The Aylesford Skull Read Free Page B

in Latin; one of them a wild-eyed French phrenologist and the other a crackpot criminologist from Turin University named Lombroso, whose work with imbeciles had impressed certain members of the Royal Society, especially Secretary Parsons, who was happy with the idea that the greater part of the world’s population suffered from imbecility. St. Ives was currently inclined to include himself among that number.
    “There might be a bigger fool than Secretary Lambert Parsons alive in the world,” Tubby said, “but if there is, he keeps himself moderately well hidden. The man is a humorless oaf. It’s a marvel that air allows itself to enter his lungs.”
    They walked down into the entry hall, where Lawrence, the doorman, was propped against the wall just inside the open door, taking advantage of a warm ray of sunlight, his eyes closed.
    “Do you have a coin for Lawrence?” Tubby whispered to St. Ives. “My pockets are empty.”
    St. Ives reached into his pocket, and in that instant there sounded a shattering explosion and he was thrown bodily to the floor, Tubby landing on top of him like two-hundredweight of sand. St. Ives was deafened by the blast, and he found himself looking up at the chandelier swaying dangerously overhead, plaster raining down.
    “Move!” he shouted at Tubby, his voice sounding small and distant, but his friend was already pushing himself to his feet, and the two of them staggered at a run through the door, the chandelier crashing to the tiles behind them, glass crystals pelting them on the back of the legs.
    Lawrence crouched on the footpath now, holding his palm over a bloody gash on the side of his head. There was the sound of screams, people shouting and running. The ground was littered with broken glass and wood, fragments of stone pots, and uprooted trees and shrubs.
    Shorter lay folded in half, dead still, twenty feet away on the lawn, his neck and head canted back at an unnatural angle. St. Ives saw at once that the man’s arm was missing at the shoulder, torn off in the blast. He looked away, his chest tightening.
    The glasshouse had blown to pieces. Where it had been there was a stone foundation and little more. Along the base of the inside wall, between what had been the glasshouse and the Bayswater Club proper, a gaping hole looked down into the Ranelagh Sewer. Sunlight shone through the hole, revealing the shimmering surface of the Westbourne River moving toward the Thames through its immense brick tunnel.
    Secretary Parsons appeared, looking stunned. “Thank God the force of the blast went out through the glass,” he said. “Aside from the odd window and the chandelier in the entry, the club itself seems to be sound. Poor Shorter.” He shook his head, looking across the lawn. “He was with Wellington at Waterloo, you know. Ninety years old if he was a day. And now he’s done down by a damned anarchist in his own palm house.”
    “Do we know that?” asked St. Ives.
    “Take a look at the man,” Parsons said. “He’s been blown to pieces.”
    “I mean do we know it was an anarchist’s device? Why would anarchists blow up a palm house?”
    “Because they’re imbeciles. They exist to be imbeciles. No one but an imbecile would detonate a bomb in a hollow tree near Marble Arch, but the thing was done.”
    Parsons and Tubby moved away toward where a policeman was just then laying a coat across Shorter’s body. It occurred to St. Ives that the totality of the old man’s begonias lay in fragments amidst the rubble. He would gather pieces of them up before he left, he thought, and Alice could carry on with them – something saved from this carnage. He stepped down onto the floor of the ruined glasshouse and looked around, seeing at once that there was a wash of fine black dust on the ground, despite the turbulence of the blast, which must have thrown most of it into the atmosphere. Several clay pots that had miraculously survived the blast burned with an orange flame, which