Full Dark House(133)

She stopped in her tracks and looked back over her shoulder with sad deliberation. She saw Bryant and held his eye, unable to move any further, and in that moment she was lost.

Up ahead there was a muffled thump, and the road vibrated sharply beneath their feet.

‘What the bloody hell was that?’ asked Biddle.

Elspeth had heard the noise too.

‘Oh no,’ was all Bryant managed to say before the two-storey front of the antiquarian bookshop lazily divorced itself from the rest of the terrace and fell forward in an explosion of dust and bricks.

As the airborne sediment settled, they saw the neat rooms inside the bookshop exposed like a child’s cutaway drawing. The building’s frontage lay collapsed across the road, virtually unbroken. As a fresh wind picked up, the entire street was scattered with the pages of rare books. Colour plates of herons, butterflies, monkeys, warriors and emperors drifted lazily past them. There were diamond shards of glass everywhere. The detectives’ clothes were pincushioned with sparkling slivers.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Biddle, scratching his head in wonder.

Of Elspeth Wynter, there was no sign at all.





61

SPIRITS OF THE CITY

Margaret Armitage sipped the glass of vervain tea made from leaves she had specially shipped to her from a French necromancer in the town of Carcassonne. Beside her, Arthur Bryant and John May dangled their legs over the ancient wall of the riverbank, nursing foamy pint mugs of bitter. Above the pub door was a large blackboard that read: HITLER WILL SEND NO WARNING—ALWAYS CARRY YOUR GAS MASK.

The waitress of the Anchor had looked at Maggie as if she was mad when she asked for a glass of freshly boiled water. It did not help that the teenage leader of the Camden Town Coven, an organization that had counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe among its members, was wearing a purple and gold kaftan belonging to an African tribal chief, topped with a peacock-feather hat and half a dozen amber necklaces inscribed with carvings representing the souls of the dead.

‘I’m a bit disappointed about there not being an actual phantom at the Palace, just a poor tortured boy,’ said Maggie, looking out across the placid grey water at the bend in the river, where it widened to the docks. ‘Let me get under your overcoat, it’s big enough.’

‘Yes, that was rather an intriguing aspect,’ Bryant agreed as he extended his gaberdine. ‘Of course, Todd Wynter was never at Jan Petrovic’s house, so there were no walls to walk through, so to speak. But when he vanished from the top-floor corridor, and again from the roof, he had me fooled for a while. John, you remember I asked you about the wind that night?’

‘Yes, I wondered what you were on about.’

‘We found Todd’s jacket,’ he told Maggie. ‘The one his mother had made for him, just a hood and cloak stitched out of blackout curtain, but it was absolutely huge, rolled up like a sheet. When I ran after him, I imagine he simply remained still at the end of the passageway and unfurled the cloak. It was too dark for me to see him. An old magician’s trick; he’d witnessed plenty of those at the Palace. He threw it off the roof when he was finished with it, and waited until he could return to his private quarters. We found it hanging from the steeple of St Anne’s Church in Dean Street. The wind had carried it like a sail.’

‘What a pity,’ said Maggie. ‘I had hoped you might be able to give us proof of the spirit world.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt Andreas Renalda is possessed, but he’s possessed by the spirits of his childhood.’ Bryant swallowed some of his bitter, savouring the pungent taste of hops. ‘In her own way, so was Elspeth Wynter. Her life was shaped by the ghosts of the theatre. She was a woman forced to survive in a world of harmful magic.’

‘That’s what witches are. Do you think she was a witch?’

‘Well, someone dropped a house on her,’ said Bryant, ‘so she might have been.’

‘You can’t fool me. You were keen on her.’

‘I was only ever keen, as you quaintly put it, on one girl. Once you’ve met the one, all the others are just phantasms.’

Maggie lightly stroked his hand. ‘Perhaps it’s time to let her memory go, Arthur.’

Bryant looked out at a pair of swans settling on the oily water. ‘It’s not a matter of choice. I have to wait for her to do that.’ He took a ruminative swig of beer. The evening’s chill had blanched his cheeks and knuckles.

‘Did you hear about your landlady?’ May was anxious to change the mood. ‘She stabbed the editor of Country Life in the foot with your swordstick.’

‘Serves him right,’ said Bryant, cheering up. ‘He has no business being in London.’