Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

“Really?” Moon made an unsuccessful attempt to blow smoke rings, much to the amusement of the women, a gray-faced creature with a painful-looking skin condition and flippers for hands. Mrs. Puggsley chided her softly. “Mr. Gray” was a regular customer and was not to be openly mocked.

“No doubt business will pick up soon.”

Puggsley shook her massive frame in what was probably intended as a shrug. “Not till the travelers leave,” she muttered, and the others murmured in assent.

Moon sat up, pulled the negligee tight about him and stubbed out his cigarette. “Travelers?” he said.

I once put it to Moon that his patronage of Mrs. Puggsley’s bawdy house was a reprehensible lapse in an otherwise approximately moral character, that his perverse attraction to these poor discarded accidents of nature was a predilection utterly unworthy of him. In reply, he maintained that these liaisons were the mark of an inquisitive mind and an experimental spirit and (somewhat more persuasively) that Puggsley’s was not in itself evil but merely a symptom of an unjust society. Mrs. Puggsley, he argued, provided a sanctuary for these girls from a world which would otherwise hate and fear them.

As it turned out, he was right about society. It was our society, of course, and not Mrs. Puggsley that was responsible for forcing these vulnerable women into their unfortunate positions. I believe I may have remarked something to the effect that I would give my life to change that society, to improve and re-engineer it for the better. But whatever philanthropic qualities Puggsley may have possessed, one thing is certain — that night she provided the key to the Honeyman-Dunbar killings.

“Tell me about the travelers.”

One of the girls tittered.

“They’re show people,” Puggsley explained. “A carnival. Novelties and funfair rides mostly. But some of their freaks turn tricks on the side. I don’t mind telling you, they’re hurting my business.”

“What are they like?”

Mrs. Puggsley groaned. “They’ve got all sorts down there — mermaid and midgets and a girl who can blow balloons up with her eyes. How can we possibly compete with that?”

Mina came back into the room. “We shouldn’t have to,” she said, absently running a comb through her beard. “It’s a proper disgrace, the way they’ve muscled in on our business.” She sat down beside Moon, gave him a perfunctory, passionless kiss on the cheek and returned to the disentanglement of her facial hair.

Moon barely noticed. “How long have they been here?”

“Rolled in about a month ago.”

“Are there acrobats? Gymnasts? Tumblers? Anyone who’d be able to scale buildings?”

“I shouldn’t care to say,” Mrs. Puggsley said haughtily. “I’ve no wish to visit such a place.”

Clara, the pinhead, spoke up. “I’ve been,” she said. “I saw this man there do this act where he climbs a church steeple and dances on top. He can crawl up anything, they say. They call him ‘the Human Fly’ because of it — and on account of the fact he doesn’t quite look right.”

“Describe him.”

“It’s horrible to see, sir. He got these scales all over his face-”

“Scales? Are you sure?”

Clara nodded vigorously.

Moon got to his feet. Showing no obvious signs of shame, he flung the negligee aside and hurriedly dressed himself before the assembly of women. “Where is this fair?”

“Is it important?” Clara asked.

“More than you could know,” he replied, struggling with his cuff links.

“South of the river. A mile or so beyond Waterloo.”

Moon gave her his thanks and ran for the exit. Mrs. Puggsley lumbered to her feet.

“Always a pleasure, Mr. Gray. Can we expect you again soon?”

“You may rely on it,” Moon called back. He left the house, ran back through Goodge Street, hailed the first hansom cab he saw and raced toward Albion Square.

“Well,” Mrs. Puggsley said as she moved with fleshy inelegance back to her easy chair, “there goes one satisfied customer, at least.”

Moon dashed up to the doors of the Theatre of Marvels to find a street arab loitering conveniently outside. “Boy!” he shouted.

The child, a ragged, underfed scrap of a thing, looked up. “Sir?”

“I’ve a sovereign for you if you can deliver a message to Scotland Yard.” He scrawled a note and handed it over. “Deliver it into the hands of a man named Merryweather. Have you got that?”

“A sovereign?” the waif asked, wide-eyed.

“Two if you hurry. Now go.”

Needing no further encouragement, the child ran headlong into the darkness.

Moon pelted down the steps to his flat, Speight grumbling sleepily as he passed.

Mrs. Grossmith was making herself a nightcap when Moon burst into the kitchen.

“Been for another walk?” she asked, her voice dripping with disapproval.

Moon ignored her. “Where’s the Somnambulist?”

“Asleep, sir, these past three hours.”

“Then we must wake him,” Moon cried, running toward the bedroom.

“Has something happened?” The housekeeper was unsurprised to receive no reply.

Moon shook his friend awake. “We have him!” he shouted. “We have our man!”

Half an hour later, in grim, persistent rain, Moon, Mrs. Grossmith and the Somnambulist stood assembled by the steps outside the theatre. Speight tottered across to see what all the excitement was about. “What’s going on?” he asked. Everyone ignored him.

“This is no night to be out in,” Mrs. Grossmith complained.

“We’ve no choice,” Moon retorted.

“Where is it you’re going at this hour, anyway?”

Before he could reply, a four-wheeler clattered into Albion Square, pulled up by the theatre and disgorged a beleaguered-looking Merryweather and two beefy plain-clothes policemen.

“You’d better be right,” he said. “You’ve dragged me out of bed for this.”

The Somnambulist nodded in weary sympathy.

“We’d best be going before this weather gets any worse. If what you say is true this’ll be the arrest of my career.”

“Have I ever failed you before, Inspector?”

It may be for the best that Merryweather’s reply was lost to the wind and the rain.

As the coach drove from the square, Grossmith and Speight walked back to the theatre ruefully shaking their heads in an unexpected moment of camaraderie. The vagrant settled stoically down upon the steps and Mrs. Grossmith felt a sudden pang of conscience.

“Mr. Speight? It’s a cold night. Might I offer you some broth?”

The tramp nodded gratefully, clambered back to his feet and the two of them retreated indoors to the warm and merciful pleasures of the housekeeper’s kitchen.

By the time they reached the carnival the rain had become torrential, and worse yet a thick fog had begun to descend, lending even the most innocuous scenes an eerie, minatory air.

The travelers had settled a mile or so west of Waterloo, colonizing a small heath beside a row of residential houses. A church sat some way off in the distance.

The fair itself comprised nothing more than a dozen or so caravans grouped together in a rough circle at the center of the heath. A few of them carried signs and placards promising contests, games, spectacles and the like, but everything was long since boarded up and covered over for the night. Most of their owners had retired but for a couple of uncouth, unshaven men sitting listlessly about a guttering, sickly fire. The plaintive wail of what sounded like a penny flute drifted through the camp.

As the investigators walked toward them, one of the men looked up, belligerence glinting openly in his eyes. “What do you want?” he asked. Attached to his left ear was the kind of large metal ring more usually to be found dangling from the noses of cattle.