Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

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Newton’s face shone in the lantern light as if it had been made of gold and his eyes were lit up like two jewels, so that I could easily see how, far from disgusted by the dreadful scene that lay in front of us, he seemed much excited by it. And almost as soon as he contemplated Mercer’s body, Newton muttered the word “Mercury” so that I had the apprehension that the meaning of the feather and the flute were already apparent to him.

“Go to your house,” he told me, “and bring pen and paper. And fetch another lantern also.”

Trembling — for the murder had been done close by where I lived, which made me fearful — I did as I was bid. And when I returned Newton asked me carefully to copy down what had been chalked upon the stairwell, which I did as if it had been an important deposition and not the meaningless jumble of letters that I thought it to be. Meanwhile Newton went up to the top of the stairs and walked back and forth between the Brick Tower and the Jewel Tower; and upon finishing my copying, I joined him on the wall. Seeing his two lanterns held low down for his eyes to search the ground, I asked him what he was looking for.

“A great effusion of blood,” he said. “For it is impossible to behead a man without it. And yet there is none on the stairs. Not even a trail.” He straightened. “Nor here also. We must go back down the stairs to Mint Street and search there.”

In the street there was no trail of blood either. But Newton paid close attention to some wheel-tracks upon the ground.

“Within the last half hour some kind of cart has delivered a heavy load and gone away again,” he remarked. “It passed right by this place.”

I looked at the wheel-tracks but could distinguish almost nothing of what my master seemed to see so clearly. “Why do you say so?”

“Half an hour ago there was a great shower of rain that would have effaced these tracks. Observe the inward-bound tracks being very much deeper than the outward-bound ones, so that we may deduce there was a very considerable weight on the inward-bound cart. Therefore it is plain he was not murdered here but somewhere else. Likely he was brought here in the cart and then placed upon these stairs, with all the trimmings we see before us now.” And so saying he laid both his lanterns close to Mercer’s headless body and scrutinised it and the head most carefully.

My own eyes were drawn irresistibly to those of poor Mercer, and to the peacock feathers on which they lay like some sacrificial offering.

“This is much like the story of Argus,” I observed, with no small timidity, fearing Newton’s scornful laughter. Instead he looked up and smiled at me.

“Do, pray, go on,” he urged.

“Argus who was slain by Mercury,” I explained. “At the instigation of Jupiter. For it was the many-eyed Argus who did guard Io, who was the object of Jupiter’s lust, but who had been turned into a cow by Juno.” Seeing Newton nod his encouragement, I continued with my classical interpretation of this scene of murder. “Mercury played his flute so that Argus did fall asleep, and while he was sleeping Mercury killed him and stole Io. That might explain the flute, master.”

“Good,” said Newton. “And the feather?”

“I cannot account for it.”

“No matter. It is hermetick and not easily interpreted by one who is not adept. Knowledge of the secret art is akin to skill in music. The death of the giant Argus is the dark matter or blackness, for argos is Greek for shining or white. His hundred eyes are set on the tail of Juno’s bird. Which explains the peacock feather. The peacock feather is also the emblem of the evil eye and is considered unlucky.”

“It certainly was for poor Mister Mercer,” I said, although I thought myself not much enlightened by Newton’s hermetick explanation. In truth I was most unnerved by a coincidence I could see: for the sight of Mercer’s gouged-out eyes prompted me to recall the attack that Mister Twistleton had made upon my own eyes not long after my living at the Warden’s house; and thinking how the matter now seemed more pertinent than of late, I mentioned the circumstances of the attack to Newton, who sighed, most exasperated.

“I wonder that you did not think to speak to me of this before now,” he remarked. “Did not the murder of Mister Kennedy give you some cause for concern that the perpetrator might have been some lunatic person?”

“I confess that it did not,” I said. “In truth, since that time, Mister Twistleton has seemed a little less troubled in his mind, or else I should have mentioned it sooner.”

“Is there anything else you have perhaps omitted to inform me of?” Newton asked. “A man carrying a bloodied axe, perhaps? Or a peacock missing its tailfeathers that you have seen?”

“Now that I come to think of it, there is something,” I said. “Something else about Mister Twistleton.”

“This is the misery of a keen mind,” groaned Newton. “To be blunted on the wits of others.”

“Your pardon, sir, but I recall how, when I struck Mister Ambrose in the Stone Kitchen, he fell upon Mister Twistleton, and knocked a paper on the floor. And just now I have recollected how, at the time, Mister Twistleton occupied himself with the perusal of a sort of confounded alphabet of letters. Much like the one upon this wall. And in the letter we found on Mister Kennedy’s body.”

“It’s very well that you remember this, sir, and so I do heartily forgive your earlier omission. But we’ll think on this again.” Stroking the peacock feather, Newton was silent for a moment. “I have seen a rendering of this story before,” said Newton. “In a book by a Flemish gentleman named Barent Coenbers van Helpen. It was titled L’Escalier des Sages, which means ‘The Stairway of the Wise,’ and is a very fine work of the philosophy.”

“Is that why the body was placed on these stairs? Is this supposed to be a stairway to the wise?”

“It may be so,” said Newton. “And yet I suspect that the close proximity of the Warden’s house now occupied by you, my dear fellow, also touches upon this matter. For why else would Mercer have been killed in some other place and then brought here, if not to teach us something?” Almost absently Newton picked a piece of straw off the dead man’s waistcoat, and then another off his breeches. “But it is a mystery exactly what that might be.”

“Are we in any danger?”

“Where there are mysteries there are always dangers,” said Newton. “Even God hides his mysteries from the wise and prudent of this world, and it is not every man who can fit his understanding to the revelation of truth.

“Come,” he said, and leaving the stairs we fetched a sentinel from the Mint Barracks, to take charge of Mercer’s body. Then we walked back to the Moneyer’s stables. Inside the stables Newton looked at bales of straw most carefully, even the loose straw, as if, like some hard Egyptian taskmaster, he wondered if it were possible to make bricks without it. Finally he seemed to find what he had been looking for, which was a small quantity of bloodstained straw, although, he said, it was not enough to identify the stable as the place of murder.

“But very likely it may help to confirm to us how the body was transported about,” he said.

For good measure he also inspected the straw in the Comptroller’s stables, but, finding no trace of blood there, we went to the smith’s shop, where the Ordnance kept some of its horses.

Mister Silvester, who was the smith, was a most knavish fellow. He had black swinish eyes, a furious slit of a mouth, and a braggart’s voice and manner that hardly stopped short of belligerence. He looked like a pig grown ill-tempered and heavy from being fattened at the mast of a ship. Following Newton about the stable, Silvester, who was still ignorant of Daniel Mercer’s murder, asked him what he thought he was doing.