Julius Winkman stood in the centre of the stage.
Tonight, the black marketeer wore a wide-breasted grey suit and white shirt, open at the collar. Beside him was a long folding table, draped with a clean black cloth. With a hairy hand he made a delicate adjustment to the little golden pince-nez on his nose as he indicated the silver-glass display box beside him.
‘This first lot, friends,’ he said, ‘is a very pretty fancy. Gentleman’s cigarette case, platinum, early twentieth century. Carried by Brigadier Horace Snell in his breast pocket the night he was shot dead by his rival in matters of the heart, Sergeant Bill Carruthers. Date: October 1913. Blood traces still present. Still contains a psychic charge from the event, I believe. Leopold can tell us more.’
At once the son spoke up. ‘Strong psychic residue: gunshot echoes and screams upon Touching. No Visitor contained. Risk leveclass="underline" low.’ He slumped back in the chair; his legs resumed their swinging.
‘There you are, then,’ Winkman said. ‘Little sweetener before the main event. Do I hear any interest? Starting bids, three hundred pounds.’
From our position high above, it was impossible to see the contents of the little box, but there were two other cases on the table. The first, a tall rectangular glass cabinet, contained a rusted sword – and a ghost: even under the spotlights, I could see the eerie bluish glow, the soft tug and pull of moving plasm. The second, a much smaller case, held what looked like a pottery statue or icon, shaped like some four-legged beast. This too had a glimmer of other-light about it, faintly visible beneath the constraining glass.
Neither of these were what I was interested in, because to Winkman’s other side was a small table, standing separate and alone, where the light from the three lanterns intersected. It was very bright, the focus of the entire room. A heavy black cloth covered the glass case on the table. Piled on the floor below it were heaps of iron chains, and rings of salt and iron filings in ostentatious protective display.
To my ears came a familiar hateful sound: the whirring buzz of flies.
I nudged Lockwood and pointed. He gave the briefest of nods.
There had been progress in the auction. One of the customers, a neat, prim-looking man in a pinstriped suit, had consulted with the small girl sitting next to him, and put in a bid. A second member of the audience, a bearded man in a rather shapeless raincoat, had topped that instantly, and the bids were now seesawing between them. The third of Winkman’s three clients had remained entirely unmoved. He sat half turned away, negligently toying with the polished black walking cane he held. He was a young, slim man with a blond moustache and curly yellow hair. Sometimes he glanced at the glowing cases, and bent to ask questions of the boy at his side; but most often he stared at the black cloth on the table in the centre of the room.
Something about the young man was familiar. Lockwood had been gazing at him too. He leaned close and mumbled something.
I bent closer. ‘What?’ I breathed. ‘I can’t make out what you’re saying.’
He rolled up the bottom of his mask. ‘Where did George get these things? Surely he could afford one with a mouth hole . . . I said: that man nearest us – he was at the Fittes party. We saw him talking to Penelope Fittes, remember?’
Yes, I remembered him, glimpsed across the crowded room. The black tie at his neck could just be seen beneath his elegant brown coat.
‘Winkman’s clients must come from high society,’ Lockwood whispered. ‘Wonder who he is . . .’
The first lot of the auction had been completed. The cigarette case had gone to the pinstriped man. Beaming and nodding, Winkman moved to the cabinet with the rusted sword, but before he could speak, the young blond man had raised a hand. He wore light brown gloves, clearly made of lambskin, or the hide of something else small and cute and dead. ‘The main event, please, Mr Winkman. You know why we’ve come.’
‘So soon?’ Winkman seemed dismayed. ‘This is a genuine Crusader blade, a French estoc, which we believe contains an actual ancient Spectre or a Wraith, perhaps of one of the very Saracens it slew. Its rareness –’
‘– does not interest me this evening,’ the young man said. ‘I have several similar pieces. Show us the mirror we’ve heard so much about, and let us move things along – unless the other gentlemen disagree?’
He glanced across. The bearded man nodded; the man in the pinstripes gave a curt wave of approval.
‘You see, Winkman?’ the young man said. ‘Come! Show us the prize.’
The smile on Julius Winkman’s face did not alter, but it seemed to me that his eyes had narrowed behind the flashing pince-nez. ‘Certainly, certainly! Always you speak your mind openly and honestly, my lord, which is why we so value your custom. Here, then!’ He swung his bulk across to the separate table, took hold of the black cloth. ‘May I present that unparalleled item, that extreme rarity that has so exercised the men at DEPRAC these past few days – friends, the bone glass of Edmund Bickerstaff!’
He pulled the cloth away.
We had been so long in the pursuit of this object that it had acquired in my mind an almost mythic weight and dread. This was the thing that had slain poor Wilberforce, that had struck a relic-thief dead before he even left the cemetery, and killed one of Winkman’s men. This was the glass that everyone wanted – Barnes, Kipps, Joplin, Lockwood, George and I. People had murdered for it; people had died for it. It promised something strange and terrible. I had only caught a flash of it in Bickerstaff’s coffin, but that shiny, crawling blackness remained imprinted on my mind. And now, finally, here it was: and it seemed so very small.
Winkman had arranged it like an artefact in a museum, propped up against a slanting velvet display board. It was in the centre of a large, square silver-glass case. From where we crouched, far above, its exact size was hard to judge, but I guessed it to be no more than six inches across – about the size of a pudding bowl or side-plate. The glass in the centre seemed coarser than I’d expected, scuffed and uneven. Its rim was roughly circular, but brown and bumpy in outline. Many hard and narrow things had been tightly fused to make it. Many bones.
The buzzing sound rubbed at my ears. Two of the children in the audience made little whimpering noises. Everyone sat attentive and stiff, staring at the object in the case.
‘I should point out that you’re seeing it from the back,’ Julius Winkman said softly. ‘The glass on the reverse is highly polished; here it’s rough, more like rock crystal.’
‘We need to see the other side,’ the shabby, bearded man said. ‘How can we possibly bid without seeing that? You’re playing tricks with us here, Winkman.’
Winkman’s smile broadened. ‘Not so. As always, I have only the safety of my clients at heart. You know this object has a certain reputation. Otherwise, why would you be here? Why would you pay the minimum asking price, which I can tell you now is fifteen thousand pounds? Well, with that reputation come dangers. You know there are risks attached to looking in the glass. Perhaps there are wonders too – that is not for me to say – but this cannot be investigated until the item is sold.’
‘We can’t buy on these terms,’ the bearded man grumbled. ‘We need to look at the viewing glass!’
‘Look at the glass by all means’ – Winkman smiled – ‘but not before you’ve paid.’
‘What else can you tell us?’ the small man in pinstripes asked. ‘My backers require more solid information than you’ve given me so far.’
Winkman glanced at his son. ‘Leopold, if you wouldn’t mind . . .?’