The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  But Suttle had failed in his cajoling, and had presumably been recalled. The man had not even said farewell to her. He had simply stopped coming to see her, and after a few weeks of his absence she walked down the hill from her house to his little dwelling and knocked on the door. There was no answer. She had tried the door, and it had opened, and she’d gone inside. The house had been empty. Suttle was gone.

  The Governor had confirmed Suttle’s departure. She was pleased, but also disconcerted. Previous assistant treasurers had not left until their replacement arrived on the island. Little handover ceremonies had become the norm: Captain Jenkins to Captain Fox, Captain Fox to Captain Campbell, Captain Campbell to Captain Suttle.

  A blissful eighteen months followed, until the day he had arrived, knocking on the door of her house one evening as the sun began to sink over Halley’s Mount. She had opened the door, and had seen him there, with his new suit and the hat rising from his head and the red hair beneath it being revealed.

  No, she had not recognised him, then. But he had stepped into the house without an invitation, she had taken a step back, and she had seen his eyes, and she had known because those eyes had not left her dreams – not really – in the intervening forty years.

  ‘Hello, mother,’ Edgar had said.

  Back from him, back from him she had stepped, her hand to her mouth and her eyes wide. The baby who had been taken from her, the mouth she had suckled, had turned into a tall, pale man with that shock of red hair. His father’s hair. He was as tall as her and his face was broad and almost Slavic, the Dutch inheritance of the Aaksters. He looked powerful. One look into his eyes and she was back, back, back over the years, back to the chair into which she now sank, back looking into his eyes as he fed on her, those eyes which seemed to be full of something old and terrifying.

  He closed the door behind himself.

  ‘Mother, I am the new assistant treasurer,’ he had said. ‘Your family line is, you see, still intact. So we will now begin our lessons. You will teach me the Opera, as your father once taught you.’

  MRS HORTON AND THE DEVIL

  Abigail walked with Seale and her husband down to the harbour wall the next morning, and watched the massive rollers in the ocean with horrid trepidation while the two men made the boat ready. They would be at it for some time, it seemed – Seale admitted that he had not taken the boat out for some time, and it appeared barely seaworthy. Her heart was in her mouth at the thought of her husband rowing out into those waves in a boat which, from here on James Town’s wharf, seemed about as robust as a muslin curtain.

  ‘I will leave you to this,’ she said to Charles.

  ‘As you wish, wife,’ he said, barely glancing at her as he inspected the bottom of Seale’s boat, coiling a length of rope between his elbow and fingers as he did so, a task which looked as natural to him as breathing.

  Men and boats. She would not try to interject.

  The soldiers at the drawbridge waved her back into James Town as if she were an old friend. She had begun to feel comfortable in this strange place – almost at home. The bright sky, the green of the foliage and the brown of the rock, the warm incessant breathing of the wind. She remembered the dark grey skies of Wapping, the smell of shit and piss in the street, the tarry thickness of the air.

  She walked back up the main street, and fetched her little leather satchel from the Castle of Otranto, glancing at the map which was still laid out on the table, the map over which the three of them had talked the previous night when Seale returned. He had taken some drink, she could see, so she had made coffee and he had sobered up quickly, and had answered her husband’s questions carefully. The two men had a project now – the bay below the old fort – and like all men it was the only connection they needed.

  Once more, she walked up the valley towards the interior. There was no mist today, even at the highest peaks, and this as much as anything else lifted the unease she initially felt at walking back up towards Halley’s Mount. The creature she had seen was not there.

  And, of course, that was the real terror: that she had, indeed, imagined it. That her mind was once again painting pictures of things that did not exist. Charles had made no such suggestion the previous day – but was he just being careful?

  The human mind is uncharted, Dr Drysdale had told her. Your experience at Brooke House demonstrates that fact. It may even be possible to put one man’s thoughts into another man’s head. The mesmerists believe something like this, do they not?

  They did believe that – and so, clearly, did Dr Drysdale, though he had imagined that she had some ability in this direction. Well, he had been wrong, and she had been abused. She would think no more of it. Perhaps she could confront her own imagination up there on Halley’s Mount. Is that what Dr Drysdale would suggest?

  The path up the mountainside in bright sunlight was a different thing – cosy and rural where yesterday it had been terrible. The dogwood trees cast polite shadows. She picked the occasional flower or leaf: the strange purple bent grass which seemed indigenous to the island; three or four different species of Aspidium which she did not immediately recognise; a thick rush which she thought was the same as that used on the roofs of the island, and which she took to be Fimbristylis textilis; cherry laurel trees, their leaves smelling slightly of the same almonds Charles had described when he talked of Gay-Lussac’s hydro-cyanic acid; large Lobelias with astonishing white flowers; a stout shrub which she saw in several places, with thick branches, which she confessed herself to be stumped by; a tree which she took to be a kind of laburnum, but of a type she had never seen before. She could not help but feel a stab of excitement at this, even though she knew it was almost impossible that she had come across a new species on an island which the Royal Society had visited so often, albeit looking for myths and not botanical specimens.

  She reached the remains of Halley’s little observatory, and once again stood watching the blue horizon for a while. No ogres presented themselves. She had been collecting for a good while, so decided to walk east to see if she might catch a glimpse of this abandoned fort. Who knew, she might even see her husband and Seale down in the sea in that untrustworthy boat. She walked quickly. And then there was a moment when she realised that she was probably being followed.

  The moment did not consist of any great revelation – she didn’t spy a head disappearing behind a rock, didn’t hear a careful footstep on the hill behind her – but slowly a dozen or more little signals coalesced into this new realisation: that someone was trailing her, and being very careful about it.

  Immediately she imagined the ugly creature of the previous day. Did it wish her ill after all?

  A definitive crack of a twig. Her follower had made a mistake. Whoever it was, they were fifty feet or so behind her, to the south west. She turned around a rocky outcrop – much as she had done the day before – and immediately ducked down and waited. Seconds later, a figure worked his way around the corner, silently and carefully.

  It was Ken, the island boy who they’d encountered on their first evening on St Helena. He was alone. No Hippo accompanied him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked Abigail from her place in the shadow of the rock. The boy yelped, and seemed about to run, but then thought better of it.

  ‘Why, Mrs Horton! What a surprise!’

  He smiled his big white-toothed smile, and his charm turned on like an oil lamp.

  ‘You were following me, Ken.’

  ‘Following you? Why no, madam, ’tis a madness to think so!’

  ‘You were. Why?’

  ‘Mrs Horton, you’re a suspicious lady, so you are!’

  ‘Ken, I’m warning you . . .’

  ‘Please, Mrs Horton,’ said another voice, and a tall man with a shock of red hair emerged from behind the rock. ‘It was not Ken who was following you. It was me.’

  Seale’s boat was an ancient but sturdy thing. Horton imagined it being passed down from Seale to Seale, constantly patched up and added to until
the original boat was little more than the idea of a boat, not a single original piece surviving. It might have been as old as the island, this boatish concept. He claimed to have built it himself, but Horton thought there was rather more to it than that.

  The ancient thing took some time to prepare. After Abigail left, they were at it for another two hours, though Horton did not begrudge the time. Preparation for sailing allowed him to occupy his hands and the front of his mind in matters of knots and sheets which were as ingrained in his muscles and bones as the memory of the deep orange sand on the beach at Margate. And meanwhile the case churned in the deepest parts of his self, the place from where connections and narratives emerged into the light.

  Eventually they were ready, and by now the sea was calm. Seale gave thanks for that. ‘The rollers beyond the quay can be murderous,’ he said. Horton remembered their arrival, and Abigail’s difficulty in getting out of the boat. He remembered the eyes of the men in the boat and the way they rested on his wife.

  He wondered if Abigail was safe, and where Edgar Burroughs the assistant treasurer might be. Perhaps he should, after all, have fetched her, brought her with them – but was she safer on this old boat, or on that lonely land? Where was she most at risk? How did he protect his wife from a world which seemed inclined to do her injury? What was the calculus of danger? The unending, unanswerable question.

  But now it was too late, they were leaving the wharf, and James Town and its hilltop forts slowly pulled away from them. They bounced and fell through the rollers, and then they were in the calmer and deeper waters beyond. They turned east out of the little bay, the shore on their starboard side, a single sail hoisted by Seale catching the wind with more efficiency than Horton would have ever credited.

  ‘What is that?’

  They were approaching Prosperous Bay. Horton pointed at a fissure in the cliff face, a gap through into the island interior, a dry valley which reached its end perhaps a hundred feet into the air. Below it was a huge cave.

  ‘That is Halley’s Cave,’ says Seale. ‘Or so I will call it when I build my model. It is where he explored in the underwater suit he had constructed.’

  He pointed to a single peak in the interior, visible along the fissure in the rock above them.

  ‘That is Halley’s Mount,’ he said.

  Horton looked at the mountain. From up there, Halley had not just been able to see the stars; he’d been able to see down this fissure, and thence out to sea. And he’d decided, it seemed, to explore this particular cave, using this so-called ‘underwater suit’ of his own devising. Why had Halley come all the way down here?

  He pictured it: a ship, anchored off the shore. A boat, let down into the rolling sea and rowed to the beach at Prosperous Bay. A cargo, carried away by that same boat and onto that same ship. An astronomer, high up in the mountains in the dark, watching lights appear off the shoreline rather than gazing at the stars. The stench of illicit activity hung over Prosperous Bay like the nosegay of a Covent Garden beau hunting down a whore.

  The bay was now to their larboard; Seale was heaving to before the fissure in the rock, and the cave below it, turning his bow through the south-easterly wind and adjusting his sail so the opposing pressures of sail and wind held them in place. He did this efficiently and well, and Horton could only admire his seamanship. He imagined the mountain dropping away beneath them, down into the depths. Take the sea away, he thought, and this might be a gentle slope leading up to the face of an escarpment, in which there was a gigantic cave below a waterfall. There were, in fact, features just like this in the island’s interior.

  ‘We can go no further in?’ Horton asked.

  Seale looked at him. He had asked few questions about why a botanist needed to see the island from the sea. He seemed to want to ask some questions now, but Horton also saw the man’s own interest in their adventure. He wanted to sail in, if only for the thrill of it.

  ‘We can try.’ So in they went.

  ‘It is true then, Mrs Horton. You are a botanist. Among a good many other things.’

  His words were chilling, even in the warm breeze that came in from the south, over the island at their back. She stood ten feet from him, and even at that distance she could feel how closed off he was, how self-contained. His thick red hair was churned by the wind, but his face and, more to the point, his eyes were dead still.

  ‘You have been watching me?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I have been watching you. I make it my business to watch people like you. And people like your husband. I have been watching both of you for a good long while.’

  He had no weapon – no pistol, no knife – that she could see. But then she looked around her, saw the rocks and the steep slopes, and observed that a well-timed shove would be as effective as a knife to the throat. The landscape was the only weapon he needed.

  And yet why did she immediately think of murder? What was it about this man that bespoke fierce and immediate danger?

  ‘Sir, you have me at a disadvantage.’

  He smiled.

  ‘I do, do I not? Perhaps a good deal more than you might imagine.’

  He didn’t give his name. His dark suit was impossibly clean, his hands and nails impossibly well groomed. It was as if he’d stepped off Jermyn Street and onto a hillside in the South Atlantic.

  ‘Have you found anything interesting, Mrs Horton?’

  He said her name as if he were stabbing her.

  ‘There is much to see of interest on St Helena,’ she replied, carefully.

  ‘Isn’t there? Of course, a great many of our plants are not indigenous. St Helena has been planted with the seeds of the whole globe, Mrs Horton. We are as it were a microcosm. I believe that is the correct word. From the Greek, yes? Mikros meaning small, and kosmos, meaning world.’

  ‘You are learned in Greek, sir. But not in manners. You have not seen fit to introduce yourself.’

  ‘No indeed. Let me remedy that. My name is Edgar Burroughs, madam. I am the recently appointed assistant treasurer on St Helena.’

  The name, though suspected, still had the capacity to chill.

  ‘You have recently been in London, sir, have you not?’

  Why she said this, she did not know. She was scared of what he might do, but she was also angry. The man’s impertinence was vicious, and if he had done the things her husband suspected him of doing, he was also the very Devil. Abigail felt a clear pulse of hatred towards this man, an immediate and visceral emotional dislike. It was as if he’d stolen her home from her; which, she supposed, he had.

  ‘You are not in London, now, Mrs Horton,’ was all he said. ‘And thus you may not benefit from London’s protections.’

  He looked over to the east of the island.

  ‘Where is your husband, Mrs Horton?’

  ‘I know not.’

  ‘A lie, I am sure. A lying woman. The most common of the species.’

  ‘Sir, you . . .’

  ‘I wish to make your husband an offer,’ he said. ‘Work for me, live on the island, build a new life. There are worse offers. A house in the sun. Better botanising than is available in Wapping.’

  It was a finely calibrated turn in the conversation, and she lost her social balance for a second. He smiled at her – the smile of a torturer picking up a new implement. He had said Wapping with the precise care of a surgeon interrogating a cadaver’s nervous system.

  ‘This is a kind of Paradise, Mrs Horton. Open to the sky and immaculate in its isolation. So much more pleasing than two rooms near the London Dock.’

  God, he knew a frightening amount about them.

  ‘And how would your husband reply?’

  ‘I know not.’

  ‘And I believe you. He is a close one, Charles, is he not?’

  ‘And who are you, to make such offers?’

  ‘Oh, a mere functionary. A guardian of fiduciary matters.’

  ‘You speak for the Governor?’

  He smiled, looking at her.
His eyes were black buttons, his face long and pinched, his feet cloven inside those beautiful boots.

  ‘No. The Governor speaks for me, my dear.’

  ‘Charles is a good man. The best man I know.’

  ‘And I am a good man too, after my fashion. I preserve the island’s secrets, you see. Even when those secrets emerge thousands of miles away.’

  ‘At any cost?’

  ‘At any cost.’

  ‘Including the lives of innocents?’

  ‘No one is innocent, Mrs Horton. Least of all the wife of a Wapping constable who knows more than he lets on, and is privy to secrets he should not be.’

  She saw something, then, down in the depths of his face. Something dark and old. It was as if a demon really did exist within those eyes. She wondered if his mother had ever seen it there.

  He stepped forward, and for a moment she imagined shoving him, hard, so that his tall black body tumbled, sharp face over cloven hooves, down into the gully below. All it would take would be a step or two.

  ‘Abigail, my dear,’ he said, smiling his well-groomed but empty smile. ‘We should be friends, not enemies. I am delighted to make your acquaintance, at last.’

  ‘Now, you make somewhat free with my Christian name, sir. It is not welcome.’

  ‘But it is such a good name for you,’ he said. ‘Pretty, but sturdy. Appropriate, for the wife of a Wapping river constable, would you not say?’

  She almost ran, but what would have been the point? He would be upon her in seconds.

  ‘I would like to take a small walk with you,’ he said.

  ‘I fear that would not be in my best interests,’ she replied.

  ‘On the contrary. I would like to discuss my proposal with you. There will be no harm.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘No, my dear. You do not.’

  He walked over to her, and with an impossible smile held out his arm. With a sense of leaping over a precipice, she took it, and together they walked towards the east, away from James Town and towards that eastern point Charles and Seale had become excited by the previous evening.