The Kingdom of Bones

“You’re going to hear what I have to say.”

“Great wisdom from the company’s Low Comedian?”

“That’s a role, sonny boy, it’s not a rank. You don’t seem to know the difference. I’ve forgotten more about the stage than you will ever know. You never match your business and you pick up your cues the same way you catch your trains. Well, I’ve seen through you and I know what your game is.”

Caspar stopped munching. He became very quiet and wary.

Gulliford said, “We both know there’s no other occupation where you can rise from the gutter to the very top of society. And from you, my friend, for all your French cologne and your high manners and your one good set of clothes, from you I get the definite whiff of the gutter. You’ve no love of the stage. You just like playacting.”

Caspar sniffed. “If you’re unhappy with my work,” he said, “talk to Edmund.”

“Edmund to you. Mister Whitlock to the rest of us. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed.”

“There’s nothing to notice. No man has hold over me. Nor I on any man.”

“No. But there’s something in it for both of you.” Gulliford reached over and took the new morsel from the end of Caspar’s fork, right under his nose.

“I don’t know what the bargain is,” he said, “and I don’t care. What I want you to remember is this. The rest of us aren’t your steppingstones. This is more than our living. This is our life.”

So saying, he flipped the morsel into his mouth.

It was horrible. He was thrown. After trying to contend with it for a moment, he had to spit it into his hand and place it on the table.

“Sack the chef,” he said and, still wincing at the taste, moved to the door.

“Anything else?” Caspar said.

“I’ve said my piece,” the Low Comedian said. “I’ll see you at the matinee.”

Caspar was left contemplating the spat-out and abandoned morsel. He speared it with his fork.

To the otherwise empty room he said, “I’m heading for places you can never imagine, my friend.”

And then he popped the appalling pickle into his own mouth, crunching it up as if such was the most natural thing in the world.

NINE

Sebastian traveled back with Turner-Smith in the superintendent’s own carriage. Once the ride was under way, he was eager to explain his suspicions and to share some of the conclusions that he’d half-thought through.

But Turner-Smith sat with his bad leg outstretched and his cane across his knees, looking out of the side window as the streets of the town unrolled past it, and said, “How is your mother these days, Sebastian? Is she well?”

The question was a surprise. Sebastian was not sure how to respond, so he simply answered, “She is, sir,” and then “I was not aware that you knew her.”

“We’ve never actually met,” Turner-Smith said. “But she wrote to me upon your promotion.”

“She did?”

Turner-Smith looked at him then, half amused as if he already knew the answers to anything he might ask, and all of his pleasure was in seeing the younger man’s reaction.

“She disapproves of your choice of profession and holds me personally responsible for your safety.”

“I apologize,” Sebastian said. “I did not know of any letter.”

“Don’t apologize,” Turner-Smith said. “You and she never spoke of the matter?”

“We rarely speak at all.”

The town’s main police office stood next to the magistrates’ courts, with a secure passageway linking the two buildings so that prisoners could be walked straight from the jail cells and into the dock. There were public rooms at the front, with offices at the back and the cells below. Its rooms were spare, bare, and high-ceilinged. Despite the presence of gas flares and the most modern cast-iron radiators, those who worked there complained that the small-windowed cells were the only warm rooms in the entire building.

There was a stable yard on the side, hidden from the street behind a high stone wall and archway. It was from the yard that Sebastian Becker and Superintendent Turner-Smith entered and made their way down the central corridor toward the Detective Department’s rooms.

Word of Turner-Smith’s arrival had preceded them. A uniformed man stood ready to open the door, and the office beyond it was tidy and square. Detectives stood to attention by their desks. The police cat and its new kittens had been swept into a cupboard and would stay confined there for the length of the superintendent’s visit.

“Be about your business,” Turner-Smith told them as he followed Sebastian. “This is not an inspection.”

He lowered himself into a chair with a sound of relief as Sebastian opened a drawer and took out a package. The seal on the package was broken, and it bore no address other than the words To the Police for their Kind Attention.

“This was left by persons unknown,” Sebastian said, opening it up and laying its contents on the table before his superior.

“When?”

“Some time yesterday morning. The desk sergeant found the package in the public waiting room, but he did not see who’d left it. There is no letter or message. In my opinion, the writing resembles that of a child.”

“Or an illiterate.”

“It’s hard to say. The spelling is correct. But the hand is not a practiced one.”

The contents were three sheets of a heavy, cheap paper with a distinct smell of the glue pot. Each bore pasted-on cuttings from a number of different newspapers.

“Perhaps the writing has been disguised,” Turner-Smith said, leaning forward with both hands on the head of his walking stick. He peered closely at the sheets without attempting to touch them.

“They are theatrical notices,” Sayers said.

“So I see.”

“All for the Purple Diamond company. All from different newspapers in different towns and cities on the tour.”

“And not a good notice among them, by the looks of it,” Turner-Smith said. It was not necessary to read the reviews in full to get the flavor of their content; certain negative words caught the eye and told the story. He added, with growing interest, “Each notice appears to have been paired with a crime report from the same pages.”

Sebastian said, “Look at the dates.”

Turner-Smith looked at them. “They’re not the same.”

“But there is a consistency. The notices are all from first nights. Which means that each mutilation murder probably coincides with the end of a run. Three days, four days, perhaps even a week later. It varies.”

“And?”

Sebastian said, “The Purple Diamond company closed at the Lyric last night. They’ve already packed up and left town for their next engagement.”

“Leaving human remains for us to find today.”

“So the pattern holds.”

“If it is a pattern. I’m sure I could throw together a list of dead paupers and foundlings for any set of dates and places you could mention.”

“Yes, sir. But all dismembered? Flayed? Eviscerated?”

“I am not disagreeing with you. I think you are probably right. This has the look of insider work, Sebastian. Someone in the company is signaling their suspicions.”

“I suspected that, sir, but I could not be sure.”

“Where are the good notices, Inspector Becker? Show me a tour that could survive on notices like these. The good ones are in somebody’s press book. These are the leftovers that no performer would care to remember.”

“Of course, sir. Now I understand.”

“You’re turning out to be not a bad little detective, though. I credit you for it, Becker.”

“I credit my teacher.”