Graves stood before them, resplendent in his grey suit and bowler hat. He appraised them both. Veronica had turned to watch him approach, and was now eyeing him warily, wondering what he was going to do next. Was he telling the truth? If he was, what was going on at the Grayling Institute with Amelia? Those duplicates were certainly not dead husks.
“Then how could the transference ever work?” Veronica was still standing in front of Newbury. He held her firmly in front of him, and she realised that his hand was moving to his trouser pocket, out of sight of Graves. He was reaching for his revolver. “If they never feel pain, the karmic debt is never repaid. It’s all for nothing.”
Graves shrugged. “I suppose we’ll discover which of us is right in the next life,” he said, a sneer on his lips. He held his arms out as if welcoming them. “Oh, it is nice to have visitors. And you’ve saved us such trouble, coming here like this. I had intended to send someone out to kill you, Newbury, but now there’s no need. It’s just a shame you didn’t bring Sir Charles along with you, too. We’ve had to deal with him separately.”
Veronica felt Newbury stiffen. She prepared herself. If she could cause a distraction…
She rushed forwards, swinging her arm up and around to aim a blow at Graves’s jaw. He saw her coming, however, and was ready for her, lashing out in self-defence and knocking her brutally to the ground with a swipe of his arm.
She’d given Newbury the distraction he needed, however, and he swung his right arm up in one easy motion, presenting Graves with the business end of his revolver. He cocked it with his thumb. “What have you done with Charles? Where is he now?”
Veronica kept her eyes on Graves as she pulled herself up from the floor. Her hands were smarting from where she’d struck the tiles in the fall.
Graves, however, had not taken his eyes off Newbury and the gun, ignoring Veronica and acting as if nothing had happened. He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, Newbury. I’d wager he’s in a hundred pieces by now, blown apart on his way to the palace. But my men haven’t returned, so I can’t answer your question. That’s the truth of the matter.” That gave Veronica hope. Perhaps Charles had been able to evade them, or better still, to best them somehow. She willed that to be true.
She glanced at Newbury. His expression was hard, unforgiving. He wasn’t playing along with Graves’s banter. “I’m not feeling very inclined to go easy on you, Graves.” He stabbed the air threateningly with the gun. His finger hovered on the trigger. Veronica wondered what he was going to do. He’d never been the sort to kill someone in cold blood, even for something as world-shattering as murdering his dearest friend. But the glint in his eye suggested otherwise. Perhaps, in this instance, Newbury felt he was the one who needed to mete out that unpaid karmic debt.
Suddenly there was a blur of motion. Newbury buckled, his face contorted in pain, and the gun clattered noisily to the tiles a few feet away. For a moment, Veronica couldn’t figure out exactly what had occurred, until she saw the sabre in Graves’s hand, and realised with mounting dismay that he had managed to draw it and use it to disarm Newbury, all in a matter of seconds.
Graves came forward, the tip of his sabre pressing dangerously against the front of Newbury’s jacket. He looked serious now, all sense of his earlier playfulness banished. “Now, Sir Maurice,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “I think it’s about time you and I sat down together and discussed this like gentlemen.”
CHAPTER
19
“Tell me, what did Edwin Sykes do to incur your wrath? Was it the fact he stole from you? Or the matter of bringing unwanted attention to your strange little society?”
Newbury was seated opposite Enoch Graves at a large round table in a flag-stoned room on the lower level. The chamber was dressed in the manner of a mediaeval throne room, with huge tapestries covering the walls and iron candelabras bearing tall, white pillars of wax to either side of Graves’s elaborate chair. The table itself was a smooth, glossy mahogany, inlaid with intricate zodiacal symbols of ebony and gold. A wreath of stylised ivy encircled an impressive goblet at the centre of the design, which Newbury took to be a depiction of the Holy Grail.
Newbury grinned. Graves really was attempting to re-create his ideal of Camelot right there in London. Of course, he would be at its epicentre, sitting resplendent on his golden throne. Newbury thought he looked faintly ridiculous, dwarfed by his massive gleaming chair.
Behind Newbury two men stood guard, dressed in the matching grey suits and hats of the Bastion Society, each bearing swords and pistols. Another two had escorted Veronica to a holding cell, where Graves had assured him that she would remain unharmed, at least for the time being. Newbury supposed that would depend on how the following conversation went, and whether Graves would try to use Veronica’s well-being as a bargaining tool to get what he wanted.
He was concerned for Charles, though. He knew his friend could hold his own in a tussle, but if Graves really had sent men after him with explosives, the chief inspector would have found himself badly outmatched. If it was too late, if Charles was dead-Newbury shuddered at the very thought-then Graves would pay with his life. More than that, Newbury promised himself. He would pay with his very soul.
It was clear the premier didn’t yet want Newbury dead, however. If that had been his intention, he would have run the pair of them through with his sabre up in the hanging room while he’d had the chance. No, he wanted something else. Newbury wasn’t yet sure what it was, but he expected it wouldn’t be long before he found out.
Graves leaned forward in his throne, peering down at Newbury from across the table. “Sykes?” He laughed, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Sykes? No… Although I probably would have executed him sooner or later for the reasons you mention. We knew all about his little crime spree. It couldn’t have been anyone else-he was the expert handler of the spiders, the only one capable of using the machines for such precision work. To be honest with you, Newbury, the entire matter was beneath my concern. He’d ‘borrowed’ one of our machines, but we have many more. And he made sure that at least half of the proceeds from his late-night pursuits were added to the society’s coffers. No, I wouldn’t have killed him for that.”
“Then why?” Newbury ran a finger around the inside of his collar. He was sweating, and his hands were beginning to tremble. It had been a while since his last dose of laudanum, and he was starting to itch again with cravings.
“Because he took it upon himself to disregard my express orders. Because he removed one of the duplicates from the growth chamber and employed it for his own purposes, leaving it in a gutter on Shaftesbury Avenue to foil the police. It was a blasphemy against our beliefs, Newbury, and I considered it a sign of his moral inferiority. He simply had to die. So I had one of the men trail him and sabotage the machine. Sykes might have been an expert in handling the mechanical creatures, but he was never intelligent enough to understand what made them work.” Graves looked smug, as if the point of his story was to highlight his own superiority. “I’d have liked to have seen the expression on his face when it turned on him. Besides, he was never truly one of ours.”
Newbury looked puzzled. “Surely though, according to your philosophy, he’ll simply be born again? So what was the point in murdering him in such a fashion?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Graves replied. “And in the next life he will carry with him the lessons learned in this one. In truth, all we’ve done by ending this stage of his existence was to preserve the integrity of his soul. Next time he might make better choices.”
Newbury laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. He couldn’t quite believe what Graves was telling him: that he’d ordered a mechanical device to tear a hole through Sykes’s chest for the man’s own good. “That’s a terribly convenient theory of existence, Sir Enoch.”