When we arrived in Praed Street again, I had the strangest sensation. I had stood there so recently facing Sebastian Nightwine that I recalled him in vivid clarity, the color of his bronzed skin, his blond mustache and eyebrows almost white against it, the honey color of his remarkable eyes. Now he was gone: to a just punishment in Barker’s opinion, to oblivion in his own. Is not infamy another form of fame?
Barker spoke to the doorman as if they were old friends. This was the man who had lent him the hat and coat and had traded places with him two nights before. I speculated he had met him earlier than that, keeping an eye on me when I was carried there against my knowledge a week earlier by Sofia. The doorman informed us that Miss Ilyanova had not vacated her rooms, although he had not seen her in a couple of days. Barker led me up the stairs to the door to her rooms and stopped. He pulled out his pistols and I mine. Another scenario presented itself: me shooting her dead, and having to carry that on my conscience for the rest of my life.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, when he hesitated.
“The room could be awash in ricin. There could be an unknown poison on the door handle. She could have packed the place with explosives.”
“Oh, lovely,” I muttered.
“Or she could have left it as she found it. I’m trying to piece together her actions based upon what little I know of her. Have you any insight?”
“I would say she fears you, based upon her sudden departure the moment you appeared here the other night, but she bears you no malice for her father’s death.”
“Good, then,” he said, and before I could stop him, he unlocked the door with the betty he kept in his waistcoat pocket and threw it open. He trusted me far more than I did myself.
There was no poison, unless it was a slow-acting one, no ricin, no explosives. The room looked deserted. There were no suitcases and her clothing was gone. I even looked for her weapons case under the armoire. She had decamped while Barker was convalescing. Good girl, I thought. I hope you’re far, far away from here.
“Thomas,” Barker said, directing my eye to the fireplace. There was a leather case there, a tube-shaped affair leaning against the side. She’d pinned a note to it that read “Mr. Barker.”
“The maps!” I cried.
The Guv crossed the room and squatted beside it.
“Ricin” he repeated. “If it is anywhere, it would be here.”
“No,” I assured him.
“Very well,” he said, and opening the lid, poured the contents out upon the floor. I held my breath, expecting to see powder pour from the tube. I had assured him, but there was no one to assure me.
Barker reached inside and pulled out a half-dozen parchment maps. They were yellowed with age and lettered in what I supposed to be Tibetan script. These were Nightwine’s private maps, the ones too precious or valuable to simply hand over to the Foreign Office. Nightwine was dead, but with them Britain could still launch an offensive action against Tibet of its own.
Still resting on his boots, he spread out the maps on the floor. Some were larger scale, showing mountain ranges and entire countries. Others were plans of buildings.
“Shambhala,” he said, pointing to the smallest of them all, no more than two feet by three. “Here is Lhasa. This one appears to be a detailed map of all the monasteries in the Himalayas, and this looks like a map of the Dalai Lama’s chambers. There’s even a hidden chamber marked to get in and out without detection.”
“Some of them look new and some look very old,” I remarked.
“They know how to preserve manuscripts in Tibet. Some of them could be as much as five hundred years old.”
Right after saying that, he lifted the corner of one and began to rip it in two.
“Sir!” I cried. “Stop!”
“It’s too dangerous, lad,” he said. “Far too dangerous. If these were in the hands of the Foreign Office, they would get into all sorts of mischief.”
“But is that your decision to make? I mean, we could bring them missionaries and medicine and education-”
“And smallpox and instability and slavery,” he continued, still ripping and destroying the maps. Some were on fresh onionskin and made a sharp, crisp sound as they ripped, while others crumbled into powdery pieces. It hurt my eyes to see such beautiful ancient works of cartography destroyed.
Barker stopped at the final map, the one of Shambhala. His hand hovered over it.
“I believe I’ll keep this one,” he said. “I’ve destroyed the one showing its location.”
He set it aside and then began shoving the torn maps into the room’s grate. A single match and they all ignited like tinder. I watched the fire consume them in the reflection of Barker’s lenses.
We lowered ourselves cross-legged on the floor and watched the fire. The blaze crackled with whatever resins or varnishes had been painted on the old parchments.
“She’s gone, then,” I said eventually.
“Aye,” he rumbled. “She’s gone.”
“I suppose we could alert Scotland Yard and have the ports blocked.”
“She would anticipate that,” he responded, watching a perfect little jewel of a monastery begin to char and curl. “She is no fool. Anyway, I don’t feel like aiding Scotland Yard at the moment. They must work their way into my good graces again.”
“You don’t regret letting the killer of Brother Andrew get away?”
“That’s just like you, Thomas, to argue one side on Monday and another on Tuesday.”
“Actually, it’s Sunday, sir,” I pointed out.
“Leave it to you to keep track of your day off.”
“Somebody must, until there is a private enquiry agents union.”
“You’ll be founding president, no doubt.”
“They’d need someone bright as a new penny.”
Carefully, Barker rolled the Shambhala map and put it in the leather cylinder.
“Come, lad,” he said. “Let us go back to the office and see what deviltry London’s got herself into now.”
“Yes, sir.”
In the lobby, Barker turned to the doorman he’d spoken to earlier, and tipped his hat.
“Give him half a crown, lad.”
I paid him and we went out to our waiting cabman.
“Half a crown?” I remarked when we were inside. “A shilling would have done. This was a very expensive case, I must say. I intend to add it all up when we get back to the office.”
“You do that,” Barker said. Crossing his arms and tipping his bowler hat over his spectacles, he rested in the corner of the cab.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
There was an assault upon the knocker that night, shortly after half past ten. Barker and I were disturbed in our separate rooms, both reading with our dressing gowns thrown over our clothes. I was reading one of Mr. Verne’s fantasies, certain if I tried to sleep without finishing it, I should dream of projectiles shooting me to the moon. When the knocker sounded, I wondered, What now? I put a marker in my book and stepped into the hallway, listening to the murmurs at the door. Actually, they were only murmurs on Mac’s part.
“I don’t care what time it is,” a voice brayed in the corridor. “Wake him. Wake both of them, or they can rot in jail this very night.”
“He does not receive visitors in his private home, gentlemen. If you wish, you may speak to him at his offices in the morning.”
I’ve got to say this about Mac: as far as his duties are concerned, he’s got all the brass a man could want. The entire Black Watch could be standing outside and he’d have denied them admittance.
Barker came up beside me and leaned over the rail to hear what was happening, as I was.