Free The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox Page A

found
    myself unwillingly regarding the coffin as it was lowered gently into the receiving earth,
    the last mortal home of the unfortunate Lucas Trendle, late of the Bank of England. For I
    had put him there, and for nothing he had done to me.

    The party began to disperse. I looked once more at his mother, and at the
    gentleman I had seen accompanying her earlier. From beneath the rim of his hat peeked a
    narrow curtain of red hair.

    Eventually, I was left alone at the graveside with the diggers and their assistants.
    Of Fordyce Jukes there was not a trace.

    I waited for nearly an hour, and then made my way back towards the Egyptian
    portals, with darkness coming on. The gatekeeper tipped his hat as he let me through a
    smaller side entrance. I took a deep breath. The wretched Jukes had played me for a fool,
    sending me all the way out here as a prank, for which he would pay dearly when the
    moment of reckoning came.

    But then, just as I was passing beneath the deeply shadowed arch into the outer
    world, I felt a tap on my shoulder as a person – a man – pushed past me. I had
    instinctively swung to the left, towards the shoulder on which I had received the tap; but
    he had gone to the right, quickly becoming absorbed in a remaining group of mourners
    standing just outside the gates, and disappearing into the deepening gloom.

    It had not been Jukes. Taller, broader, quick on his feet. It had not been Jukes.

    I returned to Temple-street dejected and confused. As I passed through the
    staircase entrance, the door of the ground-floor chamber opened.

    ‘Good evening, Mr Glapthorn,’ said Fordyce Jukes. ‘I trust you’ve had a pleasant
    day?’
    6:

    Vocat?

    __________________________________________________________________
    __________________

    The conviction that Fordyce Jukes was my blackmailer would not leave me; and
    yet he had not been at Stoke Newington, and no attempt had been made by any other
    person or persons to make themselves known to me – except for that tap on the shoulder:
    that unsettling sense of gentle but firm pressure deliberately applied. An accidental brush
    by a hastily departing stranger, no doubt. But not the first such ‘accident’ – I still thought
    of the incident outside the Diorama – and not the last.

    Why had he sent me out to Stoke Newington, if he had not intended to reveal
    himself to me there? I could reach no other conclusion but that he was biding his time;
    that the second note, summoning me to the interment of my victim, had been designed to
    apply a little additional torment, which would be repaid with compound interest. Two
    communications received. Perhaps a third would bring matters to a head.

    I kept a close eye on Jukes from that moment on. From my sitting-room window,
    if I placed my face close against the glass, I could just see down to where the staircase
    gave onto the street. I observed him carrying in his provisions, or passing the time of day
    with the occupants of neighbouring chambers, sometimes taking the mangy little dog he
    kept out for a walk by the river. His work hours were regular, his private activities
    innocent.

    Nothing happened: the expected third communication did not come; there was no
    soft knock on the door, and no indication of an unravelling plan. Slowly, over the
    following days, I began to gain ground on my enfeebled self, and, with returning strength
    and concentration, emerged one morning after a sound night’s sleep – the first for a week
    or more – to rededicate myself to the destruction of my enemy.

    Of his history and character you shall know more – much more – as this narrative
    continues. He was ever in my mind, even throughout the recent crisis arising from the
    anonymous notes. I breathed him in every day, for his fate was anchored to mine. ‘And I
    shall cover his head with the mountains of my wrath, and press him down,/And he shall
    be forgotten by men.’ This is an untypically fine line from the epic pen of