Murder As A Fine Art Part 25

"Hey!" Becker managed to shout.

The tall man kept choking De Quincey. The contrast between the tiny man and the large attacker was grotesque, like a giant choking a child.

"Stop!" Becker yelled.

The door to the corridor was ajar. With increasing strength in his legs, Becker stepped through. The shock of what was happening cleared the fog from his mind. He ran along the corridor and rammed the b.u.t.t end of his knife against the attacker's skull.

The blow should have knocked the attacker unconscious. Instead, the man merely turned in fury and startled Becker with the discovery that something protruded from his left eye socket. G.o.d in heaven, it looked like a spoon. Gore dripped from the socket.

The man released his hands from De Quincey's throat, dropping him to the floor in a heap. With an intense glare in his remaining eye, he reached under his coat. The next instant, he thrust a hand toward Becker. The hand held something that glinted, and Becker ducked back in time to realize that the object was a knife. The blade slashed across Becker's chest, slicing his coat, nicking his skin. He lurched farther back as the attacker spun the knife so that its glint resembled a furiously pivoting wheel. The movement was too fast for Becker to follow. All he could do was keep stumbling away from the terrifying blur, moving just fast enough that pieces of his coat parted but not his skin.

At once the attacker lurched rather than lunged. He jerked forward, falling. Becker saw that De Quincey had grabbed the attacker's ankles, tripping him.

The attacker dropped, face forward, onto the floor. He cried out, trembled, and suddenly became still.

Becker shook, straining to adjust to what had happened. De Quincey gasped for air, his throat red from the finger marks of the attacker.

Cautiously, Becker turned the attacker onto his back. The spoon had been rammed all the way into the man's head, the round part barely visible. The man's expression was lifeless.

"Can't," De Quincey murmured, "breathe."

Becker hurried to him. De Quincey had blood spattered on his face and his clothes, but as much as Becker could determine, the blood wasn't his.

"Take shallow breaths," Becker told him. "Your throat's swollen, but nothing's broken, or else you wouldn't be able to talk."

De Quincey nodded.

"Take shallow breaths," Becker repeated, "and let your throat relax. You'll soon breathe normally."

"Was...?"

"Don't try to talk."

"... real?"

Becker didn't understand.

"Was it real?" De Quincey sounded as if he were more afraid for his sanity than he was for his life. "Did it happen? It wasn't the laudanum?"

"It definitely happened," Becker a.s.sured him.

"Father!"

Becker turned and saw Emily clinging to the bars at the end of the corridor.

He ran to her as the jailer staggered from his office, rubbing the back of his neck.

"I think we've been drugged," Becker told them.

Outside, footsteps charged toward the door. Accompanied by two guards, Ryan hurried in from the darkness.

He wore his shapeless street clothes again, his cap covering most of his red hair. Bewildered, he looked at Becker's slashed coat before he noticed the body in the corridor.

"That's the killer," Becker said.

DRUGGED," the jailer confirmed. "Every prisoner and every guard who works in this building."

"The food?" Ryan asked.

"Yes. What the outside guards ate wasn't tampered with. Only in here," the jailer elaborated. "We use civilians to prepare the food. One of them must have been bribed."

"The guard at the gate says the dead man claimed to have a message from Lord Palmerston," Ryan said. "A sure way to get into the prison. We found the note in the governor's office. All it says is 'Treat the Opium-Eater as harshly as possible.' The governor probably didn't have a chance to read it before he was stabbed."

"Then the killer came to this building, saw that we were all asleep, found the key, and went to Mr. De Quincey's cell," Becker concluded. He drank coffee to help clear his mind from the drug. "I searched him, but he doesn't have anything on his clothes to identify him."

"A message from Lord Palmerston?" Ryan sounded doubtful. "I know several people on Lord Palmerston's staff, but I never saw this man before. Maybe a newspaper sketch artist can produce a good likeness of him. Possibly someone can identify him."

The group was in the room where Becker and Emily had fallen asleep. Emily sat with her father on the cot. The attacker's blood remained on De Quincey's face.

"You haven't explained the spoon," the jailer noted with suspicion. "How did you get the spoon?"

De Quincey seemed not to hear the question. He trembled from the effects of the fierce battle for his life.

And from the cramps of laudanum withdrawal.

"Emily, did you refill my flask?"

"I never had the chance, Father. I never left the prison."

De Quincey shuddered.

"Tell me how you got the spoon," the jailer persisted.

"I gave it to him," Emily said.

The jailer's mouth hung open.

"Inspector Ryan"-De Quincey's voice was hoa.r.s.e-"who knew I was being brought to this prison?"

"For starters, all the newspaper reporters you saw when you arrived. Lord Palmerston spread the word far and wide. By late this afternoon, it was common knowledge. He wanted to make certain that people thought you were the main suspect and that you were off the streets."

"To make people feel safe." After everything that had happened, De Quincey looked even smaller than usual, trembling on the cot.

"That's right."

"But now other murders have occurred."

"That's what I came to tell you. Two sets of them," Ryan said. "Eight people at a tavern, and three at a surgeon's house."

"Not to mention the governor. Murders I obviously couldn't have committed since I was imprisoned here. So there's no reason to keep me locked away any longer."

"Lord Palmerston hasn't given permission for that," the jailer objected.

"Yes, I expect at the moment he has numerous other things to occupy his attention," De Quincey noted. "The riots that Inspector Ryan described, for example. Nonetheless, there's no reason to keep me locked away any longer, and every reason to let me go."

"Such as?"

"I need to study the murder scenes."

Emily raised her head in surprise. "What are you talking about, Father?"

"Take me to the tavern, Inspector Ryan. I need to find what else the killer unwittingly told us about himself. Before something worse happens."

"But we don't need to worry now," Becker objected. "The killer's lying in the corridor out there. It's over."

"A killer is lying in that corridor. Yes. But the killer? No."

"What on earth makes you believe that?" Ryan demanded.

"When he burst into my cell, he said something that's too indelicate to repeat."

"For you to feel such, it must indeed be indelicate," Emily said. "But I don't intend to leave."

"Very well. He called me a clever little s.h.i.t."

"Some might not disagree," the jailer said.

"Specifically, the sentence was 'He warned me you're a clever little s.h.i.t.' "

" 'He warned me'?" Ryan asked.

"Someone gave instructions to this man. Whoever that other person is, now that he has replicated the original murders, he'll feel free to create his own masterpieces."

11.

The Dark Interpreter.

THE FOG WAS WORSE than the night before, the soot particles in greater quant.i.ty, sticking to skin and clothing. Ryan had managed to find a wagon with a cover, shielding De Quincey, Emily, Becker, and himself as a constable drove them toward the tavern. But apart from the shelter that the canvas walls and roof provided, Ryan would have preferred to see the smothering fog and try to guess the cause of possibly threatening shadows moving within it.

The faint lantern hanging under the canvas revealed that De Quincey continued to tremble. Now that he'd washed the attacker's blood from his face, it was clear that he was alarmingly pale.

"Are you all right?" Ryan asked.

"Thank you, yes. I have suffered through this before."

"You've been attacked before? You needed to fight for your life before?"

"The attack did in fact happen?" De Quincey asked Becker again.

"Most definitely."

"I can tolerate anything if I have my medicine." De Quincey hugged himself.

"Why do you insist on calling it medicine?" Becker asked.

"Without it, my facial pains and stomach disorders would be intolerable."

"Worse than you're feeling now?"

"Sometimes I can reduce the quant.i.ty until I finally discontinue it." De Quincey's voice wavered. "But the pains worsen, like rats tearing at my stomach, and eventually I can't resist the need."

"Could the pains be caused by the body's craving for the drug?" Ryan asked. "Perhaps if you became accustomed to not having the drug, the pains would go away."

"How I wish that were the case."

Becker felt pressure next to him and realized that Emily, still groggy, had fallen asleep with her head against his shoulder. Neither her father nor Ryan seemed to think that the situation was unsuitable, so he continued to provide support for her.

"My mind demands it more than my body," De Quincey continued, as if talking helped to distract him from his need. "Our minds have doors."

"Doors?" Ryan asked in confusion.

"Opening them, I discovered thoughts and emotions that controlled me but that I didn't know I possessed. Unfortunately, self-knowledge can turn out to be a nightmare. Too many nights, I dream about a coach driver who turns into a crocodile."

"Thoughts that control you but that you don't know you possess? A crocodile?" Ryan shook his head from side to side. "For a moment, I almost seemed to follow what you said."

"My friend Coleridge was a well-known opium-eater."

"I have heard such, although I confess I have not read his poems," Ryan said.

De Quincey lapsed into a singsong way of speaking that made Becker fear De Quincey had lost his mind. His words seemed to refer to hallucinations.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

"That is Coleridge," De Quincey concluded. "From 'Kubla Khan.' "

"It rhymes insistently."

"Indeed it does." De Quincey hugged himself and trembled.

"It has a child's rhythm."