things we perceive.’

  That was the crux of it, Electra said: altered images. It was true that, with long and gruelling study, a practitioner of the Art could learn to retrieve all the lost junk and treasure hidden away in the attics of the mind, and to arrange everything in order: each image in its place, tidy and accessible. But it was also true that surprising things could happen in memory houses. To embody ideas in such a fashion was to imbue them with unpredictable life. They might move around when you were not there; they might change and grow in ways you had not expected.

  She had noticed this already in her own small experiment. Further down the garden of her memory house, beyond the formal beds of ambition, she had one day been taken aback to discover another bed, in which grew a thorny tangle of grudges and resentments which she had not intended to plant. On closer examination she had been still more startled to recognise the forgotten wrongs that some of the older plants represented.

  Later, too, when she looked at the Turkish rug in which she had patterned the network of her acquaintances, she found that the curls and interleavings suggested unexpected links between them. Guided by these hints, further investigation had revealed that, yes, those graduate students were working together on a furtive conference paper which came close to impinging on Electra’s own research; that, yes, those two members of the Senior Common Room enjoyed a relationship which was not purely professional. She had not been conscious of these useful facts until her memory house had brought them to her attention.

  Such discoveries were mere toys, of course, and nothing that would rebuild the foundations of detection. But the larger possibility she had glimpsed held precisely such a promise. Consider the nature of detection, she said to Lazarus, this art to which we have dedicated ourselves. Is it not also an art of memory, in which we must retain every insignificant detail which might prove to be the key to a case? And does our discipline not have a special affinity with the ancient practice of the memory house, for where does the detective live, if not in a memory city, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and symbols? Does she not, in her mind, walk the streets at all times, in search of the meanings concealed there?

  Lazarus saw what Electra was driving at, now, and he realised immediately that although it would require phenomenal work to accomplish, the rewards could be commensurate. If a detective could build, in his mind, a memory city which replicated the real city in every detail, then every mystery contained in that city would lie open to him: he would have mastered his discipline with a perfection otherwise unthinkable.

  They talked through the night, growing bright-eyed as they developed the theme. Supposing it were possible, using the techniques of memoria artificialis, to construct an entire memory city, how would such a system of investigation work? The detective would become a perpetual flâneur within his own mind, forever wandering the pavements of memory to read the symbols and to encounter the shifting images through which the city would give up its secrets. To walk endlessly in imaginary streets would be a price to pay, no doubt, but in return one would gain powers of deduction nothing short of uncanny. Such a detective would foresee crimes before they took place, and would know criminals’ motives and hiding places before they knew themselves.

  As the discussion became more excited, even fanciful, Lazarus kept one thought to himself. It was this: he was already some way towards the creation of the hallucinatory city that Electra posited. For all the hours he laboured over his books, Lazarus spent still more time walking the city, learning the mazes of its alleyways and slums, for he had always known that this was the only book that mattered to him. When he won fame, it would be for his readings of blood on brick, not ink on paper. He told himself that, in a way, the idea had belonged to him long before Electra had come to it. With her ancient codices and hermetic schemata, she had merely given him the tools to make it possible.

  ‘For Electra,’ Peregrine said, ‘that night of feverish student talk was the apex of the project. She delved some way further into her inquiry, but before long her rationalism prevailed. She concluded that the obstacles were too enormous and the rewards too uncertain to make the idea worth pursuing, and she diverted her energies to more productive lines of research. When she mentioned this to Lazarus, he agreed, and assured her that he, too, had dropped the notion of the memory city.

  ‘Years later, I learned that he had been lying.’

  Steady drizzle fell as we left Belltown and hastened across the Old Quarter, trailing Inspector Nimrod through Twistgate to emerge into the stately public spaces of the Esplanade. In front of us, the facades of the Autumn Palace seemed to hang weightless, picked out by the floodlights. As we crossed the Parade we passed only a few night-owls on their way for a late stroll down the Mile, towards the cafés of Impasto Street or across the river to visit the headier attractions of Serelight.

  Before us, overlooked by the Palace, lay the metro plaza. By day it would have been filled with stopping and starting trams, travellers embarking and disembarking, tourists poring over maps and locals pressing irritably through the crowd, but tonight the plaza was deserted except for a single tram, standing empty with its doors open and its interior lights making it a jointed yellow prism in the dark. And gathered around it, the familiar array: the saloon cars stopped at slewed angles, the slow-pulsing beacons, the bobbing torch beams, the reflective tape, the conferrals, the faces mingling nausea and boredom, the uniforms.

  We approached the tram, and Inspector Nimrod paused to collect himself. Then, motioning his subordinates aside, he showed us the remains of Brutus Thorne, and the manner of the third murder.

  ‘One headache is where we’re going to place the scene of the crime,’ said the inspector. His laugh was a single thump on a rusty drum. He kept his eyes averted from what lay between the tracks at the rear of the tram. Peregrine, by contrast, was all attention: a critic formulating his first response to a challenging new piece.

  At last he turned away.

  ‘Brutus was a fearless comrade,’ he said. ‘No two investigators could have differed further in style and temperament than Peregrine Fetch and Brutus Thorne; but many times we reached the same ends by discrepant means.’

  Peregrine’s voice was steady, his face calm and unlined. I could not exactly name my thoughts as I observed this. I admired my mentor’s power to remain detached in the face of horrors, but as he confronted the grisly decease of an old friend for the third time in a single night, his composure untroubled, I experienced a fleeting chill.

  Brutus Thorne had not subscribed to the principles of pure reason to which Peregrine was committed. He was a detective in another tradition. While Peregrine preferred to solve his clients’ puzzles through mentation alone, and took the deepest satisfaction in those cases which he was able to conclude without once rising from the Chesterfield in his consulting rooms, for Brutus the tools of investigation were muscle and grit. He got results by using his ears in the dive bars of the Liberties, and his fists in the alleyways outside; by means of coffee-fuelled stakeouts and rooftop chases. Peregrine, an expert at impersonation, could mingle in disguise with the city’s criminal element and never be detected, but Brutus Thorne needed no disguise at all, because he lived there.

  In spite of their differing approaches to their work, the paths of the two men had crossed frequently in their shared campaign against the villainies of Lazarus Glass. Peregrine, for instance, had once devoted five months of archival research to the case of the Ship in the Mirror, and had been on the cusp of a solution when he read in the newspaper that Brutus Thorne had broken the case with a single well-placed hidden microphone. On the other hand, Brutus had once worked himself into the ground over the affair of the Green December, shaking down informants, tailing suspects and running phone-taps, only to discover that Peregrine Fetch had, weeks earlier, foreseen the whole sequence of events, and had simply been waiting for the would-be kidnappers to incriminate themselves before he in
formed the police of their intentions and whereabouts. And then again, the case of the Demolitionist’s Song would have remained a mystery to this day had Peregrine and Brutus not joined forces to expose the conspiracy. Thanks to Lazarus Glass, the felonious genius of the city, the rival detectives had become allies over the years.

  ‘What we do know,’ the inspector said, ‘is that Brutus Thorne was last seen alive in Shambles Heath, in the vicinity of Meaney’s. That’s one of the low drinking dens he was known to frequent, Ms Byrd.’

  I had picked up several useful leads in Meaney’s myself, in the past, but I just smiled.

  ‘Witnesses confirm that when Thorne left this establishment he was deep in conversation with an unidentified companion, and that both individuals were seen to proceed in the direction of the Shambles Heath metropolitan tram station.’

  That had been the last sighting of Brutus Thorne alive, the inspector told us. But there was no lack of testimony about what followed. The reports formed a long curving trail across the city, southwards from Shambles Heath through Serelight and into Glory Part, then across the Part bridge, up through Lawntown and Communion Town into the Esplanade: all the way along the line of the metro that this tram had travelled tonight.