SPIDERS IN THEIR WEBS

He was in Limehouse, somewhere near the Basin. In Beauregard's experience, the district's evil reputation was well-deserved. More nameless corpses washed up on the mudflats in a typical night than Silver Knife could account for in three months. With much creaking, rattling and shuffling, the hansom manoeuvred through an archway then came to a dead halt. The cabby must have had to bend double to scrape under the arch.

He gripped the hilt of his sword-cane. The doors were opened for him, and red eyes glittered in the dark.

'Sorry for the inconvenience, Beauregard,' purred a silky voice, male but not entirely masculine, 'but I trust you'll understand. It's a sticky wicket...'

He stepped down from the cab and found himself in a yard off one of the warren of streets near the docks. The fog here was wispy, hanging like undersea fronds of yellow gauze. There were people all about. The one who spoke was an Englishman, a vampire with a good coat and soft hat, face in darkness. His posture, studied in its langour, suggested an athlete in repose; Beauregard would not care to go four rounds with him. The others were Chinese, pigtailed and bowed, hands in their sleeves. Most were warm but a massive fellow by the cab-door was new-born, naked to the waist to show off his dragon tattoos and an un-dead indifference to autumn's chill.

As the Englishman stepped forward, moonlight caught his youthful face. He had pretty eyelashes like a woman's, and Beauregard recognised him.

'I saw you get six sixes from six balls in '85,' he said. 'In Madras. Gentlemen and Players.'

The sportsman shrugged modestly. 'You play what's chucked at you, I always say.'

He had heard the new-born's name in the Star Chamber, tentatively linked with daring but somehow amusing jewel robberies. He supposed the sportsman's involvement in this evident kidnapping confirmed that he was indeed the author of those criminal feats. Beauregard believed even a gentleman should have a profession, and always backed the Players against the Gentlemen.

'This way,' said the amateur cracksman, indicating a wet stretch of stone wall. The new-born Chinese pressed a brick and a section of the wall tilted upwards, forming a hatch-like door. 'Duck down or you'll bash your bean. Deuced small, these chinks.'

He followed the new-born, who could see in the dark better than he, and was in turn followed by the rest of the party. As the vampire stooped, dragons on his shoulder-blades silently roared and flapped. They proceeded down a sloping passageway, and he realised they were below street level. The surfaces were damp and glistening, the air cold and bad: these chambers must be close to the river. As they passed a chute from which could be dimly heard rippling water, Beauregard was reminded of the nameless cadavers, supposing this place the source of quite a few of their number. The passage widened and he deduced this part of the labyrinth dated back centuries. Objets d'art, mostly of undoubted antiquity and oriental appearance, stood at significant junctures. After many turns and descents and doors, his kidnappers were sure he could never find his way unescorted to the surface. He was pleased to be underestimated.

Something chattered behind a wall and he flinched. He could not identify the animal din. The new-born turned to the noise and yanked the head of a jade caterpillar. A door opened and Beauregard was ushered into a dimly-lit, richly furnished drawing room. There were no windows, just chinoiserie screens. The centrepiece was a large desk, behind which sat an ancient Chinaman. Long, hard fingernails tapped like knifepoints on his blotter. There were others, in comfortable armchairs arranged in a half-circle about the desk. The unseen chattering thing quieted.

One man turned his head, red cigar-end making a Devil's mask of his face. He was a vampire, but the Chinaman was not.

'Mr Charles Beauregard,' began the Celestial, 'you are so kind to join our wretched and unworthy selves.'

'You are so kind to invite me.'

The Chinaman clapped his hands, and nodded to a cold-faced servant, a Burmese.

'Take our visitor's hat, cloak and cane.'

Beauregard was relieved of his burdens. When the Burmese was close enough, Beauregard observed the singular earring, and the ritual tattooing about his neck.

'A dacoit?' he enquired.

'You are so very observant,' affirmed the Chinaman.

'I have some little experience of the world of secret societies.'

'Indeed you have, Mr Beauregard. Our paths have crossed three times: in Egypt, in the Kashmir, and in Shanghai. You caused me some little inconvenience.'

Beauregard realised to whom he was talking, and tried to smile. He assumed he was a dead man.

'My apologies, Doctor.'

The Chinaman leaned forward, face emerging into the light, fingernails clacking. He had the brow of a Shakespeare and a smile that put Beauregard in mind of a smug Satan.

'Think nothing of it.' He brushed away apologies. 'Those were trivial matters, of no import beyond the ordinary. I shall not prosecute any personal business in this instance.'

Beauregard tried not to show his relief. Whatever else he was, the criminal mandarin was known to be a man of his word. This was the person they called 'the Devil Doctor' or 'the Lord of Strange Deaths'. He was one of the Council of Seven, the ruling body of the Si-Fan, a tong whose influence extended to all the quarters of the Earth. Mycroft reckoned the Celestial among the three most dangerous men in the world.

'Although,' the Chinaman added, 'were this meeting to take place very far to the East, I fancy its agenda would not be so pleasant for you and, I confess, for myself. You understand me?'

Beauregard did, all too well. They met under a flag of truce, but it would be lowered as soon as the Diogenes Club again required him to work against the Si-Fan.

'Those affairs are not of interest to us at this moment.'

The amateur cracksman turned up the gaslight and faces became clear. The chattering thing burst into its screech and was quelled only by a mild glance from the Devil Doctor. In one corner was a large golden cage, built as if for a parrot with a six-foot wingspan, containing a long-tailed ape. It bared yellow teeth in bright pink gums that took up two-thirds of its face. The Chinaman was renowned for a strange taste in pets, as Beauregard had cause to recall whenever he used his snakeskin-handled boot scraper.

'Business,' snorted a military-looking vampire, 'time is money, remember...'

'A thousand pardons, Colonel Moran. In the East, things are different. Here, we must bow to your Western ways, hurry and bustle, haste and industry.'

The cigar-smoker stood up, unbending a lanky figure from which hung a frock coat marked around the pockets with chalk. The Colonel deferred to him and sat back, eyes falling. The smoker's head oscillated from side to side like a lizard's, eye-teeth protruding over his lower lip.

'My associate is a businessman,' he explained between puffs, 'our cricketing friend is a dilettante, Griffin over there is a scientist, Captain Macheath  -  who, by the way, sends his apologies  -  is a soldier, Sikes is continuing his family business, I am a mathematician, but you, my dear doctor, are an artist.'

'The Professor flatters me.'

Beauregard had heard of the Professor too. Mycroft's brother, the consulting detective, had a craze of sorts for him. He might well be the worst Englishman unhanged.

'With two of the three most dangerous men in the world in one room,' he observed, 'I have to ask myself where the third might be?'

'I see our names and positions are not unknown to you, Mr Beauregard,' said the Chinaman. 'Dr Nikola is unavailable for our little gathering. I believe he may be found investigating some sunken ships off the coast of Tasmania. He no longer concerns us. He has his own interests.'

Beauregard looked at the others in the meeting, those still unaccounted for. Griffin, whom the Professor had mentioned, was an albino who seemed to fade into the background. Sikes was a pig-faced man, warm, short, burly and brutal. With a loud striped jacket and cheap oil on his hair, he looked out of place in such a distinguished gathering. Alone in the company, he was the image of a criminal.

'Professor, if you would care to explain to our honoured guest...'

'Thank you, Doctor,' replied the man sometimes called 'the Napoleon of Crime'. 'Mr Beauregard, as you are aware none of us  -  and I include you among our number  -  has what we might call common cause. We pursue our own furrows. If they happen to intersect... well, that is often unfortunate. Lately there have been the changes, but, whatever personal metamorphoses we might welcome, our calling has remained essentially the same. We are, as we always have been, a shadow community. To an extent, we have reached an accommodation. We pit our wits against each other, but when the sun comes up we draw a line. We let well enough alone. It grieves me greatly to have to say this, but that line seems not to be holding...'

'There was police raids all over the East End,' Sikes interrupted. 'Balmy Charlie Warren's sent in another bleedin' cavalry charge. Years of bloody work overturned in a single night. 'Ouses smashed. Gamblin', opium, girls: nuffin' sacred. Our business 'as been bought 'n' paid for, an' the filthy peelers done us dirty when they went back on the deal.'

'I have no connection with the police,' Beauregard said.

'Do not think us na?ve,' said the Professor. 'Like all agents of the Diogenes Club, you have no official position at all. But what is official and what is effective are separate things.'

'This persecution of our interests will continue,' the Doctor said, 'so long as the gentleman known as Silver Knife is at liberty.'

Beauregard nodded. 'I suppose so. There's always a chance the murderer will be turned up by the raids.'

'He's not one of us,' snorted Colonel Moran.

''E's a ravin' nutter, that's what 'e is. Listen, none of us is 'zactly squeamish  -  know what I mean?  -  but this bloke is takin' it too far. If an 'ore gets too rorty, you takes a razor to 'er fyce not 'er bleedin' froat.'

'There's never been any suggestion, so far as I know, that any of you are involved in the murders.'

'That is not the point, Mr Beauregard,' the Professor continued. 'Our shadow empire is like a spider-web. It extends throughout the world but it concentrates here, in this city. Thick and complicated and surprisingly delicate. If enough threads are severed, it will fall. And threads are being severed left and right. We have all suffered since Mary Ann Nichols was killed, and the inconvenience will redouble with each fresh atrocity. Every time this murderer strikes at the public, he stabs at us also.'

'My 'ores don't wanna go on the streets wiv 'im out there. It's 'urtin' me pockets. I'm seriously out of the uxter.'

'I'm sure the police will catch the man. There's a reward of fifty pounds for information.'

'And we have posted a reward of a thousand guineas but nothing has come of it.'

'Forget what they say about us on the screw stickin' together like Ikeys. If we tumbled old Silver Knife, 'e'd be narked to the esclop quicker'n an Irish dipper can flimp a drunkard's pogue.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Mr Beauregard,' said the Doctor. 'What our associate is venturing to suggest is that we should like to add our humble efforts to those of your most estimable police. We pledge that any intimate knowledge which comes into our possession  -  as knowledge on so many matters so often does  -  shall be passed directly to you. In return we ask that the personal interest in this matter, which we know the Diogenes Club has required you take, be persecuted with the utmost vigour.'

He tried not to show it, but was deeply shocked that the innermost workings of the ruling cabal were somehow known to the Lord of Strange Deaths. And yet the Chinaman evidently knew in detail of the briefing he had been given barely two days earlier. The briefing at which it had been assumed no more would be heard from the Si-Fan for some years.

'This bounder is letting the side down,' the amateur cracksman said, 'and it'd be best if he stripped his whites and slunk back to the bally pavilion.'

'We've put up a thousand guineas for information,' the Colonel said, 'and two thousand for his rotten head.'

'Unlike the police, we have no trouble with mendacious individuals coming forward offering false information in the hope of swindling us out of a reward. Such individuals do not long survive in our spider-web world. Do we have an understanding, Mr Beauregard?'

'Yes, Professor.'

The new-born smiled a thin smile. One murderer meant very little to these men, but a loose cannon of crime was an inconvenience they would not brook.

'And when the Whitechapel Murderer is caught?'

'Then it's business as usual,' said Moran.

The Doctor nodded sagely, and Sikes spat out 'too bloody right, pal.'

'Once our agreement is at an end,' the Chinaman announced, 'we shall revert to our former positions. And I should advise you to settle down with your Miss Churchward and leave the affairs of my countrymen to other hands. You have been unlucky with wives and you deserve your few years of contentment.'

Beauregard contained his anger. The threat to Penelope was beyond the boundaries.

'For myself,' said the Professor, eyes gleaming, 'I hope to disengage, and hand over the everyday running of my organisation to Colonel Moran. I now have the opportunity to live for centuries, which will give me the time I need to refine my model of the universe. I intend to undertake a voyage into pure mathematics, a voyage which will take me beyond the dull geometries of space.'

The Doctor smiled, crinkling his eyes and lifting his thin moustaches. Only he seemed to appreciate the Professor's grandiose schemes. Everyone else in the ring looked as if they had eaten bad eggs while the Professor's eyes glowed with the thought of an infinity of multiplying theorems, expanding to fill all space.

'Conceive of it,' the Professor said, 'one theorem encompassing everything.'

'A cab will take you to Cheyne Walk,' the Celestial explained. 'This meeting is at an end. Serve our purpose, and you will be rewarded. Fail us, and the consequences will be... not so pleasant.'

With a wave, Beauregard was dismissed.

'Our regards to your Miss Churchward,' said Moran, leering nastily. Beauregard fancied he detected a moue of distaste on the Chinaman's proverbially inscrutable face.

As the sportsman took him back up through the passages, Beauregard wondered how many Devils he would have to ally himself with to discharge his duty. He resisted the urge to demonstrate bravado by forging ahead and leading his guide to the entrance. He could have pulled off the stunt, but it might be as well to remain in the underestimation of the ring.

When they reached the surface, it was near dawn. The first streaks of blue-grey crept upwards from the East, and the seagulls drawn inland by the Thames squawked for breakfast.

The cab still stood in the yard, the driver perched on the box, swaddled in black blankets. Beauregard's hat, cloak and cane were waiting for him inside.

'Toodle-oo,' said the cricketer, red eyes shining. 'See you at Lords.'