“Brought to justice,” she said.
“Justice,” said St. Ives, “was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back. He died in Scandinavia. He fell into a lake where he without a doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I…I saw him tumble into the lake myself. He didn’t crawl out.”
“He did crawl out.”
“Impossible,” said St. Ives — and it was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr. Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice’s vegetable garden, but the effort had cost him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn this last into a metaphor of the great man’s life over the last couple of years, but I won’t. I promised to leave tragedy alone.
“Look here,” the woman said, handing across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years, in someone’s pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the point as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most disinterested way imaginable.
She handed over a second letter, this one fresh from last week’s post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside, including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the man who had written the first missive. It didn’t take an expert to see that. There was a flourish in the T’s, and the uppercase A, of which there were two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however, was different. “H. Frost,” it read, with a scattering of initials afterward that I don’t recall.
The text of this second letter was interesting. It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at Edinburgh University, a chemist, and had heard rumors that papers belonging to our madwoman’s father were lost in the vicinity of the North Downs some forty years ago. He seemed to think that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved a certain notoriety that he’d never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so, in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, “H. Frost.”
St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the letters at all. “The doctor is dead, madam,” was what he said finally.
She shook her head. “Those letters were written with the same hand; anyone can see that.”
“In fact,” said St. Ives, “the more elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it’s the subtleties that are difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor’s hand, I don’t know. It’s an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn’t concern me. My suggestion is to ignore it utterly. Don’t respond. Do nothing at all.”
“He ought to be brought to justice is what I’m saying.”
“He’s dead,” said St. Ives finally. And then, after a moment of silence, he said, “And if this mystery were worth anything to me at all, then I’d have to know a great deal more about the particulars, wouldn’t I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were lost in the North Downs forty years ago?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a good deal that she wasn’t saying. Bringing people to justice wasn’t her only concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment, pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing anything at all. “My father’s name was John Kenyon. He was…misguided when he was young,” she said. “And then he was misused when he was older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding. He went over to Rome…”
“Moved to the Continent?” asked St. Ives.
“No, he became a papist. He repented of all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn’t have it. His manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I’m certain he didn’t, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing what he intended to do.
“But my father was a weak man, a worm. He saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to London and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I remember, and penitent, and I married and moved away within the year and didn’t see him again until he was an old man and dying. My mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself that killed her — and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by the Royal Academy. A man named Piper, who had a chair at Oxford, wanted the formulae for himself, and had got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my father said, so that he might rest in peace.
“Well, the last thing I cared about, I’ll say it right out, was him resting in peace. The less peace he got, the better, and amen. So I didn’t do anything. I had a son, by then, and a drunk for a husband who was as pitiful as my father was and who I hadn’t seen in a fortnight and hoped never to see again. But I was never a lucky one. That part don’t matter, though. What matters is that there are these papers that he mentions, this notebook. And I know that it’s him — the one you claim is dead up in Scandinavia — that wants the papers now. No one else knows about them, you see, except him and a couple of old hypocrites from the Royal Academy, and they wouldn’t need to ask me about them, would they, having stolen the damned things themselves. He’s got his methods, the doctor has, and this letter doesn’t come as any surprise to me, no surprise at all. If you know him half as well as you claim to, gentlemen, then it won’t come as any surprise to you either, no matter how many times you think you saw him die.”