‘He didn’t buy anything.’
‘What was he doing here then? Tell me, for heaven’s sake.’
‘He was selling not buying.’
Seeing the baffled, almost panicky expression on Humphries’ face, Pascal said, ‘That was Mr Fish. I know him.’
‘Fish? Yer sure his name ain’t Smight.’
‘As sure as I am that your name is Albert Humphries. Fish visits the chemists in Durham every month or so to peddle his cod-liver oil. Not his, of course. He represents the manufacturer. The quality of the oil from North Sea cod is second to none. I have just taken four bottles from him and he will be on his way to sell some to Bennet’s up the road. I’ve always thought it humorous that a man with the name of Fish should find himself selling cod-liver oil. Yet we always pass the time pleasantly and the subject of his name has never been mentioned. Are you all right, Constable?’
Humphries had gone to the door. He was gazing up Saddler Street. The tall man with the hat and bag was still in sight. If he’d run Humphries could have caught up with him. But there was no point now.
Humphries wondered about the other man who had alighted from the Newcastle train. Had he made the wrong choice, or was the whole thing a wild goose chase?
Constable Humphries had made the wrong choice. The other man who’d alighted from the 11.45 from Newcastle, the one whom Humphries had bumped into, was Doctor Anthony Smight. The murderer had no inkling that the stolid individual on the platform was a policeman in civvy clothes. He barely glanced at Humphries or at a man of about his own height and build who had got off the train ahead of him. Smight was too intent on the next stage of his plans to pay much attention to others. He walked down the curving road away from Durham station and then, by the arches of the Flass Vale viaduct, turned towards the centre of the city.
It was extraordinary, he reflected, how fate had brought him to the same northern place as Sebastian Marmont, the soldier turned magician. Smight had reason to resent Marmont – what he saw as the theft of the girl Padma from him – but it was a resentment which had burned low over the years although he had tried to cause mischief once by spreading the story in London that Marmont had stolen the Lucknow Dagger. His old antipathy to Marmont only flared again when he’d glimpsed the very man on the stage of the Assembly Rooms. Then he encountered Eustace Flask after his humiliating disappearance and saw a way to achieve a small retaliation against Marmont by enlisting the medium’s help. It had not quite worked out. Smight remembered the sight of Flask’s body, still twitching and bleeding in the wooded glade by the River Wear.
But the death of Flask or Smight’s hostility towards Marmont were less significant than his campaign of revenge against all those who had a share in the suicide of Ernest Smight. Anthony was the younger brother to Ernest. He had revered his brother. Ernest had looked after him and their sister Ethel, who was between them in age. Many years before as children, at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, they had played in the grounds of the large family house in Mortlake. Once, Ernest had saved Anthony’s life by wading into a pond and freeing the drowning six-year-old from the weeds in which he was entangled. Anthony remembered lying on the grass beside the pond with Ernest kneeling beside him, love and distress etched into his face.
They enjoyed an idyllic childhood, the three of them, untroubled by their mother and father, unrebuked by the servants. Then something had gone wrong. The family’s money had vanished, almost overnight. Anthony – Tony to his brother and sister – was too young to understand, too young even to be told anything. But he overheard incomprehensible talk of investments on the other side of the world, of minerals in South America, of returns which had not materialized, of more investments and bigger losses. He remembered his father talking about throwing good money after bad, and young Tony visualized a pit in which banknotes fell like leaves to join piles of others which were slowly decaying.
They lost the house at Mortlake and moved to Orpington. Somewhere around that time, they lost their father too. He did not die, he simply disappeared. And, whenever their mother mentioned him again, it was through pursed lips. A few years later their mother died too, and the two brothers and the sister were thrown upon each other even more.
They did go their separate ways eventually, or rather Anthony did by training as a physician and travelling thousands of miles to India. During that time he was caught up in the Lucknow siege, and the rivalry with Lieutenant Marmont over the Indian girl. It was almost a quarter of a century before he returned to England and, when he did see his siblings again, they thought him the shell of the man he had once been. Ernest and Ethel kept house together. They had not exactly prospered either, although the medium enjoyed a brief period of popularity after being taken up by a peer of the realm.
Doctor Tony settled himself in Rosemary Street. He found himself a comfortable niche among the opium-smokers in Penharbour Lane. He did a good deed occasionally, as when he attended to the sick child in George Forester’s family. He did no great harm otherwise. Or no more than the odd spot of criminality. But everything changed when he heard the news of brother Ernest’s death. The thought of Ernest sliding beneath the cold, dark waters of the Thames – as he, Tony, had once almost slid beneath the weed-infested waters of the Mortlake pond – roused in the doctor a raging pity.
The more he turned over his brother’s fate, the more passionate Anthony Smight became in his determination to extract every last drop of vengeance. There were four people he considered guilty. He had set George Forester to spy on the Seldons and the Ansells, and to find out details of their households. He had dealt with the Seldons, not crudely by bludgeoning them over the head or shooting them through the heart with the gun which he kept about his person. Instead he had performed the task in a subtle, almost tortuous style, choking them to death by opening the gas valves in the house in Norwood. There was satisfaction in knowing that the Seldons had perished by drawing poisonous fumes into their lungs just as Ernest had died through absorbing water into his.
Doctor Tony was satisfied to read the account in the papers of the accident although later reports hinted at further police investigations. Smight did not care what they found. He did not even care if they found him eventually, as long as he fulfilled his mission. By now, he had travelled north in pursuit of Mr and Mrs Ansell, the other couple who were going to pay for what they had done to Ernest. As Inspector Traynor correctly surmised, Smight decided to base himself in Newcastle rather than Durham. He preferred the anonymity of a larger city and he felt at home in the area by the docks. But he spent lengthy periods in Durham, tracking his next victims. They were not so accessible as the Seldons and action against them required more thought. Besides, Smight took pleasure in concocting an elaborate plan. As he was doing now.
He was not aware of all the police activity. If he had been, he would still have believed himself capable of outwitting the whole pack of them. Although years of opium-taking might have sapped his moral sense, as Traynor claimed, it had not undermined his sense of superiority. Indeed, at times, he felt invulnerable. He suffered from bad dreams, though.
The Palace of Varieties
Tom and Helen Ansell were chafing under their near confinement in Colt House. Inspector Traynor had suggested that they would be safer if they spent most of their time at Miss Howlett’s. A policeman, equipped with truncheon and rattle, was stationed inside the house and occupied himself bantering with the servants in the back quarters. Another constable was keeping a watch over the front by making regular patrols along the South Bailey. Aunt Julia was strangely excited by all the police activity but Septimus Sheridan seemed terrified, whether of the police or the threat of a murderer at large. He had stopped going to the cathedral library and spent most of the time shut up in his room.