You Buy Bones Page 23

  Conjoined twins were mounted in a double box. He recognised Asia in their skulls.

  A woman’s skeleton hung, toes pointing downward. In life she had been young and beautiful with smooth, even features marred only by double canines in her jaws.

  He could see all of their skulls. He could see all of their faces.

  Watson forced himself to swallow. His hands shook from the weight of the candle and he got to the nearest table before dropping it. Cold sweat spackled the table-top from his brow. Breathe, he reminded himself. You must breathe. Even as Parker’s devilish singing haunted his memory:

  Mony a one for him makes mane...

  but none sall ken where he is gane...

  O’er his white banes, when they lie bare

  the winds sall blaw forevermair...

  Stop, he reminded himself. You are the Queen’s Major. There is no wind here to blow, there is no wind at all. And until the door is opened again, there will be nothing in the way of air.

  He swallowed again, and made certain the candle was settled. He had to find something that would prize the door. Otherwise, Parker would win with a new murder under his belt, and gain a new specimen for his collection.

  I thought him corrupted; I never thought he was mad.

  “Careful.”

  Bradstreet nodded once, just to show he’d heard his friend’s warning, and stepped without a sound into the room after Lestrade. In the hallway the two felt exposed and neglected at the same time. Behind them Bobbies rustled and jangled over the front steps, listening to MacDonald mutter his orders to spread out again, search again lads, look about, keep the truncheons out, and one hand ready for the alarm. Outside and off to the corner of the scrap of green clover a knot of servants huddled with each other and demanded what was happening. It had grimly amused Lestrade to note that there was a fundamental difference between rounding up servants in London: Here the little old ladies had no fear and were happy to treat the abashed Constables like overgrown children in need of a good dose of chapel.

  “They’re not in here.” Bradstreet’s face set tight. “I looked all over this side. The house is empty except for the staff.”

  “Watson left a form under his bed. He knew something was up and he couldn’t risk telling us. I don’t like this.” Lestrade gritted his teeth. “Blast.” He ran his thumb under his chin. “We do have Watson’s permission to go in after him. That would keep it from being a closed case.”

  Bradstreet did not rail at Lestrade’s study of procedure at a critical moment. The smallest incident could throw this entire case out of court, never to be tried again. They had to be careful. Everything was at stake.

  “However many people are gone,” he warned, “Eventually some of them are going to return. We keep this as quiet as possi-”

  There was a scraping sound and Bradstreet was yanking Lestrade down hard enough to pull his arm out of the socket. A bullet burst wood splinters into the smaller man’s neck; he yelped out of reflex more than actual pain.

  Bradstreet swore and pulled Lestrade deeper into the darkness.

  Alcohol.

  A close inspection of the door was not encouraging. The door was thick and incredibly sturdy; the hinges were on the other side safe from tampering. But the sawdust floor...

  Sawdust that was clean and new, fresh and dry. Going by its stench, it was made of pine and oak and maple - all woods quick to burn.

  Watson set his lips. Parker’s refusal to shoot him and give him a clean death would be his regret.

  Alcohol in the bottles. Used to preserve the soft-tissue specimens, but alcohol was alcohol.

  The problem was the oxygen. If he couldn’t burn the organic matter in the earthen floor out within a very short amount of time, he’d suffocate all the quicker.

  It was a terrible risk, but Watson was going to take it. A large bottle held a floating fetus with a badly misshapen skull. Watson paused only to shake his head at the ghoul his teacher had been, and as gently as possible in respect to the remains, poured the liquid as slowly to rest on the earth. The fumes were beyond belief. But...

  But few people rarely step onto the actual line beneath a doorway. They are in the process of stepping over that invisible line. Hence the sawdust floor there was much softer and porous.

  Watson’s crippling had made him very, very contemplative about how people walked.

  He watched as the alcohol soaked into the earth and cautiously set the jar back. Another match; he lit it cautiously and stretched his arm out as far as it could go before dropping the tiny flame into the dark wet stripe by the door.

  And the floor began to burn. Sawdust. Charcoal scattered to eliminate odours. All flammable. The smell went from beyond belief to beyond description. He gagged; only blood made that tang. Only blood created that eerie wraithlike plume of smoke. How much of it rested over that new layer? How much had entered the floor over how many years? It had become part of the earth; bonded into the floor itself. And now...

  He backed away as the alcohol burnt itself out. The air was hazed and thick; like a fireworks-factory inside a slaughterhouse. And a good three inches had softened up.

  Eyes burning, Watson kicked off a leg from the table, gripped it in his fingers, and began digging.

  “Halt in the name of Scotland Yard!”

  Lestrade nearly felt his heart freeze in his chest at Bradstreet’s roar. The Runner sounded in control... but only just.

  The little Yarder mentally prayed that Bradstreet was not hoping to provoke Parker into doing something desperate. In this charged air, it would be too easy to make mistakes. Parker was a military man; he might have more than the one weapon. He might try to shoot at them or shoot himself to avoid arrest and disgrace.

  Either way would spare the Crown the cost of a trial...

  Silence. Bobbies sensibly kept back, out of sight and out of range, and a few were shielding Mac from closer approach. Smoke hung in the air, sharp and metallic. Someone was panting in another room.

  “You heard me!” Bradstreet roared. “We know you’re there, and we’d far prefer not to kill you in the line of duty! Now throw down your weapon and give yourself up!”

  Something heavy and blocky clicked on the floor. “Very well, sir.” The voice was high and thin and quavering. “I have lowered my weapon... I am coming out now.”

  “Keep your hands in the air, sir.” Bradstreet was calming now; he sensed he had the upper hand when Lestrade did not. Lestrade threw his concentration all about them as the clouds parted outside the windows; in the soupy light of the city a lean man, elderly with wispy white hair was stepping forward, his bony fingers splayed out from his palms like sticks.

  “Who are you, then?” Bradstreet growled.

  “The butler.” Lestrade guessed.

  “How do you know?” Bradstreet saw the shock on the old man’s face.

  “If he was the owner he would have thrown his gun down to surrender. A butler is more worried about scarring his master’s floor.” Lestrade smiled terribly at the man’s continued worry. “I suggest you be truthful,” he suggested quietly. “I know everything you might possibly imagine about service. Where are Drs. Parker and Watson?”

  “Dr. Parker went downstairs to the Vaults.” The butler spoke firmly, but he still quaked inside his clothing. “I believe the Major went after him.”

  “Do you know what Parker was doing in the Vaults?” Bradstreet had picked up the gun and was holding it rather too tightly for Lestrade’s liking.

  The butler shook his head. “I am not allowed, sir.”

  “How does one get to these Vaults?”

  “Through the Curiosity Room, sir. There is a door.” A trembling finger pointed up the stairs to a blackened doorway.

  “Moss, you keep your eye on the man, get his statement, rally Mac and the
Constables, whatever. Tell Sidthorp to give me fifteen minutes and go after me as a back-up. I’m going down these Vaults, and I’ll let you know if I need any help. Too many at once could make it all go Guy Fawkes.” Lestrade had pulled his iron out and was checking it. It was a mean sort of satisfaction to see the butler’s little eyes grow wide as he realised that this policeman were armed. The look was just as quickly replaced by a vague sort of betrayal that Lestrade was well used to seeing. The public wasn’t used to the idea of policemen carrying weapons around.

  He did not quite smirk at the man. “Tell me best how to get to the Vaults,” he advised. “This has the look of an ugly trial, and you may wish to cooperate with us as much as possible.”

  9: Cover Our Bones

  “And nothing can we call our own but death

  And that small model of the barren earth

  Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

  -William Shakespeare

  A few moments in the ‘Curiosity Room’ and Lestrade was satisfied neither doctor was present.

  He waited a moment, listening. The hapless butler had been good enough to loan a bulls-eye lantern (it looked like something out of the Yard’s Evidence Room, circa grand opening), and the wrinkled glass of the ancient globe cast watery reflections off the polished walls.

  One wall was nothing but framed diplomas, certificates, and awards. Just the display was faintly sickening to the pragmatic little detective; it made him think of some sort of academic crowing; then again, he was a product of the Ragged Schools, and his fine diction owed to listening to the Master (also the sexton) talk more than what he was trained for (not that he’d be stupid enough to talk like the Master in his hearing).

  The lantern passed over a grape clustre of eyes suspended in a brandy-coloured liquid; he nearly dropped the lantern as several floated to his direction, as if facing him. It gave him a very bad start and his fear for Watson trebled. Padriag Dooley, his Gipsy contact, said the eye held the last image it recorded in life. Better that than having to spend eternity in a jug, staring at a wall of paper bragging credentials.

  He took a step deeper into the strange room - library, or museum, or medical laboratory? It appeared to be an uneven mix of all three. His foot sank down; something shifted without a sound, and the eyeballs wobbled again, mercifully floating away from his gaze. Ugh!

  Wait a moment...

  Lestrade’s brows knit up over the bridge of his nose. He stared at the eyeballs even though he really didn’t want to do such a thing... and stepped back.

  He counted his heart-beat in the silence.

  After the eighth beat the eyeballs moved.

  Holding his breath, the little man took a slow step forward, repeating his earlier manoeuvre.

  Ten beats this time. The eyeballs jiggled like raw yolk in the eggshell.

  Ice crystals crept over Lestrade’s hands, up his arms and across the nape of his neck into the base of his skull. A whisper across time pressed needles into his brain.

  Davids, his old mentor, and his supervisory officer’s bitterest foe. Davids’ murmur of recollection breathed over the years past to present.

  “We never would have found the swag, but the man had been to Japan and he learned how to trip the floor-boards so’s he’d know if someone had been in his rooms!

  “It was the weather-glass, y’see. He kept it mounted on the opposing wall from the door-way. If you didn’t know better, you’d take a step forward into the room, and flat on the middle plank. And that would make the crystals in the weather-glass shift. Oh, it was bloody ingenious! We didn’t catch on to the trick for nineteen years, can you believe it!”

  Someone had been here, and recently. They had stepped on that plank, and they made the eyes move the first time... Lestrade gulped hard, not liking what he was seeing so far. Tall panel, left side... Lestrade mentally counted the butler’s instructions and ran his free hand over the smooth wood, going against the grain for any tell-tale lines. A part of him was growing ever-more worried that this room seemed to have swallowed up two whole men. Thoughts of pit-falls and wired traps in the slums filled his mind, conjuring up old images of bloodied bodies and injured policemen. The criminal element, he’d long learned, could be clever in ways of causing harm.

  Cool air brushed his fingertips and he caught on a flaw; he lowered the lamp to a neat little chip of wood gouged out of the edge-piece.

  Watson.

  Lestrade was impressed. The doctor was a man of surprises. He would never have guessed the man knew that little trick of the CID. It would seem he did his share of reading as well as writing. He would be good at the Yard. I wonder if he would take us up on that offer someday. It was such a tantalizing thought.

  Lestrade dug in and the panel slipped outward without a noise. There was fresh oil on the hinges. Cool, dank air blew up in his face, strongly enough to move the hairs on his head, and with it, a warm reek of charnel. Lestrade’s neck-flesh stiffened. It was wrong, that stench, like blood and mushrooms growing in a basement and...

  His leather soles clicked softly against the fitted slate steps. They spiraled down like a castle’s... not good. He did not trust ponderous architecture such as this. He held the bull’s-eye high as he stepped down, bit by bit, and his nose stung from a queer scorching sensation. A burning abattoir mixed with the worst parts of a hospital, or...

  Lestrade paused a moment, thinking. The odour had washed him back into a memory that was too close to his mind. Four years ago the Princess Alice had taken on water from a blow by the collier Bywell Castle, and over 640 men, women and children had drowned in the Thames eleven miles below London Bridge. It had taken days for the Water-Police, dredgers, and any able policemen to find the bodies. The processing-camp to identify the dead had smelt too like this: metallic smoke, mould, mildew, sewage, oil, high-fumes, blood, bile, and water...

  It had been his first serious encounter with Sherlock Holmes as a private Detective, not a private Consultant (the first one delivering a message to the man for P.S. Roanoke, and the young man had struck him as mad even then). Holmes had stood apart so easily, for his idiotic nerve in moving among the corpses as well as his idiotic cleverness. He wondered if Watson had ever been told the details of that particular story.

  Probably not...

  Lestrade re-checked for his gun on instinct, slowly pulling it into his left hand. He didn’t bother with pulling the hammer back; he was fast enough to pull it and the trigger within seconds of each other. A primed weapon was more dangerous - he’d far rather his blood be on someone’s conscience than theirs on his.[6]

  Death sounded in the history of his mind and faced him forward. Something was standing on his instincts with little knives, warning him of a very tangible danger.

  Flesh of Christian, mends itself, he recalled his mother’s proverb too easily. If Watson was in this, he was not well.

  The small man stopped. His dark plainclothes suit blended his body in with his surroundings. There were whispery sounds, faint, but louder than his heartbeat. They were soft, delicate traceries against the ear, like the anxious breath of a dog wanting to slip its leash.

  Liquid gurgling.

  Panting of a large animal.

  And now... scuffling, the heel against hard earth.

  The sound of the mews; he was a horse-master’s son. He knew that sound in his sleep. Lestrade came to a decision quickly; he’d had more practice than he liked with this sort of poor-light manoeuvre. He set the bull’s-eye down and to the side and stepped out of its dull ring into the murky void. Its black depth seemed endless; mould glimmered on forgotten doorways and a second lantern, brighter than his own, threw shadows into the hanging cobwebs.

  A huddled-up man in brown was
hunched over a door. He was pouring the contents of a metal ewer into the floor, panting loudly from his effort. Smoke still curled up the bottom, rank and foul.

  Lestrade watched, realising the other did not see him; his expensive lamp had blinded him to the old bull’s-eye’s weaker flame. The man straightened, and he clutched at the door to scuff with his heel. Contrary earth scraped up under his efforts, trying to seal the smoke shut.

  “Stop this, Parker.” Watson’s calm, firm voice from the other side of that door - Lestrade had heard that tone of voice once - in the Malmsey Keg, when Watson demanded his own form of retribution to Elspeth’s murderer. “They know I’m here.”

  “That they do.”

  Lestrade had crossed the floor in long strides, the earth carpeting his sound, and merely pressed the tip of his pistol into the man’s neck above the collarbone. “Dr. Parker, you are now under arrest in the name of the Queen, and it is my duty to inform you that anything you say can be used against you - ,” His other hand yanked the bigger man up with grit-toothed strength as he rattled off the man’s rights, and pushed him back against the filthy wall; Lestrade was used to dealing with the unsavoury lots twice his size, and before the doctor could finish his whimper his wrists were snagged. “Dr. Watson, is that you there?”

  “I should hope so.” Watson’s voice sounded clearer; Lestrade saw a hole in the floor. Parker had been trying to fill it in. “But I’d appreciate an open door, Inspector.”

  “All right, then, easy enough. Might want to step away.” Lestrade looked down at his captive, thinking to get a key, but one look at the shivered wreck of a man sobbing against the wall changed his mind. He sighed, dismissed him as worthless, lined up the hinges, and braced his weight to one side. At close range, the heel-kick sent the wood popping free from the metal housing.