The Detective and the Devil by Lloyd Shepherd Read Free Book Online

unlocked.
    Within, no letters remained to be sent, or even to be read. Benjamin Johnson had not been disturbed in any work here. The desk had an end-of-day appearance, as if a careful man had tidied up his
place of work after its completion. A quill lay next to an inkpot and some paper. Three books sat in an orderly pile. At the top of the pile was the first volume of the Reverend Daniel Lyons’
The Environs of London
. Beneath that sat a thin and rather old volume with a grand frontispiece written in Latin, and, perhaps, in Greek. He had neither language. The final volume was also
thin, but more recently published, it would seem. It bore the title
Mathematicall Preface
, and its pages were much scribbled upon. The author of this book was given as ‘Dr John
Dee’, a name which tickled at the edges of his memory, but did no more.
    It was an eclectic set of titles. He picked the books up. They felt heavy in his hands and oddly warm, as if Johnson’s reading of them had left behind some memory of itself. He noticed
that pages had been torn out of one of the books,
The Environs of London
. He put the books in a satchel he had brought with him, and then turned to the final object in the room, the one he
had been avoiding until now.
    The maul leaned against the wall under the window, exactly where he had found it the night before. As if it were on guard. Horton picked it up in both hands, felt its malignant weight and
inspected its face and handle, remembering that other maul which he himself had retrieved from number 29.
    But that maul, the property of a sailor, had been old and worn. The handle of this one was shiny and new, and although its flat face was too covered in the matter which once constituted the mind
of Benjamin Johnson, its pick-axe face was untouched and clean. The maul was brand new.
    An unlocked drawer. A pile of books. A terrible instrument. Clean floors and walls. The stories of the house whirled round his head while he stood in front of the window holding the maul, as if
he might smash his way outside.

ABIGAIL AND THE DOCTOR
    The day after their aborted theatre trip, Abigail walked to St Luke’s hospital at Moorfields. For three months now she had been working at the place, unpaid, as a nurse.
The job was part of a careful effort to place her feet back down on the normal earth and begin her life anew.
    The previous year, she had taken herself to a madhouse, Brooke House in Hackney. She had been plagued at that time by terrible dreams, and these dreams had begun to bleed into her waking hours,
such that she could barely leave the rooms she shared with Charles in Lower Gun Alley in Wapping. Her mind had become an unreliable and tearaway thing, and she had been forced to mislead her
husband in order to get it seen to.
    She had come out of Brooke House cured, or at least it had appeared so to her. The dreams had ceased. They had been replaced, though, by a lingering discomfort with her memories of the madhouse,
which were murky at best and in some instances, it appeared to her, full of queasy blanks. She went in disturbed (she avoided the word ‘mad’, even when thinking to herself) and she came
out relatively calm. Of what happened in between she had little idea.
    It was this as much as anything that had taken her to St Luke’s, the great asylum formed the previous century by William Battie and intended to be a progressive and humane place for the
treatment of madness. Its great rival in all matters relating to mad-doctoring was Bethlem, which had just moved to an enormous new building in Lambeth, such that these gargantuan temples to the
infirmities of the mind seemed to bracket the metropolis, to pinch it between their stone fingers.
    Abigail had worked as a nurse at St Thomas’s before she ever met her husband, so her skills were in some demand at St Luke’s, but she never asked for any money, nor was it ever
offered to her. St Luke’s provided her with something more valuable – an