Chapter Text
Beneath the glow of gas-fired street-lamps, Arthur stumbled to his rooms.
Why he had chosen to get drunk on a Sunday evening was a mystery. He had lectures tomorrow, and a hangover always gripped his head between two nauseating hands and squeezed until his vision blurred. Of course, this deep under the influence of too much cheap whisky, he didn’t have the answer to his idiocy.
That was probably the point, though: miserable people don't drink to remember.
The cobbled streets of Cambridge rippled, wave-like, under his shuffling feet, writhing and scraping, rock against foam-crest rock. He trailed a hand along the walls of the neat terraced housing, red brick dust clinging to his sweaty palm even in November, and hoped he wasn't leaning too obviously. Or at least, he hoped he looked sober enough to avoid rumours mounting between passing students; otherwise the hall tomorrow would be filled with speculative whispers.
Tomorrow. What was happening tomorrow, again? Lectures, yes, romanticism or something similarly beautiful. Stray lines of poetry flitted through his mind, rolling their eyes at his drunkenness: 'Hoping to cease not till death' and other phrases to dissect under a scalpel. He and a room of over-intelligent young men would bleed them until they found meaning, wringing out the words like saturated cloth.
Another quote occurred.
‘Have you felt so proud to get the meaning of poems?’
Arthur snorted to himself.
"Hmm?"
The low, foreign voice was shrouded in something otherworldly, like radio static played through a thick glass bowl—or perhaps that was the alcohol’s influence. Glancing up through his hazy sight revealed a dark figure, haloed by the lamp across the street, his features indiscernible except for the tilt of his intrigued head.
"What?" Arthur said.
The stranger side-stepped, and in this new light Arthur could see him raise an eyebrow. "You mumbled something. A question."
"I… I don't think I did," Arthur replied, and stifled a hiccup, trying to hold himself upright. Christ, he was making a fool of himself, and risking his job to boot. He was mere weeks from signing the renewal contracts and securing his position for another decade. If this stranger smelled the alcohol on his breath, Sunday evening of all times…
Wrinkling his nose, the man said, "If you say so. Are you… alright, friend?"
"I'd be better if my path home wasn't blocked," Arthur replied rudely, then kicked himself. Dammit. He wasn’t trying to risk his career, remember? He opened his liquor-loosened mouth to apologise, but was
interrupted by the stranger chuckling. It was a deep, resonant laugh, almost a growl, shaking his bones and freezing him in place.
"Just making sure you stay safe."
"Because these streets are so dangerous."
"Well, you are drunk."
"Excellent observation. What are you, a detective? Police?"
The man paused, and for a moment Arthur feared he was risking much more than just his job.
"No, nothing that official," the stranger hummed, and fidgeted with the collar of his jacket. “Just in town for some business.”
He said that word—business—like it was a secret, steeped in intrigue. Or perhaps Arthur was mistaking mystery for threat. There were plenty of gangs on the rise in England as of late, made cocky by the post-Depression unemployment; just because this man was well-dressed in a thick black woollen coat and neat Oxfords, didn’t mean he couldn’t have some affiliation.
Arthur pushed his hair back from his forehead and said, in a tone much more self-assured than he deserved, “Good luck with that. Now, if you don’t mind, I should get going—early morning tomorrow.”
For a moment, he wondered if the stranger might try to strike up conversation again, or mention the fact it was already past midnight, or—God forbid—offer to walk him back to his flat. But he only tipped his hat, and fixed Arthur with an impassive stare, eyes rendered yellow by the street lights.
“Of course. Goodnight, friend.”
“Night.”
So Arthur left the man in the street, and didn’t look back.
***
Tuesday rolled around lazily, and Arthur found himself once again in a pub. The miserable memory of why he had been drinking on Sunday evening had returned to him the morning after, and he’d survived Monday on a dangerous combination of coffee and the pressure of public appearance.
Surviving Tuesday sober, though, was apparently too much for him to handle. There was a fierce, painful grief curling around his heart. It was the only thing his parents had left him in their lack of a will.
He’d chosen a different pub tonight: slightly lower-class, and less likely to contain the judgemental eyes of the students and faculty. It was crowded with men in shabby brown suits and swarmed with
cigarette smoke thick enough to blind, and the drinks they served were so shit they might as well have been brewed in the single working toilet, but Arthur wasn’t there to enjoy himself.
“Another, please.”
The bartender shot him a look, but refilled his thrice-empty glass at the cask anyway, sliding a fresh beer across the counter. “Is anyone joining you?”
“Nope,” Arthur said detachedly. “Just me tonight.”
“Oh. Who’s that, then?”
Following the bartender's gesture towards the door revealed a man standing in the door-frame, staring at Arthur with the intensity of a bonfire. He wore a long black coat and held his gloves in one hand, and his dark hair was drawn back from his face. He looked completely out of place here, yet so…familiar.
Ah, yes. Arthur’s recollections of the event might be foggy, but he was pretty sure this was the stranger from Sunday—the not-detective with the yellow eyes and a voice like thunder. His expression didn’t change when Arthur caught his gaze, but he broke from whatever frozen state he had been in, and pushed through the crowd to the bar.
Arthur, as usual, let words tumble from his mouth without really thinking them through. “Are you following me?”
The man furrowed his eyebrows, and Arthur realised that, in the light of the bar, his irises no longer gleamed yellow—they were a deep brown, merging with his pupils to leave a vast, empty void. Was it just because every time they met Arthur was piss-drunk, or was there something subtly mystic about this stranger?
Definitely the former.
“Following you? We’ve only met twice—that’s hardly a pattern.”
“I suppose not,” Arthur said, but he wasn’t convinced. Detective or policeman or gang member, there was something off about this man, and he didn’t want to keep running into him. “Why are you here, then?”
“Well, I saw you through the window—”
“So you are following me!”
“—and wanted to ask you some questions,” John finished placatingly, taking the seat beside him and reaching for Arthur’s—Arthur’s!—glass. “Here, friend, you’re a suspicious man, and I can’t fault you for that, but I’m not here for malicious reasons. What’s your name?”
Arthur shouldn’t go around giving out his name to strangers calling him ‘friend’ who followed him into bars; nor did he want to. And yet before he could help himself, he was doing exactly that. “Lester. Arthur Lester. And yours?”
The man smiled for the first time, a strange smile that revealed sharp canines and wine-red gums. “John.”
Arthur scoffed. “Sure.”
“John Doe, if you want the full thing.”
This time, Arthur laughed. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that? You couldn’t pick a more ridiculous fake name if you tried.”
“That really is my name,” John pressed, seeming almost offended by Arthur’s disbelief. “Christ, your parents had an odd sense of humour.”
John hummed, a meek sound that didn’t belong to him, and Arthur got the sense he’d put his foot somewhere it didn’t belong. He was good at that—sticking himself in other people’s business.
Hah. Maybe, in another life, he’d have been the detective.
“What did you want to ask me, then, John?” he asked, a blatant attempt to change the conversation that John seemed to take no issue with whatsoever. He finished Arthur’s—again, Arthur’s!—damn drink, and leaned against the counter, turning his gloves over between restless hands.
“Yes. The questions,” said John, his voice returning to its natural equilibrium like a scale rebalancing. “As you correctly surmised the other night, I am a detective of sorts. A private investigator, to be precise, with an office in London and an acceptable reputation. My work most often entails tracking down wayward spouses, or reuniting parents with runaway children, but I was recently presented with a far more intriguing case.”
He spoke as if delivering a speech, well-rehearsed, each word selected to explain himself succinctly, and Arthur wondered if he’d practised this monologue before. Had he delivered it many times, seeking the aid of a random passer-by, or was this monologue designed for Arthur’s ears only? In which case, he had intended to find Arthur again; in which case, he had been following him. Hmm.
Arthur crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t think of any reason you’d have to investigate me, nor who would ask you to do so in the first place. I have few acquaintances.”
“I assumed,” John said bluntly. “No, you have no relation to this case. I saw you in the street that night, and thought you might be knowledgeable about the goings-on around here.”
Yeah, right. Arthur could read between the lines; what John had really seen was a drunken professor to take advantage of. And here he was, approaching Arthur when he just so happened to be drinking again, in a crowded place where he wouldn’t be able to make a fuss. Bastard.
“The ‘goings-on’?” repeated Arthur, hoping he sounded sufficiently sceptical. “I’m not the best person for local gossip. Again—few acquaintances.”
“True, but you are well-educated and well-read.”
“You’re in Cambridge. Half the residents are university students—you wouldn’t be hard-pressed to find someone else with those qualifications.”
“Well, I’ve chosen you,” John said, with an air of gravitas.
Was Arthur supposed to be honoured? He just wanted to spend the night alone—was that too much to hope for? “Fine. Get on with it, then.”
John fixed him with that same, piercing gaze as the other night, as if he could see right through Arthur’s exterior and burrow into his mind. His eyes, black and dark as they were, swallowed the light around them, and Arthur’s vision tunnelled.
“I’m looking into the circumstances surrounding the death of a young girl. I was told to begin my investigation in Cambridge,” he laid out, searching Arthur’s face for a reaction like scrutinising a specimen under a microscope. Arthur gave him none; there wasn’t one to give. He hadn’t been lying when he said he was useless for gossip.
“Do you have an age? Or perhaps a family name?”
With a nod, though his stare never wavered, John said, “No family name, but a unique given name. ‘Faroe’.”
Faroe.
No.
Arthur tried to suppress the flinch that stole through his body at the name, but from John’s self-satisfied smirk, he failed miserably. His heart raced against his will, his fingers trembling. He was terrified, and grief-stricken, and filled to the brim with dull regret, like some dam between him and an ice-cold reservoir had been shattered.
Except he didn’t know why.
That name—Faroe—was entirely foreign to him. There were islands near Denmark, he recalled, that shared the title, but he had no emotional attachment to them—certainly not enough to elicit such a panicked response.
He steadied his breathing. “I see.”
“Do you recognise it?”
“No.” Arthur shook his head, and he wasn’t even sure it was a lie. It felt like one, in the deep marrow of his bones, in the muscle of his heart—betrayals he had no awareness of. But his mind knew it was the truth, and he clung to that as he took measured breaths. He did not know the name ‘Faroe’.
He could not know the name ‘Faroe’.
John finally broke his stare, leaning back and crossing his arms in a mirror of Arthur’s.
“Fair enough. I can’t expect you to know the names of everyone connected to this town, let alone remember them.” He paused to let the weight of Arthur’s not-quite-lie sink in, and then: “Can I get you another drink? On me, of course, to thank you for your time.”
Seizing control of himself, Arthur smiled politely, but it was a weak facade. “No, that’s okay. I should head home soon anyway.”
John hummed, and this time it was strong, thunder rolling over mountains in a lightless sky. He took his time pulling on his gloves, and Arthur got the sense he was waiting for Arthur to concede, to tell whatever truth was lying just beneath his surface, but he remained silent. He didn’t want to talk to this odd man, still essentially a stranger, even if he had a name to put to the sharp face.
Even if the revelation of the dead girl’s name had stirred a curiosity within him, and left him simultaneously more alive and pained than he had been in years.
Even if John Doe might be his one chance at resolving this sudden mystery, and he, his. “Goodnight, Arthur Lester. It was… pleasant talking with you.”
He stood to leave, smoothing down his coat and adjusting the collar. In the light bouncing off the liquor bottles behind the bar, Arthur could have sworn his eyes shone yellow again, but it was fleeting, imagined—it must have been. It couldn’t have been anything else.
So, back turned, John slipped through the crowd towards the exit, and Arthur was glad to see him go. He was.
He was—
“Wait.”
John didn’t stop.
Cursing, Arthur dropped far too much change onto the bar, barely reacting when the barkeeper snatched it up, and followed John’s retreating form out into the streets. It was cold outside, and dark, and it must have rained at some point while he was inside; the dry, earthen smell of a downpour hung heavily in the air.
“Wait!” Arthur repeated, louder this time, and an inch too desperately for his liking. He couldn’t appear too eager, or John would exploit that. He slowed his pace, and held back until the other man turned to face him.
“Yes?”
Arthur stumbled over his words. “It’s…it’s possible I read it somewhere. The name. In a—a newspaper, or something. Perhaps an obituary, or a christening. If this girl, Faroe… If she had connections to Cambridge, her death would have been featured in the local paper.”
That sounded plausible enough, right? Hell, it might even be true—Arthur skimmed the weekly paper every morning over breakfast, so…
He couldn’t think of an alternative.
John tilted his head, considering Arthur’s proposal. Christ, he looked predatory, half-illuminated by dim streetlamps, half-bathed in grasping shadows. His shoes clicked against the cobblestones as he approached, a loaded shot-gun, and when he reached Arthur, he smiled again; that same, strange smile that pulled too hard at the corners of his mouth in an attempt to be approachable.
Arthur stood his ground, standing as straight as he could with four—no, three, dammit— beers in him. “I see. Is there anywhere I could access old papers?”
“They’re probably archived at the library,” Arthur said.
“I’ll visit there tomorrow, then. Thank you again, Arthur. You’ve been very helpful.”
And as if he hadn’t followed him, questioned him, and dealt a serious blow to the fragile stability of his life, John stalked away.
Arthur swore under his breath, but he couldn’t help himself.
“John. I’m coming with you,” he said firmly. “If I can help with this case, I will. No parent deserves to grieve their child blindly.”
The other man didn’t respond immediately. He seemed to soften around the edges, the gas-lamp light bleeding his outline into the street. Arthur thought for a moment he was just going to leave without a word—disappear back to wherever he’d come from and let Arthur pick up the pieces.
But then he nodded, and removed his glove, and offered Arthur his bare left hand to shake. “I would appreciate the help, Arthur. Two o’clock at the university library, then?”
Arthur smiled, and shook his hand.
Then someone turned out all the lights.
Surely not. That wasn’t possible. And yet his sight went dark, darker than his bedroom at night with the curtains drawn, darker than John Doe’s black-hole eyes; as if all the stars had blinked out, and the moon had vanished from its perch in the sky, and the entire town had faded away.
He released John’s hand, and as quickly as it had disappeared, the world returned.
His surprise was reflected in John’s face, all drawn-up eyebrows and wide eyes. “Are you okay, Arthur?”
A good question.
There must be something severely wrong with him. Because, far from being the final drop in a glass overflowing with oddities and unexplainable events, this inexplicable darkness only solidified his resolve to pursue the investigation.
So, for the first time that evening, he told a proper lie:
“I’m fine. Two o’clock tomorrow, right?”
The worry lingered on John’s expression for a second longer, before his features hardened back into their usual sharpness. “Yes. I look forward to it, Arthur Lester.”
Arthur would hardly sleep that night, even if he was drunk. John Doe’s unnatural presence, the blindness—Faroe: they would dance around his mind in a dizzying frenzy of questions without answers. And while he would be afraid, he would also thrum with excitement and vibrant anticipation like nothing he’d felt in the past few years.
The mystery felt right.
***
Arthur woke that morning with a numb arm—from sleeping on it strangely, he reasoned—and another headache. Taking aspirin with his coffee and toast had warded off the worst of the hangover, but he still wandered through his work distant and half-asleep.
Thankfully, his afternoon was free, and by the time he met John on the shallow steps of the university library, he felt human enough again. John, too, seemed less unnatural in the sober light of day. Arthur must have been right about imagining his…less mortal qualities.
The new library was not yet familiar to Arthur, construction having only been completed a few weeks ago—he hadn’t attended the opening ceremony, but slipped in after the crowds dispersed to explore the new archives. Since then, he had been occupied with lessons, and economised his time by using the much nearer college collections.
The main library was unmatched, though.
Inside the towering building of sleek stone were rows and rows of wooden bookshelves stretching the length of the halls, piled high with worn volumes from every era. Arthur and John seated themselves in the main reading room, an emptier space with only a few tables and high-backed chairs, where light streamed through arched windows and piles of books cast stretching shadows.
“So. What are we looking for?”
“Any mention of Faroe,” John replied, attention elsewhere. Since entering the library, an aura of awe had encompassed the other man as he absorbed the sight of the vast collection. Arthur got the sense his work didn’t usually involve quite so much academia, and he was more accustomed to trailing suspects through dark, dank, book-less London alleyways.
He sighed. “Well yes, obviously. But there are bound to be decades worth of content here—I can’t ask the librarian to pull every newspaper from the past century. How old was the girl when she died? Or, better yet, when did she die?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You’re the detective?” Arthur said, exasperated.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Brilliant. So helpful. I’ll ask for everything ever published, then.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” John growled, “that the letter I received didn’t contain the exact information required to track down the child. That would defeat the whole point of the investigation, wouldn’t it?”
His voice rose dangerously above acceptable levels, and attracted unwanted attention from other readers—stares and judgemental whispers—so Arthur held up his hands. “You’re right. How about this: I only moved here twelve years ago. For me to have seen this name in the papers, it can’t have been before them.”
Of course, he still wasn’t sure that he had read the name in a newspaper, but it was a better starting point than either of them had come up with so far.
John nodded, curt. “That’s true. We’ll look through those then.” And then, as if it cost him something, “Thanks.”
Christ, he didn’t get this guy, Arthur thought privately as he searched for a librarian. One minute he was seeking him out on a random Tuesday night, demanding he help him uncover ‘local goings-on’, and the next he was snapping at him for doing exactly that. What an ass.
He returned to their table with a trolley, stacked boxes of old newspapers balanced like precarious cake layers, and strict instructions not to tear anything. The librarian's stern stare over her angled tortoiseshell glasses made him inclined to follow her orders.
Now alone at their table, John was studying his left hand, turning it the way and that in confusion, though he replaced his glove when he noticed Arthur approaching. Arthur almost mentioned it, but decided against doing so; whatever the answer was, it would only delay their investigation.
“Here’s everything from 1922 to 1925, apparently—I couldn’t get the rest over, but these must contain almost two hundred papers alone. Hope you’ve cleared your afternoon.”
“I, unlike you, am getting paid for this,” John said dryly. “And I can’t imagine you’ve got much else on for the rest of the day.”
Ugh. The bastard was right, of course—Arthur had no plans—but he despised being read so effortlessly. “Grab a box and get investigating then, detective.”
It took them the better part of the remaining daylight to get through the first three boxes, and by the time they dragged their fourth onto the laden wood table, the sun was setting, painting the library in soft peachy oranges and further yellowing the aged paper. Arthur squinted under the table lamp, the neat lettered typeface blurring before his tired vision, and he took a swig of the tea kindly prepared by a library assistant when he realised how long the pair would be lingering.
John had been growing increasingly impatient, his initial wonder at the mountain of books dissipating, replaced by frustration. He kept worrying his lip with those too-sharp teeth, or fidgeting with the hem of his gloves. He was antsy and uncomfortable, desperate for action, though Arthur didn’t know what he had expected; they had come here to peruse texts, not chase answers through the streets.
As Arthur turned the final pages of Cambridge Independent's late March edition, his gaze alighted on an obituary, faded and tucked away in the corner. The inked name of the deceased was smudged and illegible, but that wasn’t what caught his eye. In full, the obituary read:
…passed away the evening of the 20th March, 1922 at the age of twenty-one. With a spirit that illuminated the lives around her, her sharp wit and intelligence never failed to sow laughter and love in the hearts of her friends and family. Her years at university were some of her happiest, and her memory will live on in the minds of those fortunate enough to meet her.
Survived by her father, her husband, and her newborn daughter, Faroe, she was interred at Brompton Cemetery, London, beside her mother last Tuesday after a private funeral service. The family has requested privacy, and thanks everyone for their thoughts and prayers during this difficult period.
“John!” he said, a whispered shout. “I’ve found her!”
And he had. It was a miracle, really—the newspaper idea had been such a shot in the dark, a frantic attempt at rationalising the familiarity that child’s name had fostered in his heart, but it had worked. It had delivered answers! Even if he couldn’t technically recall ever reading this obituary, he must have. Or skimmed it, at least. It was the only thing that made sense.
John snatched the paper from his grasp, scanning the article, expression urgent and excited. “Yes, Arthur, this must be her! I’ll follow up on this as soon as possible.”
“We could take the train down and visit her grave,” Arthur suggested, feeling rather excited himself. “It’s only a couple of hours to London. If we leave soon—”
But John fixed him with a serious look. “Arthur… I think it would be best for me to continue the investigation alone. I’m sure you have classes to teach, papers to oversee…and you are already far too involved in a case you shouldn’t be.”
What? “You’re the one who approached me,” he said, an angry, serpentine whisper. “I know.”
Arthur scanned John’s face, but there wasn’t a hint of regret. Something complicated, perhaps, a muddled twist of emotions he wasn’t quite sure what to do with, but no guilt. How could he not care? How could he drag Arthur along like a dog on a leash, then abruptly cut the cord? They had known each other only a couple of days—less than twenty-four hours, truly—but Arthur couldn’t help feeling he was owed something.
Answers. Explanations. A neat ending to the mystery he was helping to uncover. He was helping!
“You can’t just kick me to the curb after all this.”
“I’m sorry if I wasted your time, Arthur,” John said measuredly. “If you remember, I did try to decline your offer yesterday.”
“And if you remember, you sought me out first!”
“I see now that was a mistake. There were other ways to come across this information. Please, return to your lectures, immerse yourself in your research, and forget we met each other.”
Forget? Something had shattered irreparably in the dull, morose life of Arthur Lester. He’d tasted intrigue, involved himself in a matter much larger than his narrow bed and publications. A child was dead, and someone was seeking answers, and Arthur couldn’t ignore that. Not when he still wasn’t certain he had read Faroe’s name in a paper at all.
Not only that, but there was a magnetism to this John Doe. Sure, he was hiding something—likely multiple ‘something’s—and was shrouded in secret; he had possessed a mystic quality, those nights before. He was strange, and rude, and difficult to read, with walls too dark and lofty to peer over. He was an ass. A bastard. A cryptic shit.
Except Arthur thought he might have caught a glimpse through a crack in the facade when he shared his not-false name, and that intrigued him more than anything else—more than the eyes, or the teeth, or the otherworldly echo in his voice. He had emotions; and as a PI, he must care about other people.
He was just determined to keep Arthur at arm’s length when it came to this case, and Arthur wasn’t having that.
“No.”
John blinked, taken aback. “No?”
“No.”
“Don’t you have lessons to teach this week?”
“Then we’ll go on Saturday.”
“You’re asking me,” John said, with an air of exasperated disbelief, “to delay my investigations by two whole days so some professor I managed to accidentally pick up can traipse along beside me?”
Well. When he said it like that it sounded unreasonable.
Arthur refused to back down now.
“I am. I’ll see you at the station for the nine o’clock train, then?”
John watched him—fixed him with his stare for seconds that stretched into hours that stretched into days before he broke away. His uncanny ability to appear entirely expressionless was growing more bearable, and now Arthur noticed, beneath the facade of blank rock, a careful consideration. A concern. As if Arthur was the danger here, the unpredictable element with eyes that glowed and perpetually gloved hands, and John was the one who needed to stay cautious.
But whatever his reservations, whatever his fears and worries, for the second time in two consecutive days, John conceded.
“Alright. If you’re willing to spend your weekend chasing down dead-ends, who am I to stop you? It’s not as if she’s getting any less dead.”
Okay, yeah, he was still a blunt asshole.
Arthur smiled anyway, satisfied. “Thank you.”
John hummed like thunder.
They exchanged few words as they tidied away the sprawling mess of paper and string they’d managed to accumulate in their study—only the occasional apology when John whacked Arthur in the side with a wayward elbow, and a brief argument over the balancing of boxes.
(“They didn’t look like that when we got them.”
“Yes, well, they’re not collapsing, are they?”
“It’s polite, is all, John”)
In fact, nothing bizarre happened. No sudden déjà-vu, no abrupt vision loss, no drunkenly-imagined magic. Arthur found himself almost hoping the normalcy would recede for a moment to give him a glimpse through whatever veil he’d drawn back yesterday evening, but there was nothing.
They parted on civil terms, a polite, gloved handshake shared between them. Arthur trudged back to his rooms as the sun vanished behind the cathedral, and Cambridge fell into a shallow slumber.
***
“Now, when Keats published Endymion, it was not initially well-received. He himself admitted to the unexciting style, ironic for a poem dedicated to beauty, artistry, and creativity. And yet those first lines have been immortalised in the English canon, fulfilling their own prophecy—that ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’.”
Arthur glanced out over the hall of bent heads and scribbling pencils. His eyes drifted unguided towards the clock above the door.
“We can attribute that success to their universal truth, a truth of life. That is, after all, one of the aims of poetry—to encapsulate the feeling and facts we know to be true, but struggle to express—so although we won’t be studying Endymion in its entirety, I’ll ask you to keep that first phrase in mind as we engage with the Romantic poets.”
At last, the minute hand slid straight onto the hour mark, and Arthur struck his stack of papers against his desk. Williams—or possibly Fitz, Arthur still hadn’t learned the first-years names—startled in the back corner.
“And with that,” Arthur concluded his monologue, rather relieved, “we arrive at the end of our time together today. You can leave last week’s essay on my desk on your way out.”
The young men filed out in a stream of brown suits and polished Oxfords, and a thick stack of papers collected on the corner of Arthur’s desk. The scrawled ink writing would hurt his head later to read, but that was unfortunately an unwritten clause in his contract.
Arthur wondered, sometimes, why he had elected to teach. The profession had never been particularly attractive to him; hordes of identically intelligent students, hours of his weekends spent trudging through clumsy, fustian writing, and an unimpressive salary to boot. His rooms were small—he hadn’t bought a new coat in years—and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had spare change lying about.
But it gave him a name. A chance to publish his writing. Most importantly, it was several miles out from London and everything he’d left behind there.
“Sir?”
Arthur glanced up to see Fitz—or possibly Williams—hovering at the edge of the desk. In his hands, he nervously twisted a blunted pencil.
“Yes?”
“I have a tutorial scheduled for tomorrow evening,” Fitz-Williams said, and Arthur just had to take his word for it. “Would it be possible to reschedule?”
“When for?” replied Arthur, pretending to consider, as if his non-existent calendar wasn’t blank of social commitments and the trip into London this weekend with John wasn’t the first event he’d been invited to in years. “Does next Monday morning suit you?”
Fitz-Williams nodded, at ease, and thanked him on the way out. Arthur heard his hurried footsteps in the corridor as he raced to catch up with his friends.
Once the sounds faded, Arthur locked himself in his office with the papers to get a head-start on marking. He didn’t emerge until dinner.
***
“Christ, where have you been sleeping?”
Deep bags hung beneath John’s eyes, and a pallor clung to his brown skin. “In a hotel. Why?” “Never mind.”
The platform buzzed with a soft energy, deserted save for the occasional student and, of course, Arthur and John. Whistles broke the quiet, and creaking rails and tinny loudspeaker announcements filled the space between. A heavy fog settled over the train-tracks.
Arthur drew his coat closer to him, and gazed jealously at John’s gloves.
In one hand, the other man held a briefcase, the leather of the glove creasing around the sleek handle; in the other, a small, scrappy notebook, bulging with added pages, the cover wrinkled with water damage. It was the most like an investigator Arthur had seen John look. It suited him, the subtle unkemptness, the signs of wear and tear.
Arthur hadn’t thought to bring anything except a thick scarf and a novel.
The train pulled into the station without much fanfare, rolling to a screeching stop beside the platform, billowing thick clouds of smoke into the foggy air, tainting the fresh white with a dirty grey. A sleek beast, it gleamed rich, deep green through the cloud. They boarded, and settled into a cozy compartment with two cushioned benches facing each other. If they hadn’t sat diagonally, their legs would have tangled in the small space.
“So,” Arthur said.
“So?” replied John, setting his briefcase beside him on the bench and tapping his long fingers against the lid like rhythmic raindrops.
“So…” Shit. He wasn’t one for small-talk. “Where are you from?”
John yawned, wide and ill-mannered. “I told you—I’m based out of London. My office is down by Clapham, though I doubt we’ll have time to visit.”
“Yeah, but you aren’t British. What’s the accent? American?”
“Canadian. I moved after… There was an accident, back home. I needed somewhere new.”
Arthur muttered a quiet ‘oh’. Vague as John’s explanation was, he understood. His own arrival in Cambridge had been prompted by loss; a complete disconnect from the surroundings that had once been so comfortable.
Two people—no, bodies—swaying back and forth to an inaudible tune.
He told John as much (leaving out the details, of course), and his companion nodded shortly. It didn’t feel like a dismissal, though—rather, a quiet acceptance of sympathy, an acknowledgement of their experiences.
Outside, through the persistent fog, hills flew past. They weren’t idyllic and pastoral, though idle sheep freckled the fields; the grim weather painted them in dull monochrome, while the winter stripped the trees and bushes of their leaves, leaving spindly branches to thwack against the glass as they passed.
Even so, Arthur opened the window on a slant to let some air into the stuffy carriage, and cracked open his book to the dog-eared page:
‘No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. The picture—’
“Arthur.” He glanced up mid-sentence to see John sorting through his briefcase, rifling through his paper-clipped collection of files. “There is something else you should know about the case before we arrive in London.”
Ah, so he was hiding something. Arthur was vindicated. “What’s that?”
“This case,” John began, retrieving the page he had been searching for, “was not requested by a family member. Perhaps you already guessed as much, given the limited information offered, but the truth is… I have no idea who hired me.”
Huh. “Does that happen a lot?” Arthur asked.
“It’s not uncommon. Never this exact scenario, but I have been requested anonymously once or twice before to uncover blackmail or fraud, and provide proof in an unmarked envelope to a specified address. This time, however…” He drifted off, and Arthur kicked him lightly on the shin. “This time, all that accompanied the letter was a large stack of banknotes and a double-headed coin. Some sort of signature, I assume.”
“No instructions?”
“Other than ‘investigate the circumstances of Faroe’s death’? No, nothing.”
Something is John’s story didn’t quite add up; it nagged at Arthur’s mind. “Could I see the note?” John handed it over.
Printed on heavy cream paper, and streaked in patchy type-written ink, the letter contained no address, no names—no identifying features whatsoever, unless you counted the missing serifs on each ‘k’. Arthur doubted that would be much help unless John somehow had a way to track down and test every typewriter in the country.
In fact, the letter contained so few identifying features that Arthur couldn’t help wondering— “How did you know to come to Cambridge?”
Over the clacking of wheels against rails, John’s breath hitched. “What? Oh… It must have been in the letter.”
“There’s no mention of Cambridge. No mention of anything except the child’s name, actually.” He tried to keep his voice level and absent of accusation. “How did you know?”
John fumbled for his words, the uncertainty so far removed from every record of his character Arthur had catalogued until now it bordered on amusing. “No, of course there isn’t… I meant the—the postmark! The earliest postmark on the envelope was tracked to Cambridge, and that was all I had to go on. So Cambridge it was. Yes.” And he nodded to himself, satisfied with the explanation.
Doubt still festered in Arthur’s mind, but he let the matter drop, returning the letter to John’s briefcase. After all, he’d already decided—the mystery made this fun. If he knew everything, if John wasn’t clutching his cards close to his chest, where was the excitement? Why else had he bothered abandoning his stack of half-marked essays to follow a strange man to London?
“Makes sense.”
John breathed relief. Arthur wasn’t finished with his questions, though.
“What does that mean for the investigation, then? If this anonymous person gave you no way to contact them, and provided such vague information the case would be almost impossible to solve… Why bother hiring you in the first place?”
“Well,” John said, his expression brightening. This, evidently, he had an answer to. “They must not care about the answer itself—I can only assume that, whatever circumstances surrounded the child’s death, uncovering them will be satisfaction in itself.”
Circumstances. That had been the word used in the letter as well. “Do you think she was…” God, the word clung to his tongue like sticky syrup. “Do you think she was murdered?”
“It’s a possibility.”
Above them, the sky darkened, and dense, globular raindrops began to smack against the window in erratic pulses. A dead child, a dead mother, a potential murder… Arthur grappled with the horror and thrill warring in his stomach.
“Oh.” He fidgeted with the worn edges of the hardback, pulling apart the card from the cover. “Of course, we won’t know until we find out.”
“Clearly.”
Arthur reopened his book, and scanned the passage for his place.
‘The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so. Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile.’
***
The empty carriages filled up over the next few stations, and by the time the train squealed into King’s Cross, John and Arthur sat squeezed into their compartment with four other passengers. Like sardines poured from a tin, the travellers alighted in clicking heels and hefty suitcases, flooding the platform.
John and Arthur were among the last to disembark, Arthur craning his neck to take in the full grandeur of the station.
“Christ, I had forgotten how immense this place was.”
Twelve years had passed since Arthur last set foot in King’s Cross, and the glass domed roof still stretched over the rails, arched and gleaming. Bright advertisements plastered the walls above busy store-fronts—Bovril and night tickets and health cigarettes for sale at the newsagent's below. And all around and everywhere, through loudspeakers and from people’s chattering mouths, an endless stream of noise crowded the massive station.
“They’ve added a few more lines,” John said for no apparent reason. “Turn left here—we need to take the Piccadilly Line west to Earl’s Court, then walk the rest of the way. This train runs below ground, not overground.”
Arthur rolled his eyes as they passed the criss-crossed iron gates and entered the station proper. “I know how the Tube works, John. I lived here for years.”
“Maybe things have changed,” he retorted, sulkily as a child. “Down these stairs now.” It would probably just be easiest to let him lead, Arthur reasoned, and followed him downwards.
Below the frigid grasp of winter, the tunnels were hot and humid, sticky with trapped air. Walking through them was like walking through the inverted stomach of a snake, twisting and serpentine, the smooth, circular walls tiled in gleaming white scales. They descended into the belly of a beast, rumbling with trains and hunger. Arthur shuddered.
It took them forty minutes of sweaty tube travel to arrive in Northfields, where they surfaced from the subterranean furnace into biting rain, sharp as ice. Arthur tightened his scarf against the chill, but it provided little protection from the cunning wind.
John, with his long ponytail, brimmed hat, high wool collar, and damn gloves, seemed to be faring much better. Ass. “Alright there?”
“How long’s the walk?” Arthur asked, holding back a chatter in his teeth.
“Why? Are you cold?”
Arthur’s face twisted into a scowl. “I’m peachy, thanks. How long is the walk?” “Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes. See those trees over there?”
Biting back his complaints, Arthur stuffed his hands back into his pockets, and distracted himself from the weather with the sights. He hadn’t often ventured this far south-west—his childhood had been confined to the parks around his house, and he never experienced much wanderlust while at university. He had been far too busy for that.
Even so, he doubted this area ever changed much. The buildings lining the streets were classic apartments with intricate facades, topped by smoking chimneys like candles. The people in the streets wore fur shawls; they gleamed with old money that Arthur, on his current salary, could only imagine. The cemetery itself was no different, enclosed in delicate wrought-iron gates, the graves interspersed with pruned topiary. It was an ocean of family mausoleums, carved-cross headstones, marble and votives and bright red roses.
It put him in mind of another funeral: far more subdued, two bodies sharing a single headstone, and not a priest in sight.
John scanned the huge cemetery and sighed, his breath fogging the air. “This is going to take forever with so many headstones.”
“We could separate,” Arthur suggested.
“Yes, that would be more efficient.” Flicking open his worn notebook, John pointed out a list of names to him. “Here, we can start with these—while you were busy delaying my investigation by two whole days, I looked into female students attending around the time of our mystery woman.”
(It was not a very long list.)
“Gardner, Firth, Thomson, Beck… Any chance we can narrow these down further?” said Arthur.
“No. Surprisingly, Cambridge doesn’t keep records of which students are still alive and which are dead.”
Arthur flipped off John’s sarcasm, and snatched the hastily scribbled-and-torn copy of the list from him with more force than necessary.
They parted, taking one side of the park each and working towards the centre. Infiltrating the city as well as the countryside, fog licked around the headstones like tidal waves lapping at abandoned rockpools, and Arthur waded through it as he searched the engravings for any listed names. Occasionally, he would happen upon a mourner clutching flowers between black-gloved fingers; he shied away from their grief as if it was contagious.
Perhaps it was. Either way, he wanted nothing to do with it.
After Arthur left school, where his Catholic teacher accompanied him every month to visit his parents’ grave, he refused to set foot in a cemetery again. He escaped to university, then to Cambridge, as though he could outrun ghosts; he never bought flowers; he never prayed. Angry or upset—who was to say? The outcome was the same.
He despised grief, now: the sticky, suffocating master that drowned its acolytes in their own sorrow. It stung like sour milk in his mouth, but he told himself he endured the worst in his childhood. He survived the gaping hole in his chest where a mother and father should be, and emerged stronger for it. And when it returned, he drank it away; simple as.
He couldn’t imagine going through that again. Especially for a child. So he needed to find Faroe, to give whoever hired John the closure they needed, and return to his office knowing he had done something worthwhile with his flat, faded life.
“Arthur! Over here!”
John’s voice echoed across the vast park, loud enough to turn heads. Arthur kept his own bowed as he hurried over and joined John beside a white, polished gravestone.
“You can’t yell across a graveyard like that!” he hissed. “People will stare.”
“Yes, yes, sorry,” John said, waving away Arthur’s admonishment. “But look! Number eleven on the list—this must be her.”
Bella Saltzman. 1901-1922.
Arthur studied the engraving. His stomach capsized.
Christ, the shock was a physical reaction—the way skin burns in the sun and pales in the cold. Darkness crept over the edges of his vision, slower than it had that night with John, but persistent, until the graveyard and its tombstones, the sky and its cloud, all disappeared into obscurity.
“Arthur?”
He glanced in John’s vague direction. Now that he couldn’t see, his orientation was shot, and it sounded as if John’s voice was coming from inside his head. A trick of the sound, he assured himself. Nothing but a trick.
“Arthur, what are you… What are you looking at?”
But it wasn’t coming back. His sight wasn’t coming back. He couldn’t see John, and he couldn’t see Brompton—he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. Fluttering like weak bird wings, his breath picked up. He groped around blindly for something to ground himself. His open palm connected with the gravestone—a shiver shot through him—and he stumbled backwards.
“Arthur!”
No longer within him, John’s shout crashed right beside his ear. He forced himself to stand still, and tried to calm himself.
“Arthur, what the hell is wrong with you? Do you know this woman? How can you? Who is she?” The questions were rapid gunfire, and their answer would have made him laugh if it hadn’t been so terrifying.
“No, John. I have no idea who she is.”
He really didn’t.
“Then what are you doing?”
He had to tell him, didn’t he? Except that would mean explaining everything—from the first time they met to Faroe’s familiarity to his blindness that night in the street. It would mean exposing himself as a liar, even if he hadn’t owed John anything. But the alternative… Well, he couldn’t very well find his own way home like this, could he?
He spoke slowly. “John, I—I can’t see.”
“What do you mean, you can’t see?” John growled. “You were fine a moment ago.” “I mean, John,” and his own annoyance slipped in, “that I can’t fucking see.”
John clammed up, and they stood in silence for a moment, a silence so stagnant he wasn’t sure John was still there. Only the birdsong and the earth beneath his shoes assured Arthur he hadn’t disappeared himself.
At last, John spoke. “This way.” He thumped at hand on Arthur’s shoulder, and steered him from the grass onto the gravel path. “There’s a bench here, where you can sit. Bit further—yes, there you go.”
Those directions. Frustratingly, awfully familiar. If Arthur didn’t know better—if he wasn’t abruptly blind and had known John longer than a week—he would say this dynamic was right.
But he did know better, so instead he said, “It’s happened before. It’ll come back, don’t worry,” and tried to believe his own words. The bench shuddered as John settled beside him. “The grave—can you describe it to me?”
To his credit, John barely stumbled over his words. “Uh…alright. The headstone is polished marble, and a bouquet of flowers lies at the base. They’re daisies, I think, but the petals are rimmed with red that looks like…like splattered blood. It is as if—”
“The grave, John,” Arthur said. “Not the flowers.”
“Oh. The grave, like I said, is marble, and shaped like a cross. The grass has grown around it since the dirt was last disturbed. It’s delicately engraved with floral embellishments, and the inscription reads, ‘Our cherished daughter and mother, always in our memory.’”
Arthur frowned. “Daughter and mother? Is that all?”
“Is that not enough?”
“No—don’t you remember, John? In the obituary, it said she was survived by her father, daughter, and husband. Why isn’t he mentioned here?” said Arthur.
John’s coat rustled as he shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t want to be on the headstone.” “Or maybe someone else didn’t want him there. Either way, that’s got to be a clue, right?” “Might be,” John hummed. “I’ll note it down. Any sign of your vision yet?”
Yes, thank God. The blackness was dissipating, holes of light seeping through the dark like stars in the night sky. Arthur blinked, as though that would hurry things up, and nodded. “Slowly.”
“Good. Next steps, then,” said John. “We should gather more information on this ‘Bella Saltzman’ now that we know she’s the mother—her father, her husband, her occupation, her friends—and hopefully that will lead us elsewhere.”
Were they really moving on that quickly? Arthur had just gone blind, and John’s mind clicked straight back on track? But no, of course not, they were merely delaying the inevitable. John’s interrogation
would come later, Arthur was sure of it, and when it did, he had a few questions of his own. But for now…
“Is there a chapel nearby?” Arthur asked.
A pause as John glanced around. “There’s a large domed building at the far end of the cemetery. No iconography, but it looks very…official. Why?”
Maybe it was a good thing Arthur had imposed himself on this case, he thought, if the supposed ‘private investigator’ couldn’t make these connections. “Records, John. Churches usually keep a record of the people buried in their grounds. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a baptism, and that should contain the name of Bella’s father.”
John stood, his boots crunching the gravel, and said huffily, “Proud of yourself, aren’t you?” “Very, thanks.”
By now, Arthur’s vision was mostly clear, a few remaining clouds over the sun. He followed John down the path to the building and through the arched doorway. Inside the chapel, concentric stone tiles circled the floor, and the high domed ceiling was purled with small square alcoves. The walls and their columns pressed in from every side; years had passed since Arthur last stepped foot in a church.
“Good afternoon, sirs. Can I help you?”
The pastor, draped in a pressed black robe, emerged from an antechamber to stare at them over his half moon glasses. He was a portly man of indeterminate age with a kind smile, but it failed to calm Arthur’s anxieties.
“Hello,” John said, flipping his notebook open. “We have some questions.”
“We’re private investigators, reverend,” Arthur explained, skipping quickly over the white lie. “We’re inquiring after a woman buried in this cemetery, and are hoping to access the registers to track down her family.”
The pastor squinted at them. They must cut an odd pair, he and John, soaking wet and dripping onto the clean tiled floor. Arthur hadn’t had John down as a church-going man, and based on his lack of respect for the pastor, his hunch had been correct. Still, it wouldn’t kill his companion to fake politeness for a few minutes; he must be capable of being charming.
Despite this, the pastor nodded, and gestured for them to follow him into another room, lined with bookshelves and thick, heavy books.
“What year?”
“We believe she was born in 1901. Bella Saltzman.”
The reverend froze mid-way through reaching for a book, and a sheen of sorrow slipped over his face. “You’re investigating the Saltzmans?”
“Have you heard of them?” John asked, jumping on the lead.
“I knew Daniel Saltzman well.” The pastor frowned. “Terrible business, what happened to that family. Just terrible.”
“Daniel?” The church walls pushed inwards around Arthur, an invisible pressure against his skin.
“Bella’s father. He moved to the States a few years ago—abandoned his factories, his business, uprooted his entire life to resettle across the ocean. Couldn’t say what prompted it though, I’m afraid. We haven’t spoken in quite some time.”
Ah. So meeting with the father was out of the question, then: inconvenient, but not the end of the world. What interested Arthur more was the mention of factories. He had suspected the Saltzmans were a wealthy family, if they were buried in Brompton. Perhaps they could ask around, find someone closer to Daniel with an inkling where Faroe had gone…
John got there first. “When did he emigrate?”
“Almost ten years ago,” the pastor said, considering. “Last time I saw him was at his daughter’s funeral, though. And then nothing. Radio silence.”
The timeline struggled to come together in Arthur’s mind—he needed paper and a pen, to draw it all out and sort through the barrage of dates being constantly thrown at them. “And the factories? Where would we find those?”
“I’m afraid most of them closed down during the Depression without his management. I believe the one in Birmingham remains operational, though, if you’d like to visit. Wait here, I’ll get you the address.” And he bent his head in a subtle bow, returning the way he came.
John finished scribbling down the information, crossing his final ‘t’ so viciously he nearly took Arthur’s eye out. “This is good, Arthur! Another name, an address—excellent call with the church.”
“And we didn’t even need to read anything this time.” Arthur grinned. “Shall we head straight up to Birmingham, then?” The itch of the investigation was seizing him again, a restlessness to discover and resolve and answer. It was amazing how quickly any thought of the actual work waiting up in Cambridge had vanished.
But John carefully peeled back his left glove to check his watch, and shook his head. “No, we’ll stay overnight here. If we leave now the sun will be setting by the time we arrive. I doubt there’ll be anyone around to question except beggars and gang members.”
“They always have the best intel in mystery novels,” Arthur pointed out, but he conceded. He didn’t much fancy catching another train so soon anyway.
So when the pastor appeared with a scrap of paper and a neatly penned address, Arthur and John left the cover of the church into the dampness of London. Even with the heavy rain weighing down on him, Arthur felt freer here, out in the open air without the suffocating pressure of the chapel and all its associated expectations.
“Do you attend church, John?” he asked as they passed the wrought-iron gates and merged with the bustling crowds.
John looked surprised at the question. “Don’t have much faith in gods at the moment. I haven’t for years. Perhaps I did, before, but not anymore.”
This was the second allusion to John’s past—meagre breadcrumbs in a hidden trail that Arthur struggled to follow. He understood, of course, the desire to brush it all under the rug; but at the same time he was desperately curious, itching to scratch that particular mystery off his list. Obscurity clung to John like a shroud. The less cynical part of Arthur—long buried beneath practicality and rejection— wasn’t sure he was even entirely human.
Woah. Okay. It sounded ridiculous when he thought it out like that.
“Before what?”
“Oh. Is that a tea shop?”
Arthur could have pressed. The detective inside him wanted nothing more, but instead he rolled his eyes and followed John into the rich scent of fresh cakes and warm tea leaves.
Excellent diversion, John.