Murder As A Fine Art Part 30

The artist strained to get the words out. "You're Jack Gordon."

"It is Robert! I trained with him! He's part of my unit!"

"You're... attacked."

"I can't understand what you're saying, Robert. Drink this water."

"You're going to be attacked."

Gulping from a canteen, the artist staggered along the caravan. He suddenly pointed at the same one-legged old man, wizened grandmother, and little girl who had joined his own caravan. After soldiers grabbed them, a search revealed that the man was neither old nor one-legged. Makeup made him look elderly. The seemingly absent leg was bent back and up from the knee, strapped in place beneath his robe.

The stooped, wizened grandmother turned out to be a middle-aged woman of excellent strength. As with the old man, makeup had aged her. The little girl was indeed a little girl, but she was so well trained that she might as well have been an adult. A bag of poison was under her robe.

The artist rested only briefly, then tortured the captives, wishing that he didn't need to rely on a native translator. Again, he vowed to learn the area's languages. He confirmed the signal the Thugs used to tell the rest of the band that everyone in camp was dead from the poison: three clangs from an oxen bell.

Where would the next attack occur?

They resisted telling him.

He inflicted more pain. The little girl finally couldn't bear it any longer and revealed everything.

He shot them.

The caravan reached the area where the attack was supposed to occur. They formed the wagons in a circle for the night, took care of the animals, made an evening meal, and pretended to go to sleep, presumably to die from the poison. The artist rang the oxen bell.

When twenty Thugs snuck through the darkness, the artist killed five of them himself while the rest of the command took care of the others. He made sure that one Thug was kept alive, and promised to set him free if the Thug would teach him the cult's methods of disguise. The captive endured unimaginable pain before he finally revealed secret after secret: about makeup, about blackening teeth to make it seem that some were missing, about applying wigs and fake beards and thickening eyebrows, about putting a pebble in a shoe to create a convincing limp. The Thug also revealed various places where his band of marauders camped.

When the Thug no longer had things to teach, the artist shot him.

The artist led cavalry to the various Thug campgrounds, destroying everyone there: men, women, and children.

He was promoted to second lieutenant. Most officers were gentlemen of means who paid to be given authority in the military, sometimes with disastrous results. But the artist received his commission based on merit and reputation.

Soon he was a full lieutenant.

The Opium War with China provided even more reasons for him to be promoted. The English government was determined to earn millions of pounds by flooding China with opium. The Chinese emperor was determined to prevent his millions of subjects from becoming mindless. Thus, there needed to be a war that lasted four brutal years, from 1839 to 1842, and the artist needed to kill increasing numbers of people.

Opium. The lime odor of the countless bricks of it stacked in warehouses made him nauseous. Even the coffee-colored look of the drug affected his stomach. He could no longer drink coffee because of that color. Or tea-after all, tea was what the opium bricks were traded for. He drank increasing quant.i.ties of alcohol, however.

Nightmares woke him, images of bones and corpses swirling as if he were under opium's influence. The faces of his victims resembled poppy bulbs that exploded with white fluid gushing from them instead of blood.

A loud noise shocked the artist out of his night terror. He pulled the knife from the scabbard on his wrist, tumbled from his cot, and braced himself for an attack.

The loud noise was repeated.

Someone was outside on the street, pounding on the door.

With visions of the h.e.l.l of India still turning in his mind, the artist crept around the cot, stepped over the crumpled newspapers, and approached the small window to his bedroom, so small that not even a child could squeeze through it. The window had bars as a further protection.

The artist pulled a drapery aside and saw darkness beyond the gla.s.s. As the pounding on the door continued, he unbolted the window, swung it out, and peered down toward a fog-shrouded man standing under a gas lamp.

"What do you want?" the artist shouted.

"You've been summoned!"

13.

The Inquisition.

FOG SWIRLED ON THE STREET known as Great Scotland Yard. Eager to escape the cold, a constable opened a door marked METROPOLITAN POLICE and entered a corridor lit by gas lamps mounted along the wall. He took off his gloves and rubbed his hands together.

On his left, an elderly woman slumped on a bench, with her head tilted back against the wall. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open. The constable peered close, thinking she might be dead. Then he noticed a slight movement of her chest.

She had a faded burn scar on her left cheek.

He turned to his right, addressing a constable behind a counter. "Who's the old woman on the bench?"

"Came in four hours ago. Says she wants to talk to Inspector Ryan. Says she has information about the murders."

"Which ones? Sat.u.r.day or tonight?"

"Neither. The killings forty-three years ago."

"Forty-three years ago? Ha. A little late to offer information about them."

"Claims she knows something about those that'll help us solve these."

"Poor soul. Look at her. Too old to think clearly, confusing then with now."

"I asked her what she wanted to tell us. The answer was always the same-she's so ashamed, she won't say it more than once, and even then she says she's not sure she can say it to a man instead of a woman."

"Seeing as how we don't have a woman constable, she'll be waiting a long time. What do you suppose an old woman could be ashamed of?"

Continuing the Journal of Emily De Quincey With the mob outside the tavern and with no other place to spend the night, Inspector Ryan and Constable Becker sequestered Father and me in an upstairs room. The bed's rumpled blankets made it obvious that the room had a previous occupant, probably the tavernkeeper, but I remained groggy from having been drugged, and my exhaustion was greater than my revulsion at sleeping on a dead man's bed. Cushions provided a place for Father on the floor. Ryan and Becker slept outside the room. Despite the corpses downstairs, I managed to sleep.

A loud noise jolted me awake.

The pounding of a fist.

Pounding on the tavern's door.

One of Father's essays is t.i.tled "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth." It describes the moment when Macbeth and his wife realize the enormity of the murder they conspired to commit. Lady Macbeth says she feels uns.e.xed while Macbeth claims not to be of woman born. Time seems to stop, along with the beating of their hearts. Abruptly a knocking at the gate startles them. The pulse of the universe begins again, rushing them toward their destiny.

I felt that way as I wakened to the pounding on the tavern's door. Briefly, while I slept, I had managed to forget the horrors of the past three days, of the prison, of the dead in their slumber below me. But suddenly the pounding on the door caused the world to rush at me again, and I had the terrible premonition that the outcome of this wide-awake nightmare would overtake us horribly soon.

"Who is it?" I heard Inspector Ryan demand, hurrying down the stairs.

The pounding continued as I heard him unlock the door.

Indistinct voices drifted up.

Ryan closed the door and climbed the stairs, his sounds less quick, giving the impression of reluctance to deliver whatever message he had received.

I opened the door before he could knock. He and Becker, unshaven and weary-looking, faced me.

"What's wrong?" Father asked behind me.

"Lord Palmerston wants to see all of us immediately."

As our vehicle proceeded through the increasing fog, creating the greater impression of unreality, I saw the vague shapes of guards on every corner. Two of them stopped the coach that Lord Palmerston had sent for us. After leaning inside and recognizing Inspector Ryan, they told the driver to continue.

The gloom was dispelled by a growing radiance that troubled me. Every other building on the street was dark, but the wall outside Lord Palmerston's mansion was illuminated by numerous lamps, as were all the windows of the wide structure's three levels.

Father had retrieved his flask from me and refilled it with laudanum at the tavern. Now he drank from it as a gate admitted our coach to a curved driveway flanked by more guards.

We stepped down and walked past guards into an enormous foyer, the marble floor of which reflected flames in a chandelier. At the top of a wide staircase, we entered a ballroom in which numerous gla.s.ses on tables and the strong smell of champagne provided evidence that an event had occurred the previous evening.

The event must have been joyless, given the stern look we received from a heavyset man of perhaps seventy, with long, thick, brown-dyed sideburns and the narrow eyes of someone accustomed to giving commands. He wore evening clothes, evidently not having retired after the conclusion of the event.

Next to him was a tall, straight-backed man in his early forties. His strong, harsh features reinforced the impression of discipline that his military posture communicated.

When Inspector Ryan respectfully removed his cap, exposing his red hair, both men gave him a disapproving look.

"I'll take care of this business quickly." Lord Palmerston pointed toward a tall stack of newspapers. "These will soon be on the streets. I don't know how reporters obtained information about the attempt on my life this afternoon, but-"

"Someone tried to kill you, Your Lordship?" Ryan asked in surprise.

Lord Palmerston's sharp gaze left no doubt of its meaning-Don't interrupt me.

"The city is already in a panic. Reports of my near a.s.sa.s.sination will only make things worse. Eight people slaughtered in a tavern. A surgeon, his wife, and a constable killed at the surgeon's home. Mobs attacking sailors and constables. The governor of Coldbath Fields Prison killed during a rescue of the Opium-Eater."

"Rescue? No," Becker objected. "That was an attempted murder."

"What's your name?" Lord Palmerston demanded.

"Constable Becker, Your Lordship."

"Not any longer. You're relieved of authority. Your coat is in rags. Why is there blood on it?"

"At Coldbath Fields Prison, I attempted to stop the intruder from killing Mr. De Quincey, Your Lordship."

"From rescuing him, you mean." Lord Palmerston turned away. "Ryan, you're relieved of authority also. Not twenty-four hours ago, I warned you what would happen if you failed to control this crisis. Instead you chose to put yourself under the sway of the Opium-Eater."

With each reference to that disparaging term, I sensed Father become more rigid beside me.

"When I ordered you to arrest the Opium-Eater, my motive was to a.s.sure the population that events were under control," Lord Palmerston continued, as if Father were not in the room. "Putting a logical suspect in prison gave us time to discover the actual murderer while calming the citizenry. But now I believe that the Opium-Eater is in fact responsible."

"This is wrong!" I exclaimed.

"Colonel Brookline, tell them what you discovered."

The tall man with a military bearing stepped toward several doc.u.ments on a table. "The Opium-Eater can't account for his activities at the time of the murders on Sat.u.r.day night. He argues that his age and lack of strength make him incapable of overpowering so many people. That his daughter helped him isn't credible."

The colonel's dismissive tone in my direction made me feel insulted.

"But that doesn't mean he didn't have help. The accomplice who tried to rescue him from prison proves that he isn't working alone."

"No," Becker insisted. "The man was trying to kill Mr. De Quincey, not rescue him."

"If you become more argumentative, I shall order you removed and perhaps arrested," Lord Palmerston warned. "Colonel Brookline, continue."

"After the Opium-Eater's arrest, I conducted a thorough inquiry. The evidence here proves his intention to instigate a rebellion comparable to what happened during the Year of Revolution six years ago. From his earliest days, he demonstrated contempt for authority. He ran away from a school in Manchester and settled among the worst elements of London, living on the streets with prost.i.tutes. When he became a student at Oxford, he partic.i.p.ated in almost no educational activities. In fact, he left the university during his final examinations, apparently realizing that the requirements to demonstrate facility in Greek were too demanding for him to bluff his way through."

"No, the examination was too easy-in English rather than in Greek!" Father protested. "I left because I felt insulted!"

Colonel Brookline continued to act is if Father were not in the room. "While the Opium-Eater pretended to be a student at Oxford, most of the time he appears to have actually been in London in the company of radicals. He had a fascination with atheism."

"Atheism?" Father repeated indignantly.

Colonel Brookline turned on Father, for the first time acknowledging his presence. "Do you deny your familiarity with Rachel Lee, the notorious atheist?"

"She was a guest at my mother's house."

"Which tells us about the dubious nature of your home environment," Brookline noted.

"Leave my mother out of this."

"While you posed as a student at Oxford, you made contact with Rachel Lee during the infamous trial in which she accused two Oxford students of abducting and attempting to rape her. Their own testimony indicated that she had gone willingly with them in an effort to leave her husband and engage in a menage a trois. The trial came to a startling conclusion when she was asked to give testimony on a Bible but she refused on the grounds that she did not believe in G.o.d. The proceedings were immediately halted, the students exonerated. These are the sorts of dangerous people with whom you enjoy collaborating.

"Your a.s.sociation with the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge is even more suspect. You followed them to the Lake District, a well-known radical enclave. There, Coleridge created a socially disruptive newspaper to which you pledged both money and enflaming articles. You a.s.sisted Wordsworth in publishing a pamphlet that was libelous in its attack of Parliament. Wordsworth's disruptive praise of the common man-farmers and milkmaids and so forth-impressed you to the point that you showed your contempt for the structure of society by descending beneath your station and actually marrying a milkmaid."

"My dear departed wife was not a milkmaid." Father's expression became rigid.

"Call her what you will, her father was the most extreme radical in the Lake District, constantly urging the overthrow of the gentry." Brookline's accusations rushed on. "You have frequently been sought by law-enforcement officials. You often a.s.sumed aliases and concealed your numerous addresses, sometimes having as many as six lodgings at one time."

"Because of debts, I changed my name and moved frequently to avoid bill collectors."

"Or were you avoiding Home Office agents a.s.signed to keep track of your rebellious activities?" Brookline demanded. "You wrote aggravating essays for both conservative and liberal magazines, urging both sides to extremes."

"To pay my bills, I worked for whoever wanted my services. The editors encouraged me to be reactionary."

"In one case, your invectives contributed to a lethal argument between the editors of two magazines. In a duel, one of the editors was mortally shot. No doubt you hoped that both of them would be killed and that the resultant outrage would lead to more violence."