“Tell us what you’ve found,” Bainbridge asked Foulkes with little or no ceremony.
“It’s a baffling one, sir,” Foulkes said, lifting his bowler and scratching his head. “It seems the perpetrator came in through the back door. There’s a hole in one of the panels, about so big-” He made a gesture with his hands. “-that looks just like the hole we found up at Flitcroft and Sons over on Regent Street, and the scenes before that.”
“You think the same man is responsible?” asked Newbury.
“I’m not a betting man, Sir Maurice, but I’d put my life on it.” Foulkes seemed to consider this for a minute. “Only difference this time is the body. And it’s not a pretty sight. It seems that whatever miraculous device the burglar has been using to cut his way in can also be used as a weapon. And a pretty damn effective one at that.” He sniffed, as if demonstrating his disapproval of such visceral things. “As I see it, one of three things occurred: Either the burglar interrupted another man trying to steal the loot and finished him off, or he had a partner along with him and they fell out over the share of the proceeds. Only other explanation is that the miraculous device I was talking about suddenly turned on him, but that seems unlikely.”
“Have we been able to identify him yet?” Veronica realised she was about to get a look at what might have become of her or Newbury, had the incident in her apartment not turned out as well as it did.
“Not yet. He’s… well, let’s just say that identification is not an easy matter in this instance.” Foulkes screwed up his face in distaste, and Veronica gave an involuntary shudder.
Newbury was removing his jacket. He handed it to Charles. “Better take a look, then.” He edged past Foulkes, heading toward the doctor in the brown coat.
“I hope you haven’t had a big breakfast,” Foulkes called behind him. But he was not smiling. He took a step closer to Veronica and lowered his voice to a whisper. His breath smelled of peppermint. “Seriously, Miss Hobbes. I should consider giving this one a miss. I won’t think any less of you if you take my advice. If I’m truthful, I wish I hadn’t seen it myself.” He smiled kindly, and she knew he was only looking after her best interests-or at least what he considered to be her best interests.
She hesitated, unsure now what to do. “Well, I-”
“Charles!” Newbury’s voice, raised in alarm, suddenly echoed throughout the hall. “You’d better get over here quickly.”
Veronica smiled weakly at Foulkes and moved past him, heading towards Newbury and the body.
She almost baulked at what she saw. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere she looked: sprayed up the staircase, spattered and pooling on the floor, even dripping-drip by ponderous drip-from the glass chandelier high above them. Jewels lay scattered all around the body, in all manner of colours, shapes, and sizes; tiny flecks of beauty in the midst of utter, devastating violence.
The corpse itself-or what was left of it-was splayed out upon the tiled floor facedown, its head and right arm thrown up onto the bottom stair. And there was a hole right through the middle of it, a ragged-edged void where the spider thing had chewed through the meat and bone and cartilage, burrowing through the man’s chest and bursting out through his back. Ribbons of shredded intestine hung like pink drapes from around the edges of the hole.
Newbury knelt beside the body, cradling the man’s head in his hands. The face was covered in a series of ferocious gouges, and the hair was matted with dark arterial blood.
She heard Bainbridge beside her, but couldn’t look away from the obscenity before her, couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sheer horror of what she was seeing.
“My god!” Bainbridge exclaimed. She surmised he was experiencing a very similar response to her own.
“There’s more,” Newbury said, shifting the body around so they could see.
“What? What is it?” Veronica just wanted to get out of there, to get outside and away from the stink and the blood. She had no time for games.
Newbury pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to smear the blood away from around the dead man’s face. “There. Do you see it now?”
Veronica studied the man’s face. The expression was one of sheer terror, the lips curled back in a frightened scream. But beneath the blood and the webwork of scratches, one thing was suddenly clear: The dead man in Newbury’s arms was none other than the enigmatic Mr. Edwin Sykes.
CHAPTER
11
“It’s extraordinary! They’re identical!” Bainbridge exclaimed loudly. He looked terribly confused by the whole affair.
“Hmmm,” said Newbury, without looking up.
Much to Veronica’s unease, the three of them had returned to the police morgue. They had driven convoy across town from the house on Cromer Street, following the police wagon bearing the corpse. The journey had been arduous, conducted at a funereal pace, and now she was back at this most distasteful of establishments for the second day in a row, and starting to regret ever getting herself mixed up in the affair.
The body had been one of the most horrendous things she had ever seen, comparable to when she and Newbury had discovered the violated body of James Purefoy, the young reporter, or-perhaps worse-the shriveled, exsanguinated husks of former village folk at Huntington Manor earlier that year. It was the sheer violence of the attack, the utter disregard for life that disturbed her so. Seen like this, people became nothing but shreds of meat and bone, and she hated it. Perhaps it was also the understanding that, if not for Newbury, she might well have been discovered that morning in much the same condition. Either way, she didn’t wish to spend any longer in the company of the dead than was strictly necessary.
As it was, they had been at the morgue for an hour. It had taken the police surgeon only ten minutes to complete his assessment and ready the corpse on the mortician’s slab. For the rest of that time, Newbury had been examining the body in minute detail. Not only that, but he had recalled the corpse they had seen on their previous visit, which now lay uncovered on a second slab beside the new arrival.
It had been a few days since that first corpse had been found in the gutter, and the flesh had taken on a bruised, sickly hue. It had also begun to smell. Badly. As a consequence, Veronica had covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief, which had the dual purpose of suppressing the smell and keeping her grimace hidden from the others.
Newbury was currently comparing the left hand of the new body with the identical hand of its double. He was stooped low, circling the marble slabs, a looking glass clutched in his right hand.
Veronica lowered the handkerchief. “Couldn’t this be a simple matter of identical twins?” she ventured. She’d read about cases such as this, where a long-lost or previously unheard-of relative had made a sudden reappearance, capitalizing on their likeness to their more successful kin. In some cases, they’d gone so far as to attempt to assume the identity of their brother or sister, even murdering them as a means of keeping them out of the picture.
Bainbridge, however, was shaking his head. “I don’t believe so, Miss Hobbes. We checked the birth records. Sykes was an only child. It was a complicated birth and his mother died during delivery. If there had been twins, the doctor would have recorded them as such at the hospital.”
Newbury stepped back from the slab and looked up at them, bleary eyed. “There’s far more to it than that,” he said enigmatically. “There are sinister forces at work.”