“What do they show?”
“Pet Ta Tuat,”
the Professor said, biting the words hard. “The Egyptian heaven, earth, and hell. The cycle of life, in fact. Panels show life in the fields, then the ceremony of death and mummification—without too much graphic detail, naturally—and then daily rejuvenation in the afterlife. All as an allegory, of course.”
Then, seeing the young girls restless, the Professor added, “If
you gentlemen will excuse us, I promised these ladies a tour of the treasures.”
Langton and Brunel bowed and left the Professor to guide his guests around the Egyptian room. They followed the passage that the Professor had used and found themselves toward the rear of the house, once again overlooking the gardens. The fog had deepened, now all but obliterating the neat foliage.
Brunel acknowledged the greeting of several guests and asked Langton, “Do you believe in the power of imagery?”
“In what way?”
“That perhaps certain designs have inherent meaning and power?” Then, before Langton interrupted, Brunel went on, “You see remarkably similar recurring themes in the architecture of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, Incas, Aztecs and Minoans, and the Egyptians. Not so much in the buildings themselves as in the ornamentation guarding them.”
“Guarding them? From what?”
Brunel smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Fate, maybe. Chaos or entropy.”
“You mean like the gargoyles that guard cathedrals?”
“They’re a primitive example, but yes, I suppose so. Many engineers and architects today are still using the Gothic vernacular, gargoyles and the medieval decoration of some lost Romantic ideal more suited to King Arthur. It’s not really architecture, of course, more that half-world between building and statuary, or art…” Brunel rubbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry. I must be boring you. I’m afraid that fatigue is catching up with me.”
As Brunel went to turn away, Langton said, “Is that why you chose Egyptian motifs for the Span? To protect it?”
“In a way. Of course, the Professor’s designs are attractive in their own right, but we felt it would do no harm to have an element of positive significance.”
When the greatest feat of Victorian engineering adopted the superstitions of an ancient civilization, Langton thought, what hope
was there for the rest of society? Even hardheaded engineers like the Brunels, men used to dealing in precise figures, quantifiable certainties, and scientific laws, had fallen for the mythology. Was all lost?
“I think,” said Langton, “that any image has power if people
believe
it has.”
Brunel thought for a moment, then nodded. “A good summation.”
“I hope the Span benefits from the designs.”
“So do I,” Brunel said, shaking Langton’s hand. “It will carry the hopes and dreams of millions.”
Langton watched Brunel merge with the crowd and realized that the Span, although not yet open, had already become a symbol. Of freedom? Perhaps. More of optimism. The promise of a new life. A new start.
He checked his fob watch. Just before eleven. He didn’t want to arrive late at Wavertree. Good manners required Langton to say good night to the Professor and thank him for being invited, but good manners could hardly apply when your host became one of your chief suspects. There was, however, one person that Langton wanted to wish good night. He pushed through the crowds, through the perfume, French wine, cigarettes and cigars, until he saw Sister Wright standing before one of the Professor’s paintings in the drawing room.
“Sister? I must wish you good night.”
She turned to him and smiled. “Is it so late?”
Langton hesitated. He looked into her calm eyes and almost confessed. “I have work that cannot wait.”
“Our work never can, Inspector. We care too much, you and I.” She took his arm and pulled him closer, then nodded to the painting before them. “I’m not keen on some of the Professor’s purchases—his taste is a little modern for me—but this holds my gaze.”
The painting in oils, perhaps a yard high by half a yard wide, showed a weary traveler trudging through snow and about to collapse into a small glade of sparse, bare trees. In the distance, the silver towers of a city the poor man would never reach. Every brushstroke, every hue, reinforced the cold atmosphere of the work.
“It draws you in,” Langton said. “Although it is a little melancholy.”
“You think so?” Sister Wright did not turn from the painting. “I find it reassuring.”
Langton waited.
“The traveler has a goal,” Sister Wright said. “Not the earthly one, which is beyond him, but another. Soon he will reach it. Soon he will be free and find peace.”
Perhaps she was right, but Langton wondered why so many of the Professor’s paintings and artifacts spoke of death. Was that usual in a man dedicated to saving life?
“I must go,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for inviting me here tonight.”
“Did you find what you searched for?”
How could he tell her? She respected the Professor so much. “I learned a great deal.”
“If there is anything I can do, Inspector, simply ask.”
From the hallway, Langton looked back and saw Sister Wright still standing in front of the snowy painting like a child staring out a window.
He took his hat and coat and tipped a footman, who waved forward a hansom cab. Once inside, Langton let his thoughts range over the evening. Images and conversations jumbled together, overlapping: the Egyptian artifacts, Brunel, the Professor, Sister Wright. How would she react if she knew Langton’s suspicions? With anger? Sadness? Disbelief?
Perhaps Langton’s suspicions had no foundation; perhaps the Professor’s interests and tastes were no more than that. If they really did indicate a morbid fascination with death and rebirth, they might identify him as Doktor Glass. Proving it would take courage.
In the passing haze of gas lamps, Langton checked his fob watch again: eleven thirty. As he thought of what awaited him, a knot tightened in his stomach. He knew he had to do this. For Sarah.
B
EFORE THE HANSOM
cab reached Plimsoll Street, Langton asked the driver to halt. Although he doubted that the Jar Boys would keep watch on Mrs. Barker’s house, he didn’t want to take even that small chance. He got out on Martensen Street, a handful of roads to the west of Plimsoll, and watched the cab drive away; fog swallowed the rear red light that glowed like a single burning eye.
As Langton headed east, looking up at the black-and-white street, his footsteps echoed along the empty pavement and joined in his thoughts with the fading echoes of music from the Professor’s reception. The fog closed in on him, damp and cold and cloying, a fog that tasted of smoke from Edge Hill’s rail shunting yards nearby.
He could have been the only person in the city; no sounds of traffic or humanity penetrated the fog, and no lights shone in any of the terraced houses. Then, as Langton turned into Plimsoll Street, he saw a white glow among the yellow streetlamps. Double-fronted houses here, more spacious and imposing than the terraces: high sash windows,
fine railings, three steps up to the front door. Langton headed for the white lantern and climbed the steps of number forty-two.
The door opened to reveal a petite figure dressed in black. Inside the hallway, the pale glow of old-fashioned oil lamps turned low; their soft light reflected from the rope of pearls fastened about the woman’s neck.
Langton waited until the door clicked shut, then said, “Mrs. Barker?”
“You must be Inspector Langton.” She gripped his hand for a moment before picking up one of the glass oil lamps from the hall stand. Her metal-tipped walking stick tapped on the parquet floor as she made for the stairs. “Mr. Paterson is in with Edith now.”
Farther down the hallway, close to the foot of the stairs, another door stood open. Langton had the impression of two faces peering through the gap, pallid and silent. Before the circle of light from Mrs. Barker’s lamp illuminated them, the figures withdrew into the dark room with a rustle of cloth. The door closed without a sound.
As he climbed the carpeted stairs behind Mrs. Barker, Langton caught the odors of disinfectant and enclosed air, the almost tangible atmosphere of long-term sickness. The mixture took Langton back six months or more to his own house, to Sarah in that big bed. He stumbled, almost fell, gripped the banister, and continued up the stairs.
At the first landing, Mrs. Barker turned. She rested on her walking stick. The oil lamp in her hand threw yellow light on half of her face but set the rest in shadow.
Langton kept his voice low. “How is she?”
“Fading, Inspector. Fading.” Mrs. Barker turned to the door, head bowed. “May God guide her.”
As Mrs. Barker reached for the door, Langton hesitated. The whole atmosphere of the house weighed down on him and constricted his throat. The thought of the dying girl inside the room turned his limbs to lead.
“Inspector?”
Langton forced himself to approach the bedroom. How right the modern French writers were: how powerful a reaction came from a simple aroma. It made him want to run down those stairs and into the night, to escape this suffocating place.
He remembered Mrs. Grizedale’s belief, her
certainty
that Sarah lay imprisoned, alone and vulnerable. Langton stepped forward.
Inside the bedroom, two more lamps gave out pale light. In the corner, the black-leaded surround of a small coal fire now glowed orange with banked embers. The room’s enormous mahogany bed made the emaciated girl huddled in its center seem like a child. Blankets, sheets, and a quilt engulfed her. On one of the bedside tables, brown glass bottles, medicines, tinctures, pills, powders. The saccharine smell of liquid morphine.
Langton took another two steps and saw the girl’s eyes shut, her lips open slightly, her skin greasy and yellow beneath the lamp light. At her neck, the frill of a high nightdress.
Forbes Paterson rose from the armchair in the corner. “Are you sure you can do this?”
Looking back to the bed, then to Mrs. Barker, Langton said, “I must.”
Paterson drew him farther into the corner. His voice never rose above a whisper. “All is arranged. I have constables in the surrounding streets and a carriage waiting.”
“I saw no one.”
“That’s exactly how it should be.”
The girl in the bed murmured. Langton watched Mrs. Barker set the lamp down and reach for an enamel basin; she wrung out the cloth and wiped her niece’s face with slow, careful strokes. Langton’s eyes clouded over.
“I’ll be waiting in the room next door,” Paterson said, nodding toward another door. “I don’t want to risk the Jar Boys recognizing me.”
“Where shall I wait?”
“Here.”
“Alone?”
“With Mrs. Barker.”
“You’ll be my brother George, from London, Inspector,” Mrs. Barker said, turning from the bed. “That’ll explain your fine suit.”
Langton cursed himself; he should have remembered a change of clothes. Mrs. Barker no doubt believed he’d just come from a party, which, in fact, he had. “Do you have anything I might borrow?”
“I don’t think so, Inspector. My poor Alfred’s clothes, God rest his soul, wouldn’t go near you. And there’s only Maisie and Lily in the house besides us.”
“You’ll do,” Paterson said. “It’s too late to change.”
Twelve ten by Langton’s watch. “They’re due at one?”
“If all goes well.”
Langton stared at his colleague. “Is there a problem?”
Paterson glanced at the two women, then told Langton, “I’ve tried for so long to catch these men. Not just these, but all the Jar Boys. I have a pessimistic voice inside me that wonders if we can succeed this time. I hope we can.”
“So do I, Inspector,” Mrs. Barker said, without looking up from her niece. “Parasites, these devils are. It was bad enough when they tried to fasten themselves onto poor Alfred, but when I think of Edith…”
She stroked her niece’s face with a simple gesture so natural and touching that Langton had to turn away.
“You’re a credit, Mrs. Barker,” Paterson said.
“It’s my duty.”
With time running out, Langton helped Paterson set the scene. They moved the armchair away from the other door, to give Paterson room to rush in when called. Sitting there, Langton had a good view of Edith and of the door leading to the landing. The two lamps, moved slightly and turned up, threw light on the bed and on Edith’s inert face, making her look like a statue.
Leaving the communicating door slightly ajar, Paterson sat on a
cabin trunk in the adjacent box room. Behind him stood dusty luggage, boxes, and towers of yellowing periodicals.
Langton set his fob watch on the arm of the chair and sat back. The house creaked as it settled in the cold night. The water in the enamel basin splashed as Mrs. Barker anointed Edith’s face.
Would they come? Or would something or someone warn them off? Langton hadn’t told any of his own staff about this trap; too much information had already left his office. The newspapers knew of his movements, for one, but more important so did the murderers of Kepler, Stoker Olsen, and Redfers. Langton had to consider the possibility of an inside informer, but once he began to suspect his own colleagues the ground beneath him turned to quicksand.
Twelve thirty. Langton’s eyes became heavy. He blinked awake and tried to concentrate. Edith began to moan in pain, softly at first, then louder. Each cry pierced Langton and made the intervening months disappear.
“There, there, flower. It’s all right. All right.” Mrs. Barker’s soothing words seemed to calm Edith for a few minutes. “It’s all right, sweetheart.”
Then the girl gasped and sat up in bed clutching her stomach. She stared at Langton in pure terror, her eyes wide like an animal’s.
The cry had pulled Langton to his feet. Now he wanted to run, to flee this room.
Mrs. Barker stopped him, saying, “Pass me the tall brown bottle. Quick.”
While Mrs. Barker eased Edith back down beneath the covers, Langton fumbled on the bedside table. The tallest brown bottle stood half empty. He removed the ground-glass stopper and smelled morphine.