Читать книгу Island of Point Nemo - Jean-Marie Blas de Robles - Страница 12

III

Talkative Soles

“Pigeon shit,” said Holmes, attempting to scrape some dried droppings from his shoulder.

“Seagull, actually,” corrected Canterel, while Miss Sherrington placed his container of opium in front of him.

“A pipe made of stingray and shark vertebrae,” rhapsodized Holmes, his eyes shining. “And, if I’m not mistaken, a Yixing terracotta bowl? You don’t deny yourself anything, my dear fellow!”

Canterel remained focused on the wad of chandoo speared on a long needle that he was heating over a lamp.

“Where is she?”

“Well, where do you think she is? In Scotland, of course, at Eilean Donan Castle. She’s waiting for us there.”

“And the feet?”

“The coroner is a good friend of hers, we will be at our leisure to examine them.”

“Which means that you have not yet seen them?”

“Correct. I didn’t want to skew your first impression . . .”

“And, if I may,” said Grimod, “there is a train to Paris in two hours.”

“We can do better than that,” replied Canterel, exhaling the smoke that he had been holding in his lungs for several seconds. “Do you know how to drive?”

“Yes,” said Grimod.

“Very good. You will be able to relieve Miss Sherrington at the wheel.”

He turned to the housekeeper, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.

“It’s all ready,” she said. “The luggage is in the car. We can leave whenever you wish.”

“I’m very lucky to have you with me, Miss Sherrington. You are an extraordinary woman.”

“Thank you, Monsieur. I shall remind you of that on occasion.”

What Martial Canterel called his “car” looked nothing like an automobile. It was a Cottin & Desgouttes coach, its motor modified by the brilliant Devonshire mechanic Harold Bates. When he bought it, Canterel had had its interior refurbished in a way that gave it the comfort of a small apartment in the style of Haussmann. Inside was a lounge hung with silk damask, a breccia fireplace with a brass fireback, Venetian mirrors, five medallion chairs of solid cherrywood—one of which turned toward the wheel to function as the driver’s seat—wide bay windows with embroidered tulle curtains, a functioning kitchen, perfectly soundproof toilets, a bathroom with portholes, a tiled Roman tub, a red copper water heater, and a mirrored scale; additionally, two bedrooms with foldaway double beds—which served as stylish work desks during the day—and a private space that allowed the driver to make use of the same commodities. From the outside, the vehicle had the appearance of a hearse fit for a circus giant, all the while giving an impression of luxury and power. Luxury, thanks to the Coromandel screens—signed by Liang P’ei Lan and dated 1693—that adorned the body of the car; as for power, this came from the stainless-steel pipes that escaped from the hood to join a pressure gauge toward the back of the coach, before connecting to a kind of flat tank that doubled as the vehicle’s roof.

“My word!” exclaimed Holmes. “Where do you hide these things, Martial? What does this palace on wheels run on?”

Canterel threw him a look that expressed his complete disinterest in the question.

“Methane,” replied Miss Sherrington, whispering in Holmes’s ear. “There is a nozzle in the rear that can extract this gas from any manure; calf, cow, pig, chicken, anything. The methane is stored up there, then redistributed and converted by a special carburetor. We can go for two hundred kilometers, and refilling only takes half an hour . . .”

“If I may,” said Holmes, concerned, “how do we fill up?”

“We are in France, Monsieur, we are surrounded by shit.”

They took a day to reach Calais, slept in the car, and embarked the next day on a ferry bound for Dover. Canterel did not say three words the whole voyage. He smoked more than usual, switching between periods of lethargy and long moments of scrutinizing the transparency of a strange photograph engraved in glass that seemed to fascinate him.

Eilean Donan Castle did not appear until the end of the afternoon. Heavy purple clouds rested on the Cuillin Range and the solitary mountains of the Five Sisters of Kintail; through a patch of blue sky, light was still gilding the surface of Loch Duich, the crenellated walls, the massive keep standing on its islet eaten over with green mosses and heaths. In the shadows of evening, the castle was striking. Starting the car across the thin stone bridge that straddled the loch, Miss Sherrington shuddered in displeasure; she closed her right hand into a fist, thumb and pinkie out, to ward off evil.

A wizened servant was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the main doorway. He invited them in, then went ahead of them, showing them the way to a huge chamber, the ceiling of which revealed sturdy oak beams. Settling down in front of a monumental fireplace where a recently kindled fire was crackling, they curiously examined the colored coats of arms, the tall stained-glass windows whose pointed recesses formed many smaller rooms, the gallery containing portraits of kilted ancestors, the sabers over carved stone lintels—all of it bathed in the amber light of an enormous chandelier and the candles that were artfully placed around the room.

A door slammed; Lady MacRae appeared, the nonchalance of her gait contrasting with the violence of the sound that had preceded it. She was wearing an ensemble of dark-red silk, the bodice trimmed with Spanish lace, obscuring but not concealing the advantages of a bosom that Martial had once been at his leisure to contemplate. Black roses had been stitched to the top of the waist of her pleated silk skirt, which sat low on her hips. Her bronze-colored hair was pulled up in a chignon. At forty-four years old, she was more beautiful than ever; her half-closed Kyrgyzstani eyes seemed dazzled by a low sun, her voice beguiled through a mixture of childlike softness and sudden, throaty derailments.

“You are welcome, Messieurs,” she said, giving each of them her hand to kiss. “I hope that you have had a pleasant journey.”

She took a seat on a couch beside Grimod.

“We came as quickly as we could,” said Holmes. “Our friend’s automobile is very comfortable.”

Lady MacRae addressed Canterel. “And so, you have come,” she said with emotion.

While a Malaysian valet, dressed all in white, serves them refreshments, and outside the fog is finishing erasing Eilean Donan Castle from the charcoal drawing of the Highlands, let us endeavor to become better acquainted with the lady of the house. When she appeared in Canterel’s life, thirteen years earlier, Lady Clawdia MacRae still bore the name of her French husband, a civil servant whose absence never ceased to cause gossip. People said he was posted in Dagestan, somewhere in the Caucasus. Supposedly well-informed persons asserted that his wife was, for her part, of Russian blood, with a maiden name ending with “-anov” or “-ukov,” which her sharp cheekbones and slightly slitted eyes seemed to substantiate. The only undeniable facts were that Clawdia Chauchat was recovering from some kind of chlorosis at the Sanatorium Berghof, near Davos, and that no one had ever seen a wedding ring on her finger. Certain ladies believed that she had engaged in various encounters with men who passed through the facility, but did not, for all that, consider her a loose woman; at worst, they accused her of neglecting her manicure from time to time—a fact that sheds light on her incredible ability to charm.

Martial Canterel, too, had found her “delicious.” They had met in Biarritz, during her stay in the Pyrenees, one of the trips that she had frequently gone on to get away from the stifling atmosphere of Berghof. The story of their passionate love deserves to be told, but it lasted only three weeks and interests us only because of its disastrous results: after having returned to Davos with another man—Mynheer Peeperkorn, a Dutch millionaire spoiled by the Tropics—Madame Chauchat realized that she was pregnant with Canterel’s child. Whatever the reasons for her decision, she chose not to tell him anything and gave birth to a daughter she named Verity. Seven years later, long after the death of Peeperkorn, and at the exact moment that her mother was becoming a lady by marrying Lord MacRae, Verity had gone to sleep on a church pew and never woken up. In a moment of great distress, Clawdia had written to Canterel to inform him both that he was the father of a little girl as gracious as she was bright, and that, by the gravest of misfortunes, this girl had just turned into a Sleeping Beauty. Having thus learned of his child, Martial made unsuccessful pleas to see her, then his responses became less frequent, and then he stopped sending letters altogether. It had now been four years since he had heard anything about his daughter, or about the woman who was, to him, ever the bewitching and mysterious Madame Chauchat.

“How is Verity?” asked Canterel, avoiding her gaze.

Clawdia rubbed her neck.

“No noticeable changes,” she replied, icily. “But I don’t believe that subject interests you very much.”

“That’s not the case, as you can see.”

“She’s still sleeping. I had her moved to Glasgow, where I go see her as often as my occupations allow. At least once a fortnight, no matter what. She has grown up, she’s a young woman now. But it is painful to see her.”

Canterel looked at her, making that strange little grimace that is the prelude to a question, then changed his mind.

“The doctors know no more today than yesterday,” Clawdia continued. “It’s some kind of lethargic slumber, her brain has not gone through any changes, she may continue to sleep for the rest of her life or wake up this very moment, no one can say.”

Holmes waited for silence to settle in again, then cleared his throat. “I would not want to hurry you, Lady MacRae, but you know very well that, in this kind of situation, every minute counts. When will we have the chance to examine the sinister items you told me about?”

“Right away, if you wish. The coroner brought them by the castle this afternoon. My late husband was very generous with the county, which accounts for this little bending of the rules. Come with me, they are in the kitchen.”

They followed her there. The valet opened the heavy door of a tall icebox and pulled out a wooden box, which he placed on the serving table. Having donned a pair of white gloves, Holmes lifted the lid, uncovering the three shoes they had come to examine.

“Sizes 42, 39, and 37, the investigation found. Rubber soles, white leather uppers, brand Ananke on a machine-sewn insert . . .”

He cautiously brought them out one by one and set them on the table. Each one still contained fragments of bone and waxy flesh from the feet that had been severed at the ankle.

“It is strange that they were severed in the same place,” remarked Clawdia, with a look of revulsion.

“No, it is quite normal, in fact,” responded Grimod. “When a body decomposes in the sea, it is common for the head, hands, and feet to detach. The extremities always give out at the thinnest point, but normally it all stays on the sea floor; in our case, the rubber soles allowed them to float up.”

“As for the shoes’ shape,” suggested Holmes, “it must have preserved the contents for longer.”

“It certainly helped,” said Grimod, prodding the flesh, “but when bodies—and feet in particular—are left in seawater, they can change into adipocere, or ‘grave wax.’ The lack of oxygen combined with the influence of the cold and the damp causes a process similar to saponification; thus, the flesh becomes waterproof and takes on the waxy look that we see here. However, this makes any calculation of time of death very problematic. I highly doubt that the tests will give us anything.”

“May I see the soles?” asked Martial.

Holmes tilted the shoes, and Canterel bent down to inspect them, hands behind his back for fear of touching them.

“And here’s the odd thing,” he said. “The pattern of the nonslip grooves is different on each, even though they are the same model.”

“You’re right,” noted Grimod. “I’m going back up to our rooms to look for something to take their imprints.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Clawdia. “What do you need?”

“Ink and paper. A sponge, as well.”

A look from Lady MacRae sent the valet off in search of the required equipment.

“Well,” said Holmes, “I believe that’s everything on this side of things. For now, we have three right feet, that is to say three bodies, and one . . . ‘necessity.’ It’s not much, I must say.”

“Where was the diamond?” asked Canterel.

“In my safe. A Delagarde Amiens with a lock and combination. It was not forced open, and I don’t understand how it’s possible.”

“The key?”

She looked him right in the eye, tugging on a small gold chain that slid the key between the curves of her breasts. “I always have it with me.”

“How did you come to have such a jewel in your home?”

“Unusual circumstances. I always leave the Ananke in the Royal Bank of Scotland, but the Duchess of Kent was supposed to visit me, and I had promised to show her the gem. No one knew about it.”

Holmes shook his head. “Besides the employees at the bank, the deliverer, and the security officers who accompanied him . . . Let’s say between fifteen and fifty persons. That’s a lot of people, milady.”

The valet returned, and Grimod quickly began taking the shoes’ imprints. Having swabbed the soles with an ink-soaked sponge, he applied them to three pieces of rice paper. The macabre remains went back into the icebox, and everyone returned to their seats by the fireplace to go over what they had learned, though they did not refrain from partaking in some of the best malt in Lady MacRae’s cellar.

“It’s extremely confusing,” said Grimod, passing the imprints to Holmes. “This does not resemble anything I recognize.”

“Indeed,” replied Holmes. “The circles in these tread patterns appear to have been placed completely at random. You’d swear they were leopard spots . . . Perhaps there were three machines, one for each shoe size, with their own unique patterns?”

“Unlikely . . . I would lean more toward a custom-made fabrication, but that doesn’t make sense.”

“These three shoes, however, seem to have the same pattern of wear on them,” said Canterel.

Miss Sherrington took a look at the impressions, ranked them from largest to smallest, then held them out to Clawdia for her to pass on.

“Not very talkative, your Russian dolls,” she said, giving them to Canterel.

“More than you would believe,” exclaimed Canterel, looking at all three together through the transparent paper. He adjusted them a little and smiled briefly in satisfaction. “Look, each of the imprints works as a fragment of the same stamp, we must assemble them in order for them to acquire meaning. Layered on top of each other like this, the markings on the treads come together to form a word: ‘Mar-ty-rio.’ That’s what I read, anyway.”

Holmes leapt out of his chair. “Terrific, my friend! I knew I was right in bringing you! Let me see that. ‘Martyrio’ . . . It’s right there. Incredible!”

“Except that we have gotten nowhere.”

“Martyrio, you say?” asked Grimod, looking thoughtful. “I’ve seen that word somewhere before. Wait . . . It was in the New Herald, in the same issue as the discovery of the three right feet.”

“Kim, please,” said Lady MacRae.

The Malaysian valet took a few steps and returned with a touch-screen framed in varnished wood. Grimod scanned it silently with his finger.

“There it is!” he said, separating the page out. “‘Chung Ling Soo finally returns to London. After his triumphant tour of the United States, the celebrated Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo will be presenting his show at the Wood Green Empire, February 5-7. He will, for the first time in years, perform his “Condemned to Death by the Boxers,” the extremely dangerous act that made a name for him at the Martyrio Circus before he went off to do his own show.’”

“Well,” muttered Miss Sherrington, “I get the feeling I should repack the bags . . .”