“My son is dead. We have answered all these questions before. My husband and I are satisfied that the police are doing everything in their power to settle the matter. And we most certainly do not require the services of an amateur.” She spat out that last word with some vigor, as if trying to dislodge an awkward piece of gristle trapped between her teeth.
“My wife is a devout woman,” Mr. Honeyman added mildly, as if that explained everything.
They rose to their feet and filed silently from the room. Evidently, Moon’s audience was at an end.
The Somnambulist was waiting outside, standing by the fish pond and engaged in a conversation with a gardener about the finer points of tree surgery. The giant turned away and wrote Moon a message.
CLOOS
Moon shook his head morosely. “Nothing,” he said, and stalked away into the foliage.
Later, aboard the train, he sounded almost angry. “Could it just have been random? Motiveless malignancy?”
The Somnambulist shrugged in response.
“But it seems so premeditated. There’s something planned about it. A sense of… theatre. Grand Guignol. This is not the work of a common hoodlum.” He fell silent, brought out his cigarette case and, to the exasperation of his fellow travelers, proceeded to fill the carriage with thick, acrid smoke.
The following evening, Moon and the Somnambulist were invited to a party.
Their hostess was Lady Glyde, a valuable patron in the early days of the theatre and the woman largely responsible for introducing Moon to high society. Her house in Pall Mall was an ugly, ostentatious place, a shrine to wealth and vulgarity, a warren of interlinking rooms and chambers which, despite their considerable size, tonight brimmed almost full.
A manservant took their coats and hats and led them through the teeming throng into the drawing room. A string quartet were plucking their way through some baroque sonata or other but were all but drowned out by the babble of conversation, the tinkle of polite laughter, the chink and clink of glasses, the sounds of insincerity. The servant stood at the doorway and announced, with the po-faced solemnity of a pastor reading the last rites: “Mr. Edward Moon and the Somnambulist.”
The volume dropped momentarily as heads swiveled and turned to ogle these new arrivals. Moon — once the toast of the best soirees in London — offered his most dazzling smile, only to watch his fellow guests glance at him briefly with glazed indifference before returning to their conversations as though nothing of any significance had taken place. A decade ago, dozens would have dashed forward, jostling to the front to be the first to greet him, to shake his hand or fetch him a drink. Many would have asked for autographs. Today, there was only the barest flicker of interest before he was dismissed by the herd.
The servant thrust drinks into their hands and vanished, abandoning them to the uncertain mercy of the mob. The Somnambulist gave Moon a warning nudge as a dumpy, pugnacious-chinned woman pushed her way toward them.
“Mr. Moon!”
The conjuror raised his voice in order to be heard above the tumult. “Lady Glyde.”
She reached them at last, clasping Moon’s hand with all the feverish pertinacity of a drowning woman. “Edward,” she gasped. “I’m quite sure I don’t know who half these people are.”
The conjuror laughed politely and even the Somnambulist’s face cracked a dutiful grin.
“You have drinks?”
“Thank you, ma’am, yes.”
She looked curiously at the Somnambulist. “You always choose milk?”
He nodded.
“Come with me,” she said, “there’s someone you simply have to meet.” And she thrust her way back into the scrum, her new companion trailing reluctantly behind. “Are you engaged on a case at present?” she called back.
Moon told her.
“Really?” She seemed genuinely fascinated. “I gather the papers speak of little else. It must be quite a challenge, even for you. Are you very close to a solution?”
“I’m quite lost at present,” Moon admitted. “I’ve yet to find a suspect.”
“Well, if anyone can crack the case, I’m sure it’s you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“I must say, you’ve recovered wonderfully well from that dreadful business in Clapham. Most unpleasant. A lot of men in your position might have given up after that. Thrown in the towel.”
Moon did not have time to respond before Lady Glyde stopped beside a small group of women gathered about a young man holding court. Moon caught a little of what he was saying — from the sound of it, something unnecessarily contentious about America.
Squat, freckled and sporting an ugly shock of ginger hair, the fellow cut an unprepossessing figure amongst Lady Glyde’s social elite. Stoop-shouldered and stuffed into an ill-fitting tuxedo, he seemed an alien there, an interloper, a moth amongst the butterflies. His face was made up of an unusually revolting set of features and he appeared to be missing a finger on his left hand.
“Enjoying the party?” asked Lady Glyde.
The ugly man beamed. “It reminds me of a marvelous little soiree I went to once before in Bloomsbury…” — he paused before delivering his punch line- “in 1934.”
Moon took an instant dislike to the man. Lady Glyde giggled in a manner quite unbecoming for her age.
“Mr. Moon,” said Lady Glyde, with the air of an impresario introducing a music hall act. “Meet Thomas Cribb.”
“We’ve already met,” Cribb said quickly.
Moon glared. “I doubt it.”
“He won’t remember me, but I know Edward well. In fact, I think I’d go so far as to say we’re friends.”
Lady Glyde laughed and Moon eyed the man with a good measure of confusion. The Somnambulist’s reaction, however, was unexpected. On seeing the stranger a kaleidoscope of emotions crossed his face — what almost seemed like recognition, then suspicion, then anger, then rage, then fear. He turned away, and disappeared back into the party. Nobody saw him leave.
“Mr. Cribb,” said Lady Glyde, “it sounded as if you were having the most fascinating conversation when I arrived.”
“Oh yes. Go on, do,” squealed one of the women, and the others chattered their empty-headed approval.
Cribb made an unconvincing dumb show of embarrassment before bowing, inevitably, to their demands. “I was speaking of America,” he explained, “of what she will achieve a few short years from now.”
“And what is that?” one of the women asked. “Civilization at last?” She snorted at her own waggishness.
“She becomes a great power,” Cribb said soberly. “A mighty nation that eclipses our own. Our empire withers and dies.”
With the exception of Moon, everyone laughed at this. Lady Glyde all but whooped in delight. “Oh, Thomas,” she gasped. “You are wicked.”
The man gave what he mistakenly believed to be an enigmatic smile. “I’ve seen the future, madam. I’ve lived it.”
Thomas Cribb was an enigma.
As is often the case with men like that, there are innumerable rumors and theories about his origin. He may have been a genuine eccentric, a man with simply no conception of his oddness. He may have been a professional charlatan, a canny self-publicist who had started, disastrously, to believe his own press. More plausibly, he may just have been someone who made up stories to get invited to parties.
He claimed to have knowledge of the future, to have lived there and seen the city a century from now, but whether anyone actually believed this is irrelevant. What mattered was that his stories granted him a color and theatricity which would otherwise have been quite beyond his grasp. Whenever he spun those yarns, women hung on his every word for what was almost certainly the first time in his life. Middle-aged widows like Lady Glyde adored him. He had cut a swath through polite society and become a fixture at these events, where he was regularly brought on as a kind of semi-comic turn. Above all, they made him interesting.