we neared our destination, they removed the straitjacket. The three men escorting me did not live long enough to regret it. I jumped from the moving carriage. Nearly blinded by daylight, I was still able to complete my escape.'
'What did they mean to do with you?'
'The carriage was riding through Kensington. Toward the palace. I believe that their intention, having created this craving in me, was to implicate me in the execution of some terrible crime.'
Sparks drained his glass and stared at the corner.
'So as to what you witnessed on the night we rode to Whitby ... in spite of my best efforts in the intervening months, I have not altogether rid myself of this ... dependence.'
'Is there anything I—'
'Having said just that much ... I must call upon you as a friend and a gentleman and insist that we never speak another word of this matter again.'
The muscles in Sparks's jaw clenched tight. His eyes went hard, his voice hoarse with emotion, withdrawn.
'Of course, Jack,' said Doyle.
Sparks nodded, rose abruptly from the table, and moved out the door before Doyle could react. The weight of this new knowledge added to Doyle's oppressive weariness. He staggered to the rear of the car and looked in through the drawn curtains at Eileen in the lower berth. She hadn't moved from the position he had first seen her assume, her breathing slow and regular. As quietly as he could manage—holding at bay a befogged awareness that this decision carried more import than could possibly seem apparent—Doyle climbed to the upper berth. Sleep—a sonorous, black, unconscious deep— came and took him quickly.
Doyle opened his eyes. No sensation of movement; the train was not moving. Daylight filtered into the berth. He looked at his watch—quarter past two in the afternoon—and parted the curtains, squinting against the brightness: a train yard, the one they had used before in Battersea, south of the
city. He swung his feet over the side and climbed down. The lower berth was empty, as was the rest of the car. He exited.
The engine and tender were gone, uncoupled. The passenger car sat isolated on a remote siding. Doyle searched, but there was no sign of the engine anywhere in the yard. He ran to the stationmaster's office. An old, bewhiskered engineer stood at the window.
'The engine that pulled in that car,' said Doyle, pointing. 'Where did it go?'
'Left early this morning,' said the man.
'There was a woman on board—'
'Didn't see no one leavin', sir.'
'Someone must have.'
'Don't mean they didn't; but I didn't, did I?'
'Whom can I ask?'
The old man told him. Doyle canvassed workers who'd been present when the train came in. They recalled the train arriving, but none saw anyone leave it on foot. Definitely not a woman; that they would have remembered.
Yes, you would have remembered her, said Doyle.
Doyle looked for a card to leave with them when he remembered his last few belongings had been lost at Ravenscar. But his pocket was not empty. He found a thick roll of five-pound notes and Sparks's silver insignia. Placed there while he was asleep. He thumbed the notes; there was well over a year's salary. The most money he'd ever seen at once in his life.
Doyle walked back to the car and methodically searched for any sign or letter that might have been left behind but, as he suspected would be the case, found nothing. He retrieved his coat, stepped down from the platform, and left the yard.
The day was heavily overcast, not overly cold as the wind was down. Doyle stopped at a pub to sate his gnawing hunger with a shepherd's pie. He thought of Barry. He bought a cigar at the register, left the pub, and waited to light the smoke until he began to cross the Lambeth bridge. Stopping halfway, he looked down at the churning, impersonal gray water of the Thames and tried to decide where he should go.
Resume his old life? If his patients, such as they were, would have him. The generous stake he'd been left was more than sufficient to set him up in another apartment and replace his possessions.
No. No, not yet.
The police? Out of the question. Only one idea made any solid sense. He crossed the rest of the way, turned right through Tower Gardens, past Parliament, and north along Victoria Embankment. The rush of traffic, the blur of commerce, felt as insubstantial as apparitions. Eventually, he reached Cleopatra's Needle. How much time had passed since he'd stood here with Jack and heard the story of his brother? Less than two weeks. It felt like a decade.
He turned left away from the river and made for the Strand. He bought a leather satchel, a pair of sturdy shoes, socks, shirts, braces, a pair of trousers, articles of underwear, and a shaving kit from the first men's outfitters he encountered. From a tailor down the street, he ordered an expensive bespoke suit of clothes. Alterations would take a day or so, if the gentleman didn't mind. The gentleman was in no particular hurry, he replied.
He packed the clothes in the satchel and hired a room at the Hotel Melwyn. He paid in advance for five days and nights, requesting a suite by the stairs on the second floor. He signed the register as 'Milo Smalley, Esquire.' The clerk, whom he did not recognize from his previous stay, took no particular notice.
Doyle bathed, shaved, returned to his room, and dressed in his new clothes. The police would still be interested, if not seeking him actively, but that concern troubled him not at all. He walked out into the evening. He bought two books from a stall near the hotel: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavad-Gita. He dined alone at the Gaiety Restaurant, spoke to no one, returned to the hotel, and read Twain until sleep overtook him.
The next day he walked up Drury Lane to Montague Street. Sparks's apartment was closed tight, no signs of life, not even the sound of a dog. No neighbors were available to query. On the way back, Doyle bought a bowler and umbrella from a haberdasher on Jermyn Street. He picked up his new suit at the tailor later that afternoon.
No sooner had Doyle finished changing into his gray worsted suit—the finest he had ever owned—when there
came a knock at the door. A hall-boy conveyed a message: a carriage waited for the gentleman downstairs. Doyle tipped the boy and asked him to tell the driver the gentleman would be there shortly.
Doyle put on the bowler and overcoat, picked up his umbrella—there was a threat of rain—and went down to the carriage entrance. The driver was not known to him, but waiting inside the hansom was Inspector Claude Leboux.
'Claude.'
'Arthur,' Leboux said, with a curt nod.
Doyle took a seat across from him. Leboux signaled the driver, and they drove away. Leboux was loath to meet Doyle's eye; he appeared simultaneously angered and chastened but was clearly in no mood for confrontation.
'Been keeping well?' asked Doyle.
'Been better.'
The ride took twenty minutes, during which Leboux twice consulted his watch. Doyle heard gates open outside as they slowed, then the echo of hoofbeats as they entered a porte cochere. The carriage stopped; Leboux preceded Doyle out of the cab and ushered him through an open, waiting door, where they were greeted by a solid, dignified man of early middle age, alert, intelligent, but weighed by deeply private responsibility. The man struck a note of recognition in Doyle, but he was unable to track its source. The man nodded to Leboux, both thanks and dismissal, and led Doyle away.
They walked through a dimly lit antechamber, down a narrow, wainscoted corridor, and into a comfortable sitting room. Nothing could be learned about its owner from the room; furnishings were exquisite but neutral and impersonal. The man waved a hand at a davenport, inviting him to sit.
