The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  “Church?” Merryweather said. “Can you tell us the name of that church, sir?”

  “More of a charity, I think, properly speaking. Somewhere in the city. Of course, I’m perfectly happy with our little parish church but then she was always far more serious about all that than me. She was quite besotted with this new lot. Lord knows why.”

  “The name of the church, sir?”

  Honeyman harrumphed. “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you without looking it up.”

  Merryweather favored the man with his best professional smile. “We’re happy to wait, sir.”

  Muttering under his breath, Honeyman trudged from the room.

  “Inspector?” Moon said suspiciously. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  Merryweather was unable to hide his excitement. “It’s a rare day I’m ahead of you, Mr. Moon, but I fancy this time I might just have managed it.”

  “Tell me,” Moon said sharply. “Now.”

  “Patience.”

  Before Moon could frame a sardonic reply, Honeyman returned, brandishing a sheaf of papers. “Just as I said. They’re a philanthropic organization. Missionaries, I think. Something of that sort.”

  “Their name?” Merryweather asked again as he reached for his notebook.

  “I have it here.” Honeyman flicked vaguely through his papers until he came across the information. “The Church of the Summer Kingdom.” He wrinkled his nose. “Ridiculous name. You think it could be significant?”

  Merryweather scribbled furiously. “Yes, sir. I think it just might be.”

  They left with a promise to keep him fully informed of their investigation and strolled outside to the grounds where the Somnambulist was loitering about by the fish pond, listening to a groundsman chatter incoherently on about tree surgery. He gave them a quizzical look.

  “The inspector’s keeping something from me,” Moon explained sulkily.

  “Wait till we’re in the coach. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

  They were halfway back into the city before he finally told them the truth. “You remember Dunbar?” he began as the coach lurched with fearless rapidity in and out of the jostling ranks of traffic. “The Fly’s other victim?”

  “Of course.”

  “Seems his mother disappeared around about the same time as Mrs. Honeyman.”

  Moon sounded almost disappointed. “I see.”

  “Wait for it, Mr. Moon. Wait for it. This is the really interesting part.”

  “Let me guess,” the detective interrupted swiftly. “She was also a member of this gang of philanthropists — the Church of the Summer Kingdom?”

  Merryweather clapped his hands together in delight. “Precisely so.”

  “Well, then. It seems at long last that we have a new lead in the murder of Cyril Honeyman.”

  The Directorate.

  Skimpole had never liked the name. He thought it was ostentatious, pompous and unnecessarily melodramatic. It originated from the founding of the agency in more theatrical times, days of blood and thunder. Since the death of the Queen, Skimpole had harbored hopes that the excesses of the past would not continue into the new century. He felt that a secret organization (if it were to have a name at all) ought to take pains to make itself sound as commonplace and as unworthy of notice as possible — certainly not revel in a title like “the Directorate,” which sounded as though it had been torn from the pages of popular fiction and seemed to him to reek of showmanship and cheap sensation. Dedlock, however, had always heartily approved of the name and, as it happened, considered himself a man who positively thrived upon showmanship and cheap sensation.

  It was late in the working day and they sat in their usual places at the round table, Dedlock doggedly working his way through a bottle of wine, Skimpole struggling with a set of dense and tiresomely exhaustive surveillance reports.

  “This is quite like old times,” Dedlock said, all of a sudden gregarious.

  “How so?”

  “You hard at your studies, me bunking off for a drink.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Like being back at school, isn’t it?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Sorry I spoke.”

  The albino went back to his work, only to be interrupted again. “Don’t sulk, Skimpole, for God’s sake. You never talk about the old days.” After the consumption of the best part of three-quarters of a bottle, he seemed in a ruminative mood.

  Skimpole slammed down his reports on the table. “What news of Madame Innocenti?” he asked, pointedly ignoring Dedlock’s overtures of nostalgia.

  “She was last seen in New York. After that — poof! — disappeared.”

  “Damn.”

  “You’re convinced she was the real thing?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. But if there’s the slightest chance she was genuine — and frankly, I can’t believe that all the information she gave us was entirely a string of lucky guesses — then the very last place we want her is New York. Power like that in the hands of the Americans is unthinkable.”

  Mackenzie-Cooper emerged from the shadows, dressed in his usual unconvincing guise of a Chinese butcher. “Drink, sah?” he asked, speaking in that risible accent. Irritated, the albino waved him away.

  “You should join me,” Dedlock said. “It’s surprisingly good.”

  “Far too early for me.” Skimpole turned to Mackenzie-Cooper. “I’ll have a cup of tea.”

  The man bowed and disappeared to the back of the room. Although neither of his superiors noticed it at the time, he seemed oddly nervous. Dedlock was later to claim that he saw the man’s hands tremble and shake as though palsied, but this particular detail was one he was only able to recall a number of months after the incident and — suspiciously — during a dinner party at that.

  “What’s Mr. Moon up to?” Dedlock asked.

  “Following a lead on the Honeyman case. He’s still convinced it’s connected.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “I’ve learnt by now to trust his instincts.”

  Dedlock scratched idly at his scar. “He’s your agent,” he said.

  “I shan’t try to interfere. But if Madame Innocenti was correct, then we’ve only got four days left.”

  “I hardly need to be reminded.”

  “I’m thinking of moving my family out of the city. You know, before it happens. Have you made any arrangements?”

  Before he could reply, Mackenzie-Cooper returned with a large pot of tea. He poured Skimpole a cup and, offering the same to Dedlock, stressed in rather more forceful tones than really behooves an underling the efficacy of the drink in combatting insobriety. Dedlock grudgingly accepted and a cup of the rehabilitative brew was set beside his wine.

  As Mackenzie-Cooper was pouring, Skimpole swigged from his own cup and frowned. Far too much sugar. Still, he drank again, a bigger sip this time, taking a guilty pleasure in the saccharine rush.

  Dedlock leant across to the phoney Chinaman. “You all right, old boy? You don’t seem quite yourself.”

  Startled, Mackenzie-Cooper snatched the pot away, clumsily spilling a good deal of its contents in the process.

  “Velly sorry, sah,” he muttered, frantically searching his pockets for something to mop up the mess. “Velly sorry.”

  “No need to get yourself the up about it. It was an accident.”

  At last Mackenzie-Cooper produced a dishcloth, but as he reached across to clean up the tea, he succeeded in toppling his superior’s wineglass. Dedlock cursed as rivulets of tea and wine ran across the table and Niagaraed onto the floor.

  “Sorry, sah. Sorry, sah.” Beneath his greasepaint and disguise, Mackenzie-Cooper had begun to sweat.

  Dedlock started to clear away the spillage, but barely had he begun before he observed a most curious effect. As the wine and tea combined and intermingled on the table before him, the liquids seemed first to bubble, then to steam and stew in some unnatur
al reaction.

  Mackenzie-Cooper saw it, too. For an instant, they stared open-mouthed at each other, the one astonished that he had been found out by so petty an accident, the other trying desperately to understand the precise nature of what had occurred.

  With a Greek-wedding clatter, Mackenzie-Cooper threw the teapot to the floor, its china splintering expensively, and ran at full pelt for the exit. Dedlock bounded to his feet (with surprising athleticism for a man of his age) and raced after him, an unexpected blur of motion. Mackenzie-Cooper yelped in fear. Just before he reached the door, the older man rugby-tackled him, hurling his quarry to the ground, pinning the interloper to the floor.

  “Why?” he snarled. Mackenzie-Cooper said nothing, his eyes darting about him in fear. Dedlock slapped his face hard. “Why?” he asked again, and the man looked as though he might be about to cry. Another slap. “Why?”

  At this, Mackenzie-Cooper began to contort his face, gurgling, dribbling like a teething infant. Dedlock looked on. “What now?”

  By the time he realized what was happening it was too late. Mackenzie-Cooper screwed up his face again, swallowed something, then shuddered and convulsed, his face turning a mottled purple, white foam bubbling at his mouth. Seconds later, his body seemed to crumple in upon itself and he spasmed a few times before falling still. Dedlock screamed his frustration. Flinging the corpse aside, he staggered to his feet.

  “Cyanide capsule,” he explained (superfluously, in Skimpole’s opinion). He reached across to the spilt tea, dabbed a finger in the pool and smelt it carefully. “There was enough poison in that pot to kill us both. How much did you drink?”

  Skimpole lied. “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course,” the albino said, too quickly. “I drank nothing.”

  Dedlock nodded vaguely.

  Skimpole gazed down at the twisted body on the floor. “Thought you told me he went to Oxford.”

  Dedlock bent over the body and rugged away the man’s disguise to reveal not the callow Oriel alumnus they had expected, but a bald, middle-aged stranger, lugubrious-looking, ill and wasted. “Somehow I doubt he’s an Eton man,” he said.

  You may be interested to learn that the real Mackenzie-Cooper — a genuine, amiable old Etonian with far too trusting a nature ever to have enjoyed much success as an agent of the Directorate — was found three days later locked in a bathroom in one of the most squalid of the city’s lodging houses, half his head caved in and a look of abject terror on his face. No happy ending, then, for him.

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t recognize him?” Skimpole asked, surprised.

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Declan Slattery. Formerly a Fenian agent till he went independent a few years back. Bit of a legend in the field. Past his best now, of course. Gone to seed. This must be the first time anyone’s hired him in ages.”

  “But who?” Dedlock asked. “Who would want us dead?”

  Skimpole shrugged. “Could be a long list.”

  The Church of the Summer Kingdom was run out of a small third-floor office in Covent Garden which smelt strongly of dust and halitosis. On their arrival, Merryweather, Moon and the Somnambulist were met by a man whose bluff, ruddy-faced looks seemed to owe more to the taproom than the pulpit.

  “Donald McDonald,” he said, sticking out a meaty paw and adding with a twinkle: “Me mother had a sense of humor.”

  Moon shot him a disdainful look and he withdrew his hand unshaken.

  “What’s this about, gentlemen?”

  “We’d like to talk to you about one of your flock,” Merryweather said. “A Mrs. Honeyman.”

  “I’m so glad someone’s finally doing something. We’re awfully worried here. I’ve been absolutely frantic.”

  The inspector took a notepad from his pocket. “How often did you see her?”

  “She was one of our most devout members. One of the cornerstones, you might say, a bedrock of our little church.”

  “Forgive me for asking” — Merryweather scribbled frantically — “but what is the exact nature of your association with the church?”

  “Oh, I’m nothing special,” McDonald said, his modesty unconvincing. “I do a little lay preaching… help out where I can… assist our pastor in his good works.”

  “And who is he?”

  “It’s him you should be talking to by rights. Our leader, sir. Our shepherd. The Reverend Doctor Tan.”

  Merryweather dutifully wrote down the name. “May we speak to this Tan?”

  “He’s out of the city at present. I’m a poor substitute, I know, but you’ll have to make do. Normally we’re so much tidier than this.”

  Merryweather saw the thick layer of dust blanketing the place and tactfully decided not to comment. “Where is your church, sir? Surely you can’t take services here.”

  “Oh.” McDonald sounded vaguely irritated by the question. “We worship… nearby.”

  Growing tired of the seesaw of their conversation, Moon had begun to examine the room for himself, nosing about the cupboards, shelves and bookcases, openly curious, brazen in his rummagings. A crucifix hung above the door; below it was a discreet plaque depicting a black, five-petaled flower. Printed beside it were the words “If a man could walk through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke — what then?”

  Donald McDonald wandered across. “I see you’ve found our motto.”

  “Motto? I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance.”

  “Paradise, Mr. Moon. Elysium. The condition to which we all aspire.”

  “This isn’t scripture.”

  “S. T. Coleridge. The Reverend Doctor’s a great admirer. Our church reveres him and his work.”

  “Coleridge?” Moon was incredulous. “Might I ask what kind of church venerates a secular poet?”

  McDonald simpered. “No doubt you find that strange. Many do. Though I can assure you that anyone who spends time amongst us soon comes to appreciate our point of view.”

  “The flower beneath the crucifix,” Merryweather asked, trying to wriggle back into the conversation. “What does that represent?”

  “A motif we’ve appropriated from Greek mythology.” Donald McDonald summoned up a faraway look. “The immortal flower which blooms in Paradise for poets — amaranth.”

  “What’s the point of this?” Moon spat. “What is it you people do?”

  “We’re missionaries.”

  “Missionaries? In Covent Garden?”

  “The Reverend Doctor sees no reason to travel out of England when there is so much spiritual poverty, so much pain and deprivation, on our doorstep. London is in greater need of the cleansing light of revelation even than the darkest recesses of the Congo. Our work is done here amongst the forgotten people, those abandoned by the city, left to rot in the slums and in the hopeless places.”

  “We’ve heard enough.” Moon turned smartly on his heel and headed for the door. “Come along, Inspector.”

  “You will let us know if there are any developments?” McDonald asked, his voice dripping spurious concern, ersatz sympathy. “Mrs. Honeyman is in my prayers.”

  The inspector followed Moon from the room. “Didn’t believe a word of it,” he said once they had emerged onto the street. “Man knows more than he’s telling. You?”

  “I’m not sure,” Moon admitted. “This latest development is — I confess — unexpected.”

  “What was all that business about the plaque?”

  “Coleridge,” Moon said mysteriously.

  “Is there some significance?”

  “Are you a poetry-lover, Inspector?”

  “Not seen a word of the stuff since school.”

  “Then at least you’ve learnt one valuable lesson today.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Read more.”

  Later that evening, lulled by the rhythmic snoring of
his wife, just as he was about to go to sleep, Inspector Merryweather would think of rather an amusing retort to this. But he would know that the moment had passed, and would roll over instead and hope for pleasant dreams.

  Moon seemed excited. “Did you recognize the flower beneath the crucifix?”

  “Seemed pretty unremarkable to me.”

  “We found the same sigil outside the Human Fly’s caravan.”

  Merryweather shrugged. “Coincidence?” He looked about him. “Besides, aren’t you forgetting somebody?”

  “Who?”

  “The Somnambulist.”

  Regretfully, Mr. Skimpole put aside his fourth cup of tea since he had left the Directorate for the day, reflecting as he did so that the sound of a teacup clinking into its predestined place on a saucer was one of life’s small but perfect pleasures. There was something indefinably comforting about it, something soothing and warm and British. “Are you sure you don’t know when he’ll be back?”

  On hearing the question, Mrs. Grossmith felt a deeply uncharacteristic urge to unleash a scream of rage and frustration — in part at the albino’s bloody-minded persistence but also at a bottled-up lifetime of tireless obedience to the whims of infuriating men. She restrained herself. “No,” she said, trying not to let her irritation show. “I’ve no idea where he is or when he’ll be home. Mr. Moon’s quite capable of disappearing without warning for days or weeks at a time. Once, when he was investigating that Crookback business, he was gone for the best part of a year.”

  After the unpleasantness of the morning, Skimpole had wanted to speak to Moon, only to find him vanished. It was at times like this that he regretted honoring his promise to retire the conjuror’s shadow.

  “More tea?” Mrs. Grossmith asked, secretly willing the man to refuse.

  Skimpole waved the offer away and relief showed immediately in Grossmith’s face.

  “I’ve outstayed my welcome, haven’t I?”

  “Not at all.” The housekeeper’s smile was strained but still in place. Strange to think that there was a time when she had found this man a figure of menace.