The Black Crow Conspiracy (5 page)

It still burns, and I fear that this wound will be the death of me. You cannot help me now. I have failed the King and the shame will follow me to an early grave.”

With a pained grimace, Middleton pulled back his sleeve, hiding the burn once more. “Leave me now,” he said, a note of command returning to the old soldier’s voice. “I want to be left in peace with my sins.”

Penelope opened her mouth to ask another question, but before she could speak, she felt Alfie rest his hand on her shoulder.

“We should leave now,” he said, his face almost as pale as the soldier’s. Behind him, Penny could see the huddle of labourers rising from their chairs, angry stares darting in their direction. Leaving Sergeant Major Middleton staring into the bottom of his empty glass, Penny and Alfie hurried for the door.

“So what now?” Alfie asked once they were
safely outside the tavern, the two of them hastening up Horselydown Lane. “We still don’t know who might have stolen the Crown Jewels.”

Blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, Penelope shaded her eyes with her hand. In her mind, she could still see the image of the burn seared across the old soldier’s skin, the impossible echo of his words haunting her still.
Glowing ghosts… Angels of death
…
The radiant boys
…
Her mind whirred, the words finally clicking into place. She now knew where she had heard this before. In the offices of
The Penny Dreadful
, scattered amidst the countless competition entries, she remembered the torn newspaper clippings reporting sightings of strange wraiths and radiant boys haunting the streets of London.

She turned back towards Alfie. “Oh, but we do,” she replied with a smile. “We’re looking for the radiant boys.”

VIII

Penelope studied the newspapers fanned out across the reading-room table in front of her:
The Times, The Morning Post, The Illustrated London News
and countless more. Newsprint stained her fingertips as she leafed through the pages of the
Evening Standard
. Beneath its masthead, the date Monday, May 12, 1902 could be read. Two days after Sergeant Major Middleton said the Crown Jewels had been stolen.

Penny’s eyes scanned the rows of columns, flicking past each article and report in turn, searching for the clue that would bring her one step closer to solving this mystery. Of course, there was no mention of the theft of the Crown Jewels in any of the newspapers she had read; Inspector Drake and his men had made sure of that. No, Penelope was searching for a different sort of story.

Her gaze snagged on a brief article tucked away
at the bottom of page thirteen, its headline telling her that she had found her lead at last.

A RADIANT BOY HAUNTS BLACKFRIARS

The neighbourhood of Ludgate Hill has been thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement by the rumour that a supernatural apparition has been sighted. On Saturday night, Henry Chappell, a respectable-looking man, was returning to his lodgings at 6 Carter Lane, Blackfriars, when he reportedly saw an apparition walking through the wall of the Old Bell Tavern. Several other revellers frequenting the tavern attested to witnessing the same, with one even describing how he pursued the apparition along Ludgate Hill where the insubstantial form disappeared without a trace. The description of the spectre given by each of the witnesses is the same – a young man with glowing features dressed in a long flowing coat.

A small smile of satisfaction played around Penelope’s lips. This was the very same story she had first seen clipped from the pages of this newspaper and posted to her at
The Penny Dreadful
. At the time she had dismissed it as yet another half-baked competition entry, the person who sent it seemingly believing that Montgomery Flinch could conjure up a tale of the macab
from such meagre fare. Her gaze settled again on the headline:

A RADIANT BOY HAUNTS BLACKFRIARS

The few scant details reported here seemed to match the description that Sergeant Major Middleton had given her exactly: a young man with glowing features, dressed in a long flowing coat; a boy who could walk through walls.

The story of
The Thief Who Wasn’t There
had been here all along, she just hadn’t realised it. This must be the man, if it was a man, who had stolen the Crown Jewels.

Taking a careful note of where the sighting had been reported, Penny pushed the newspaper to one side. Beneath this lay a map of London, the city’s streets and parks covering most of the table. Seated around her, the other library patrons muttered reprovingly as the rustle of papers disturbed their peace. Ignoring this, Penelope searched out Blackfriars on the map, marking the exact spot with a cross and against this noting the date and time when the sighting had been reported. Clearing the rest of the newspapers out of the way, she studied the map with a sigh.

The map showed the whole of London pitted
with the marks Penelope had made. From Mayfair to Sloane Square, South Kensington to the Elephant and Castle, a graveyard of crosses were scattered across the city. No rhyme and reason, it seemed, to where the ghost of the radiant boy had been seen. These sightings didn’t just date from the night of the tenth of May. Indeed, the reports of strange glowing figures seemed to have plagued the city for the past month, with light-hearted articles detailing ghostly sightings tucked away under News in Brief. But if anyone took the trouble of joining the dots, it looked like an invasion of the dead…

A sudden gleam of realisation shone in Penelope’s pale-green eyes, the idea coming to her in an instant. That’s what she had to do. Reaching beneath her chair, she lifted her valise up on to the table, unfastening its clasp with a satisfying click. As a chorus of tuts sounded again, Penny drew out a ruler from her bag and placed this on the map. Moving her case to one side, she began to draw a series of lines between each of the ink crosses she had already marked on the map, working through these in order to trace the paths that the ghostly figure must have taken as he slipped through the streets of the city.

Gradually, a pattern began to emerge as the lines meandered through Westminster, Whitehall and the Mall. By tracing each night’s journey back to its earliest sighting, the lines all seemed
to converge on a single spot – a property near the corner of Carlton House Terrace in the heart of St James’s. Penelope frowned. What business could a ghost have in this fashionable street populated by lords, earls and ambassadors?

She glanced down at her watch. It was half past four. Alfie should be back from the printers now. Even though
The Penny Dreadful
had been banned from publication, there was still work to be done: printer’s bills to pay, paper orders to cancel, the pulping of returns to oversee. In Wigram’s absence as he tried to free Monty, Alfie had stepped into the breach, taking on the older man’s duties as he and Penny fought to keep the magazine alive.

Folding up the map, Penelope placed it in her valise, snapping the clasp shut with a determined look. She would pick up Alfie on the way to Carlton House Terrace.

It was time to go ghost hunting.

Away from the din and bustle of traffic, Penny and Alfie hurried down Pall Mall. Garlands of flowers and strings of gaily coloured bunting criss-crossed the street; the coronation decorations hung resplendent between the grand palatial buildings. Beneath this finery, a stream of elegantly dressed men strolled down the pavement, hansom cabs dropping their occupants at the doors of one or other of the grand gentlemen’s clubs that called
this street their home. Passing by the classical columns of the United Service Club, Penelope turned left down Waterloo Place.

“So we’re following in the footsteps of a ghost?” Alfie asked as he studied the oversized map flapping in his hands. Taking his arm, Penny steered him past the sneering glance of a well-heeled businessman, the pavement narrowing as they passed beneath the broad-leafed trees bordering the club’s private garden.

“We’re following in the footsteps of a thief,” she corrected him. “I can’t see what use a ghost would have for the Crown Jewels of Empire.”

“Perhaps it’s the ghost of Henry the Eighth?” Alfie suggested with a grin. “Come back from the grave to claim his crown.”

Penelope shook her head as they crossed the road at the end of the avenue.

“I’ve never heard of a ghost whose touch could brand a living man,” she said. “Not even the ghost of a king.”

In his mind, Alfie saw the burn mark scorched across Middleton’s arm, the memory of it sending a shiver down his spine.

Penelope came to a halt beneath the Duke of York’s statue, its shadow lengthening as evening approached. Taking the map from Alfie, she studied the place where the lines converged. To her left she could see a grand terrace of white-stucco-fronted houses overlooking a
private park. This was the street where the radiant boy’s nightly journeys seemed to begin. Perhaps one of these houses held the key to unlocking this mystery.

With Alfie by her side, Penny started to walk along the terrace. The houses were set back behind wrought-iron railings. Corinthian columns buttressed sweeping balconies, each property reaching up for three storeys. Penelope gazed up in awe, her eyes searching for some kind of clue amid the grandeur. Then she spotted it, a nameplate fixed beside the front door of the second house on the left:
The Society for the Advancement of Science
. Her mind flicked back to the anonymous letter, her fingers twitching as she recollected the confession she had read.
You must believe me when I say I do not wish to do these things that they ask of me, but when that terrible fire races through my veins I am powerless to refuse. I am a living man, but these experiments are turning me into a ghost
. These experiments…

“This is the place,” Penny murmured, staring up at the elegant façade. The high windows lay in darkness, blinds drawn to keep out the early-evening sun. “It’s time to find the thief who wasn’t there.”

She climbed up the stone steps that led to the front door, Alfie following uneasily behind. He glanced nervously up at the grand portico.

“Are you just going to knock on the door?” he asked.

Penny shook her head, reaching up to the black ceramic bell push, set high on the wall.

“I think I’ll try the doorbell.”

In reply, a faint tinkling sound came from within. They waited, Alfie shuffling uncomfortably in his shoes as the seconds ticked by into minutes. The front door remained resolutely shut.

“Perhaps we should try the tradesmen’s entrance,” Alfie suggested.

With a nod of agreement, Penny followed him as they retraced their steps. Behind a small gate in the railings, a narrow flight of steps led the way below stairs. Reaching the bottom, Penelope wrinkled her nose in the gloom. To her right, beneath a recessed porch, stood the tradesmen’s entrance, a sign fixed to the black-painted door proclaiming, “No hawkers or pedlars. All deliveries must be made between the hours of 8.00 a.m. and 6.00 p.m.” A strange smell of chemicals hung in the air, the most likely source the four tall dustbins standing in the shadows near the door. Next to these bins, stacks of empty bottles and beakers were arranged with geometrical precision in open wooden cases. Penny’s gaze ranged over the scene, taking this all in with a novelist’s eye. If the radiant boy had come from this place, then the initial evidence seemed to suggest that there might be a scientific
explanation for this rather than any supernatural cause.

As Alfie skulked in the shadows, Penny rang the bell next to the door. The clang of this sounded louder down here, but there still came no answering reply. It looked like the Society for the Advancement of Science had closed for the night.

“We’ll have to come back during office hours,” Alfie suggested, glancing down at his watch. “There’s bound to be someone here then.”

Disappointed, Penny looked down again at the map in her hand. Next to each of the ink crosses where she had recorded the sightings, she saw that every single one of these had occurred after dark. A slow smile of realisation crept across her lips. Of course, who had ever heard of a ghost who chose to walk in daylight?

“I think we should stay.” She glanced around in the gloom, searching for a place where they could hide out of sight. “Let’s wait to see what darkness brings.”