Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

It was late in the working day and they sat in their usual places at the round table, Dedlock doggedly working his way through a bottle of wine, Skimpole struggling with a set of dense and tiresomely exhaustive surveillance reports.

“This is quite like old times,” Dedlock said, all of a sudden gregarious.

“How so?”

“You hard at your studies, me bunking off for a drink.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Like being back at school, isn’t it?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sorry I spoke.”

The albino went back to his work, only to be interrupted again. “Don’t sulk, Skimpole, for God’s sake. You never talk about the old days.” After the consumption of the best part of three-quarters of a bottle, he seemed in a ruminative mood.

Skimpole slammed down his reports on the table. “What news of Madame Innocenti?” he asked, pointedly ignoring Dedlock’s overtures of nostalgia.

“She was last seen in New York. After that — poof! — disappeared.”

“Damn.”

“You’re convinced she was the real thing?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. But if there’s the slightest chance she was genuine — and frankly, I can’t believe that all the information she gave us was entirely a string of lucky guesses — then the very last place we want her is New York. Power like that in the hands of the Americans is unthinkable.”

Mackenzie-Cooper emerged from the shadows, dressed in his usual unconvincing guise of a Chinese butcher. “Drink, sah?” he asked, speaking in that risible accent. Irritated, the albino waved him away.

“You should join me,” Dedlock said. “It’s surprisingly good.”

“Far too early for me.” Skimpole turned to Mackenzie-Cooper. “I’ll have a cup of tea.”

The man bowed and disappeared to the back of the room. Although neither of his superiors noticed it at the time, he seemed oddly nervous. Dedlock was later to claim that he saw the man’s hands tremble and shake as though palsied, but this particular detail was one he was only able to recall a number of months after the incident and — suspiciously — during a dinner party at that.

“What’s Mr. Moon up to?” Dedlock asked.

“Following a lead on the Honeyman case. He’s still convinced it’s connected.”

“Do you agree?”

“I’ve learnt by now to trust his instincts.”

Dedlock scratched idly at his scar. “He’s your agent,” he said.

“I shan’t try to interfere. But if Madame Innocenti was correct, then we’ve only got four days left.”

“I hardly need to be reminded.”

“I’m thinking of moving my family out of the city. You know, before it happens. Have you made any arrangements?”

Before he could reply, Mackenzie-Cooper returned with a large pot of tea. He poured Skimpole a cup and, offering the same to Dedlock, stressed in rather more forceful tones than really behooves an underling the efficacy of the drink in combatting insobriety. Dedlock grudgingly accepted and a cup of the rehabilitative brew was set beside his wine.

As Mackenzie-Cooper was pouring, Skimpole swigged from his own cup and frowned. Far too much sugar. Still, he drank again, a bigger sip this time, taking a guilty pleasure in the saccharine rush.

Dedlock leant across to the phoney Chinaman. “You all right, old boy? You don’t seem quite yourself.”

Startled, Mackenzie-Cooper snatched the pot away, clumsily spilling a good deal of its contents in the process.

“Velly sorry, sah,” he muttered, frantically searching his pockets for something to mop up the mess. “Velly sorry.”

“No need to get yourself the up about it. It was an accident.”

At last Mackenzie-Cooper produced a dishcloth, but as he reached across to clean up the tea, he succeeded in toppling his superior’s wineglass. Dedlock cursed as rivulets of tea and wine ran across the table and Niagaraed onto the floor.

“Sorry, sah. Sorry, sah.” Beneath his greasepaint and disguise, Mackenzie-Cooper had begun to sweat.

Dedlock started to clear away the spillage, but barely had he begun before he observed a most curious effect. As the wine and tea combined and intermingled on the table before him, the liquids seemed first to bubble, then to steam and stew in some unnatural reaction.

Mackenzie-Cooper saw it, too. For an instant, they stared open-mouthed at each other, the one astonished that he had been found out by so petty an accident, the other trying desperately to understand the precise nature of what had occurred.

With a Greek-wedding clatter, Mackenzie-Cooper threw the teapot to the floor, its china splintering expensively, and ran at full pelt for the exit. Dedlock bounded to his feet (with surprising athleticism for a man of his age) and raced after him, an unexpected blur of motion. Mackenzie-Cooper yelped in fear. Just before he reached the door, the older man rugby-tackled him, hurling his quarry to the ground, pinning the interloper to the floor.

“Why?” he snarled. Mackenzie-Cooper said nothing, his eyes darting about him in fear. Dedlock slapped his face hard. “Why?” he asked again, and the man looked as though he might be about to cry. Another slap. “Why?”

At this, Mackenzie-Cooper began to contort his face, gurgling, dribbling like a teething infant. Dedlock looked on. “What now?”

By the time he realized what was happening it was too late. Mackenzie-Cooper screwed up his face again, swallowed something, then shuddered and convulsed, his face turning a mottled purple, white foam bubbling at his mouth. Seconds later, his body seemed to crumple in upon itself and he spasmed a few times before falling still. Dedlock screamed his frustration. Flinging the corpse aside, he staggered to his feet.

“Cyanide capsule,” he explained (superfluously, in Skimpole’s opinion). He reached across to the spilt tea, dabbed a finger in the pool and smelt it carefully. “There was enough poison in that pot to kill us both. How much did you drink?”

Skimpole lied. “Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” the albino said, too quickly. “I drank nothing.”

Dedlock nodded vaguely.

Skimpole gazed down at the twisted body on the floor. “Thought you told me he went to Oxford.”

Dedlock bent over the body and rugged away the man’s disguise to reveal not the callow Oriel alumnus they had expected, but a bald, middle-aged stranger, lugubrious-looking, ill and wasted. “Somehow I doubt he’s an Eton man,” he said.

You may be interested to learn that the real Mackenzie-Cooper — a genuine, amiable old Etonian with far too trusting a nature ever to have enjoyed much success as an agent of the Directorate — was found three days later locked in a bathroom in one of the most squalid of the city’s lodging houses, half his head caved in and a look of abject terror on his face. No happy ending, then, for him.

“Who is this?”

“You don’t recognize him?” Skimpole asked, surprised.

“Enlighten me.”

“Declan Slattery. Formerly a Fenian agent till he went independent a few years back. Bit of a legend in the field. Past his best now, of course. Gone to seed. This must be the first time anyone’s hired him in ages.”

“But who?” Dedlock asked. “Who would want us dead?”

Skimpole shrugged. “Could be a long list.”

The Church of the Summer Kingdom was run out of a small third-floor office in Covent Garden which smelt strongly of dust and halitosis. On their arrival, Merryweather, Moon and the Somnambulist were met by a man whose bluff, ruddy-faced looks seemed to owe more to the taproom than the pulpit.

“Donald McDonald,” he said, sticking out a meaty paw and adding with a twinkle: “Me mother had a sense of humor.”