He shut the door with a muffled slam. “Be available tomorrow, Mr Collins. You will be needed.”

“I cannot…” I began but then saw the two men with guns emerge from the crypt. The Malay was no longer with them. I stared in horror at the right sleeve of the taller man. His expensive tan coat was crimson from the cuff upward, as if blood had wicked up the wool halfway to the elbow.

“The Malay…” I managed. “He must have been the one in police custody. The one the Metropolitan Detectives Bureau turned over to you for interrogation.”

Inspector Field said nothing.

“Where is he?” I whispered.

“We sent the Malay down as a message,” said Inspector Field.

“As a messenger, you mean.”

“We sent the Malay down as a message,” repeated Inspector Field tonelessly. He rapped on the side of the carriage and Barris and I rolled away through the narrow streets of Bluegate Fields.

BARRIS DROPPED ME off outside my home at 90 Gloucester Place without a word. Before I entered my own door, I stood shivering in the fog and watched the dark carriage roll out of sight around the corner. Another dark carriage came past, its side lamps lit. It also turned right at the corner. I could not hear if they both stopped—the fog and snow muffled even hoofbeats and axle rumbles—but my guess was that they had. Barris would be appointing lookouts, giving instructions. Inspector Field’s men would be watching the front and back of the house, I felt sure, although not in the high numbers of the previous 9 June.

Somewhere out there in the fog were my new Gooseberries. But all I had to do to outsmart them was go down into my own coal cellar, knock down a few bricks, and crawl through the narrow hole into the upper levels of Undertown. The city would then be mine to travel in… or at least under.

I giggled at the thought but stopped when the hysterical giggle turned to nausea. The scarab shifted in my skull.

WHEN I STEPPED into the foyer of my home, I opened my mouth to scream in horror.

Detective Hatchery’s intestines were strewn from cornice to chandelier, from chandelier to stairway, from stairway to candle sconces. They hung there just as in the crypt, grey and wet and glistening.

I did not scream. And after a moment in which I shook like a child, I realised that the “intestines” were simply garlands, grey and silver silk and ribboned garlands, left over from some inane party we had thrown at the old house ages ago.

The house smelled of cooking—pot roast and other beefs simmering, some sort of rich bouillabaisse getting started—and the urge to vomit rose in me again.

Caroline swept out of the dining room.

“Wilkie! Where on earth have you been? Do you think you can just disappear every night and not… Good Lord—where did you get those atrocious rags? Where are your real clothes? What is that smell?”

I ignored her and bellowed for our parlourmaid. When she rushed in, face flushed from the kitchen steams, I said brusquely, “Draw a hot bath for me—immediately. Very hot. Hurry on, now.”

“Wilkie,” huffed Caroline, “are you going to answer my questions and explain?”

“You explain,” I growled, waving at the draped ribbons everywhere. “What is all this trash? What’s going on?”

Caroline blinked as if slapped. “What is going on? In a few hours is your very important pre-theatre dinner party. Everyone is coming. We have to dine early, of course, as you specified, since we all must leave for the theatre by…” She paused and lowered her voice so the servants would not hear. What emerged was a steam kettle hiss. “Are you drunk, Wilkie? Are you addled by your laudanum?”

“Shut up,” I said.

This time her head snapped back and colour rose to her cheeks as if she had been slapped.

“Call it off,” I said. “Send the boy… send messengers… tell everyone the party is off.”

She laughed almost hysterically. “That is quite impossible, as you well know. The cook has begun dinner. People have arranged transportation. The table is already set with the complimentary theatre tickets at each place. It would be quite impossible to…”

“Call it off,” I said and brushed past her to go upstairs and take five glasses of laudanum, give the wretched clothes to our servant Agnes to burn, and bathe.

I SHOULD HAVE slept in the steaming water had it not been for the crawling in my skull.

The pressure from the scarab was so great that three times I leapt from the bath to stand in front of the looking glass. Adjusting the candles for maximum light, I opened my mouth wider than I thought possible—my jaw muscles actually groaned in protest—and the third time I did it I was sure that I saw light gleam on a black carapace as the huge insect scuttled back out of sight, away from the light.

I turned and vomited into the basin, but there was nothing left in my stomach to bring up, and the beetle was back in my skull by then. I got back into the bath, but each time I approached sleep I relived the inside of the crypt, the grey gleaming, the abattoir stink of the place, and over that I smelled incense and heard the chanting and saw the huge black bug burrowing into my belly as if flesh were sand.…

There came a rap on the door.

“Go away!”

“There is a telegram come for you,” said Caroline through the door. “The boy said it was important.”

Cursing, I rose dripping from the bath—which was growing cold at any rate—pulled on my robe, and opened the door long enough to grab the flimsy from Mrs G—’s thin white fingers.

I assumed the note was from Fechter or someone else at the theatre—they had the profligate habit of sending telegrams as if a simple messenger-borne note might not suffice. Or perhaps it was from Dickens. In a flash of revelation, I imagined him confessing to his own scarab and acknowledging that he somehow knew that I had gained mine.

I had to read the actual six words and signature four times over before the meaning sank into my exhausted, inhabited brain.

MOTHER IS DYING. COME AT ONCE. CHARLEY

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

My mother’s face made me think of a newly dead corpse from which the silent soul was still trying frantically to escape.

Her eyes, showing mostly whites with only a hint of dark iris under the heavy and reddened lids, strained and bulged as if from some terrible internal pressure. Her mouth was open wide but her lips, tongue, and palate looked as pale and dry as old leather. She could not speak. She made no sounds except for a strange rasping, hissing sound emanating from her chest. I do not think she could see us.

Charley and I embraced in horror in full view of her sightless gaze and I gasped, “Dear God, how did this come to be?”

My beloved brother could only shake his head. Mrs Wells hovered nearby, her arthritic hands flapping from the folds of her black lace shawl, and somewhere in the far corner of the room waited Mother’s long-time elderly physician from Tunbridge Wells, Dr Eichenbach.

“Mrs Wells said that she was well—no, not well, hurting, coughing some, but well enough to eat with an appetite and enjoy her tea of an afternoon and to be read to and to chat with Mrs Wells—yesterday evening,” managed Charley. “And this morning… I came from London to surprise her… and discovered this.”

“This is oft the case with the old waiting and willing and wanting to depart this world,” muttered Dr Eichenbach. “No warning. No warning.”

As Eichenbach, who was more deaf than not, was chatting in the corner with Mrs Wells, I whispered urgently to Charley, “I want my doctor to see her. Frank Beard will come at once.”

“I have been trying to get in touch with her most recent physician, Dr Ramseys,” Charley said softly.