The Devil in Amber Read online

  All at once, the shingle suddenly gave way to marshland but this provided scant relief. Exhaustingly, for every stretch of firm, reed-covered ground there was another of swampy morass. Time and again, I wasted valuable minutes tugging my frozen feet from the ground, the saturated soil gripping leech-like to my shins and only giving them up with a horrible, sucking belch.

  I was conscious of little save the huge, cold sky and the smudge of land at the horizon. The bleak landscape was dotted all over with boats, stranded by the low tide, their rudders projecting in ungainly fashion from every limpet-encrusted stern.

  Staggering on, I tripped and fell head-first into the reeds, sending a pair of geese clattering and squawking into the air. Lungs aching appallingly and with the familiar taste of iron in my mouth, I lay there for a long moment. I watched the geese flap off into the reddening sky, their path crisscrossed by a ragged ‘V’ of other birds winging south.

  Utterly spent, I could hardly bear to raise my face from the embrace of the soaking soil and took long, laboured breaths, inhaling the scents of the marsh, the musty stink of the reeds, the distant aroma of woodsmoke.

  Cracking open an eyelid, I suddenly saw salvation. Lying abandoned and almost completely covered in the long grass was the wreck of a fishing boat. It was upturned so that the peeling planks–Wedgwood blue and positively festive in that desolate landscape–faced the sky. It was exactly what I needed as a hiding place and I crawled towards the wooden shape hoping against hope that the interior was dry.

  The knees of my trousers were soaked through to the skin but I inched onwards, pulling myself through a ragged hole in the disintegrating planks and into fusty but wonderful darkness.

  I sank down, breath coming in great whooping bursts. It was hardly a permanent solution, but this shattered hull at least gave me room to think.

  I could head for the nearest town. Despite my state of déshabillé, I’d pass for a sailor and I still had cash, tucked away in the soaking money-belt. But, of course, the place would be crawling with rozzers. I might as well turn up and bang a gong, announcing the arrival of the celebrated Lucifer Box: artist, bon-viveur, sexual athlete and wanted felon.

  An uncontrollable shivering took hold of me and I hugged my knees in a vain effort to keep warm. I knew I should move on, find somewhere genuinely secure to rest, but I felt my head nodding again as the strain of the past few hours began to take its toll.

  I snapped suddenly awake at the dreaded sound of baying hounds. With renewed desperation, I felt in my pocket for matches, hoping against hope that they were sufficiently dry to be of use. I stiffened as, below the noise of the pursuing dogs I became aware of another sound. Close to. A sort of shuffling.

  At once, I tried the matches. Once, twice, three times, I rasped at the sandpaper without result until, suddenly, the little stalk flared into sulphurous life.

  I grinned happily at my success until I saw what the match had illumined.

  It was as though the whole of the stern of the ruined old boat were encrusted with jewels. Bright, shining shapes glittered at me like rubies in the darkness.

  Eyes.

  I gawped as the match spent its little life and then an horrendous squealing confirmed what I already knew. The place was alive, was boiling with rats.

  Scrambling backwards on my rear, I made for the open air just as the mass of rodents exploded outwards and I was overtaken by a torrent of stinking fur. I cried out in sheer horror as they overwhelmed me, their teeth sinking into the fabric of my coat and trousers, their scaly tails, thick as my numbed fingers, thrashing about my face. Gagging with disgust, I tried to scramble under the rotten planks and out into the daylight but the tide of rodents overwhelmed me. I positively swam through the onslaught of fur and teeth, my arms flailing as I clawed at the wet ground and dragged myself through into the open air.

  Then, all at once, as though obeying some silent command, the rats streamed away into the marshes like a trickle of oil.

  Flat on my back, I looked up at the vast expanse of sky, chest heaving.

  A strange quiet had descended and I sat up, looking about me. There was absolutely no sign of the pack of rats and not a sound to be heard: no curlew winging through the morning sky, no frog paddling in the soaking ground at my feet. Even the icy wind had dropped completely. I got to my feet and looked about, conscious of the same curious feeling of dread that had come upon me in my cabin on the Stiffkey. I felt with absolute certainty that if I stamped my foot it would make no sound whatsoever. It was as though the whole world had been smothered in cotton wool.

  And then, as before, the clear air began to blur and change.

  I froze in absolute terror as the dreadful, goatish face began to form once more, pitiless eyes shining redder and more lurid than those of the slavering rats. Closer to, the creature’s flesh seemed like some horrid mixture of animal remains, squashed together beneath the wheels of a motor car.

  As I watched, transfixed in absolute sweating terror, the tendrils of smoke drifted into the marshland and, with a horrible, shrieking peal, the pack of rats appeared once more, spilling out of the grass in three distinct lines, then merging into one. I steeled myself for their attack but the great charcoal-black phalanx took off across the wetland at a rate of knots. My skin crawled at the awful sight of them.

  Yet this was nothing compared to the frightful apparition hovering in the air beside me. I tried to look away but it was as though some queer magnetism were working on my strained frame. My eyelids quivered and my face glowed with cold perspiration as a sense of utter despair took hold of me and I sank to my knees on the spongy ground.

  Then, as suddenly as if I’d been slapped across the face, the spell was broken. I cried out in horror, shocked by the sound of my own voice–but of the apparition there was no sign. Instead, I became fully aware of the rumbling bark of the police dogs. Struggling to see into the middle distance, I could make out the bent shapes of men being dragged through the marshland by their excited hounds. They were moving in completely the wrong direction!

  I knew at once what had happened. The dogs were in full pursuit of the filthy pack of rats. In which case the hellish ghoul I had seen–had I seen it or was I merely delirious?–had come to my rescue.

  I thought back to what Aggie had said. That the thing she’d seen was her guardian…

  ‘Yet this was nothing compared to the frightful apparition hovering in the air beside me.’

  14

  Tuppence For A Bloater

  Not wanting to waste a moment, I assumed a low crouch and scarpered, keeping out of sight of the men and their dogs, now little more than vague silhouettes on the horizon.

  There wasn’t time to consider the insane events I had just witnessed. I could only thank my stars that Fate had granted me a chance of escape. Now I had to find proper shelter and food and give some thought to rescuing Aggie.

  I rounded a kind of crescent-shaped outcrop that might once have been a harbour, though it was now silted up and choked with marsh grass. Slowing to a brisk walking pace, I almost immediately spied a structure projecting from the landscape like a broken tooth. Tarred and tumbledown, it had evidently been cannibalized from driftwood and resembled nothing so much as the ribcage of some fossilized giant of the Jurassic. In sharp contrast to this, the front door, salvaged, it seemed, from a luxurious Portuguese vessel, was of gorgeous teak and bore the legend Capitão in beautiful copperplate script. The door was slightly ajar and the somewhat overwhelming strains of Don Giovanni were blasting through it.

  Tacked to the outside of the shack and swaying gently in the breeze were dozens of smoked fish glinting like gold leaf, woodsmoke swirling about them. My stomach cramped painfully and I realized, with a jolt, how utterly ravenous I was. Inhaling the bluey smoke until I felt my eyes beginning to sting, I let the music flood over me.

  Worn out and ragged since that night in the Manhattan drugstore–how long ago?–it was no wonder I’d started seeing things. What next hove in
to view seemed merely one more part of my delirium.

  There was no sign of life save for the sound of the scratchy gramophone and I was just reaching over for one of the smoked fish when the teak door flew open and an old, old woman came out. With my senses stunned to buggery, I thought she was a witch.

  Bent almost double, she leant heavily upon a gnarled stick only a foot or so long, had virtually a full white beard of a rather frightful wispiness and a heavily tanned face resembling a long-perished fig. Her black bonnet, as crow-black as the rest of her apparel, was in the style of forty years back. She fixed me with eyes as moist and clouded as the sky.

  ‘Tuppence,’ she cawed, chewing gummily at her lips.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Tuppence,’ I said with more gaiety than I felt. The crone stared at me. I coughed as the woodsmoke caught in my throat.

  ‘Bloaters is tuppence,’ insisted the contorted old thing in a strange Australian squawk. ‘I’m Mrs Croup,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Wanna come in?’

  ‘Madam, I could kiss you.’

  She looked me up and down and gestured towards the teak door.

  Introducing myself as Sal Volatile, lately of New York and now tramping about the countryside in search of work, I was ushered into a wonderland of curious relics, mostly, I presumed, reclaimed from the sea. All the furniture was slightly crippled, a missing ball and claw foot here, a patched-together cane bottom there. The tarred walls had patterned fabric pinned to them and, though filthy, the whole place had a sort of weathered charm that well suited its owner.

  The principal decoration, however, consisted of newspaper clippings, seemingly hundreds of them, though my exhausted eyes couldn’t make out the details.

  In one corner, in pristine nick, was the gramophone, with a vast yellow trumpet like a daffodil. Neatly stacked records abutted it, a spidery scrawl identifying them. Mrs Croup plunged me into a disreputable old armchair whose burst cushions sprouted straggly hair as freely as her chin.

  ‘Well!’ said the old woman, bending over the dirty old stove and tossing a fish into a pan. ‘Mr Volatile of New York, is it? Strewth, you must’ve seen some of the best’uns out there.’

  ‘Best’uns?’

  ‘Did you see Stanford White shoot Thaw? Or Leopold and Loeb? No, that was out in Illinois, wasn’t it? Did you ever go out West? That’s where they done for Fatty Arbuckle.’

  My face must’ve been a picture. What the deuce was the old dear banging on about? ‘Umm…’

  ‘I slipped away from the old man once and caught a peek of Robert Wood. He’d been fingered for the Camden Town business, if you remember. But then the buggers only went and acquitted him!’

  My eyes scanned the newsprint-plastered walls and suddenly all became clear. For every yellowing clipping, every carefully scissored paragraph, every damp-mottled photograph related to a notorious murder trial.

  ‘Oh!’ I cried, settling back in the chair and anxious to curry favour. ‘Oh yes, I’ve seen some corkers. Both here and in the States.’

  Mrs Croup’s gums worked feverishly. ‘Christ, what I wouldn’t give to travel again. The Old Bailey! Manchester Assizes! Too crooked now, though. Almost got to the Bailey when they strung up Thompson and Bywaters, but…well, Mr Croup was very strict on these matters.’

  I settled my hands on my lap, knowing I could warm to the theme. ‘I saw Crippen and Le Neve back in ’10—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘…and my father knew Dr Neil Cream…’

  ‘Never!’ she almost screamed. ‘Cream? The boss-eyed Canadian strychnine poisoner? I’d have hacked off me arms and legs to have caught the merest glimpse! Strike me down, leave me a limbless torso and stuff me in a trunk at Charing Cross Station if I wouldn’t. Cor!’

  She gazed at me, from my wet hair to my clammy feet, and blow me if she didn’t whistle. ‘Strewth. You’re a man after me own heart. And a looker too. Just like Mr Croup was. But he wasn’t a kind man. No, sir, not kind at all. You can overdose me with hyoscine, steam across the Atlantic and get caught by electric telegraphy but I won’t say he was a kind ’un. No I won’t.’

  What a queer old egg she was. I cleared my throat. ‘Any tea on the go?’

  Mrs Croup shuffled towards the gramophone, wound it up with great energy, then pulled out a big black disc. ‘Murder a cuppa, eh?’ she cackled. ‘I’ll get the kettle on. First though, a bit of “Carmen” Caruso recorded, in San Francisco, night before the’ quake. It’s a beaut.’

  She proceeded to stuff a quantity of woollen knickers into the trumpet of the machine to muffle the sound, then swilled out a cracked Dresden pot. ‘You look done in, mate,’ she observed. ‘Never mind bloaters. I’ll fix you some proper breakfast. Agreed?’

  ‘I must bow to your wisdom. You’re an angel.’

  She cackled and rubbed her chin. ‘With these whiskers? Hee-hee! Reckon you’ve been at sea too long, mate! It’s a long time since old missus here turned any feller’s head, unless it was to turn away and spew up his dinner! Distil arsenic from me wallpaper and poison me kiddies if I tell a lie.’

  I threw myself with gay abandon into a plate of thick gammon, eggs and sausages, washed down with strong tea that ran like quicksilver through my being. I closed my eyes in unadulterated joy.

  As I ate, Mrs Croup sang along with Don José in a cracked warble and gave me a neat précis of the illustrious career of the great barrister Marshall Hall. That got us through pudding. I was just belching behind my hand as we reached the Green Bicycle Murder and the old bird paused to smile benevolently at me. ‘Enjoy that? Don’t you fret about letting your wind out, neither. I hear tell it’s a sign of appreciation, somewhere out foreign’

  She plonked herself in a shipwrecked deckchair and, rolling a thin cigarette, fixed me with a twinkling stare.

  ‘Still, ’spect you didn’t come here just to hear about sundry hangings and gougings and suchlike.’

  I returned her frank gaze. ‘Then why am I here?’

  She shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘Reckon you’re looking for something. Reckon we’re all looking for something.’

  ‘I’ve found everything I could possibly want in your larder, my dear,’ I said, folding my arms over my stomach. ‘But if you could help me with a little information, I’d be inordinately grateful.’

  She spat into the fire. ‘I’ll help if I can.’

  ‘Is there a convent hereabouts called St Bede’s?’

  Mrs Croup pulled the fag from her mouth with a pronounced pop. ‘Like the Venerable?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh, yeah. There’s one. It’s out on an island close by, mate. There’s a causeway at low tide, otherwise it’s a boat trip. You taking holy orders?’

  I yawned expansively. ‘Not quite.’ The cosy room and the crackling fire were beginning to lull me into exquisite slumber.

  ‘You want to get your head down?’ she murmured, her hand toying with the ragged hem of her skirt.

  I swallowed, nervously. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I can make you up a beautiful little camp bed,’ she said, to my relief. ‘Then we can head out to the island tonight, if you like. What d’you say?’

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to flop my head down onto a pillow. If Percy Flarge and Olympus Mons and the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan had descended on the old woman’s hut I don’t think I could’ve stayed compos.

  ‘That’s it, dearie,’ cooed Mrs Croup. ‘You drift off now. Old Mother here’ll look after you. Slice out my guts, throw ’em over my shoulder and leave me in a Whitechapel slum if I don’t.’

  With which charming send-off, aware only briefly of the rough pillow-ticking in my face and the faded blankets slung about me, I sank into the sleep of the blessed.

  When finally I stirred, waking to the muffled strains of ‘La Boheme’, I felt wonderfully refreshed. Stretching out my long legs under the blankets, I gave a little yelp as my foot hit something cold and hairy.

  I cracked open a sleepy eye. A rheumy grey one looked b
ack at me.

  Lying on the adjacent pillow in the hastily improvised bed was Mrs Croup!

  She was grinning suggestively, a blanket pulled up over her withered–and naked–dugs.

  ‘What…what are you doing?’ I swallowed.

  ‘Protecting me modesty,’ she wheezed. ‘What does it look like?’

  My toes still lay against her own horribly hairy specimens. I attempted a smile. ‘Your…um…your tiny foot is frozen.’

  Mrs Croup seemed pleased with my bon mot. ‘I can’t offer you no artificial flowers, only smoked fish.’

  I shuffled backwards on the mattress. Happily I was still fully clothed but my decrepit antipodean Mimi, taking advantage of my exhaustion, had stripped completely. It was rather like waking up next to a quantity of brown tissue paper and it was not a pretty sight.

  ‘Madam,’ I said, sounding like an affronted parson, ‘I’m very grateful for your charity—’

  ‘Ain’t charity,’ she grinned, sucking on her lower lip. ‘Tuppence for a bloater, as I say. Gammon and eggs, though’–at this she winked suggestively–‘they might be a little more expensive.’

  By Jove, this was a pickle! ‘What…um…what would Mister Croup say?’ I managed at last.

  ‘He’s dead,’ cried the hag. ‘God curse him. Dead as if I’d bashed a chop-axe twenty-three times into his face!’

  I went quite cold. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘No!’ she cried, sounding disappointed. ‘I only wish I had! The bastard ran off with a winkle-picker from Blakeney! I heard the ’flu took him just after the War. Serves him right. Anyway, I’m alive! I’m here, now! Nice and warm to the touch of your lovely nimble fingers!’

  My mind raced. I’m married, I couldn’t possibly, it’s against my religion, I’m a Uranian outcast, I’m a eunuch, I prefer goats (no, that one might not help).

  I think I was on the point of smothering her with the pillow when the old girl saved me, creeping out from beneath the covers and pulling on a tattered nightdress that might as well have been a shroud. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m moving too quickly for you, ain’t I? It’s always been my curse. I frighten off the fellers ’cos I’m so eager. There’s plenty of time, eh?’