towards an elegant house immersed in silence.
The fence around it was not too high, and a creeper seemed to adorn its facade for the sole purpose of making it easier for a daring man to climb to the window of a sleeping girl.
Tom gazed with infinite tenderness at the girl who loved him as no one had ever loved him before. From her lips came short, soft sighs as though a summer breeze were wafting through her. He noticed her right hand clutched a piece of paper on which he could make out Wells’s minuscule handwriting. He was about to wake her with a caress, when she opened her eyelids slowly, as though he had roused her simply by gazing at her. She did not appear in the least surprised to see him standing beside her bed, as if she had known that, sooner or later, he would appear, guided by the scent of her narcissi.
‘You’ve come back,’ she whispered sweetly.
‘Yes, Claire, I’ve come back,’ he replied. ‘I’ve come back for good.’
She smiled serenely at him, pushed back the bedclothes, stood up and walked into his open arms. And as they kissed, Tom understood that, regardless of what Gilliam Murray thought, this was a far more beautiful ending than the one where they never met again.
PART THREE
Chapter XXXIV
Inspector Colin Garrett of Scotland Yard would have been glad if the sight of blood did not make him feel so queasy that each time his job obliged him to look at a dead body he had to leave the scene to be sick – especially if the cadaver in question had been subjected to a particularly dreadful attack. However, sadly for him, this was such a regular occurrence that the inspector had even considered the possibility of forgoing breakfast, in view of how little time the meal remained in his stomach. Perhaps it was to compensate for this squeamishness that he had been blessed with such a brilliant mind. At any rate, that was what his uncle had always told him – his uncle being the legendary Inspector Frederick Abberline who, some years previously, had been in charge of hunting down the vicious murderer, Jack the Ripper.
Such was Abberline’s belief in his nephew’s superior brainpower that he had practically delivered the boy himself to Scotland Yard’s headquarters with an impassioned letter of recommendation addressed to Chief Superintendent Arnold, the austere, arrogant man in charge of the detective squad. And, during his first year there, Garrett had to acknowledge that, to his surprise, his uncle’s trust in him had not proved unfounded. He had solved a great many cases since moving into his office overlooking Great George Street, apparently with very little effort. He had achieved this without leaving his lair.
Garrett would spend long nights in his cosy refuge, collecting and fitting together the pieces of evidence his subordinates brought to him, like a child absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle, avoiding contact with the raw, bloody reality that pulsated behind the data he handled. A sensitive soul like his was unsuited to fieldwork.
Perhaps the morgue was the place that showed off the grittier side of crime to its most flamboyant effect – its tangible side, its unpleasantly real physical side, which Garrett tried so hard to ignore. Each time he was forced to view a body, the inspector would give a resigned sigh, pull on his hat and set off for the loathsome building concerned, praying he would have time to flee the autopsy room before his stomach heaved, and avoid bespattering the pathologist’s shoes.
The corpse he was meant to examine that morning had been discovered in Marylebone by the local police, who had handed the case to Scotland Yard when they had found it impossible to identify what kind of weapon had inflicted the wound on the victim -apparently a tramp. Garrett imagined the bobbies doing this with a wry smile, content to give the brainboxes in Great George Street a sufficiently puzzling case to make them earn their salary.
Dr Terence Alcock had been waiting for him at the entrance to the York Street morgue, wearing a blood- stained apron, and had confessed that they were faced with a mystery he for one found completely baffling. And when a man as well versed as the pathologist, who was fond of airing his knowledge at every opportunity, admitted defeat so openly, Garrett decided he was confronted with a truly interesting case, the sort you might expect to find in a novel featuring his hero Sherlock Holmes. In real life, more often than not, criminals showed a distinct lack of imagination.
To Garrett’s astonishment, the pathologist greeted him with a grim expression and guided him in solemn silence down the corridor to the autopsy room. He immediately understood that the inexplicable wound had vexed him to the point of clouding his usually excellent humour. Despite the rather alarming appearance that having only eyebrow gave him, Dr Alcock was a cheerful, garrulous fellow. Whenever Garrett appeared at the morgue, he always greeted him jovially, reciting in a sing-song voice the order in which he considered it most appropriate to examine the abdominal cavity: peritoneum, spleen, left kidney, suprarenal gland, urinary tract, prostate gland, seminal vesicles, penis, sperm cord ... a litany of names ending with the intestines – he them left until last, he explained, for reasons of hygiene: handling their contents was a revolting job.
And I, who see everything whether I want to or not, as I have repeatedly reminded you throughout this tale, can confirm that, notwithstanding his propensity for bluster, in this instance the doctor was not exaggerating. Thanks to my supernatural ability to be in all places at once, I have seen him in this unpleasant situation, covering himself, the corpse, the dissecting table and even the floor of the autopsy room with excrement. Out of concern for your sensibilities I shall refrain from any closer description.
This time, however, as he walked down the long corridor, the pathologist had a melancholy air, and did not reel off his usual list, which Garrett, thanks to his prodigious memory, had often caught himself singing under his breath, usually when he was in a good mood. At the end of the corridor, they reached a large room where the unmistakable odour of decaying flesh lingered in the air. It was lit by several four-branched gas lamps hanging from the ceiling, although Garrett thought these were not enough for such a large room, and only made it seem even grimmer. In the semi-darkness, he could scarcely see more than two yards in front of him.
Rows of cabinets filled with surgical instruments lined the brick walls, with shelves of bottles containing mysterious opaque liquids. On the far wall was a huge basin, where on more than one occasion he had seen Dr Alcock rinsing blood off his hands, like someone practising a macabre ritual ablution. In the centre of the room, a figure with a sheet draped over it lay on a sturdy table, lit by a single lamp. The pathologist, who always wore his sleeves rolled up, which Garrett found disturbing, gestured to him to approach the table. On a stand next to the body, like a sinister still-life, lay an assortment of dissecting knives, blades for slicing through cartilage, a cut-throat razor, various scalpels, a few hacksaws, a fine chisel and accompanying hammer for boring into the cranium, a dozen needles threaded with catgut suture, a few soiled rags, some scales, an optical lens, and a bucket of pinkish water, which Garrett tried not to look at.
Just then, one of the pathologist’s assistants opened the door hesitantly, but the doctor shooed him away angrily. Garrett remembered hearing him rail against the foppish youngsters they sent fresh out of university, who wielded an autopsy knife as though it were a pen, moving only their hand and wrist rather than their whole arm, and making timid little cuts as if they were preparing a meal. ‘They should leave that type of slicing to the people
