The Detective and the Devil Read online

  Lloyd Shepherd is a former journalist and digital producer who has worked for the Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC and Yahoo. He lives in South London with his family.

  By the same author

  The English Monster

  The Poisoned Island

  Savage Magic

  LET THE WATERS ABOVE THE HEAVENS FALL,

  AND THE EARTH WILL YIELD ITS FRUIT

  THE QUATERNARY RESTING

  IN THE TERNARY

  Printed in London by Simon & Schuster,

  Printers, of Gray’s Inn Road, London

  A.D. 2016

  Soli Deo honor et gloria

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Lloyd Shepherd, 2016

  Map copyright © Neil Gower, 2016

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Lloyd Shepherd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-612-2

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-611-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-613-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Let he who does not understand either be silent, or learn

  John Dee, Propaedeumata Aphoristica

  CONTENTS

  ACT 1 LONDON

  1585: JACOBUS AND THE LIBRARY

  1815: CONSTABLE HORTON AT THE THEATRE

  1588: JACOBUS AND THE MERCHANTS

  CONSTABLE HORTON INVESTIGATES

  ABIGAIL AND THE DOCTOR

  THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

  1590: JACOBUS AT THE ISLAND

  CONSTABLE HORTON IN THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY

  CONSTABLE HORTON AND THE BODIES

  ABIGAIL AND THE DOCTOR

  CHARLES HORTON AT THE INQUEST

  CONSTABLE HORTON AT PUTNEY

  CONSTABLE HORTON LUNCHES WITH MR LAMB

  MRS HORTON’S TRIP

  CONSTABLE HORTON RETURNS TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY

  CONSTABLE HORTON IN KENT

  CONSTABLE HORTON’S LAST DAYS IN LONDON

  INTERVAL: ABIGAIL AND THE WHALE

  ACT 2 ST HELENA

  1765: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S MOTHER DIED

  THE HORTONS ARRIVE AT ST HELENA

  1773: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S FATHER DIED

  THE HORTONS GO EXPLORING

  MRS HORTON’S ODD MOMENT

  1776: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S SON WAS TAKEN

  MRS HORTON ENCOUNTERS A MONSTER

  1815: THE YEAR IN WHICH MINA’S SON RETURNED

  MRS HORTON AND THE DEVIL

  CONSTABLE HORTON AND THE DEVIL

  VIOLENCE

  THE HORTONS LEAVE THE ISLAND

  ACT 1

  LONDON

  The Universe is like a lyre which has been tuned by the most excellent Maker, and the strings of this lyre are separate Species of the universal whole. If you knew how to touch these strings with skill and make them vibrate, you could bring forth astonishing harmonies. Man himself is entirely analogous to this Universal Lyre.

  John Dee, Propaedeumata Aphoristica

  1585: JACOBUS AND THE LIBRARY

  By the time the barge reached Mortlake he had a revolt on his hands. The ill-headed English fools were drunk when they climbed aboard at Deptford and were half-blind and half-mad by Putney. One of them had already gone over the side into the river. Presumably he was dead by now, floating downstream of Hammersmith. The rest of them were on the point of upending the ‘whoreson Dutchman’ – as they had taken to calling him – into the river to join him.

  ‘Good fellows, fall to ’t yarely,’ he begged in his adopted voice, the one he thought of as ‘English theatrical’. It was good enough for a Bankside theatre, in his view. Too good, perhaps, for these violent men had fallen to mocking it.

  ‘Fall to ’t thyself,’ said one of them, and some of the others giggled. ‘Thou art a droning flap-mouthed clot-pole.’

  ‘Did you hear that in a play?’ said another of them.

  ‘Go firk thyself,’ came the reply.

  ‘Do you not see it?’

  He pointed dramatically upstream. The shape of a house. It might have been the necromancer’s; it might have been some poor bloody widow’s; it might have been Hampton Court itself. He didn’t know. He didn’t much care by then.

  ‘We are arrived,’ he cried, praying it was true. He was by then giving serious consideration to diving off the barge and swimming back to the other boat, the one which had followed them upstream, the one only he knew about. This lot were too stupid and too drunk to be relied upon for the task to come. His scheme was as ridiculous as his dramatic facade.

  And yet the place seemed right. The tide was high up against the towpath, and the lighterman he’d paid to bring them here steered the barge alongside. Oars clattered into each other as the drunken Englishmen tried to stow them. They’d been clattering into each other all the way upriver.

  Now anxiety descended on his motley crew of ne’er-do-wells, the ale-stewed anger and defiance underworked by the outline of the house jagged in the moonlight, its roof steeply pointed into the sky, more assertive even than the church tower next to it. The place was directly alongside the towpath, and was encrusted with the silhouettes of chimneys and outhouses, with none of the organising principles of a noble riverside palace.

  He climbed out of the barge and onto the towpath. Not one of them followed him. He looked back and they were standing in the barge, a ragtaggle gang of frightened little boys.

  ‘How can we be certain he’s not inside?’ said one of them.

  ‘He’s not inside,’ he replied.

  ‘But how can we be certain?’

  ‘He’s in Poland.’

  Such was his intelligence, anyway. He had no wish to encounter a wizard this evening.

  ‘You go in first, Dutchman.’

  ‘Yes. Fall to ’t, yarely.’

  A snigger from one of them lifted the mood a little. He turned towards the house.

  A year in the making. A year of planning, scheming, travelling. He’d met some interesting men this past twelvemonth. Only some of them had been European.

  Now he was standing on John Dee’s land, beyond the towpath, and the house looked even more odd from here than it had from the river. It was completely silent. A strange smell hung in the air, a mixture of almonds and urine. In these outhouses, it was said, were Dee’s laboratories, where he boiled and burned the elements of the Earth with God-knew-what intent.

  He had to persuade the Englishmen to go into the house. Hell’s teeth, he had to persua
de himself to go into the house. They were against it to a man, but he’d been careful not to pay them anything upfront. Their fee depended on their completing the job. He reminded them of this now. They looked up at the shadowy house of the wizard, and three of them left, right there and then, just climbed out of the boat and walked away from the river, towards the silhouette of the church tower, muttering about how this place was wrong, wrong, wrong, and they weren’t going to be possessed by the necromancer’s guardian demons just for a few shillings.

  He looked at the ones who remained.

  ‘More for you lot, then.’

  They looked at each other, and then they did as they were told.

  They smashed their way in, shoving the door off its hinges. They tramped into the large central hall, its ceiling high but not, thought Jacobus, as high as the roof he’d seen from outside. There were other rooms, in the eaves.

  He saw books. They were everywhere, stacked vertically and horizontally, in wooden shelves and cases, their spines to the wall. There was some rationale to the layout, and he almost laughed when he realised it. The books were arranged by size. Even to an unlettered man such as Jacobus Aakster, this seemed queer and unscholarly.

  The men didn’t know what they were about. This was deliberate on his part. He pointed randomly at shelves, and issued commands. Take the books out of the boxes. Put them on the floor. Take these books from the shelves. No, not those, these ones. And these. And these.

  They removed hundreds, perhaps thousands. Some of the volumes were chained, but most were not, and those on chains were simply pulled away from the wall. He cast his net wide, walking around the central hall pointing to whatever looked likely, ignoring theology and concentrating on natural philosophy and exploration, the stuff that might prove to be useful in the real world. Who knew? Perhaps Dee had discovered a north-eastern passage to Cathay, and it was hidden inside one of these books. That would be worth something, but it would be as nothing against the secret he was really here for.

  He slipped away and further into the house on his own, following staircases and corridors into smaller and smaller rooms. Somewhere inside here was Dee’s private room, his interna bibliotheca, where he communed with angels and kept his most precious books: Agrippa’s De occulta philosophica, the Mystica theologica of Dionysius the Areopagite, the manuscripts of Ramon Llull.

  He found it eventually, tucked away in the eaves of the steep roof. Its small window looked out onto the dark river, and its interior had been partly denuded. There was no sign of any demonic apparatus; Dee had, presumably, packed this up and taken it to Poland with him. But there were books and manuscripts, dozens more of them. Jacobus placed his candle on a pile of volumes and settled down to hunt, the noise of the men downstairs fading away as his concentration deepened onto the task at hand. The whole night – the whole year – came down to this moment. If he didn’t find it, the scheme of the merchants would fail. Not to mention his own still-secret adaptation of said scheme.

  But he found it. It wasn’t hidden. The merchant’s spies had suggested that Dee might not have known what he had in this particular manuscript, and it was indeed given no special status, nor was it locked away – though it was in this internal room, so Dee had presumably been trying to study it. It was bound in the scrappy pages of some other manuscript; some of the more hysterical sources Jacobus had consulted had said it was bound in human skin. He smiled at the workaday reality. It was slim in comparison to the hefty tomes that surrounded him in the little room. He flicked to the title page, and read it in the flickering candlelight. The strange swirling script he found inside was as he expected it. He checked a few more pages.

  The manuscript was there, and then it wasn’t, because it had a new home now, deep inside a hidden pocket of his coat. He stood, and went back downstairs. The work was almost done. The boxes of books they had taken from Dee’s library were carried out into the garden and down to the towpath, where they were loaded onto the barge.

  ‘Now, fellows – enjoy yourselves,’ he said, passing around their money and a few bottles of very, very strong wine he’d had ready and waiting. He went out into the garden, where the lighterman was preparing to sail the barge back downstream on the tide, out into the Estuary, where the Amsterdam merchants waited for him on their ship.

  ‘Change of plan,’ he said to the lighterman. He had dropped the English theatrical airs in favour of Dutch practical. ‘There’s more work to be done here. I’ll follow you in a few hours. Wait for me at Deptford.’

  The lighterman muttered but he was being paid to do as he was told. Jacobus untied the ropes, and the barge moved out into the stream. He watched it go before walking back along the towpath to find the second barge tied up. It had slipped a little upstream, out of sight.

  He climbed in, and Mina was there with her delicious lips and her wicked chuckle, to kiss him and fondle him and congratulate him.

  A vast whoop of male laughter accompanied a sudden sound of breaking glass as one of the windows of John Dee’s house burst outwards. Someone had thrown a chair through it from within. Books followed the chair into the garden, and someone lit a fire as the barge pulled away into the stream. In only minutes Dee’s house was flickering with the flames from the garden as a pile of books made their own inferno.

  ‘You have it, Jacobus?’ Mina said.

  ‘I have it, beloved,’ Jacobus replied.

  1815: CONSTABLE HORTON AT THE THEATRE

  Six months from that night, with the island falling away to starboard, Charles Horton would remember the Drury Lane Theatre, and he would mark it as the starting point. Enter the constable, stage left.

  He would recall the noisy crowd, the slow staccato of pips being spat at his shoulders from someone behind, the musky smell of the oil lamps and candles which hung precariously in the chandeliers.

  He would remember the astonishing quiet that descended as the delicious verses unwrapped themselves, the shrill mob surprised to find itself distracted. There was a wizard in the building, and he weaved a powerful spell of another’s devising.

  The wizard’s name was Edmund Kean, a young man of wide repute, his famous face tonight transformed through greasepaint enchantment into that of an ancient sage. The latest star of the Covent Garden stage, a study in controlled intensity, his robes flowing around him in richly coloured waves, as if possessed of their own character and desires.

  The part he played was of a second wizard, and so strong was the magic that this other wizard seemed to occupy the young bones and muscles and face of Kean; an older wizard, the Duke of Milan, full of his own mysterious motivation.

  Rather like a dream than a reassurance.

  Prospero’s words were not his own, and they were not Kean’s. The man whose spell this was seemed to hover in the air, the puller of the strings, the play’s very own Ariel.

  To have no screen between this part he played

  And him he played it for.

  It was Charles Horton’s first Shakespeare.

  He was mesmerised; in truth, he had been transported from the play’s opening, as a storm rang through the theatre, loud enough to wake the magistrates of Bow Street, sending the King of Naples into the depths. Outside, the whores of Drury Lane played their own parts in their own play, their audience of men clutching pennies, snatched-at by their lusts. But here inside, there was magic afoot, savage and potent and dangerous.

  From his position up in the gallery, high above the stage, Horton saw the crowd in the pit, all of them standing and watching in silence. All their petty hooliganisms had been forgotten. The Drury Lane mob was notorious, but tonight the mob was tamed. It watched Kean conjure his sea-sorrow and Ariel flame amazement, flying in on unseen mechanisms, at times invisible to every eyeball, at others heard only in the groans of the shipwrecked.

  Lie there, my art.

  Prospero removed his cloak from his shoulders and laid it down, emphasising its circular shape with his staff. When it settled flat upon the stage it
was as round as a hole looking down through the earth and out to the other side. It was something alive, quivering with the stars and planets and comets which decorated it.

  From up where he sat, high in the gods, Horton looked down into the wizard’s black hole and imagined shapes moved within it, as if a portal to some other London had been opened, a London where the crackles of fairy magic were commonplace.

  Or perhaps that was this London, and another London where no stench of magic remained was looking curiously from within, back to this dreamland in which Horton now found himself.

  Music filled the vaulted air of the theatre, played on instruments hidden who-knew-where, and his wife Abigail’s hand squeezed in his, gripped as it had been gripped since the opening storm. Her fingers pulsed to the rhythm of the word-music.

  Masks were removed, identities were revealed, love was pledged. Horton felt the terrified awe of the boatswain, all clapped under hatches, his wrecked ship restored by unknown capacities. Towards Caliban he felt first horror, then disgust, then a deep and senseless pity.

  And Ariel – well, Ariel he thought he understood. An instrument of greater men, trapped by obligation and unseen chains of secret knowledge he was powerless to reveal.

  Yes, he thought he understood that pretty well.

  The play unwound itself from the magic to return to the every day. Even Prospero noticed the sea-change.

  Do not infest your mind with beating on

  The strangeness of this business.

  The strange business of the stage began to give way to London’s grubby, incessant masque. Horton could no longer ignore the fact that the Earl of – had failed to return to his box for the second part of the play, leaving the young woman who was most definitely not his wife to weep into her fan. He saw money changing hands between two men below him, and saw the handing over of an object wrapped in ticking. He could no longer ignore the woman next to him, who smelt like a wet dog and fervently whispered The Emperor! The Emperor! every few minutes. He would speak to her when the play ended. If she spoke of Bonaparte, he would have to haul her to Bow Street on a charge of sedition.