Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

Dr Gaston, lantern in hand, waved goodbye to the Englishman, then mounted the steps back into his domain. He closed the creaky front door of the asylum against the elements. Taking a bunch of keys from his pocket, he carefully locked the door, turned, and crossed the vast, echoing hallway. The darkness hung heavy, like the cobwebs that adorned the upper of the high ceiling, but the lantern cast enough light for the doctor to see his way. Besides, he knew the house like the back of his hand now. To one side of the still imposing staircase that curved up into the darkness of the upper floors there was a secret door made to resemble the wall in which it was cut. He fumbled another key on the ring into the lock and stepped through the door, closing it behind him.

He heard a very familiar shriek. Descending the stairs that took him down to part of the warren of cellars under the chateau, he stopped at another locked door. The moaning came from behind this door. There was a shutter in the upper part of the door, and he slid it gently back. He looked at his latest research subject, and felt firm in his resolution to harbour the secret of his existence. The worth to science, and to Gaston’s reputation, would be inestimable. He watched as the lunatic repeated his strange compulsion over and over again.

The man with the bushy Dundreary whiskers, now somewhat obscured by the full growth of beard on his chin, stared wide-eyed in terror at the illuminated square cast on the wall of his cell. He appeared transfixed by what he saw. In the corner of the room lay an oak box, bound with brass. Unfortunately, the brass had not saved the contents of the box from destruction in some sort of accident. One that Gaston now knew as the man’s leap from the Paris train. The box rattled when shaken, but the man refused to relinquish it.

The occupant of the room screamed, and the doctor slid the shutter closed. He knew the cycle was now going to be repeated over again. And he longed to know what the man saw on the wall, where there was only a feeble square of light cast by the lamp he insisted on keeping burning all hours of the day and night. A blank patch of yellow light that terrified him. The doctor shook his head in bewilderment.

Louis sat mesmerised by the projected image of his persecutor on the wall. It was as real as reality itself. Like so many times before, the tall, thin man in the Inverness cape was sitting opposite him on the train, fixing him with his steely eyes. They were alone in the carriage. Slowly, that eternal, predatory leer formed on his face, and his silent lips formed the words, ‘Give me the camera, Monsieur Le Prince.’ Louis’s heart sank. He could not take his eyes off the man, trying as he had done so many times to fix the man’s features with his gaze. But the image was blurred, and lost in shadow, like a poorly developed photograph, sitting hopelessly in a tray of fixative. The only hope was to add more cyanide of potassium to it. He stared, knowing what was coming next, anticipating the inevitable.

The image shook, just as the camera had when the train had braked sharply, and the tall, thin man threw himself at Louis. The man’s face filled the screen as Louis swung the camera at his head, a sickening crunch jarring him to the elbow. Then the image shifted jerkily to a shot of the carriage door, swinging open, and he was enveloped in the flapping wings of the man’s cape. Under the dead weight of the body, Le Prince plunged into the darkness. He screamed.

I should stop smoking. I’m sure I should. I know I should. Smoking is bad. And it can lead to bad things.

On the other hand, there is a good side to smoking, especially these days. It’s a social thing. And that’s it. Smoking is social, and I don’t just mean lighting up and sharing a cig after you-know-what.

Smoking has always been social, associated with parties, drinking, fun. But these days there’s a new dimension. I’m talking about the way all us smokers gather in doorways outside office buildings and factories, the places where we’re sent now we’re banned from the insides. So those of us who persist, who resist, who continue, we’re all bound to bond. When you’re huddling together from the cold, you make friends.

And together we have common cause to complain. Fat people aren’t sent out to eat. Idiots don’t have to go make their dumb mistakes in the rain. Parents aren’t sent to the bike shed with the bore-the-knickers-off-you pictures of their bloody children. I’ve known people who pretended to be smokers just to get away from all that.

Yeah, we’re social on the doorstep, in ways the people left inside just aren’t. That’s what I find. I mean, I haven’t done, like, the kind of research you read about in the papers, but it’s my experience, and I’m not special or different. I’m just ordinary. So I bet it’s true.

There’s other things that follow from us being on the doorsteps. I mean, we’re out there at times when before everybody – us included – was inside. I won’t go so far as to say I think we’re healthier than our workmates because of the fresh air we get, but if some clever clogs did research that said so, it wouldn’t knock me down with a feather. And another thing is we see things that didn’t used to get seen, you know? We’re bound to, aren’t we? Being as how we’re out there looking around when nobody used to. So that’s the thing with smoking, there’s cons but there’s also pros.

I work at Evening Eye, a fair size factory for the Marston Trading Estate – we have thirty-eight of us on the production side. I don’t know what ‘Evening Eye’ made when Jake, the owner, first picked the name. That was back when the factory was in the town centre, and before my time. But you have to be flexible to keep a business above water these days, what with the market ups and downs and all the new technological stuff. You have to be ready to respond to the market. Jake says so, and it makes sense. Whatever he made back then, now we make handbags. Not lumpy everyday bags a housewife will chuck all and sundry into. We’re up-market, us. We make evening accessories for the posh and famous. Not Posh herself, yet, but lots of other rich people, some of them so posh I’ve never even heard of them.

Our bags are finest quality made from the best materials. A third of our output is filling special orders, but we do bread-and-butter top gear too, sold in high-tone catalogues and in places like Harrods. Not like Harrods. In Harrods. Well, you know what I mean.

All of it, even the catalogue stuff, is handcrafted. It sells for a bomb. We’re in the haute fashion industry, so it ought to.

Evie says back when we were in town Jake didn’t let us smoke on the factory floor either, because of the combustibility of stuff like the silks and velvets. But back then you could smoke in the canteen, no problem. Out here he doesn’t even have a canteen. A sandwich wagon parks down the street every day in front of the double-glazing place. If you don’t bring your own, that’s where you get your grub. Unless you’re one of them that goes off-site for lunch every day. I say them, but I mean only the one who does that on a regular basis, from the thirty-eight of us on the floor.

Evie says Jake moved the business during really hard years when lots of companies were going under. He survived by selling up the town site, moving to the unit in the trading estate, and using the cash difference to retool. Committed to Evening Eye, is Jake. It’s his life and soul, anybody can see that. It doesn’t make him likeable, but we respect him for it. And the business is still here, even if the thirty-eight of us used to be ninety-six of us when he was in town, according to Evie.