The Kingdom of Bones

Someone was standing over him. He looked up as the waiter spoke. “The gentleman is here now, sir,” the waiter said, and moved aside for his visitor.

“I’m Tom Sayers,” the man said, and took a seat on the opposite side of the booth. The waiter hovered for a moment, but the newcomer shook his head.

When the waiter had moved away, the man faced Turner-Smith and said, “What can I do for you, Superintendent?”

“I’d been hoping to speak to Mister Whitlock himself.”

“I’m Edmund Whitlock’s acting manager. I handle all the company’s practical affairs. If I can’t help you with it, then it probably can’t be done.”

Turner-Smith considered the man before him for a moment, and then decided that he could speak as one gentleman to another. They were more likely to have interests in common than in conflict.

“Take a look at this, please, Sayers,” he said, and placed before him one of the pasted-up sheets that suggested a link between paupers mutilated without apparent motive and the stage company’s progress around the country.

The other man read for a while, and then glanced up.

“Some of our less notable receptions.”

“The dates, Mister Sayers. Look at the dates.”

He read on for a while. Then he sat back in the attitude of a man conceding an argument that had already been won. “This is very revealing,” he said.

And Turner-Smith, who for the past minute had been given the opportunity for a closer study of his visitor, said, “Are you by any chance wearing greasepaint, Mister Sayers?”

The man threw the paper onto the table between them.

“Ah,” he said. “There you have me.”

Under the table, Turner-Smith reached out for his sword stick. He took care not to signal his intention. “Yet you are not listed on the playbills among the actors,” he said.

“Very true.” The man smiled. “I can see that you are too good a detective for me, Superintendent.”

A few moments later, the man rose from the booth and walked out of the saloon. The four commercial travelers in the next booth were laughing so hard at a story that none of them noticed his departure. One took a draft from his mug and leaned back in his seat, only to splutter it out all over the table.

His fellows were slow to catch on. Their humor ebbed, where his had vanished in a flash.

“What the devil?” he said. “Something pronged me!” And he turned in his seat to find out what it was.

All clustered for a closer look at his discovery. An inch of pointed blade protruded from the horsehair back of the bench on which he’d been sitting. “Lor’, Jack,” said the one with the walrus mustache. “They’ve sat you in one of them iron maiden thingies.”

“Iron maiden be buggered,” said the wounded one, and stood up to look over into the next booth.

There sat the white-haired, stern-looking man who’d come limping in on a stick about three-quarters of an hour before. His back was to them, his head bowed.

The stick was in two pieces now. The hollow shaft lay across the table by his emptied glass. The other, the blade and handle part, had been thrust through his chest and had him pinned in place like a bug.

James Caspar was across the alleyway and in through the stage door in no more than a dozen strides. The Silent Man pulled the door shut behind him and then followed along a snaking route through the backstage areas toward the wings. As he walked, Caspar shed his jacket, his cravat, and his collar. He let them fall and the Silent Man collected all of them in his wake. Out came the cuff links, his sleeves shaken loose. Up five steps and through a door, and ahead of them the fly ropes and the lights of the stage. He put his hand in his hair and tousled it, as befitted a man who’d been unjustly condemned at the end of the first act and was now being returned to life and honor, thanks to the remarkable insight and unstinting efforts of a sixty-year-old detective with rouged cheeks and a corset.

Out on stage, Whitlock had already spoken Caspar’s cue. It came at the end of an entire page of speech, delivered to a grieving Louise and building to a rip-roaring climax that usually brought the house to its feet as the lover she’d thought hanged was restored to her with a flourish.

Seeing no sign of Caspar, the Low Comedian had drawn breath for an ad lib to cover a stage wait. Before he could deliver it, Caspar sprang into view, not so much entering from the wings as being ejected from them. He flung down the hooded cloak of the mysterious beggar who had been seen outside the window in the middle of the second act—all part of the detective’s brilliant plan to fool the true culprit into revealing himself—and threw out his arms to receive Louise. She ran to him and hit him like a train, and as the audience cheered their embrace, Whitlock quietly moved upstage of the pair ready for his next revelation.

At the back of the auditorium, Sayers had returned to the spot where he’d been standing earlier. As those around him whooped and whistled, Sayers nursed a heart like a heavy stone. The reason for this was a short conversation that he’d had with Louise in the brief interval between the play’s two acts.

It had gone like this:

Tom!

What is it?

I need to ask you something.

Anything.

Do you think James—Mister Caspar—likes me at all?

A silence.

Tom?

But everybody likes you, Louise.

Later, when the evening’s entertainment was over and the players were all leaving the theater, they were confronted by a considerable police presence around the public house next door. Two wagons were drawn up on the street and a large number of uniformed men had surrounded the building and were turning onlookers away. Lanterns had been set for extra light, and sheets and a stretcher were being taken inside. A man from the Salford Chronicle was talking to people on the pavement, trying to separate fact from fiction and getting some of the most enthusiastic accounts from those who had been nowhere near the events. It was a fight over a woman; it was the work of a gang over from Regent Road; two people were dead; three people were dead; everyone in the pub had been massacred. A drunk had run amuck with a knife. Sailors had fought with locals. It was the so-called Buffalo Bill’s Gang, local scuttlers stirred to a violent frenzy by their unreasoning passion for the penny-dreadful magazines.

Sayers made it his business to get the women away as quickly as possible.

Caspar was nowhere to be seen.

ELEVEN

Before he went for his train, Sebastian Becker went to church. It was his first visit for some time. The doors were unlocked but there was barely any light in the dawn sky outside, and it seemed he would have the place to himself for a while. When he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the fall of the iron latch echoed like a gunshot all the way up to the vaulted roof.

Perhaps this was a mistake. One look at his surroundings and again he felt some of the deep spiritual terror that he’d known as a small child, making its mark that he knew would never be fully erased. The Catholic Church, the same the world over. Whether it was a cathedral in Cologne or a mission in California, in their essence they never varied. Candles and gilt, darkness and mystery.

And suffering. Always suffering. In every image, in every hymn, and in every prayer; and it was always inflicted by a God who spoke in Latin, and borne by a Christ who resembled no Jew that Sebastian had ever met. As if the real Christ had been insufficient for the Church’s purposes, so they’d manufactured their own.

He knelt briefly in the aisle, and crossed himself. It took no effort to remember the procedure. He wanted to ignore it, but could not see how. The training ran too deep and he knew that he would freeze, unable to continue until the omission had been corrected.

Once that was over, he took a seat at the front of the church. Where the congregation sat, right in the front row. There were oil lamps around the high altar that had been burning all through the night. Behind the altar, in an