The Vesuvius Club

17. The Lair of Mr Lee

«IS it, by George!»

I looked over his shoulder and indicated a double line that had been inked into the shape on the chart. «And this?»

«I believe it is known as a vent, sir. A fissure in the rock through which the magma flows to the surface.»

Charlie took the fragment from him. A series of arrows had been drawn by hand inside the lines. «Then why are these arrows pointing towards the inside of the volcano?»

«I really cannot say,» sniffed the butler.

We advanced towards the book shelves. «Tell me, Stint. Do you think, by any chance, we could track down the particular volcano?»

A smile fluttered over his pale lips. «Every chance, I should think, sir. I’m sure Sir Emmanuel would be very happy to know his collection is being put to good use. I believe we shall need the steps, sir, if you’d be so kind.»

Charlie pulled the revolving library steps from their shadowy niche. Before I could protest, he had mounted the steps and began pushing his way along the shelves. The steps’ wheels squealed appallingly.

«Hmmph,» said Stint, disapprovingly. «Now then,» he said and pointed upwards. «Third shelf. What do you see?»

In the feeble light Charlie passed treatise after dreary treatise. There were atlases, text-books…

«Manlove’s Tectonic Activity,» Charlie read. «Vulcanism in the Pacific Rim… The Lava Bomb…»

«We’re getting warmer, you might say.»

Charlie had stopped with one hand on the shelf, preparing to push himself off again when a hefty book in a cloth-bound cover seemed to catch his attention. «Magnetic Viscosity?» he called hopefully.

«That’s the one,» said Stint.

«Maxwell Morraine,» I cried.

Stint looked over at me. «Yes, sir? What of him?»

«It never occurred to me to ask you, Stint. What do you know of your late master’s colleague, Morraine? He threw me out of the house at the very mention of his name.»

Stint shrugged. He seemed suddenly weary. Charlie came down the steps and stood by him, handing him the book. Stint began to flick through it as he spoke. «You are far too young to remember, sir, but it was quite a tragedy. Professor Morraine went… funny.»

«Funny?»

«In the head, sir. They do say it was on account of his wife running off with some gent but Sir Emmanuel told me Mr Morraine had always been a little touched. Even when they were students together.»

«Yes. I had heard they attended the same college. And they came out here, didn’t they, to work?»

Stint nodded vigorously, then paused, comparing the fragment of chart with an illustration within the great book. «Sir Emmanuel’s father had this house and he always loved the Italian countryside. Seemed like a natural place to pursue their researches. All Greek or Italian to you and me, I suppose, sir, but Professor Morraine had theories about the massive potential energy contained within the lava, within the very stuff of the earth’s core! But it all came to naught. Then there was the fire and poor Mrs Morraine… well. Aha! I have found the volcano, sir.»

He held the book aloft, the piece of chart pressed against the relevant page. To no one’s great surprise, it was a cross-section of Mount Vesuvius.

Emmanuel Quibble’s extraordinary library was proving to be invaluable. Following the positive identification of the geological chart, we began digging for a clue as to the identity of the strange chemical used on the old man.

Charlie sat down and put his feet up on the desk, pulled off his boots and began to pick at his toes, earning fierce stares from Stint.

«Make yourself useful,» I ordered, tossing him a copy of Arsenical Poisoning and its Causes.

«I am. Being useful, I mean. I’m thinking.»

«Ha! I am on His Majesty’s service. You are on mine.»

He put his hands behind his head. Is it possible to swagger whilst sitting down?

«Seems to me there is a connection between this purple stuff and what I told you about Venus’s fella.»

«What about him?»

«The House of the Lightning Tree. Remember?»

His face dimpled into a cock-eyed smile.

«Opium?» I cried.

And within a very few minutes, thanks to Stint’s cross-referencing, we had it. «A distillation of the seeds of the manganese poppy,» I read, tracing a finger over the delicate colour-plate showing the flower.

«Never heard of it.»

«I don’t doubt it. Grows only in certain parts of the Himalayas. Now, get your boots on, Charlie, you’re going back out.»

«I am?»

«Yes. Arrange some transport for our visit to this den. We’ll reconvene in the lobby of the Santa Lucia at ten.»

«Righto, chief.» Charlie got up and struggled into his boots, holding the door frame for support.

«Oh, and Charlie?»

«Yes?»

«Do mind out for yourself. I fear you are becoming indispensable.»

The boy smiled and I felt a curious twinge as he closed the door after him. I thought at first it must be some undigested fancy from the Café Gambrinus but I finally recognized it as an almost alien emotion. Fondness.

I took my leave of Stint and returned to the hotel. Quibble, Verdigris, Bella, Reynolds, Charlie — my head was spinning. After a long bath I soon felt more like myself. I felt myself so much, in fact, that I ended up having one off the wrist, imagining the wondrous Bella wrapped in my fevered embrace.

We dined together that evening and Miss Pok looked more glorious than ever, I thought, glowing like a moonbeam in the gilded shadows of the restaurant. I apologized again for the unseemly hastiness of my departure from the funicular.

«There’s really no need,» she said lightly. «You did warn me you might have to… pop off a little hastily now and then.»

«Did that Italian chap see you back all right?»

«Oh yes. He was quite charming.»

She smiled and raised her glass. «To you, Lucifer.»

I responded, clinking my crystal against hers. «No, to us.»

«You have not though, been entirely frank with me,» she said after sipping her wine.

«No?»

«No. Unless you felt a pressing need to sketch the crowd, it did look very much like you were chasing someone.»

«Ah,» I said. «Umm…»

She held up her hand. «Don’t say anything. I know you would tell me if you were able. There are matters of great import on hand, are there not?»

I nodded slowly.

«And this business with Mr Miracle is somehow part of it.»

«Indeed.»

She nodded. «Then one day, perhaps, you will tell me about it.»

I liked the sound of that. It promised a future. Together.

We said goodnight at her hotel room door and, for the first time, I was allowed a kiss on her smooth cheek.

Ah, me!

Anticipating a night’s work, I returned to my own room and changed into a Norfolk jacket, nautical sweater and light but sensible tweed trousers. On the stroke of ten, I slipped down to the lobby and found Charlie waiting for me.

I looked about for a four-wheeler but Charlie pulled at my sleeve. «No carriages. They’ll hear us coming a mile off.»

To my amazement, he pulled aside a quantity of canvas that lay in a bundle in the street. Beneath it, at an angle to the wall, was a tandem bicycle.

«Is that the best you could do?» I cried.

«Needs must,» he grinned. «I nicked it.»

I have never been a, shall we say, fan de cycle, and was not in the best of moods for mounting one. However, Charlie was right — it would be a far less conspicuous way of approaching Naples’ premier opium den than a cab. I grudgingly acquiesced and dragged the machine from its hiding place. Together we managed to mount it. After a few wobbly moments, we mastered the thing and began peddling feverishly up the slopes to Capodimonte, following Charlie’s directions. I was grateful, at last, for all those bone-shaker lessons my governess forced me to take.

At length, we turned into some kind of rookery, a shambolic collection of semi-ruined villas adjacent to a vast olive grove. The rotten plasterwork of the structures was visible even in the star-light; the eaves of the buildings practically merged into one another like a line of guardsmen toppling on the parade ground.

I hopped off the bicycle and held it steady so that Charlie too could dismount. Then we began to push it quietly along the road. Before us was a large and disreputable-looking building with a blackened, twisted olive tree dominating its façade.

«That looks like it,» whispered Charlie.

I nodded — even in this town of curiosities, what else could it be? — and indicated that we should lay down the bicycle on the parched earth.

I felt glad of my reloaded revolver as we advanced into that filthy hole.

Torches burned in sconces on the fronts of some of the dwellings and it was possible to see figures huddled in the shadowed gloom. That they meant us ill was obvious and I raised the gun and cocked it in as blatant a fashion as I could.

«Stay close by me, Charlie,» I hissed.

The shadows fell back a little but we hurried briskly along past walls of blotched green plaster.

Charlie hammered repeatedly on the door of the big house.

I slipped into a shadowed niche, watching as the figures that surrounded us grew bolder. I distinctly saw a great bear of a man with a kerchief knotted around his head grinning at me in the flickering torch-light. In his hand he carried a thick cudgel and he was slapping it repeatedly into his palm.

«Let’s cut along, eh, Charlie?» I said quietly.

Suddenly, the door creaked open and an indisputably Chinese face loomed out of the darkness.

«What you want?» squawked the newcomer, his scantily bearded face appearing as a strip of red flesh in the torch-light.

I surged forward through the door and pushed him backwards. Charlie bounded inside, darted past him and slammed the door shut behind us.

«What you do? What you do? You cannot come in here!» barked the little man. He was round as a pudding and clad in a filthy muslin robe.

I levelled the revolver at him. «I think this will do as my passport,» I hissed in his face.

«No need for this!» cried the Chinaman in a hoarse whisper. «Why you come like this? We all friends here. You want pipe?»

«No. Yes. Let’s get inside,» I urged.

We followed the Chinaman through a warren of rubbish-strewn corridors, emerging eventually into a large chamber that might once have been a sitting room. The walls were festooned with cobwebs and damp-blossoms. What was visible of the floor showed naked and broken floor-boards leading to some noisome cellar beneath.

The prevailing impression, however, was of a terrible fug, a poisonous atmosphere rich in the unmistakable scent of the poppy. Opium smoke hung in wreaths over the heads of the multitude that crammed the room, their slack jaws and rolling eyes speaking of days and weeks lost to the pipe. Like so many sacks, the addicts lay strewn over the floor, gurgling happily as they sucked, the shining black beads of opium glowing like fireflies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prude and like a pipe as much as the next man. But all things in moderation, as Genghis Khan used to say.

Our Chinese host was threading his way through the heaps of human detritus, lantern in hand. «My name Mr Lee. You fine gentlemen. I have office. We talk there.»

The «office» was at least clean. Two chairs and a table comprised the only furniture. I sat in one and Charlie sat down heavily on the other. Lee set the lantern on the table and giggled most unpleasantly.

«I have extra fine poppy for you, English. Very cheap»

«No thank you. I have very expensive tastes. I want some of the purple poppy.»

Lee’s blinked then laughed. «I not understand. House of Lightning Tree have many pipes. But no purple poppy. Come. Relax.»

I stood up, seized him by his filthy robe and pushed him up against the wall. «My friend and I are in something of a rush, do you see? We need to know to whom you supply the purple poppy?»

His fat face flushed in alarm and he shot an appealing look over my shoulder at Charlie.

«You crazy! You crazy! Please!»

Charlie got to his feet. «I can’t help you,» he said to Lee. «This fella’s a painter. He’ll as like bite your ear off unless you tell him what he wants to know.»

Lee gave a gulp and his chins wobbled. «I know nothing.»

I slammed him against the rotten plaster. «Tell me, you glorified tobacconist.»

«There no such thing as purple poppy!» he squealed.

I nudged the barrel of the pistol into the folds of fat around his wet mouth. «Believe me, I will take a professional interest in seeing the red of your blood running against the yellow of your skin.»

Lee looked at us desperately, wringing his chubby hands. «I tell you! I tell you!»

Shaking with terror, Lee sank back against the rotten plaster. His pin-prick eyes closed momentarily. «Purple poppy come over especial from Shanghai. Most rare. Most precious. It is much dangerous. It has many faces. Up, down, forget some, even kill you. Must be very, very careful. Needs expert. No good for you nice gentlemen!»

«I see,» I said quietly. «And you’ve been supplying this filthy stuff to someone, haven’t you? To what end?»

«I cannot tell you…»

I pressed the pistol further into his face. Sweat was streaming over his oily skin. «Please! Please! I know only my instructions! I deliver purple poppy and I hear no more.»

I stepped away from the perspiring fat man while still keeping him covered with the pistol. «Deliver it where, exactly?»

Lee smiled his fat smile. «I can give you address, but it is impossible for me to leave these premises, my business, you understand»

I levelled my revolver at his nethers. «You will take us there, Lee. Or the Neapolitan castrati will be acquiring a new member.»

The darkness was thickening as I commandeered a dog-cart and set off with Charlie and the reluctant Chinee into the sleeping streets. We must have made a pretty sight, lashing away at the skinny steeds but then Naples is accustomed to strange sights; half-mad city that it is.

Lee spoke little but contented himself with pointing and urging as we clattered through the narrow alleys, ducking wet washing that was strung between the houses and shops.

We clattered out of the city and along the coastal road.

«Now look where we’re heading,» observed Charlie with a grunt. It was no great surprise to see the great volcano looming before us, its fiery crown smoking like a beacon. After an hour or so, we rolled on into an area of broad parkland. A strange collection of buildings formed a squared «C» shape around the perimeter. In the ruined isolation of the C’s centre stood a blackened villa, its windows fogged with soot.

«This place,» said Lee. «Place where I bring poppy.»

I jumped from the cart and swung my pistol round to cover Lee. «Come on, out!»

The Chinaman shook his head. «Please. Do not make me. I not want to go in there.»

«What’s the matter?» cried Charlie, clambering out and lighting a lantern. «We’ll look after you.»

Lee did not appear to be reassured and shook his head violently, eyes glittering like jet. «Not that. I never see anybody when I come. But… house haunted.»

«Pah!» I ejaculated.

«No, no!» protested Lee. «Is the truth, sirs! Please let poor Lee go home now.»

I shook my head. «I fear not, old man. Don’t worry your top-knot, though. Any spooks will get a blast of this.» I cocked the revolver and the three of us began to make our way stealthily across the grass.

A dim light shone in the lower floor of a neighbouring house. We slipped into the shadows so as to remain invisible. I looked about. A pair of old, blistered black doors were visible at the base of the building. The coal cellar.

«Where did you bring the poppies, Lee? To this cellar?»

Lee shook his nervous head. «No, no. Through front. Come, come.»

We moved silently forward to the blackened edifice of the villa and crept over the gravel to the porch. The front door seemed intact but all the windows that were visible had been boarded up. I reasoned it was wiser not to advertise our presence so, in a very few moments, I had pulled down some of the splintering wood and exposed a smoke-blackened window-pane. I took off my muffler and, wrapping it around my fist, smashed the glass. It gave with only a faint tinkling.

The three of us clambered inside, our feet sinking slightly into a carpet of glass and debris, Lee whimpering and squealing like a nervous child.

The atmosphere was at once oppressive with decay. The lantern showed fire-damaged furniture, their varnished surfaces blistered and cracked.

I turned to Charlie. «Seems quiet enough.»

«As the grave.»

Lee wailed softly. I grabbed him by his robe. «Where did you leave the opium?»

The Chinaman was looking about in terror. «Here in hallway. Not want to stay longer than need to.»

The dusty floor of the entranceway had clearly been disturbed. Charlie held up his lamp revealing a series of trails, as though sleds had cut swathes through the dust.

I tapped him on the shoulder. «You explore the house, Charlie,» I whispered, lighting my own lantern. «Mr Lee and I will take the cellar.»

«Righto.»

I watched him heading for the mouldering staircase then began swinging the lantern about in search of the entrance to the coal cellar. I found what I was looking for in a recessed corner beneath the stairs.

«Please, sir,» whimpered Lee. «Let us go now. This place bad.»

I felt for a door handle. It was big and carved into a hexagonal shape. To my very great surprise, it turned easily and the door creaked softly open.

Gingerly we stepped down on to a poorly lit wooden stair. The smell of damp assailed me at once but my attention was riveted on the curious sight before me.

The coal cellar appeared to have been adapted into some kind of laboratory. The remains of tubes, flasks and retorts littered benches and there were fragments of geological charts pinned to the wall. Fragments, merely, as the place now resembled the flue of some great chimney. The broken walls were soot-streaked and wet. Glass lay twisted into fantastic shapes on the remains of benches and cupboards. In the corner was a broad, fat-legged table and on it burned a single candle.

There was someone else in this house.

Just as the thought crossed my mind, I heard a terrible moaning.

For a moment I took it to be Lee but the fat creature was jibbering with fear right by me, his eyes clamped shut. I glanced over my shoulder and back the way we had come. The sound was coming from up the stairs, an awful, wretched groan, followed by a burst of ragged sobbing.

«Charlie!» I cried. «Is that you?»

At once the noise ceased. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

«Charlie?»

I jammed the pistol in Lee’s back and quickly we mounted the cellar steps, pushed open the door and stepped back into the hallway.

I held the lantern high above my head but could see no one.

Then the moaning began again, as though a soul were in torment. It seemed to be coming from upstairs. I swung the lantern in that direction and, just for an instant, caught a glimpse of something white on the landing above. It seemed to flutter into the shadows like a great bird. I started. Lee absolutely yelled in shock.

«Shut up, you fat fool!» I spat then, and, urging him forward with the revolver, made for the staircase.

The creak of our feet on the rotten stair seemed to halt the sobbing once more. We pressed on, ascending swiftly.

I called out for Charlie, then swung the lantern round as I caught sight of the whitish shape again, still above us on the staircase. It was a figure, dressed in some sort of billowing white gown. Or shroud, I thought dully.

I strode towards the phantom shape, determined not to be rattled.

«Who’s there?» I demanded. «Show yourself!»

With Lee almost hysterical at my side, I reached the top of the staircase and was confronted by a door. Gingerly, I reached out a hand and took hold of the knob.

I swallowed, nervous in spite of myself, and began to turn it.

A hand reached out of the shadows and clasped my arm. I pulled back in undisguised alarm, thrusting the lamp aloft and shining a light down on the frightened face of Charlie Jackpot.

«Bloody hell, Mr Box! Did you see it? Did you see it?»

I nodded, a little too quickly. «I saw it!»

«The face!» he whispered. «Did you see its face?»

All at once, the door in front of us flew open and the figure in white seemed to swarm upon us.

I yelled in stark terror and batted at the thing with both hands. Lee took to his heels and pounded down the rotten stairway. Charlie threw himself behind me and we sank back against the wall as the spectre went hurtling down the stairs after the Chinaman, screaming and sobbing as though it were a denizen of Hell itself.

«Christ Almighty!» I gasped, after we had picked ourselves up off the landing. «What was it?»

Charlie shook his head. «It went… it went towards the cellar.»

I stood up and opened the lantern to its fullest extent.

Slowly and silently, we descended the stairs and approached the door to the cellar.

There was no sign of Lee.

I opened the door, taking care that it should not creak, and then took a few tentative steps downwards.

I lifted the lamp. Behind me, Charlie gasped and clapped a hand to his mouth.

Sitting in a fire-charred chair was the ruin of a woman. Dressed in a stained and tattered white robe, her hair hung about her shoulders in great, knotted clumps. It was her face, though, which drew all our attention. The eyes looked out from a skull-like visage from which the flesh seemed to have been boiled away. Great blistered lumps of skin hung like candle-wax from the jaw and cheek-bones.

«Good God,» whispered Charlie.

The woman looked at me wildly, those dreadful eyes glistening in the lantern-light. Then she began to moan once more, her whole body shuddering as though a disinterred mummy had been brought to some foul simulacrum of life.

And all at once I knew her.

«Mrs Knight?» I cried. «Mrs Midsomer Knight?»

«Yes,» said the voice of Lee behind us. «Most regrettable that you will never have chance to meet her properly.»

He was brandishing a Colt in his pudgy hand.

«Please to stay still. I can certainly kill one of you before you have chance to overpower me.» The Chinee turned his narrow black eyes upon me and smiled. «Drop gun.»

With a sigh, I dropped my revolver to the tiled floor.

Lee levelled his own gun at me, a horrible snarling grin flickering over his lips as he bent down to retrieve mine. He thrust it inside his robes. «You have done well, Mr Box. But it is time to stop toying with you. You dangle like child’s puppet. So sorry.»

He advanced on the wretched woman before us. He plucked a hypodermic syringe from somewhere in his robes, and with practised efficiency plunged it into her forearm. With a groan, she slumped forward. «Now, please to escort lady from cellar.»

He gestured with the Colt and Charlie and I manhandled Mrs Knight up the stairs and back into the hallway. Thanks to the nameless drug — no doubt the purple poppy in one of its many guises — she was the very opposite of a ghost. She weighed a ton.

Lee ushered us through the house, into a large, gloomy room dominated by a pair of disreputable-looking French windows. Its floor was an inch-thick in dust but clearly visible in its centre were four coffins, dragged in from the hallway.

Three of the coffins were sealed, the fourth open. Lee smiled. «One bird fly. She not have enough of purple poppy. Now she sleep better. Please to put her in.»

Reluctantly, Charlie and I lowered the woman into the empty coffin, its satin lining rustling in a peculiarly horrible fashion.

«Let us check on others,» said Lee with a smile. «Please to open coffins.»

Gingerly, Charlie knelt down and lifted the lid from the first of the grisly boxes.

«Raise lantern please, Mr Box,» said Lee with infuriating politeness.

Within the coffin was what appeared to be the corpse of a man, his skin waxen and deathly pale. He was of large build and had a very prominent chin. His eyes were spaced wide apart. Professor Eli Verdigris.

The remaining coffins revealed, as expected, Professors Sash and Quibble. All of them lived on. Lived on in some ghastly, drug-induced coma.

«So all is ready. The party is complete.»

«What the hell is all this for, Lee?» I demanded.

Lee said nothing but indicated that we should move towards the French windows. Charlie pushed at the rotten woodwork until the doors groaned open.

Beyond lay an extraordinary landscape, lit by flaming torches — a vista of shattered stonework, tree-lined avenues and ancient, rutted roadways. I stepped out on to the flagged ground and gasped.

«What is this place?» cried Charlie.

«You not know?» said Lee with a horrid smile.

«I know,» I breathed. «It is Pompeii!»

The torches illumined the ruins in a fearful relief, the hazy black hump of Vesuvius rearing over the lost city like the back of some dreadful beast.

«And now,» said Lee, hissing with laughter and brandishing both pistols. «It is time for you to die.»

For an instant, I despaired, letting my hands drop to my sides. But in that moment, Charlie jumped out in front of me and hurled his lantern at the Chinaman. It hit him full in the chest, there was a satisfying splintering of glass and as the startled Lee looked down in surprise, his foul gown burst alight, and he was enveloped in flame.

I darted forward and brought my own lantern crashing down on Lee’s head. He staggered and fell forward on to his knees, dropping a pistol and battering desperately at his blazing robe with his free hand.

Despite his panic and his hideous shrieks of pain, Lee raised a shaking hand and aimed a pistol at me. Roaring like an enraged tiger I ran at him full force and planted my fist in his throat. I felt the flesh give sickeningly and he toppled to the flagstones, smacking his cheek against the crumbling masonry.

Charlie was at my side in an instant. He whipped off his jacket and succeeded in putting out the flames.

«Well done, Charlie,» I said, breathlessly. «Let’s get the fat lump inside. Once he’s recovered his senses, he can tell us what the hell’s going on.»

Charlie looked down at Lee and shook his head, «’Fraid not, sir. You don’t know your own strength. He’s a gonner.»

I turned the Chinaman over. His wind-pipe was crushed and he was quite still.

«Bugger,» I said eloquently.

Exhaling heavily, Charlie sat down on the flagstones and looked at me. «Now what?»

I peered into the fiery gloom. «Now, Mr Jackpot, we wait. Sooner or later, someone is going to come and collect those coffins.»