The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) Read Free

touched two fingers to his hat and returned to where Monckton Milnes had joined Swinburne and Trounce. “Both at nine o’clock! Scarlet snow and Spring Heeled Jack.”
    The detective inspector cupped his hands and blew into them to warm his fingers. “Lord help me, are we faced with another of your damnable affairs?”
    “My affairs, Trounce?”
    “More king’s agent ballyhoo.”
    “Ah, I see. I don’t know, but if Bartolini’s was really invaded by Spring Heeled Jack, then I fear we might be.”
    They joined the other Cannibals.
    “The devil himself was among us!” Bendyshe trumpeted. His voice was never less than stentorian. “Gad, what a horror!”
    “You should have seen it, Richard,” Henry Murray said. “A ghost? A mechanism? I’m utterly flummoxed.”
    “I thought it was a man in a costume,” Sir Charles Bradlaugh added. He put a finger to his right cheek, which was darkly bruised. “But when the thing shoved me aside—the feel of it!”
    “What do you mean?” Burton asked.
    “Like fish skin but solid and waxy.” Bradlaugh shuddered. “Hard. Not clothing at all.”
    And calling for me. Why?
    As if reading his thoughts, Bendyshe cried out, “I say, old horse, we all know you’ve been up to your devilish eyebrows in some bizarre business recently, but this takes the biscuit! Care to explain?”
    “I can’t, Tom,” Burton responded. “I have no notion what the apparition was or why it was searching for me. Would you excuse me for a moment?” He addressed Trounce. “I need to know where it went.”
    Trounce pointed to a constable who was moving among the gathered crowd. “There’s Honesty. He was with the men who chased after it.”
    Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce strode over to P. C. Thomas Honesty, a wiry and dapper man with immaculately trimmed eyebrows and an extravagantly curled moustache. Only a few months previously, he’d been the groundsman at New Wardour Castle, the seat of Isabel Arundell’s family. After the events that led to her death, he’d joined the Police Force and, on government orders, had been rushed through training.
    Burton hailed him. “Hallo, Tom!”
    Honesty saluted. “Sir! Strange night. Snow. Stilt man.”
    “Strange is the word. It’s been a while since I saw you, old fellow. Has your wife joined you in London? Are you settled?”
    “We are. Nice little place in Hammersmith. Baby on the way.”
    “My good man! Congratulations!”
    Honesty accepted a handshake then pointed to the side of the square opposite Bartolini’s. “Consensus is, the phantom jumped down from the rooftops over there.”
    “Phantom?” Swinburne queried.
    “Or whatever it was.”
    Burton said, “Judging by the mark on Bradlaugh’s cheek, it was rather too substantial to qualify as a spook.”
    As if it had been adjusted via a control, the snowfall suddenly slowed and thinned until only a few stray flakes were left drifting down.
    The men surveyed the square.
    “Looks like an iced cake,” Trounce murmured.
    Honesty nodded his helmeted head in the direction of Charing Cross Road. “Made off in that direction. We chased. Too fast. Lost it.” His eyes widened. He gave out a strangled yelp and pointed. “There! It’s back!”
    Burton whirled in time to see a figure apparently falling from the sky. Its stilts hit the ground and slipped from beneath it. The apparition crashed down onto its side, scrabbling wildly in the snow, limbs flailing. It howled—its voice filled with despair.
    Someone shouted, “Bloody hell! What is it?”
    The creature gained its feet, shrieked wordlessly, then cried out, “Prime Minister, where are you? Please! Where are you? Guide me! Guide me!”
    The crowd outside Bartolini’s screamed and scattered.
    Shaking its head as if to clear it, the stilted man raised its featureless face to the sky and yelled, “Burton! Burton!”
    “Here!” the king’s agent called, striding forward. He drew the rapier from his silver-handled swordstick.
    Spring