Murder As A Fine Art Part 42

"He does?" Emily asked in surprise.

Ryan's cheeks became as red as the hair that peeked from his newspaperboy's cap.

"And this is the street beggar who broke into Colonel Brookline's residence?" Mayne asked.

"Surely you don't intend to arrest him," Emily intervened. "He risked his life to find the killer."

"It remains to be proven that Colonel Brookline is the killer. My intention in accompanying Inspector Ryan is to urge caution. We all need to work together, not fight with one another."

"You called him 'inspector.' Does that mean we're police officers again?" Becker asked.

"Even I can't countermand Lord Palmerston's orders. But unofficially you have my confidence. After Mr. De Quincey showed me the interior of the colonel's residence-an intrusion which made me feel extremely uncomfortable, by the way-I admit that I now have concerns."

"For starters, why was Brookline storing a quant.i.ty of gunpowder in his home?" Ryan wanted to know. "And why does he abuse his body in a way too indelicate to discuss in front of Miss De Quincey?"

"I'll take your word for that," the commissioner said. "Since I refused to violate the colonel's privacy by invading his bedroom, I did not see the blood and whip that you described."

"Whip?" Emily asked.

"Truly," Ryan answered, "the subject is too delicate for-"

"Brookline flagellates himself with sufficient force to draw blood," De Quincey told her.

"Thank you, Father. My imagination might have leapt to even greater extremes."

"I fail to see how the subject has anything to do with the murders," Mayne said. "What Colonel Brookline does in his home is no concern of ours."

"That he is the son of John Williams must carry some weight against him," De Quincey insisted.

"You have only the word of an elderly woman who works in a bakeshop near the worst rookery in London. There's no proof that the woman is in fact Margaret Jewell."

"And yet Brookline's remarks in my books indicate an obsessive identification with John Williams."

"An equal obsession with you. None of that proves he's the killer. I instructed a constable to wait for the colonel to return to his residence and inform him that I wish to speak with him."

BROOKLINE NEVER ALLOWED a cabdriver to know where he lived. His usual method was to tell a driver to turn from Oxford Street toward Soho Square, proceed onto Greek Street, and stop a couple of blocks farther south. All the while, he would study the neighborhood. If all appeared normal, he would return on foot, continuing to watch for surveillance.

Now as the cab went past number 38, Brookline leaned back in the compartment's shadows, alarmed by the presence of a constable at the steps to his door. The door was ajar. The steps had blood spatters. Brookline didn't dare show his face to peer out and see where the spatters led along the street.

Blocks away, he paid the driver, descended from the cab, and varied his usual route by going around the corner and proceeding up a parallel street. There, he entered a low pa.s.sageway between buildings, reached a gate, unlocked it, reached another gate, and unlocked it also. In each case, he studied the locks for signs that they had been sc.r.a.ped by someone manipulating them. He also examined carefully positioned grime on the edges of the gates to determine that the gates had not been disturbed.

He entered a dismal courtyard that contained a privy. Steps led down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the kitchen was located. Its single window was barred. Its door remained locked, with no indication of having been disturbed.

Steps led up to the first floor. Here the windows were barred also. Like the front door, the back door had no k.n.o.b. Brookline's uniquely shaped key fit into the lock. Again, strategically placed grime revealed no evidence that the door had been opened.

Inside, a narrow stream of light protruded into the front hallway, where the front door wasn't fully closed. Indeed, that door wasn't capable of being closed-the slot for the lock's bolt had been removed from the doorjamb.

The rotten-egg odor of a match lingered in the air, as did the disagreeable smell of the tallow candle.

Blood was on the floor.

Brookline's astonishment turned to rage that his home had been violated. His impulse was to rush to learn what else had been disturbed, but years of military discipline took control. He was suddenly on a reconnoitering mission, determined not to alert the sentry outside. After moving cautiously along the hallway, he s.h.i.+fted into the room where he kept his chair and his books.

Vomit was on the floor. The books were disarranged. One of them was open, vandalized, a page having been ripped from it.

The lamp on the table had its gla.s.s chimney removed. The cap that covered the hole into which coal oil could be poured had been removed also, indicating that someone had discovered the gunpowder inside.

Mindful of the constable outside, Brookline moved quietly to the opposite room, where the strip of light from the slightly open entrance revealed footsteps in the grains of gunpowder that one of the kegs had left on the floor. The footprints were small.

Reaching the stairs, he saw that the page torn from his book awaited him. A note had been penciled onto it: The Opium-Eater came to call and regrets that you weren't at home.

Brookline's rage swelled as he climbed the stairs, taking care to remain close to the banister and avoid the step that triggered the crossbow. Not that his precaution was necessary-he discovered that the crossbow had already been triggered, its shaft released, with luck into the little s.h.i.+t who had left the note.

My bedroom.

Mounting hurriedly to the top of the stairs, he saw that his bedroom, always closed, was now open. Entering, he found the wardrobe open also, its crossbow triggered, its shaft in the wall next to the door.

But what occupied Brookline's attention was the military cot on which he slept. Its blanket and sheet had been thrown off, exposing the dried blood on the canvas. The whip that he had hidden above the wardrobe was now on the bloodstains.

His gaze focused so intently on the cot that he felt he could see the fibers of the canvas and the dried blood that filled the area between them. In India, he had slept on an identical cot, waking from nightmares about the things he had done. He had wakened from nightmares about the things that his father had done. No matter how much punishment he inflicted on himself, he could not purge any of it from his memory.

There is no such thing as forgetting, the Opium-Eater had written.

Fury and shame overwhelmed him. He extended his arms and raised his head toward the ceiling. He opened his mouth to scream. Although no bellow emerged from his widely parted lips, the roar expanded inside him, reverberating silently, making him feel that his chest would explode from the power of the primal rage that possessed him. The veins in his forehead pounded until he expected them to burst. The sinews in his throat stretched so tautly that it seemed his quiet roar would make them snap.

The little s.h.i.+t.

THE LITTLE s.h.i.+T.

The constable outside was proof that the police knew about the gunpowder. How would Brookline explain things to Lord Palmerston? Nothing linked Brookline to the murders, but after tonight, there would be serious questions about why he had stored gunpowder in his home. At last, even Lord Palmerston would be compelled to consider the unimaginable.

For that eventuality, Brookline had long ago made plans. Without a transatlantic telegraph to broadcast police reports about him, he could easily escape to America. In that ever-expanding country, he could readily vanish. After all, India had taught him about disguises.

The evidence of his shame, though, could not be allowed to remain.

Brookline descended the stairs. Hearing the constable shuffle his feet beyond the gap in the door, he gathered the box of matches and the lamp that contained the gunpowder. He crept back up the stairs, reentered his bedroom, and placed the lamp next to the cot.

He drew a knife from under his coat, sliced the cot's sheet into strips, and tied one of the strips to the wick on the lamp. Next, he stretched the strip across the floor and overlapped it with another. He did the same with a third and a fourth strip, lengthening and curving them so that they fit the room.

Finally, he placed matches along the strips so that if the flame began to fail, the matches would give it fresh strength.

Brookline struck a match. Punis.h.i.+ng himself by a deep inhale of the rotten-egg odor, he touched the match to the end of the fourth strip. As the flame moved slowly along the cloth, he stepped from the bedroom and closed the door.

Quickly he descended the stairs, proceeded to the back, and went outside. Even in the dismal courtyard, he could feel a breeze. Tonight there would not be a fog. The city would view its destruction.

He shut the courtyard gate behind him, moved along the pa.s.sageway, closed another gate, and emerged onto the next street.

"Boy," he said to a beggar, one of the unfortunates who could not escape the city tonight. "Here's a s.h.i.+lling for extending me a favor."

"A s.h.i.+llin'?" The boy looked suspicious. "What do you want me to do for a whole s.h.i.+llin'?"

IS ANY OF YOU THE OPIUM-EATER?" a scruffy boy asked as De Quincey and the others hurried from Dr. Snow's building.

"Why do you want to know?" De Quincey asked.

"Yes, you'd be him. The gentleman said you was little. The gentleman paid me a s.h.i.+llin' to follow the blood from Thirty-eight Greek Street. Said to be quick. Said to give you a message."

"What's the message?"

"That the gentleman regrets not bein' home when you came to visit."

The air seemed to compress. De Quincey felt as if an invisible hand nudged his chest. One street away, an explosion roared, its shock wave making his ears ring. Even from a distance, the sound of falling debris was powerful.

The group rushed toward the corner. When they reached Greek Street, they gaped at where number 38 had been.

The top floors were in flames. On the middle floor, the room to the right had exploded into the street. The gla.s.s in all the other windows had been shattered. The building's brick front leaned forward, about to collapse.

The policeman who'd been on duty outside the entrance lay motionless on the street.

As Ryan and Becker ran to him, people gathered in a panic. Shouts accompanied the increasing crackle of flames. The breeze carried bitter smoke.

Frantic, Ryan and Becker tugged the fallen constable toward the opposite side of the street. The wall creaked, bricks sc.r.a.ping, and suddenly toppled in an enormous crash that sent debris flying in every direction.

People stumbled away. Hunched over the constable, Ryan and Becker turned their backs to the chunks of bricks and wood that clattered around them. A fire bell rang in the distance.

A HALF BLOCK AWAY, Brookline watched from an alcove as the Opium-Eater gaped at the devastation. Ryan and Becker were with him, unable to resist the impulse to rush to the fallen constable and be heroes.

Commissioner Mayne was there also. No doubt he would soon be talking to Lord Palmerston.

Brookline walked away.

THE GROUP DESCENDED quickly from a coach and faced the wax museum.

"Brookline was seen here this morning," De Quincey said.

They looked to the southeast, where the strong breeze carried the smoke from the fire on Greek Street. By the time they'd left the area, two firefighting crews were working to suppress the blaze.

"People will worry about the smoke. Rumors about the explosion will spread. The panic will worsen," De Quincey said.

The few vehicles and pedestrians on the street emphasized De Quincey's point.

Commissioner Mayne gestured toward the wax museum. "What do you hope to find here?"

"With everything that's on Brookline's mind, he wouldn't have come here unless this place is important to him."

De Quincey needed to knock several times on the window of the ticket booth before a woman arrived.

"Finally some customers," she said.

"Afraid not," Mayne told her, showing his police commissioner's badge.

With a look of disappointment, the woman opened the door.

"A gentleman came here earlier," De Quincey said to the woman. He described Brookline.

"Yes, he rented the exhibition for an hour. Three other gentlemen joined him. They were the only business we had today."

"Where did they go?"

The woman pointed down a hallway. "The Chamber of Horrors."

The group entered a shadowy room, where they encountered two men in the midst of removing a corpse from a coffin in a graveyard. The display was so realistic that Emily drew a sharp breath.

"Burke and Hare, the resurrectionists," De Quincey commented.

Another display showed a guillotine with blood on it and the heads of two of the French Revolution's victims.

"That's Robespierre and Marie Antoinette," De Quincey said.

Abruptly he stopped at the next display, which showed corpses on a floor, their heads bashed in. A man swung a mallet toward a clerk at a counter.

"This is why Brookline came here," De Quincey said. "An effigy of John Williams in the midst of his first killings. Does he look familiar, Commissioner?"

After a moment, Mayne answered, "Good G.o.d, he resembles Brookline."

"Uncannily. Brookline can't stop obsessing about the murders his father committed." De Quincey pointed past the rope barrier toward the grotesque scene. "When he looks at that wax figure, does he imagine himself killing those people as much as he sees his father doing it?"

The commissioner frowned. "Is that an opium thought? It makes me dizzy."

"He's been making the rest of us dizzy since Sat.u.r.day night," Ryan said.

"And making us have thoughts of our own," Becker added. "Such as this one. Brookline wouldn't have destroyed where he lives if he didn't think he was close to being exposed. He knows he doesn't have much time."

"Yes. Whatever Brookline plans to do next," De Quincey agreed, "it will happen tonight."

THE COACH STOPPED on Oxford Street, near a legless beggar who rested his stumps on a platform with wheels under it.

Ryan motioned for the beggar to approach.

Wheels squeaking, the beggar complied.

"Edward, my good man," De Quincey said from the coach, out of view of anyone who might be watching for him. "Did you receive any more reports?"

"This Colonel Brookline you're lookin' for, a boy on a dustman's pony cart followed him to the docks this mornin'."

"Which docks?"

"The boy couldn't get close enough to find out. Brookline was in a police wagon with three constables."