Dark Detectives Page 6

  Belach stared at her with white, taut features.

  “You mean that you will do battle with this evil force?”

  Fidelma smiled thinly. “That is what I mean,” she said emphatically.

  Reluctantly, Belach helped Monchae back up the stairs, leaving Fidelma standing in the darkness. She stood still thinking for a while. She had an instinct that whatever was happening in this troubled isolated inn, it was building up towards its climax. Perhaps that climax would come before sunrise. There was no logic to the idea but Fidelma had long come to the belief that one should not ignore one’s instincts.

  She turned and made her way towards a darkened alcove at the far end of the room in which only a deep wooden bench was situated. She tightened her cloak against the chill, seated herself and prepared to wait. Wait for what, she did not know. But she believed that she would not have to wait for long before some other manifestation occurred.

  It was a short time before she heard the sounds of the pipe once more.

  The sweet, melodious lullaby was gone. The pipes were now wild keening. It was the hair-raising lament of the goltraige, full of pain, sorrow and longing.

  Fidelma held her head to one side.

  The music was no longer outside the old inn but seeming to echo from within, seeping up under the floorboards, through the walls and down from the rafters.

  She shivered but made no move to go in search of the sound, praying all the while that neither Monchae nor Belach would disobey her instructions and leave their room.

  She waited until the tune came to an end.

  There was a silence in the old building.

  Then she heard the sound, the sound she had heard on her first waking. It was a soft, dragging sound. Her body tensed as she bent forward in the alcove, her eyes narrowed as she tried to focus into the darkness.

  A figure seemed to be rising from the floor, upwards, slowly upwards on the far side of the room. Fidelma held her breath.

  The figure, reaching its full height, appeared to be clutching a set of pipes beneath its arms. It moved towards the table in a curious limping gait.

  Fidelma noticed that now and again, as the light of the glowing embers in the hearth caught it, the figure’s cloak sparkled and danced with a myriad pinpricks of fire.

  Fidelma rose to here feet.

  “The charade is over!” she cried harshly.

  The figure dropped the pipes and wheeled around, seeking to identify the speaker. Then it seemed to catch its breath.

  “Is that you, Monchae?” came a sibilant, mocking whisper.

  Then, before Fidelma could prepare herself, the figure seemed to fly across the room at her. She caught sight of light flashing on an upraised blade and instinct made her react by grasping at the descending arm with both hands, twisting her body to take the weight of the impact.

  The figure grunted angrily as the surprise of the attack failed.

  The collision of their bodies threw Fidelma back into the alcove, slamming her against the wooden seat. She grunted in pain. The figure had shaken her grip loose and once more the knife hand was descending.

  “You should have fled while you had the chance, Monchae,” came the masculine growl. “I had no wish to harm you or the old man. I just wanted to get you out of this inn. Now, you must die!”

  Fidelma sprang aside once more, feverishly searching for some weapon, some means of defence.

  Her flaying hand caught against something. She dimly recognised it as the alabaster figure of the Madonna and Child. Automatically, her fingers closed on it and she swung it up like a club. She struck the figure at where she thought the side of the head would be.

  She was surprised at the shock of the impact. The alabaster seemed to shatter into pieces, as she would have expected from a plaster statuette, but its impact seemed firm and weighty, causing a vibration in her hand and arm. The sound was like a sickening smack of flesh meeting a hard substance.

  The figure grunted, a curious sound as the air was sharply expelled from his lungs. Then he dropped to the floor. She heard the sound of metal ringing on the floor planks as the knife dropped and bounced.

  Fidelma stood for a moment or two, shoulders heaving as she sought to recover her breath and control her pounding emotions.

  Slowly she walked to the foot of the stairs and called up in a firm voice.

  “You can come down now. I have laid your ghost!”

  She turned, stumbling a little in the darkness, until she found a candle and lit it. Then she went back to the figure of her erstwhile assailant. He lay on his side, hands outstretched. He was a young man. She gave a soft intake of breath when she saw the ugly wound on his temple. She reached forward and felt for a pulse. There was none.

  She looked round curiously. The impact of a plaster statuette could not have caused such a death-blow.

  Fragments and powdered plaster were scattered in a large area. But there, lying in the debris was a long cylindrical tube of sacking. It was no more than a foot high and perhaps one inch in diameter. Fidelma bent and picked it up. It was heavy. She sighed and replaced it where she had found it.

  Monchae and Belach were creeping down the stairs now.

  “Belach, have you a lantern?” asked Fidelma, as she stood up.

  “Yes. What is it?” demanded the innkeeper.

  “Light it, if you please. I think we have solved your haunting.”

  As she spoke she turned and walked across the floor to the spot where she had seen the figure rise, as if from the floor. There was a trapdoor and beneath it some steps which led into a tunnel.

  Belach had lit the lamp.

  “What has happened?” he demanded.

  “Your ghost was simply a man,” Fidelma explained.

  Monchae let out a moan.

  “You mean it is Mugrán? He was not killed at Loch Derg?”

  Fidelma perched herself on the edge of the table and shook her head. She stooped to pick up the pipes where the figure had dropped them onto the table.

  “No; it was someone who looked and sounded a little like Mugrán as you knew him. Take a look at his face, Monchae. I think you will recognise Cano, Mugrán’s young brother.”

  A gasp of astonishment from the woman confirmed Fidelma’s identification.

  “But why, what …?”

  “A sad but simple tale. Cano was not killed as reported at Loch Derg. He was probably badly wounded and returned to this land with a limp. I presume that he did not have a limp when he went away?”

  “He did not,” Monchae confirmed.

  “Mugrán was dead. He took Mugrán’s pipes. Why he took so long to get back here, we shall never know. Perhaps he did not need money until now, or perhaps the idea never occurred to him …”

  “I don’t understand,” Monchae said, collapsing into a chair by the table.

  “Cano remembered that Mugrán had some money. A lot of money he had saved. Mugrán told you that if he lost his life, then there was money in the inn and you would never want for anything. Isn’t that right?”

  Monchae made an affirmative gesture.

  “But as I told you, it was just Mugrán’s fantasy. We searched the inn everywhere and could find no sign of any money. Anyway, my man, Belach, and I are content with things as they are.”

  Fidelma smiled softly.

  “Perhaps it was when Cano realised that you had not found his brother’s hoard that he made up his mind to find it himself.”

  “But it isn’t here,” protested Belach, coming to the support of his wife.

  “But it was,” insisted Fidelma. “Cano knew it. But he didn’t know where. He needed time to search. How could he get you away from the inn sufficiently long to search? That was when he conceived a convoluted idea to drive you out by pretending to be the ghost of his brother. He had his brother’s pipes and could play the same tunes as his brother had played. His appearance and his voice made him pass for the person you once knew, Monchae, but, of course, only at a distance with muffled voice
. He began to haunt you.”

  “What of the shimmering affect?” demanded Belach. “How could he produce such an affect?”

  “I have seen a yellow claylike substance that gives off that curious luminosity,” Fidelma assured them. “It can be scooped from the walls of the caves west of here. It is called mearnáil, a phosphorus, a substance that glows in the gloom. If you examine Cano’s cloak you will see that he has smeared it in this yellowing clay.”

  “But he left no footprints,” protested Belach. “He left no footprints in the snow.”

  “But he did leave some tell tale sign,” Fidelma pointed out. “You see, he took the branch of a bush and, as he walked backwards away from the knoll, he swept away his footprints. But while it does disguise the footprints, one can still see the ruffled surface of the snow where the bush has swept over its top layer. It is an old trick, taught to warriors, to hide their tracks from their enemies.”

  “But surely he could not survive in the cold outside all these nights?” Monchae said. It was the sort of aspect which would strike a woman’s precise and practical logic.

  “He did not. He slept in the inn, or at least in the stable. Once or twice tried to search the inn while you lay asleep. Hence the bumps and sounds that sometimes awakened you. But he knew, however, that he could only search properly if he could move you out.”

  “He was here with us in the inn?” Belach was aghast.

  Fidelma nodded to the open trapdoor in the floor.

  “It seemed that he knew more of the secret passages of the inn than either of you. After all, Cano was brought up in this inn.”

  There was a silence.

  Monchae gave a low sigh.

  “All that and there was no treasure. Poor Cano. He was not really evil. Did you have to kill him, sister?”

  Fidelma compressed her lips for a moment.

  “Everything is in God’s hands,” she said in resignation. “In my struggle, I seized the statuette of Our Lady and struck out at Cano. It caught him on the table and fragmented.”

  “But it was only alabaster. It would not have killed him, surely?”

  “It was what was inside that killed him. The very thing that he was looking for. It lies there on the floor.”

  “What is it?” whispered Monchae, when Belach reached down to pick up the cylindrical object in sackcloth.

  “It is a roll of coins. It is Mugrán’s treasure. It acted as a bar of metal to the head of Cano and killed him. Our Lady had been protecting the treasure all these years and, in the final analysis, Our Lady meted out death to him that was not rightful heir to that treasure.”

  Fidelma suddenly saw the light creeping in through the shutters of the inn.

  “And now day is breaking. I need to break my fast and be on my way to Cashel. I’ll leave a note for your boáire explaining matters. But I have urgent business in Cashel. If he wants me, I shall be there.”

  Monchae stood regarding the shattered pieces of the statuette.

  “I will have a new statuette of Our Lady made,” she said softly.

  “You can afford it now,” replied Fidelma solemnly.

  Charles Beauregard

  SEVEN STARS EPISODE ONE

  THE MUMMY’S HEART

  BY KIM NEWMAN

  The Diogenes Club is situated behind a discreet door in London’s Pall Mall, on the fringes of Whitehall. Through its unexceptional foyer pass the city’s most unsociable and unclubbable men. The greatest collection of eccentrics, misanthropes, grotesques and unconfined lunatics outside the House of Lords is to be found on its membership lists.

  Ostensibly for the convenience of that species of individual who yearns to live in monied isolation from his fellows, this unassuming establishment is actually much more. A soundproofed suite on the top floor is set aside for the use of the club’s Ruling Cabal of five persons, each connected, mostly in minor official capacities, with Her Majesty’s Government.

  Charles Beauregard is at the disposal of the Diogenes Club, and when he is called upon, it invariably results in a voyage to some far corner of the world and involves confidential matters affecting the interests of Great Britain. Although Beauregard considers himself something between a diplomat and a courier, he has at times been required to be an explorer, a burglar, an impostor and a civil servant. The invisible business of government has afforded him a varied and intriguing career.

  Sometimes the business of the Diogenes Club is known in the outside world as the Great Game. Charles Beauregard was first introduced in Kim Newman’s acclaimed novella ‘Red Reign’ in The Mammoth Book of Vampires (1992), which the author expanded into the award-winning novel Anno Dracula the same year. Since then Beauregard, along with Irish journalist turned vampire Katharine Reed, have appeared in the sequels The Bloody Red Baron (1995) and Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1999), although these novels are set on an alternate timeline to the one of Seven Stars. Kate Reed, who is also the protagonist of Newman’s ‘Coppola’s Dracula’ (The Mammoth Book of Dracula, 1997), ‘The Gypsies in the Wood’ (The Fair Folk, 2005), ‘Aquarius’ (the Titan Books edition of Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha, 2012) and ‘Grand Guignol’ (Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear, 2015), was created by Bram Stoker, but never written up by him.

  The Diogenes Club was also invented by Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft is a member—in his story ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (The Strand, September 1893), but it was co-writer/director Billy Wilder who established its status as an intelligence agency in his 1970 movie, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Newman’s The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (2007) collected seven stories featuring members of the club, along with a couple of useful appendices for American readers. It was followed by The Mysteries of the Diogenes Club in 2010, containing four novellas and the ‘Seven Stars’ sequence.

  IT WAS THE size of a human heart. Charles Beauregard let his hand hover over it, fingers outstretched. He shut one eye but could not quite blot out the jewel.

  “Aren’t rubies generally smaller than this?” he asked.

  Professor Trelawny shrugged. “So I believe. I’m an Egyptologist, not a geologist. Strictly, a ruby is a pure transparent red corundum, though the term is loosely applied to merely red gemstones, like certain varieties of spinel and garnet. In rock-tapping circles, there’s an argument that this isn’t a ruby proper. Corunda, as you know—sapphire, emery and so on—are second only in hardness to diamond. The Seven Stars is at least as hard as diamond.”

  Trelawny tapped the Seven Stars with a knuckle, touching it with a diamond ring. He did not try to scratch the priceless artefact. Presumably for fear of breaking his ring.

  “So it’s a red diamond?” Beauregard assumed.

  Trelawny’s huge eyebrows wriggled. “If such exists, it may well be. Or mighthap a gemstone unknown to modern science. A variety perhaps once familiar to the Pharaonic Kings, lost to obscurity and now rediscovered, for the glory of our own dear Queen.”

  Ever since the cloth was unfolded and the jewel disclosed, Beauregard had felt an urge to touch the stone. But he kept his fingers away. Though it was absurd, he had the impression the jewel would be hot as fire, as if just coughed from a volcano.

  “Why is it called the Seven Stars?”

  Trelawny smiled, weathered face crinkling.

  “Turn up the gaslight, would you?”

  Beauregard obliged. The flame grew with a serpent’s hiss, casting more light. The basements of the British Museum were divided into dozens of storerooms, offices and laboratories. Trelawny’s lair, a surprisingly uncluttered space, was currently devoted to the study of the Jewel of Seven Stars.

  Trelawny pulled on a white cotton glove and lifted the stone. He had to stretch his thumb and little finger to get a secure grip.

  “Look through the jewel, at the flame.”

  Beauregard stepped around the table. Trelawny held the gemstone like a lens. In the red depths, seven fires burned. Beauregard shifted position and the fires vanished. He moved back, and the
y shone again. Seven pinpoints of light, in a familiar pattern.

  “Ursa Major,” he commented.

  Trelawny set the jewel down again.

  “The Great Bear, Charlemagne’s Wain, the good old Plough. Also known, I understand, as the Septentrionnes, the Seven Ploughing Oxen, and, to the Hindoo, the Seven Rishis or Holy Ancient Sages. Or, as our American cousins would have it, the Big Dipper. What in Hades do you think a dipper is, by the way?”

  “A ladle. Do you take an interest in astronomy, Professor?”

  Trelawny laughed and indicated the jewel.

  “I take an interest in this. The rest of it I got from an encyclopedia.”

  “Is it a natural effect?”

  “If not, Ancient Egyptian jewellers were possessed of secrets lost to memory. Which is, incidentally, not an entirely unlikely hypothesis. We still don’t really know how they managed to build pyramids. I incline, however, to consider the stars a natural, or supernatural, phenomenon.”

  “Supernatural?”

  Trelawny’s eyebrows waved again.

  “There’s a curse, you see.”

  “Of course there is.”

  Without the light behind it, the jewel seemed a dead lump, a giant blood clot. There was certainly blood in its history.

  “I can’t take curses too seriously,” Trelawny announced. “Every ancient site has been at least thrice-accursed. If you consider its collection of maleficent objects from unhallowed graves, you’d have to deem the British Museum the most curse-plagued spot in the Empire. But hundreds of visitors traipse around upstairs every day without suffering ill-effects. Unless, of course, they’ve first stopped at the pie stall in Great Russell Street.”

  Beauregard thought the professor might be whistling in the dark.

  “And yet,” he mused, “this little item has its secrets.”

  “I assure you, Professor, I should not be here if those secrets were not taken very seriously by eminent persons.”