The Death Collector Read online

  ‘You all done, sir?’ the constable asked hopefully. His hope visibly faded as he caught sight of Jones’s expression. ‘What is it, Doctor Jones?’

  Jones turned and strode over to the small desk in the corner of the room. He took a pen, dipped it in ink, and scribbled furiously on a sheet of paper. When he was done, he folded it and wrote a name on it. He handed the stained paper to the police constable.

  ‘I want you to take that to the station and have Sergeant Fisk or whoever is the most senior man on duty send it on to Sir William Protheroe at the British Museum.’

  ‘Sir William Protheroe?’

  Jones dried his hands on a discoloured towel and nodded at the body on the table. The constable made a point of not looking at it. ‘I quote: “In the event of extraordinary results or findings that cannot be explained in the normal way of medical and anatomical understanding we are to inform Sir William Protheroe who will advise.”’ He tossed the towel into the corner of the room. ‘So cut along, constable, and have him informed. And you’d best tell your sergeant that this matter is not to be pursued, unless Sir William specifically asks.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’ The constable turned to go. ‘Just out of interest, sir. Hope you don’t think I’m prying. But, what is the problem with the dead gentleman?’

  Jones smiled thinly at the man’s deference. ‘Apart from the fact that he is dead, which can’t be a very satisfactory situation for him? Apart from that, the problem, as I have explained briefly to Protheroe in my note there, is that the bones in at least some of the dead gentleman’s limbs are not his own. Not even human, come to that.’ He sighed and looked back at the pale cadaver on the table. ‘And if that doesn’t run counter to our normal anatomical understanding of things, I don’t know what does.’

  Chapter 9

  The body was laid out on a workbench in the room that Sir William Protheroe used as a laboratory. It was a large room at the back of the British Museum. To all intents and purposes this room together with Protheroe’s rather smaller office, several large store rooms, and the persons of Protheroe himself and his assistant Garfield Berry constituted the entirety of The Department of Unclassified Artefacts.

  Sir William had many skills, but he was not a professional pathologist. So rather than examine the body he turned his attention first to the notes provided by Doctor Jones. Each and every point the police pathologist made, Sir William himself checked with Berry’s help on the corpse lying before them. Anything that Protheroe and Berry did not understand or could not verify, Berry noted down on a sheet of paper.

  Finally, Protheroe came to the bones. From his knowledge of palaeontology and archaeology he had some understanding of how bone behaved after death. He also had enough anatomical expertise to see at once that Jones had been right. The bone removed from Albert Wilkes’s left leg was not a human bone at all.

  Under Protheroe’s direction, Berry weighed the bone, measured it, drew a scale diagram. ‘What do you think is up with this chap?’ Berry asked as he labelled his diagram.

  Protheroe made a non-committal sound. He was examining the corpse’s right arm, feeling along the scar that ran down it. ‘Pass me that scalpel, will you?’

  Berry put down his drawing and passed the surgical knife. He winced as he watched Protheroe open up the arm along the scar. Turned away as the elderly man folded back the dead greying skin and pushed his fingers inside. ‘How very curious,’ he murmured.

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘I thought I was right with that bone from the leg. Now I’m sure.’ He held the slippery bone for Berry to take. It was surprisingly heavy.

  There was something else odd about it too, Berry realised as he rinsed it in the laboratory sink. It had run the entire length of the arm, yet it was a single bone. He turned to Protheroe, and saw that the man was watching him, nodding with encouragement, drawing out the obvious question.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ Berry said. ‘There’s no joint. It’s all one piece. Where’s the elbow?’

  ‘A very good question,’ Protheroe conceded. ‘Another good question is how this bone could ever have connected to the wrist. Or the shoulder, come to that.’ He paused to consult a page of handwritten notes. ‘This Doctor Jones is both very thorough and very astute,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Berry laid the bone down next to the one taken from the dead man’s leg. ‘Are you suggesting this man had no elbow? That his joints were not connected?’

  ‘I am not suggesting anything,’ Sir William Protheroe said. He poked at the bone from the arm. ‘But as Jones surmised this is most certainly not a human bone. In fact, unlike Jones, I recognise it quite distinctly.’

  Berry just stared at the bones. ‘Then what … ?’ He wasn’t even sure what question he should be asking.

  ‘This man,’ Protheroe said quietly, ‘has the bones of a dinosaur.’

  ‘You did what?’ It was difficult to tell if George Archer was more annoyed or surprised.

  Eddie had thought they would be pleased. He had waited until Liz arrived at George’s house before stepping out from the shadow of an oak tree on the other side of the street. The door had opened immediately to his knocking, and at first both George and Liz had seemed pleased to see him.

  Then he told them what he had done that afternoon. It provoked anger and disbelief from George. Liz went pale and quiet. There was silence for several moments, then both the adults seemed to slump into their chairs.

  Eddie perched on the edge of George’s threadbare sofa and waited for further reaction. When there was none, he decided that they must be waiting for him to tell them more. ‘I didn’t use your real names, of course,’ he said, in case that was what worried them.

  ‘Oh good,’ George said weakly.

  ‘No, they’re expecting Mr and Mrs Smith.’ Eddie grinned at his improvisation.

  ‘Smith?’ Liz said. Her voice sounded strained. ‘I don’t suppose they will believe that for a minute.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have chosen something less obviously false?’ George wanted to know.

  Eddie sighed. ‘It’s all arranged,’ he told them. ‘There’s some other people there too, but this Madame Sophia said she can squeeze you in.’ Now came the bit they really wouldn’t like, and Eddie cleared his throat and lowered his voice to add: ‘for only three shillings.’

  It looked for a second as if George was about to explode. ‘Three shillings?!’ He blinked and mouthed words that failed to appear, then shook his head. ‘Three shillings?’ he said again. ‘For something I don’t even want to go to – for a séance?’

  ‘It’s normally six,’ Eddie said. ‘I haggled them down to a shilling each.’

  ‘Well, that’s a mercy,’ George said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘If you don’t go, you won’t have to pay,’ Eddie pointed out. ‘But I think you should. If this Wilkes bloke is dead and you want to ask him what’s going on and that, it’s your only way.’

  ‘It’s Percy I’d really like to talk to,’ George said quietly.

  ‘Percy?’

  ‘Percy Smythe,’ Liz explained. ‘George’s other friend at the Museum. The man who was cataloguing the diaries. He’s dead too,’ she added.

  Eddie laughed. ‘There you are then. Two for the price of one. Bargain. What you complaining about?’

  ‘I suppose it would do no harm,’ Liz murmured. It seemed to Eddie that despite her earlier protests she was looking forward to the experience.

  ‘You’re serious?’ George asked in surprise. ‘You think we should go?’

  Liz considered a moment, then nodded. ‘What have we got to lose?’

  ‘Three shillings.’ George stood up thrust his hands into his trouser pockets as he thought about it. Slowly he turned towards Eddie. ‘You said you got them down to a shilling each.’

  ‘Wasn’t easy.’

  George held up his hand and counted on his fingers. ‘Mr Smith, that’s me. Mrs Smith, that’s Liz.’ He waggled the fing
ers. ‘That’s only two shillings.’

  ‘You’re forgetting young Master Smith,’ Eddie said. ‘That’s me.’

  Liz was on her feet now. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh no, no, no.’

  Eddie leaped up too. ‘What do you mean, “no no no”? Whose idea was this?’ Eddie demanded. ‘Who arranged everything? I’m coming.’ Eddie folded his arms and sat down.

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘No, you’re not. This is your chance to get a good night’s sleep. You can have the spare room. It used to be my father’s.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Eddie repeated, not looking at either of them.

  ‘Either George and I go – alone,’ Liz said sternly, ‘or none of us is going.’

  There was no changing her mind. George seemed to find the whole thing amusing, which just made Eddie all the more annoyed.

  ‘I’ll show you the room,’ George said.

  They all trouped up the narrow staircase and George led Eddie to a small room that contained a narrow bed and little else. The window gave a view of a tree, its branches dark and skeletal against the grey of the night sky. There was a key in the door and Eddie eyed it suspiciously.

  ‘You’re not locking me in.’

  ‘I would hope we don’t have to,’ Liz said. ‘Do we?’

  Eddie looked at her.

  ‘Do we?’ she repeated.

  ‘All right, I’ll give you my word of honour,’ Eddie told her solemnly. ‘I’m not coming out of that door till you get back. Not unless I ’ave to. Happy?’

  ‘What do you mean by “unless I ’ave to”?’ Liz mimicked Eddie’s accent, and he smiled despite himself.

  ‘Well, if there’s a fire, or someone comes to the door, or I need to go for a –’

  ‘All right, that’s fine,’ Liz agreed quickly. She took a step towards Eddie, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to give him a hug. But she settled for: ‘Goodbye. We’ll look in on you when we get back and if you’re awake tell you what happened.’

  ‘I won’t be asleep,’ Eddie told her indignantly. ‘And if I am, you can wake me up.’

  Eddie waited until he heard the front door close behind them. Then he went to the window and looked out. The room was at the front of the house, so he could see the dark figures of George and Liz walking down the street outside. He glanced back at the door and sucked in his cheeks as he thought. He had given them his word he wouldn’t go out the door, and Eddie was not one to go back on his promise. His word was his bond, and he sensed that they both knew that.

  He waited another minute to be sure that Liz and George had reached the end of the street. Then he undid the catch and opened the window.

  Chapter 10

  The Atlantian Club was only ten minutes’ brisk walk from the British Museum. Sir William Protheroe sat alone in the oak-panelled dining room, thinking carefully through the events and discoveries of the evening. No one joined him for dinner – the people who knew him well enough could also see that he was deep in contemplation. They knew better than to disturb him.

  By the time he had finished dinner, Protheroe had already forgotten what he had eaten. He thanked Vespers the chief steward of the club, nodded in greeting to Sir Henry Walthamstow and a few other acquaintances, and made his way back through the chill of the night to the Museum.

  He had several ideas about the body, and was ready to start putting them to the test. Protheroe had sent Berry home before he himself headed off to the club for dinner, so the few rooms that constituted the Department of Unclassified Artefacts were dark and empty. He lit the lamps in the main specimen room. Their flames flickered in the glass doors of cabinets and cases, dancing across artefacts that should not, according to science, exist.

  But the workbench was bare. The body of Albert Wilkes, and the bones that Protheroe had removed for examination, were gone.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ The room was almost totally dark and Madame Sophia’s voice was a ghostly wail that echoed in the gloom.

  George had decided that the séance was a waste of time as soon as Madame Sophia greeted ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ at the door and bustled them into her parlour. She gave almost every impression of being a scatty, eccentric lady of a certain age. But her sharp eyes gave her away. George could almost feel himself being sized up by the woman. If she had licked her lips in anticipation, it would not have surprised him.

  Liz on the other hand seemed to be completely taken in. She sat carefully and attentively at the large round table in the middle of the cluttered parlour and seemed to hang on Madame Sophia’s every word.

  There were six of them in all. Madame Sophia’s husband was a small man with a sharp nose on which was perched a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He was forever rubbing his hands together and had a permanent stoop that George thought made him look like a fictional money-lender. Madame Sophia introduced him as ‘my husband Gerald’.

  Mr and Mrs Paterson made up the six. Mrs Paterson was a small, timid, white-haired woman, while Mr Paterson was a huge, broad-shouldered man who was so fat he had to sit well back from the table. His hair was as black as his wife’s was white, and slicked across the top of his head with oil.

  ‘I do hope the spirits will be kind to us tonight,’ Mrs Paterson said as husband Gerald turned down the lights. Her voice was shrill, like a bird pecking for a worm. Gerald was preoccupied with something on the dresser at the back of the room.

  ‘Oh so do I,’ Liz said, sounding eager and excited. ‘It’s all so enthralling.’

  George said nothing. In the near-darkness, he was aware of Mrs Paterson’s fingers coldly meeting his own as they spread their hands across the table. If they hadn’t been twitching, he might have imagined he was touching a corpse. On his other side, Liz’s fingers were warm and comforting.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ Madame Sophia repeated.

  George looked round, trying to see if everyone else was attentive. Something moved at the corner of his vision, a slight ripple of light in the emptiness. For a moment his heart flickered – a spirit? He stared, trying to make it out.

  A bell rang. The sudden jangling made Mrs Paterson’s hand leap away from George’s in surprise. ‘They are here!’ she hissed. ‘The bell!’

  ‘What bell?’ George asked, despite himself. He could see now that the dim light from one of the gas lamps had caught on a thread as it moved. A pale, thin thread that stretched across the back of the room.

  ‘On the dresser,’ Madame Sophia explained. ‘The spirits have taken to ringing the bell when they are preparing to make themselves known to us.’

  George grinned in the dark. ‘How very convenient for us,’ he said. The thread he had glimpsed stretched to the dresser, and he would be willing to bet it was attached to the bell. But before he could decide whether or how to tell Liz, he felt her hand shift too.

  ‘Look!’ she gasped. Liz had raised her arm, dark silhouette pointing across the room towards the door. ‘A spirit,’ she breathed. ‘At the door.’

  George shifted slightly to see the door. And sure enough, a pale, ghostly face was staring back at him.

  ‘Don’t look,’ Husband Gerald whispered loudly. ‘They don’t like you to stare.’

  ‘And please don’t break the circle,’ Madame Sophia said. ‘That could be very dangerous indeed.’

  ‘Of course,’ Liz said, returning her hand to its position next to George’s. He thought he could detect a hint of amusement in her tone, and as if to tell him he was right, her fingers tapped the back of his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ Madame Sophia was saying. ‘Yes, I can hear you … You wish to speak to someone here?’ Her voice had taken on an ethereal, sing-song quality. The bell rang again. ‘You do!’ Sophia exclaimed in delight. ‘And your name is … Edward.’

  ‘Edward?’ Liz’s voice was shaking with emotion. ‘Not Edward?’

  ‘You know an Edward? Someone who has passed over?’ Husband Gerald asked. There was a glimmer of satisfaction in his voice.

  ‘Why, no,’ Liz said. ‘I
t just sounds such a nice name. For someone who is dead.’

  George stifled a laugh. ‘I don’t know any Edward either,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Liz told him in apparent seriousness.

  ‘No wait,’ Sophia interrupted quickly. ‘Edward is his spirit name. Here on Earth he would have been known as …’ She hesitated, for all the world as if listening to a voice that George and the others could not hear. ‘As …’ she added impatiently after a few moments. ‘It isn’t,’ Mrs Paterson said in a squeak. ‘I mean, it couldn’t be – could it?’ She gave a table-jolting sigh. ‘Not little Andrew?’

  ‘Why yes.’ Sophia seemed surprised. ‘That is what he says his name was. Andrew. There is another name …’ She made no effort to give it.

  ‘Griffiths,’ Liz said with conviction.

  ‘Andrew Griffiths,’ Sophia agreed. Then she realised that it was Liz who had spoken. ‘Er, is not the name,’ she finished.

  ‘Andrew Jones?’ George suggested.

  ‘Do we all have to guess?’ Mr Paterson asked. He sounded bored.

  ‘My brother,’ Mrs Paterson explained with an oblivious sob. ‘He … passed over when we were children.’

  ‘It is a child,’ Madame Sophia confirmed, as if this was something that she had simply forgotten to mention in all the excitement.

  ‘We were hoping for an Albert,’ Liz said sternly.

  George sensed she had had enough of this. ‘Or a Percy,’ he added, trying to sound equally stern.

  ‘The spirits are not at our beck and call,’ Husband Gerald reprimanded them.

  ‘Oh, aren’t they?’ Liz murmured, just loud enough for George to hear. Then a moment later: ‘Look!’ she gasped.

  Their eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness now, and everyone looked where Liz pointed. They all saw a white shape, formless and ethereal, hanging in the air above the table. It shimmered and twisted as if trying to become real, dancing across the room towards the dresser. It disappeared into the darkness and the bell gave a startled jangle.