The Detective and the Devil (15 page)

The change was so sudden that he wondered whether Mrs Suttle’s friendship with Mrs Hopkins was anything more than an excuse to end a conversation that was veering towards uncomfortable
matters. The maid arrived, and he walked towards the door. As he went, he nodded towards the mantelpiece.

‘I was admiring your painting.’

‘You were?’ She had turned away from him, wanting him gone.

‘It is very striking.’

‘Captain Suttle painted it himself. From his own sketches.’

‘It is a likeness of a real island?’

‘Yes, of course. St Helena.’

‘In the Atlantic? The Company island?’

‘The very one.’

‘When were you there?’

‘I was not there, constable. My husband was. He was the assistant treasurer at St Helena for six years.’

It was almost full dark by the time he reached Lower Gun Alley. As he had predicted to Abigail, the trip to Putney had taken longer than he’d intended. Peach had waited
for him all afternoon in the tavern where he had met Martha Fry, and by the time Horton returned from Mrs Suttle’s, the man was drunk. The trip back downstream was alarming in the extreme,
with half a dozen near collisions and no time to think clearly.

He left Peach singing to himself at Wapping Old Stairs, while he climbed back up to the street. The man’s slurred voice echoed up from the riverbank, as if being pulled down by the
receding tide. Wapping was quiet and watchful in the warm night air. To his left a great vessel was making its slow way into the Dock, and even the men shouting from its decks down to the quay
sounded self-conscious, as if trying not to wake some giant within the Dock walls.

He passed the Police Office. He needed to report to Harriott, but first he needed to see Abigail. Turning the corner from Wapping Street he sensed, right away, that something was wrong. The
apartment’s windows on the first floor were open, but there was no light from inside; it was if they had been left open all day. He saw no movement within. He looked around to see if one of
the Wapping street boys – Cripps, perhaps, or Twitcher – was watching the house, but there was no one about. A single shout rang out from by the Dock, followed by a peal of
laughter.

He went through the street door and climbed up the stairs. There was still no noise, not even from the neighbouring flats. The door to his apartment was open, wide open, disgustingly open. He
stood on the threshold and looked inside. More darkness. More silence. The smell of a guttered fire. He stepped inside, and an old board creaked like a mast punished by a gale. He stopped, and
waited. Silence drifted in to replace the creak of the board.

If there was someone inside, they were in darkness. He, though, must have been framed by the dim glow from the hallway. He stepped away from the door, into the shadows. Through the little
parlour. Into the bedroom, to the right. Round the bed, down to the floor, moving his hands around in the pitch dark, terrified lest they brush against a lifeless face or an outstretched limb. Out
to the parlour again. A scurrying of rats’ feet in the walls. Some small glow from the street in here, enough to see the shapes of furniture. He walked around, looked around. Waited.

Nothing. No one was here.

Abigail was not here.

He turned and ran out, down the stairs, and barrelled out the street door, running straight into Cripps, who tumbled backwards with salty imprecations.

‘Watch it! Bloody watch it!’

Horton put a hand down to help him up, even as he began his questions.

‘Abigail! Where’s Abigail?’

‘Safe, constable. Safe. You don’t need to snap my bleedin’ arm! She’s at the Office.’

Abigail had done exactly what he’d asked her to do: she had fled to the closest shelter at the first sign of something being awry. She was there now, sitting with John
Harriott in his rooms, reading papers by the fire, and when Horton was shown in she stood and allowed herself to be wrapped within him. Horton glimpsed the magistrate over Abigail’s shoulder
and saw the old fellow smiling in an avuncular fashion. An oddly domestic scene.

‘Where is Rat?’ he asked.

‘He is waiting downstairs,’ replied Harriott. ‘I will not have street urchins sitting in my office.’

‘He is our ward, sir,’ said Abigail, with some defiance, and Harriott’s old face flushed red, whether in anger or embarrassment Horton did not care.

Abigail returned to her seat, and Horton stood behind her as she told her story. She had come home to find the house broken into. She’d been gone for only an hour, out buying some bread
and meat, accompanied by Rat. When she’d returned it was almost completely dark. She did not go into the house, seeing it opened. She had just turned around and come here. With, Horton
trusted, a watching but invisible honour guard of Wapping boys.

‘Did they steal anything?’ Harriott asked.

‘I do not know, sir,’ Abigail said.

‘But – what of the necklace?’ Horton asked.

‘It is safe,’ she said.

‘What necklace?’ said Harriott, irritably.

‘Sir, I have spent the day in Putney, speaking to Emma Johnson’s sister, and to the widow of a certain Captain Suttle. Mrs Johnson, her sister and their father were once in service
in this Captain’s household. I believe Mrs Johnson had some form of illicit correspondence with Captain Suttle, stretching back some time. Captain Suttle was recently found dead on Boxhill
after having been missing for a week. I was told that Mrs Johnson always had a notable amount of ready money, even as a girl. And Captain Suttle had a connection to St Helena – he was a
former assistant treasurer on the island.’

Harriott frowned in his chair, as if Horton had read him a riddle.

‘Also this, sir. Whoever entered our lodgings did so to search them, not to harm my wife. I would imagine the most likely explanation is that someone was watching the house and waiting for
her to leave. That suggests that whoever entered suspected we had discovered something, and wanted to know what it was. Or knew what it was, and wanted to retrieve it.’

‘And have you? Discovered something, I mean?’

‘Perhaps. This gold necklace holds a key. It unlocked a drawer in the dressing table in Mrs Johnson’s bedchamber. That drawer was empty when I searched the house.’

‘Meaning the killer emptied it?’

‘That was my initial conjecture. The necklace has some blonde hair tangled within it. Mrs Johnson also had blonde hair.’

‘
Ergo
, the key was hers, and whatever was in the drawer was hers.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘
Ergo
, whatever she had in there she kept secret from her husband.’

‘Possibly, sir. Even probably.’

‘Such as correspondence with Captain Suttle.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A love affair?’

‘That is possible. Mrs Suttle alluded to the possibility of inappropriate encounters in the past. As I said, I thought at first the killer must have taken the contents of that drawer. But
now I wonder if Amy Beavis removed them, and was killed for it.’

‘Eh? This did not come out at the inquest.’

‘It is mere speculation on my part. But something was taken from the girl’s home, I am sure of it. An etching had been hung on the wall, recently, which has now been removed. I
wonder if Amy, on discovering the bodies, removed the key from her mistress’s neck, opened the drawer and took the letters, hoping to make use of them. She may even have written to Captain
Suttle’s widow. I would wager that whoever killed Amy went to see her with the pretence of paying for whatever she had placed behind that etching. He offered a celebratory drink but then
poisoned it, and left with whatever Amy had hidden.’

‘The letters, perhaps?’

‘Yes. The letters.’

‘Which must, surely, have revealed a plot of some kind.’

‘Such would be my estimation.’

Horton was acutely aware of Abigail’s presence. She had not been in this room before now, and he was astonished to find how discountenanced he was by her being there. This was the room in
which Horton and Harriott did their work. He felt himself watched and considered.

‘It seems clear, does it not, sir, that there is conspiracy here?’ he said to Harriott.

‘Clear? Nothing about this is clear.’

‘But the Company . . .’

Harriott bristled a little.

‘The Company is very much like a nation unto itself: its own governance, its own army, its own rules,’ he said. ‘It must be expected that any encroachment from outside
authorities will be resented.’

‘Indeed so. But I suspect that this goes somewhat further than that. There seemed to be a determined effort to hide anything unusual that might have occurred in the private trade
office.’

‘And your hypothesis is that this may relate to the correspondence removed from Mrs Johnson’s dresser.’

‘Yes, sir. I have become convinced that the Johnsons were taken away and killed and then returned. Perhaps the killer wanted to stop Johnson investigating certain Company matters. Or
perhaps he wanted information on what Mrs Johnson did or did not know. But whatever he was after, he wanted that search hidden beneath the outcry that the return of the Highway killer would spark.
The maul was left for us to find, but this maul was new. I suspect its first use was in this act. It did not kill anybody. They were already dead.’

Rat sat in the chair by the fire, snoring softly to himself. His clean skin glowed orange and white in the flickering light. The parlour which had seemed darkly alien to Horton
as he’d searched it for signs of violence was now cosy. That odd whiff of domesticity that had come to him in the magistrate’s office had accompanied them home. The former mutineer, the
former nurse, the street urchin. An odd family indeed.

‘You will not apologise, Charles Horton,’ Abigail said, putting her hands over his as they sat at the table by the window. A candle sputtered light into the room, and danced in the
glass of the outside window.

‘Your safety has been endangered by my activities,’ said Horton, looking at the shadows which danced around her young-old eyes that had seen so much these past few years. ‘If I
had known it was so dangerous being my wife, and so unfruitful, I would never have married you.’

‘Ah! I see. You married me, husband. But what if I married you?’

She sighed. There was a sadness in here tonight, one he could not quite explain.

‘Charles, our story began with me tending you, did it not?’

Horton nodded. It had. She had been a nurse, he the victim of an attack. He had almost died.

‘Did you woo me, husband? Did you read me poetry or sing me ballads?’

Horton shook his head. Indeed, he had not.

‘No. You lay there barely talking. You were lost and lonely and terribly unhappy. But you noticed things. You noticed the other patients. You remembered the names of the doctors and the
nurses. And you noticed
me
, Charles. I saw you reading my face, taking in my words, placing me in that capacious library which sits between your eyes. I began to think that you had given
me a special place in that library. I know not why. And that’s when I began to woo you, Charles Horton. I wanted to see where you had placed me.’

Rat snored, gently.

‘I chose
you
, Charles Horton. And you were not an auspicious choice, all those years ago. You have improved, somewhat, like a good wine. And yet you persist in believing you
press-ganged me from a happy life into a dangerous one. Not your choice, husband.
Mine
.’

‘And yet – you are in danger.’

‘We are all of us in danger, husband. You as much as anyone. Would you have me run away and hide?’

‘A few days in Sheerness would . . .’

‘Oh, you and Sheerness!’

She smiled, but was angry nonetheless. Brown eyes gazed at him from under blonde hair.

‘You mentioned nothing of Dr Dee today, husband.’

‘Indeed not. Mr Harriott does not react well to talk of wizards.’

‘You do not believe Dee’s life to have a bearing on the case?’

‘How can it? Most likely, Johnson came across a reference to Dee’s time in St Helena, and decided to investigate further.’

‘Most likely.’ She smiled a wicked smile. ‘But – is it not intriguing?’

‘I have the most unyielding sense that I am being passed messages by whoever is behind all this. Have you discovered anything new in your reading today?’

She sighed, and he remembered how unhappy she had seemed the previous day when Rat first came, as if something unpleasant had occurred to her while he had been at his work.

‘Only that I understand nothing of what these Elizabethan men believed,’ she said. ‘I cannot unwrap the odder parts of the
Mathematicall Preface
. I have resorted to
the work of a man Dee refers to with admiration – but only because his book has been translated into English. I wish I had Latin!’

‘Who was this other man?’

‘He was called Henry Cornelius Agrippa. He was German, and denounced as a black magician during his lifetime. I could try and relate to you his cosmological view, but it would make as
little sense to you as it does to me. He asserts truths rather than proves them – it is as if he is describing a different reality. He believes the stars and planets revolve around the Earth,
and exert influence on everything here below by their rays. He thinks he can talk to angels. His life seems to be a mess of secret texts and hidden meanings and arcane symbols. He was, it seems, a
profound influence on Dee. I think they both believed that man could be perfected somehow; that he could become one with God.’

‘A blasphemous suggestion, no? Where did you discover all this?’

Abigail smiled, a secret expression that worried him profoundly.

‘I asked certain people.’

‘You should be careful, wife. We may be modern in our thinking, but such talk of dark arts may attract the wrong form of attention.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Charles. No one takes notice of one such as me talking of things like this. I am not Byron.’

Arcane symbols
, Abigail had said, and he remembered the bodies in the Police Office, that strange symbol which had disturbed him so.