Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

He strode away and Skimpole watched as he melted into the distance. “It may come to that,” he said softly. Then, more firmly: “It may yet come to that.”

The following day did not start well. The ape Moon had used in his set for the past two years fell unexpectedly ill and was prescribed by his veterinarian a rest cure of indefinite duration. The zoo sent a replacement but he was an obstreperous troublesome fellow with none of the natural talent of his predecessor. Asked to caper with enthusiasm, he gibbered listlessly; required to materialize with style and panache, he limped onstage with all the eagerness of a condemned man queuing for his final meal.

It was with relief, then, that Moon returned home at the end of the show, the Somnambulist choosing to linger upstairs a while longer in an attempt to cajole some semblance of a performer from the recalcitrant chimp.

When Moon let himself inside, Speight was dozing uneasily on the steps. On hearing his arrival, Mrs. Grossmith hurried out to greet him. “There’s somebody waiting for you. I said it was late but he did insist.”

“Who is it?” Moon lowered his voice to a whisper. “Is it the albino?”

Someone out of sight laughed uproariously.

Moon walked into the kitchen to find an ungainly figure sprawled in his favorite armchair.

“Albino?” The visitor laughed again. “Really, Moon, I swear your friends get odder each time we meet.”

Moon allowed himself a small smile. “Inspector.”

Detective Inspector Merryweather got to his feet and shook Moon warmly by the hand. “Pleasure to see you again. I only wish that one day we might meet under happier circumstances.”

As Mrs. Grossmith retired discreetly to her room, Moon produced a bottle of whisky and a set of glasses, sat opposite his guest and poured them both a generous draught. “I take it this is a professional visit?”

“’Fraid so. I apologize for the lateness of the hour but I’m at my wits’ end.”

“You mean you have a case for me?”

“You’ve seen the headlines?”

“The Honeyman business? I’ve followed your lamentable lack of progress with no little disappointment, Inspector. I’d hoped by now that you might have learnt something from my methods.”

“We’ve done our best. But take my word for it, it’s the strangest one yet. The most baffling case of my career.”

Moon arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t they all?”

“This one’s special,” the man insisted. “There’s something queer about it, something grisly and gothic and bizarre. So you see why I thought of you.”

“It sounds perfect.”

Merryweather laughed again, another raucous, splenetic bellow. “Mrs. Grossmith told me you were bored. You know, by rights, I shouldn’t be here. My colleagues don’t approve. They think I’ve got rather an idee fixe about you. Still, that business in Clapham-”

The conjuror flinched.

Well, they’re not so inclined to turn a blind eye any more.”

HELLO INSPECTOR

Merryweather had always felt oddly discomfited in the presence of the Somnambulist, and on the giant’s entrance the inspector’s natural good cheer was immediately muted.

The Somnambulist sat down, tore off his tie and poured himself a tot of milk. He had just raised the glass to his lips when Moon got to his feet and turned to the inspector. “Well, then,” he said impatiently, “I want to see where it happened.”

An hour later, the three of them stood at the top of the tower where the late Cyril Honeyman had taken his final, ignominious curtain call. The window through which he had fallen had not yet been repaired and the room was bitingly cold. The smell of decay congealed in the air, its source a table stacked with putrid, long-abandoned food — what was once a great feast made stinking and corrupt.

“My apologies for the smell,” Merryweather said. He was wrapped up in a thick woolen coat, a black slab of scarf knotted about his neck. “There was a bottle of champagne here as well but the boys polished that off days ago.”

Moon ran a finger along the table, stained gangrenous and gray by dust and mold.

“What was this place?”

“No one’s quite sure. We think it might be some sort of water tower. Disused,” he added rather desperately. “Can’t find it on any maps. Doesn’t seem to exist officially.”

“I don’t think it’s a water tower, Inspector.” Moon stood by the window, gazing absently down at the street. “I think it’s a watchtower.”

“Sorry about the mess. The Met boys seem to have trampled your evidence half to death.”

Brandishing his chalkboard, the Somnambulist tapped Moon on the shoulder.

SUEISIDE

Moon dismissed the suggestion with a brusque wave of his hand.

“You know the reputation of this district,” Merryweather said. “Given the food and the bed, we think he may have been lured here.”

Moon hardly seemed to hear him. “I should have thought that was obvious.” He knelt at the foot of the shattered window and picked up some broken pieces from the floor. “See the way the glass has fallen. If Honeyman broke the window when he fell, I would expect to find glass only outside. There’s far too much in here for that to have been the case.”

Merryweather furrowed his brow. “What are you implying?”

“That someone — or something — broke the window from the other side. From outside the tower. Something got in.”

“Impossible. No one could possibly climb this high.”

“Curious, isn’t it?”

Merryweather sighed. “Will you take the case?”

Moon did not reply.

“I don’t understand. You’ve been longing for something like this. Something knotty, you said, something complex, like the old days. Something with the stamp of real criminal ability about it. By rights, this ought to be a dream for you.”

“Dream?” Moon repeated absently and began to shift the glass shards about the floor, rearranging them in a fresh pattern free of any discernible order.

“Will you take the case?”

Moon gave a distracted nod. “Against my better judgment.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that there is something wrong here, Inspector. It means that this is no ordinary crime, that is has some larger meaning. That we’re only on the edge of something terrible.”

Merryweather laughed. “Good God, do you always have to be so gloomy?”

Moon gazed unblinkingly back, silent and solemn, shaming the inspector into silence.

The Somnambulist pulled a childish face and wrote another message.

FRIGHTENED

Moon did not smile. “You should be,” he murmured. “We all should be.”

The murder of Cyril Honeyman was the sixty-third criminal case to be investigated by Edward Moon. It was the nineteenth in which he had enjoyed the assistance of the Somnambulist and the thirty-fourth sanctioned by Merryweather and the Yard.

It was also to be the last of his career.

He began, as was his custom, by immersing himself in the minutiae of the killing, by haunting the murder scene and trawling the streets for clues, interviewing witnesses, speaking to the most tangential of bystanders. But despite his diligence these efforts bore little fruit. It was as though the evidence had been somehow erased from existence, the ground of his inquiries swept clean, become a blank slate, a tabula rasa. He spent long days in the Stacks but could find no trace, not a shred of a clue on the Honeyman affair, nothing to shed light on the man’s demise.

At the end of the first week, more out of courtesy than any real belief it would materially aid his investigation, he and the Somnambulist visited the parents of the deceased. They lived in a large country house, miles beyond the furthest reaches of the city and isolated by several acres of green and pleasant land.