Burton & Swinburne 1 - The Strange Affair Of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

assailant soared high above the top of the warehouses, and, in midair, vanished.
     

THE COMMISSION
    Die, my dear doctor! That' s the last thing I shall do!
    CORD PALMERSTON
    "Great Scott, man!“ exclaimed Lord Palmerston. ”What have you been up to now?"
    Burton lowered himself gingerly into the chair before the prime minister's desk. His body was bruised; his right eye blackened; his lips cut and puffy.
    “Just an accident, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
    “You look perfectly hideous!”
    You're a fine one to talk! thought Burton.
    For the past two years, Palmerston had been receiving Eugenicist lifeextension treatments. Though seventy-seven years old, he currently had a life expectancy of about a hundred and thirty. To match this, he'd received a cosmetic overhaul. The loose skin of his face had been tightened, the fatty deposits removed, and the discolorations eliminated. Paralysing toxins had been regularly injected into the wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth, smoothing them out and giving his face the clean contours of a young man-or, thought Burton, of a waxwork, because, in his opinion, the prime minister appeared to have wandered out of Madam Toussaud's. There was nothing natural about him; he was a shiny mockery of himself, a freakish caricature, his face too white and masklike, his lips too red, his sideburns too bushy, his curly hair too long and black, his midnight blue velvet suit too tight and foppish, his eau de cologne too liberally applied, and his movements too mannered.
    “I say!” declared the prime minister. “It's not the first time you've been knocked around, is it? I remember when you came back from Abyssinia with those dreadful wounds on your face. You seem to have a nose for trouble, Burton.”
    “I think it's more a case of trouble having a nose for me,” muttered the adventurer.
    “Hmm. Be that as it may, when I look back over your history I see one disaster after another.”
    Palmerston leafed through a report on his desktop. The desk was an extremely big, heavy affair of carved mahogany. Burton noticed with amusement that, just below its lip, there ran around it a horizontal band decoratively carved with scenes of a highly erotic nature.
    There were not many items on the desk: a blotting pad, a silver pen in its holder, a letter rack, a carafe of water and a slender glass, and, to the prime minister's left, a strange device of brass and glass which sporadically emitted a slight hiss and a puff of vapour. Burton could make neither head nor tail of it, though he saw that part of the mechanism-a glass tube about as thick as his wrist-disappeared into the desk.
    “You served under General Napier in the East India Army and undertook intelligence missions for him, I believe?”
    “That's correct. I speak Hindustani, among other languages, and I make up well as a native. I suppose it made me a logical choice.”
    “How many languages do you speak?”
    “Fluently? Twenty-four, so far, plus a few dialects.”
    “Good gracious! Remarkable!”
    Palmerston pushed on through the pages. Burton found it astonishingand ominous-that so much had been written about him.
    “Napier speaks highly of you. His successor, Pringle, does not.”
    “Pringle is a cretinous toad.”
    “Is he, indeed? Is he? Bless my soul, I shall have to be a little more rigorous in my choice of appointments, then, shan't l?”
    Burton coughed lightly. “My apologies,” he said. “I spoke out of turn.”
    “According to these reports, speaking out of turn is another of your specialisms. Who was Colonel Corsellis?”
    “Is, sir-he still lives. He was acting CO of the Corps when I met him.”
    Palmerston tried to raise his brows but they remained motionless on his taut face. He read aloud:
    "Here lies the body of Colonel Corsellis,
    The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is."
    The corner of Burton's mouth twitched. He'd forgotten that youthful doggerel.
    “To be fair, he did ask me to write