Then came the third section, the portion with only two floors. Thirty metres away, narrow stripes of light spilled from two windows, revealing wall, weeds, overgrown path, then sparkling water. We stood for a time, listening to the night: the sough of the wind; a susurration of water against moss-draped rock; the whine of a mosquito in search of blood. As I raised my collar against that last, I heard a sort of gulping squawk from farther up the island, followed by the faint, high thread of noise that was the voice of a bat.
No machinery, no gramophone records. Trams with iron wheels might have been a thousand miles away. Only the vague aroma of wood-smoke suggested that the building beside us was inhabited by human beings.
Holmes’ shoe gritted against the path as he moved forward. I followed, all senses alert. A bat darted through a shaft of light, hunting the attracted moths. When brightness lay at the very toes of our shoes, we stopped again to listen. Something large moved behind the shutters. A small metallic clatter was followed by a muttering voice.
Calf-high weeds lay between the path and the building, but nothing large enough—or sharp enough—to keep us from peering through the cracks. I allowed Holmes to continue to the far window, then together we crept forward.
The air smelt odd, the closer I drew to the lighted room, of chemicals and burning paraffin. Taking care not to touch the wood itself, I leaned forward to squint into the dazzle between the shutters.
A heavy line obscured the left-hand side of my vision, but beyond it was an array of glittering glass shapes and, oddly, some kind of chart on the wall. I gingerly moved over a step, to a spot where a gap between two boards offered a narrow horizontal view of the room.
Another heavy upright—and because I had recently spent a night in a room framed by precisely that view, I recognised it instantly: an iron bar, set into the window-frame between the closed shutter and the now-open glass pane behind. The glittering shapes were laboratory equipment: test tubes, flasks, alembics, and retorts—a Kipp’s apparatus stood to one side, identical to ours in Sussex, and as with our laboratory, the shelves held everything from homely baking soda to stoppered apothecary bottles whose labels wrapped halfway around the sides. Everything not on a shelf was lined up across a high wooden work-bench, along with an old-fashioned microscope, an electric desk-light for close work, several kinds of mortars and pestles, a Bunsen burner (currently unlit), three different sizes of mounted clamps, and various objects whose use I did not know. My gaze lifted to the back of the room: the charts included one of the blood flow in a human body, one with the muscles in a human body, and a third showing all the organs in a human body.
This would have been quite ominous enough, considering that Poveglia was an island from which passers-by heard shrieks and wails. But then I inched a bit farther over and what came into view froze me in my tracks. An autopsy table. It had draining troughs around the edges, an array of lights overhead, and a set of shelves with metal trays holding all the requisite scalpels, bone-saws, and mallets needed to open a corpse—everything but, I was extremely grateful to see, the corpse itself. The table held nothing but a crumpled rag.
Dear God, what was going on here?
When a white shape crossed my field of vision, it so startled me that I stepped back, catching my heel on a stone and nearly sprawling onto the ground.
I did manage to keep my own madhouse-shriek firmly behind my teeth. I took a deliberate breath, let it out, and brushed myself off—not looking to see if Holmes had noticed—before returning my eye to the crack.
It was a man in a doctor’s white coat, ill-shaven and haggard. His hair needed cutting—and combing and probably washing as well. The coat was riddled with unsavoury smears; its breast pocket bulged with writing implements and scraps of paper; one side-seam was torn up from the hem. His hands were nicked and discoloured, like Holmes in the throes of a chemical investigation. If I’d been told the man’s name was Moreau, I would not have doubted it for a moment.
He had crossed the room to mix something in one of the mortars, taking the stopper from a glass storage bottle and measuring out a scoop of some brilliant green powder resembling chromium oxide. I watched for a while, but despite having a first in chemistry, I could make no sense of what he was doing.
Perhaps Holmes would know.
In any case, the doctor appeared satisfied with the progress of his mixture. He abandoned it on the work-bench. Wiping his hands on the front of his coat, he went back across the room to the autopsy table. He pulled a tray from one of the shelves, removed a couple of instruments, and bent over the rag on the table.
Except it was not a crumpled rag. It was a creature, slightly larger than my fist—and when he picked it up to position it better under the lights, the long naked tail identified it.
A dissected rat is less troubling than a human autopsy, but still.
The man bent to his work. As he did so, a sound rose in the night, a sound that took a moment to identify: the man had begun to hum beneath his breath, a tuneless buzz of noise that, along with his nonchalant dabs and slices and flicking aside of scraps, set my skin to crawling.
Chapter Forty
I’D HAD ENOUGH—AND SO, I was grateful to see, had Holmes. We left our spy-holes and continued to the end of the building. No windows here, no autopsy tables, no rats, nothing but the sultry breath coming off the lagoon.
I gave an exaggerated shudder. Holmes started to reach for his cigarettes before he caught himself—he, too, appeared to have found the room troubling.
“Holmes, what the hell was that?”
“Curious, I agree.”
“Not the word I’d have used. Creepy, yes. Macabre? Disgusting? Just plain weird? God, yes.”
“Some of his equipment was remarkably out of date,” Holmes mused.
“Not that autopsy table,” I objected. It looked precisely like the one I’d tried to avoid the last time Lestrade dragged us into a murder investigation.
“True. And one of the graduated cylinders was made by the Corning company in America within the past ten years.”
I didn’t bother asking how he knew. “Holmes, we can’t leave Vivian here. Not with that going on.”
“Frankly, I am not sure precisely what was going on in that laboratory.”
“Creepy stuff? Autopsies?”
“Merely a necropsy. Unless you propose that a human might have a tail like that.”
Not unless that really was Dr Moreau—but I did not say it aloud. “I’m not sure it matters. Whatever he was doing, I doubt Ronnie and her mother would be happy to have Vivian anywhere near it.”
“You suggest we storm in and remove her forcibly from the premises?”
“Don’t you? Holmes, I know you brought your gun with you.” The care he had taken in keeping that side of his jacket away from me on the gondola and in the Runabout had made it obvious.
“Russell, your friend’s aunt has been here for some days—perhaps as long as a week and a half. Wouldn’t you prefer to approach her on, as it were, neutral territory? Miss Maxwell’s party is less than eighteen hours away.”
I counted wavelets for a while, watching the shimmer of light across the water. Then I sighed. He was right: Vivian might be here against her will; however, to be suddenly and violently wrenched out of her bed by an armed rescuer would be traumatic even for a woman of unquestioned stability.
“All right. But, Holmes—if she doesn’t show up at the Lido tonight, we’re coming here first thing Sunday morning to carry her out.”
Chapter Forty-one
WE RETURNED TO THE EXCELSIOR’S harbour in much the same way we had left: I paused to let Holmes off at its mouth on the lagoon. He created another distraction (not a fire this time) while I steered the valiant little boat up to its allotted berth. Somewhat short of petrol, true, but I hoped the Hon Terry would check the gauge before he ran it too far out from shore.
I met Holmes (slightly out of breath) and we woke our snoring gondolieri, who rowed the distance from Lido to Piazza somewhat more slowly than they had on the way out. We took to our beds as the sun was turning the mist to warm pearl.
* * *
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