The Naming of the Birds, page 27
The inspector drew in a long breath. He shook his head slowly, and his manner became almost sorrowful. “Do you know, Mrs. Lytton, you have raised yourself a little in my estimation. You put on a poor show the last time I saw you, but tonight you outdid yourself. I had to take hold of myself once or twice, since I was coming near to believing you. You have a gift, no doubt about it, and someone took trouble over your training. It is no wonder you have clawed your way to such high places. It does you credit, I suppose, for you had a long way to climb.”
Mrs. Lytton lifted her chin, her fingertips poised beneath her sapphire. “Are you testing your wiles against mine, Inspector? You know nothing about me beyond what I have chosen to reveal, and I have chosen very carefully.”
Cutter shook his head again. “Not carefully enough, Mrs. Lytton. You told me very little about the man you called your uncle, but you thought to mention that he had an orchid named for him. I have very little schooling, as you know, but I have enough to make use of a library. Librarians are helpful and obliging souls, I have often found. With their help, I discovered that Sir Aneurin had named a good many orchids, though most of those names were great clumps of Latin that I could make nothing of. One librarian was good enough to puzzle over them with me, and I learned that he had given himself a whole species, and from another he had bred two crosses—cultivars, I believe they are called. When that is done, it seems, an ordinary English name can be put at the end of all the Latin. The names he put were Cora and Lydia.”
Mrs. Lytton made no answer to this, but her eyes never once left his face.
“It is a common practice, I am told, and it is often done to honour a loved one. A wife or a sister. A daughter, commonly. But Sir Aneurin never married, and we know he had no sister. He had no daughters either, or none that he ever acknowledged. Were you ever shown those orchids, Mrs. Lytton? Did they look like—what was it now?—like ‘dishevelled slippers’? Or were they prettier things than that?”
When Mrs. Lytton spoke at last, her voiced had hardened. “The offer I made can be withdrawn, Inspector. I have made provisions for an unhappy outcome. Is that the outcome you want?”
“Oh, you made provisions, right enough. I counted four of your men as I came through the grounds, though it seems they were told not to trouble me on the way in. Did you tell them not to trouble Milo either, or should I offer up a little prayer for them?”
Mrs. Lytton’s gaze flickered away for an instant. “Inspector, I will state my position only once more. I have taken a great deal of trouble, to say nothing of considerable risks—”
“Oh, you have taken risks, all right. I doubt you have any notion. How many did you have guarding that man on the way here? Half a dozen? You took no chances, anyway, since you knew how closely you would be watched. And you did not want the bait taken before it was time. By the by, Sir Austin there seems to lack your discipline. He is trying to slip his knots already. Either he has forgotten that he is playing the part of a prisoner, or something has made him nervous. I wonder what it could be.”
Gideon had missed this, being so much taken up with the inspector’s stream of talk, but Sir Austin was indeed struggling against his bonds. His eyes were scouring the far reaches of the gallery. He snarled in rage at Mrs. Lytton. “I warned you, you vain, witless bitch! Cut me loose, damn you! Cut me loose while there is still time!”
She did not so much as glance at him, only fluttering her fingers in dismissal. “Oh, be quiet. I made those knots tight for a reason. Now, Inspector, let us be candid with one another at last. If there is indeed a ghost at this feast, our positions are not altered. I am standing twenty feet above the floor, and I have you and your sergeant for sentries. You will do your duty, if it comes to it. You will take no joy in it, I’m sure, but you can hardly do otherwise. You are an officer of some standing, and you could not very well creep unseen into a prominent public building in South Kensington.”
“Funny you should mention it, Mrs. Lytton. All I will say is that you’re not the only one who plans ahead. As for doing my duty, well, there is time enough for that. It wouldn’t be doing my duty, anyway. Not here, not tonight. It would be doing your bidding. I have made my share of mistakes, God knows, but I will not make that one.”
Mrs. Lytton averted her face for a moment. Her fingers traced the taut contours of her neck. “It is your only chance,” she said quietly. “He is the last. After that she will disappear.”
She. Mrs. Lytton had not used the word until now. She had danced around it with curious artfulness, just as the inspector had for so long. Gideon watched for his response.
“Enough, Mrs. Lytton.” Cutter bent his head for a moment, scratching absently at his nape. “Enough,” he said again. “I’m going to tell a little story, if I still have time. When I was an eager young sergeant, I was out on my beat one night. It was a balmy evening in May, and I had just turned out of Drury Lane to cross the court towards the opera house. Likely I had it in my mind that there would be young ladies climbing the steps in their summer silks. I was a younger man then, as I say, and still inclined to scent promise in a gentle breeze.
“If I had not been in such a daze, I might have been quicker in my wits. There was a crowd in front of the opera house, right enough, but they were all huddled about some commotion on the steps. The only ladies I saw were the ones shrieking about the blood and the wickedness of it, about the poor young gentleman, so soft in his manners and hardly more than a babe. Some said the poor young prince, but that proved to be high of the mark. It makes no difference who he was, if I am to be truthful.
“It was no more than luck that I saw what followed after. If I had come upon the scene by another way, I would have gone straight up the steps and ended up doing little good beyond roaring for order and jotting down nonsense. But I had turned that corner for good or ill, and do you know, it was not even her that I saw first. It was the man pelting after her with his hat gone and the rest of his opera finery hanging half in tatters. I thought to myself, There is some upstanding fellow meaning to do half my job for me, but when he caught sight of me he gave me reason to wonder. There I was, a copper plain as day in a fresh-pressed uniform, but did he point and sing out, ‘Look there, Constable,’ or ‘Stop that blackguard’? He did nothing like it. His face soured and closed up when he saw me, and he tucked in his chin to hide what he could of it. But by God, he was keeping up the chase as if his life depended on it.
“By the time I thought to turn and look for his villain, he was near to passing me by and I had not shaken my blundering stupor. It was a whole second before I saw her, and to this day I cannot tell if that was because of my own blind dithering or her gift for going unseen. But see her I did, in the next instant, and I can see her in that moment even now.
“I caught a flicker of pale silk, something between blue and grey. I wonder still if she didn’t choose that fine gown for that reason alone. It was fit for the opera, no doubt, but it was also a very near match to the air of a May evening. In any event, I caught that flicker because she had been running like a stone skimming a pond, but when she came to the corner—the same corner I had just turned—well, I won’t say she came to a halt, for she never did that entirely, but she seemed to fling herself into the air and pivot like a vane in a storm.
“When she touched the ground again, she was stretched out like a drawn bow, one knee thrust out in front of her and the other leg stretched back like no leg was ever meant to do. She had one arm gathered back, too, though I made that out too late. I had only half a heartbeat to take it all in—that she was barefoot under that gown, that she was hardly more than a child, for Christ’s sake—and by then she was fixed on him. I saw her spread a hand low for balance, and I saw something glint above her shoulder, then her arm was flung out and already she was launching herself away again. The sound came a fraction later. A neat little sound, like someone halving an apple on a folded cloth.
“He was only two paces past me when it struck him, and the next I knew of it was that the upright young man was upright no longer. He was on the cobbles with his arms and legs all askew, and it was plain enough that nothing could be done for him. By rights I should have touched nothing, but I had myself half-fooled already. I would be preserving evidence, or some such notion. There was not very much thought in it, if I am honest.
“I had never seen a throwing knife before, so I was struck by how dainty the handle looked. Hardly the size of my thumb—the weight is all in the blade, you see—and traced all about with little patterns of white gold. I whipped out a handkerchief, and I’m afraid I was none too delicate about wrenching it free. It was near enough buried in his right eye, is the fact of it, and there was no nice way of going about it.
“In the next moment, needless to say, I was whipping back around the corner of Drury Lane and I will spare you most of the chase that followed. I will say that I found sense enough to grow puzzled after the first minute or so. I was a young man, to be sure, but I was galloping fit to burst my heart and I was barely keeping her in sight. And all the while I knew that she need only jink aside once to lose me, for it is all a maze of lanes and alleys between there and the river.
“Whatever her reasons, I stayed in the hunt for half a mile or more, but I believed by then—and I believe it still—that I stayed in it only for as long as she chose. And when she tripped—we were halfway over Waterloo Bridge by then—I was more than half in doubt about my turn of luck. Remember, I was a keen young copper, and I was not so filled with marvel at this creature that I could not see the glory in catching her. Narrow young lass or no, she had just put knives in two men, and one of them was something near to a prince. I doubted my luck, but I was not about to put it to waste.
“She was hardly stirring by the time I took hold of her, but there was not a mark on her and she sprang up in my grip like a willow sapling out of a bank. She seemed barely strained, though I was all in a lather and wheezing like a racehorse. For a while I was fool enough to think I had collared the most docile little bird that was ever hauled into the nick. ‘It is only eighty-five yards to that police station,’ she said, meaning the Thames station, which stands just in the lee of that bridge. Eighty-five, mind you, not just shy of a hundred or anything that might have come out of a squint and a guess. ‘You can take me there, if you want. But first there are things I must tell you.’
“I won’t share the whole of her tale. Not all of it matters just now, and more to the point, not all of you deserve to hear it. But I will tell you what you should hear—you, Mrs. Lytton, because you were something else before you were a heart of marble hung about with sapphires and ivory; and you, Gault, because for all your whips and your torments, it was not you who made her what she is.
“She told me they were taken, though I couldn’t tell exactly what she meant. ‘We were taken,’ she said, ‘and we were remade.’ She told me that she didn’t know her age then and could only guess at it now. Seventeen, she made it, and no doubt she was as exact in that as she could be. Eighty-five yards, remember. She told me how she learned what she was being fitted for, and of the children who were found to be unfit. Remember now that she had only the space of a short walk; she must have known how small a hope she had of being believed. This tale of hers might have come out of some ancient storybook full of wicked witches and dark forests, but you cannot grasp what it was like without hearing her tell it. She talked like no young girl I ever encountered, and like no lunatic either. She had a voice like cold water, and though she was obliged to be quick, she never faltered once or uttered a single word that did not fit into its place like a bead on a bracelet.
“For years afterwards, I doubted the account I just gave you. I told myself I had been lulled like a country simpleton, that I had witnessed two murders and failed in the plainest of my duties only because the demon I hunted down wore torn silks and had the face of a tranquil child.
“I asked her about the man with the knife in his eye. He was there to watch over her, she said, and to see that the job got done. Because she had run, his last duty was to cut her throat and leave her in a gutter. I would find a knife and a pistol on him, she said, but I would find nothing else that might put a name to him. That much turned out to be true, by the by.
“By this time we had come a little over half the distance, and either I was not watchful or she gave no sign of her intention. The river was high after a spring flood, and I did take note of the quickness of the water. There were scraps of blossom scattered amongst all the wrack and the rubbish, and the water carried them like embers from a bellows. I think I was still set in my purpose when the moment came. I had her right arm braced hard to her shoulder blade and my left hand clamped tight over her shoulder, but maybe I knew in my heart that I might as well have my hands in a basket of eels.
“Whatever the case, what she said last was meant to give me a choice, I think, or the look of one. She said that dying was the only course left to her, though what she meant by dying I couldn’t exactly tell. Maybe all she wanted was to disappear. Maybe she was just weary of it all. She said the boy on the steps was younger than she was—the boy she was sent to kill—and that she would have disobeyed if the soldier had not been so close. Then she said this: ‘They wounded me to make me a knife,’ meaning they raised her up to kill. ‘They wounded me to make me a knife, but that is not how knives are made. I was always a knife and always a wound. I was never theirs to use. I want to lay myself down.’
“So that was my failing, whether I failed knowingly or not. She slipped from my grasp, or I let her slip. It makes no difference. She leapt from that bridge like a blue-grey knife into the blue-grey water, and she was beyond seeing before she ever broke the surface. She laid herself down, and for sixteen years I hoped she was at rest, one way or the other.”
“Inspector,” said Gideon, taking a pace towards him. He hardly knew what he meant to say. He had not made sense of it all yet. All he knew was that it was a secret that might just as easily have been his own, for he would surely have done just the same.
But Cutter only shook his head. Not now. Octavia, who was standing nearer, stretched out a hand and laid it for a moment upon the inspector’s arm. That arm was shaking slightly, a thing Gideon had never witnessed, and the inspector’s chest was settling as if after some great exertion.
“Well,” said Mrs. Lytton. She had resumed her pacing during the inspector’s story, though Gideon had been only faintly aware of it. Sir Austin, too, had begun writhing again, his wheelchair rattling forlornly against the scaffold boards, or perhaps he had never left off. “That was a pretty version of the tale, I’m sure, and you yourself seem moved even if no one else is.”
Cutter said nothing. His gaze had settled somewhere in the empty air.
“I’m not sure that you’ve achieved anything, though,” Mrs. Lytton continued. “Well, beyond unburdening yourself. Your information comes from an untrustworthy source. You may feel that you know this deranged person, but you are surely not depending on her to save the hour. Even with all I know, I can only predict so much. And if she does come, so be it. I am still standing out of reach, and at a moment’s notice I can deprive her of her final prize.” She paused by Sir Austin’s chair and tapped at its frame with the toe of her finely sculpted shoe. “Isn’t that right, Dean?”
Gideon started forward again. “Inspector,” he said, making no effort to keep the urgency from his voice. He could not tell what Cutter might know, but he could surely keep it to himself no longer. “Inspector, she is—”
The inspector lifted a hand to silence him, but he met Gideon’s look with the briefest of skimming nods. When he addressed Mrs. Lytton, he did not bother to look up. “You are right, madam. I don’t know where she is at this very moment, but I do know where she was eight minutes ago. Not ten minutes, mark you. Eight. And I know where she was nineteen minutes before that. Is that good enough for you? Oh, and one other thing. You may be out of my reach, but I’ll warrant you are not out of hers. You are not the only one who keeps souvenirs. I held on to that throwing knife, the one I retrieved from the scene at the opera house. I kept it locked away for years, having little inclination to reminisce over it. Just lately, however, I discovered that it was one of a matched pair. Its twin was left on my doorstep the day before Sir Aneurin’s death. By way of a calling card, I suppose, though I mistook its meaning at the time. In any case, I haven’t much call for such items, even as keepsakes. I have returned them to their rightful owner. I’m sure she’ll find a use for them.”
Mrs. Lytton must have made sense of this a moment too late. She had paused again behind the railing, and at first she appeared only faintly quizzical, but in the next moment her gloved fingers tightened about the iron strut and she lifted her face to search the darkness.
The knife was soundless almost until the last instant, when it lodged itself with a terse whisper in the flawless stem of her throat. She raised her fingers to it with a look of slanted curiosity, then she made a harsh retching noise and guided herself to her knees. The blood had soaked her white glove and was spilling freely from the crook of her wavering arm.
They surged forward at almost the same moment. Octavia was quickest to rouse herself, but Cutter swept past her and turned with his arms spread. “No!” His face was hard and earnest. “No. You can’t put yourselves in her way, not now. I will … leave it to me. I will try, for all the good it will do.”
He was skittering backwards as he spoke, and with a final upward glance he turned and broke for the ladder.
The shape appeared—she appeared—before he had taken a full stride, unfurling herself impossibly from behind an immense buttress and flinging herself sidelong through a great chasm of vacant air. She alighted on a slender brink of cornice-work, and Gideon glimpsed a head shorn to an intimate stubble. He saw dark and restive eyes, their hollows deepened by ashy smudges.
