The Shadow in the North (11 page)

Jim finished copying the clipping, glad not to have to face her. He didn't know what to say; her emotion was so naked and helpless. He ran his finger over the embroidery, his mind racing.

"D'you make this?" he said.

She nodded.

"I can get you a good price for stufF like this. You don't have to live in a poky little room like this, earning pennies. I know what you're thinking—^you do it to hide away, don't you? I bet you only come out at night."

"It's true. But—"

"Listen, Miss Meredith. What you've shown me tonight is a big help. I don't know if he's ever going to come back here. I reckon he's done a bunk, meself, out of that stink-hole, and you'll be lucky to see him again. No," he said as she started to protest, "I ain't finished. I'll give you one of our cards, and I'll put another address on the back—it's a young lady. Miss Lockhart. She's one of the firm—she's a good 'un. If you need anyone to go to, you call on her. And if you do see Mackinnon again, make him come and see us. All right? Or let me know yourself It's for his sake, afi:er all, silly bugg—bloke. If we can clear up this business, he can go back on the stage and do his tricks again, and we can all breathe easy."

As he left: Lambeth, he found himself whistling, for he'd made progress; but then he thought of her strange, lonely, passionate life and stopped. Villainy was nothing new to him, and even murder was understandable and clear-cut. But love was a mystery.

When he got back to Burton Street, he paused in the darkened shop, hearing voices raised in the kitchen.

Sally was there, and she wasn't pleased with Fred, by the sound of it.

Jim turned the handle and walked in. Webster was seated peaceftilly by the fire, pipe going, whiskey on the arm of the chair, feet on the fender, deep in one of Jims penny magazines. Chaka lay at his feet, grinding a ham-bone to splinters and taking up half the floor, while Frederick and Sally were standing face to face across the table, their tempers straining at the leash, voices shaking.

"Evening," said Jim. No one took any notice. He helped himself to a bottle of beer from the larder and came to sit down opposite Webster. "I've found Mac-kinnon," he said, pouring his beer. "And I know what he's up to. And I found out what Nellie Budd meant. I bet that's more than you silly buggers have done. I'm talking to meself, ain't I? No one's heard a word. Oh, well." He took a long swig from the mug and looked at the cover of the penny dreadfiil that Webster was reading. "The treasure's under Skeleton Rock," he said, and Webster looked up. "The Clancy Gang put it there after they blew up the bank. Deadwood Dick disguises himself as an outlaw and joins the gang. Ned Buckeye—the new crook—that's Deadwood Dick, only you ain't supposed to know."

Webster tossed the magazine down, exasperated. "What'd you tell me that for?" he said. "You spoiled it."

"I had to wake you up somehow. What's going on with these two, then?"

Webster looked up vaguely at Frederick and Sally. "Don't know," he said. "I wasn't listening. I was enjoying Deadwood Dick. They quarreling or something?"

Frederick was banging his fist on the table. "If you'd had the sense—" he was saying.

"Don't you talk to me about sense," Sally came back, tight-lipped. "I told you not to get in my way, didn't I? If you want to work together on a case—"

"Shut yer gob-boxes, the pair of you!" said Jim loudly. "I never heard such a racket. If you want some news, sit down and listen to this."

They stood for a moment, hostility still crackling between them; and then Frederick pushed a chair toward Sally and perched on a stool. She sat down.

"Well?" she said.

Jim told them about Isabel Meredith and read them the words he'd copied from the newspaper clipping.

"The way I see it," he said, "Mackinnons blackmailing Bellmann. He got hold of this cutting from somewhere, put it together with the trance business, and tried to touch Bellmann for a packet; and naturally Bellmann won't have it. Simple. What d'you think?"

"What's the connection between Nellie Budd and Mackinnon?" said Frederick.

"Stone the crows, I don't know," said Jim. "Maybe they both belong to a Share-Your-Psychic-Secrets Club. Maybe she's Bellmann's fancy lady?"

"And this business of inheritance," Sally said. "His

fother was someone important—^was that what she said?"

"Thats right.**

"Perhaps thats true. Perhaps he's the heir to something Bellmann wants."

"TjTits true," said Frederick. "Still, at least weVe got a little further. Did this Miss Meredith strike you as being truthful?"

"Oh, yes," said Jim. "I mean, she came up to me in the first place. She needn't have done that at all if she'd wanted to hide anything. She's only got one thing on her mind, and that's keeping him safe. I'm sure she'd lie to do that if she had to, but she wasn't lying to me. I'd swear to it."

"Hmm," said Frederick, rubbing his jaw. "Pax again, Lockhart?"

"All right," she said grudgingly. "But I wish you'd tell me straightaway when you find something out. If I'd known it was Bellmann who was chasing Mr. Mackin-non, I'd have had something else up my sleeve when I saw him."

"It was a damn silly thing to do anyway, if you ask me," said Frederick. "Charging straight in and—"

"Yes, but I don't ask you," Sally snapped. "You've already—"

"Enough!" said Jim. "Who wants some cheese and pickles? Mr. Webster? How's yer bone. Chuckles?"

Chaka thumped his tail on the floor as Jim rubbed

his ears. Frederick brought out a loaf of bread and some cheese, and Sally cleared the table, and within a few minutes they were eating. When they finished they put the plates on the bench behind them, and Jim got out his cards and they played whist, Sally partnering Fred against Jim and Webster, and before long they were laughing again, as they had done in the old days, before Sally went to Cambridge, when the partnership was new; before she and Fred had started quarreling. Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith's either. This was what love ought to be like: playfiil and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it. They were equals, these two—tigers, at the very least. They could do anything in the world if they worked together. Why did they have to fight?

cJke ^J/Pinler ^ardi

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On Monday morning Charles Bertram arrived at the shop with some news. He had a friend at ElHott and Fry s (the smartest photographers in London; they specialized in portraits of weakhy people in fashionable surroundings), and this friend had told him of a commission theyd just received: to take the engagement photograph of Axel Bellmann and Lady Mary Wytham.

Frederick whisded. "When?" he said.

"This afternoon, at Wytham's house in Cavendish Square. I thought you'd be interested. It's a full-scale job—^you know what Elliott and Fry are like. There'll be an assistant under-flashlamp holder, a junior lens polisher, a deputy tripod adjuster ..."

"What's the name of your pal? It's not young Proth-erough, by any chance?"

"As a matter of fact, it is. D'you know him?"

"Yes—and he owes me a favor too. Well done, Charlie. So Bellmann's getting married, eh? And to that lovely girl. . . Well, I'm damned."

And he seized his coat and hat and ran out.

Sally gave a morning a week to Garland and Lock-harts, to keep an eye on the accounts and to discuss developments with Webster and Mr. Blaine. She'd come in that morning expecting Frederick to be there as well, because Mr. Blaine had mentioned the need for more space and hoped Frederick would back his arguments.

"You see. Miss Lockhart," Mr. Blaine said as they stood by the counter, "I think we need some kind of clerical assistance, but as you are aware, there's very lit-de room for it to take place in here. I don't know whether there might be room in a corner of the new studio. ..."

"Absolutely not," said Webster firmly. "In fact, I'm beginning to wonder whether the studio's going to be big enough anyway."

"How are they getting on with it?" said Sally.

"Come and have a look," said Webster. "Busy, Charles?"

Charles Bertram joined them in the yard behind the shop. The new studio building was nearly complete; the roof was tiled, and two plasterers were working on the walls, but the windows were still empty. They picked their way through the planks and the ladders and the wheelbarrows and stood on the newly laid floorboards in a patch of thin, wintry sunlight.

"I'm wondering, you see," said Webster, "whether we're going to have enough room in here for the tracking camera. We'll only manage if we have the rails going round in a horseshoe shape—and then the light won't

be constant, either. Unless we black the whole place out and use artificial light. But the emulsion won't be sensitive enough at the speed we'll be using ..."

Charles saw Sally's expression and said, "There is a solution. This building's quite adaptable—it doesn't have to be a zoetrope studio. There isn't room enough in the shop for everything we do at the moment. Miss Renshaw would be able to take twice the number of bookings if we weren't so pushed for studio space. Why not put a wall across here—^just a light partition would do—and divide this into another better studio and the office space Mr. Blaine needs? Webster's quite right— we can't get a tracking camera in here, and we were silly to think we could."

"But you must have known . . .," Sally began. "What did you ever have it built for if it's too small?"

The two men looked sheepishly at each other.

"Well, it wasn't when we first designed it," Webster explained. "But we hadn't thought of the tracking camera then. We were thinking in terms of a fixed camera with a rapid plate-changing mechanism. There'd have been room for that in here. And that's where the fixture lies—^with a single camera. So the money's not wasted."

"I suppose you'll want to buy a field next," she said. "You're no better than Fred. Where is he, anyway?"

"Gone to Elliott and Fry's," said Charles. "Your Mr. Bellmann's getting married, and they're taking an engagement portrait."

"Married?" she said, astonished. The idea of marriage

seemed so at odds with the Bellmann she'd seen at Baltic House the week before that she could hardly imagine it.

"This field idea . . . ," began Webster, not interested in Bellmann. "What d'you think, Charles? We'd have to build a wall and lay the rails perfectly level parallel to it. Facing south. We could make it as long as we liked. Roof it over with glass, perhaps, against the weather ..."

"Not yet," said Sally. "There's no money for it. Get this studio built and earning as much as you say it will, and we'll see. Mr. Blaine, it looks as though you can have your office space. Do you need a fiiU-time clerk? Or would just mornings be enough?"

The tracking camera that Webster mentioned was an invention of his own, based on an idea from a photographer called Muybridge. It existed only on paper so far, since they hadn't had the space to set it up. It was really a battery of cameras mounted on wheels, which would be drawn on rails past a certain point and exposed in rapid succession in order to capture the movement of a subject there. The idea of photographing movement was in the air at the time; many people were experimenting with different techniques, but no one was close to a breakthrough. Webster believed that he had part of the answer in his tracking camera. Charles Bertram was working on more sensitive emulsions to allow faster exposures. If they could find a way of capturing a negative on paper instead of glass, they might be

able to mount a roll of sensitized paper behind one lens and use that instead of the tracking camera—provided they could make a mechanism accurate enough to pull the paper through without tearing it. If they managed that, they could use the new studio for the zoetrope, as Charles called it. There was a lot to be done.

Sally and Mr. Blaine left them discussing it happily, and went back inside to think about what they needed in the way of office help.

Early that afternoon, Lord Wythams daughter. Lady Mary, was sitting in the winter garden of his house in Cavendish Square. Too big to be called a conservatory, this glass and iron structure contained palms, rare ferns, orchids, and a pool in which swam slow, dark fish. Lady Mary (in white—a high-necked, ornate dress of silk, with a pearl choker, and everything the color of snow, like a sacrificial victim) sat in a bamboo chair under the fronds of a large fern. There was a book in her hand, but she wasn't reading.

The day was chilly and dry, with a hazy brightness that the glass and greenery diffiised into something almost subaqueous. From the middle of the winter garden Lady Mary could see nothing but green and hear nothing but the trickle of water that fed the pool, and the occasional gurgle of steam in the pipes along the wall.

Lady Mary's beauty was not a fashionable sort. The taste of the time ran to women built like sofas, with an

air of permanence, comfort, and stuffing, whereas Lady Mary was more like a wild bird or a young animal— slender and light-boned, with her mother s warm coloring and her fathers wide gray eyes. She was all delicacy and shy fire; and she had discovered already that her beauty was a curse.

It awed people. Even hardened charmers, eHgible young men about town, felt uneasy in her presence, clumsy and dirt)' and tongue-tied. And quite early on in her teens she had felt an intuition that instead of attracting love, she might even helplessly repel it, by being too beautifiil. Already there were shadows of tragedy in her cloud-colored ^t.s\ and her new engagement was only part of it.

After she had been sitting still for some time, she heard voices from the library beyond the glass door. She trembled; the book fell from her hand to the iron grille of the floor.

The door opened, and a footman said, "Mr. Bell-mann, my lady."

Axel Bellmann, in a gray morning coat, stepped past and bowed slighdy. Lady Mary smiled at the footman.

"Thank you, Edward," she said.

He withdrew, and the door whispered shut. Lady Mary sat quite still at the edge of the pool, her hands folded in her lap, as quiet as the white water lily beside her. Bellmann coughed gently; in the palm-laden air of the winter garden, it sounded like the soft growl a leop-