The Candle Man

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Wouldn’t believe ’ow many unwanteds end up being flushed down the sewers, Bill. Me and Poll know what we doin’, love. You can rely on us.’

  That was then. Last night, when presumably they’d imagined he’d be taking them to some grimy, stinking, shite-hole lodging house down their neck of the woods. Some cheap little tart, barely more than a child herself, and her freshly-sprung bastard, still purple-skinned and coated in dried fluids, nestling in a laundry basket full of dirty clothes.

  This nice house, with its own front yard, seemed to have thoroughly spooked them.

  ‘Come on . . . job ain’t gonna do itself,’ he grunted.

  He pushed the gate aside, walked up the front garden and pulled the chain on the front door. The noise from across the narrow street was too loud to hear if a bell had actually rung inside and he was about to try again with a firm knock on the door when it cracked open.

  ‘Oui?’

  He could see a slender face framed by wisps of dark hair that had spilled from a tidy bun. Large, bleary brown eyes blinked sleep away whilst a pair of dark eyebrows arched in a wordless enquiry about his business. She tucked a tress of hair behind one ear. ‘Yes?’

  Bill smiled at her, careful to keep it polite and congenial: the weary but courteous greeting of a tradesman going about his rounds. She looked like she’d just woken up from a snatched sleep; her cheeks were blotched with fading pink, her eyelids heavy, one dusted with a little dry crust of mucous.

  Still, a real beauty, though. A real beauty. Some rich bastard’s tumble.

  ‘Lan’lord sent us, miss. To come take a look at the pipings on yer out-’ouse.’

  She frowned for a moment, struggling with his cockney accent. Her gaze quickly fell on the two women behind him. A man knocking on his own perhaps might have made her suspicious enough to query the unscheduled call.

  ‘This is number twenny-six, ain’t it, love?’

  She nodded. ‘Oui . . . yes, twenty-six.’

  ‘Right, I gotta take a look atcha plumbings,’ he said, waving a piece of paper around. ‘Lan’lord, see?’

  She hesitated a moment longer, glanced once again at Annie and Polly standing in the front yard. They both offered a courteous smile. ‘D’accord. All right. You come in, please?’

  She stepped back to let them pass into her narrow, dimly lit hallway, polite nods exchanged between them all as they wiped their feet on her doormat. And as she gently closed her front door, she was not to know that the rest of her life and her baby’s life were, at best, going to be measured in mere seconds.

  Bill saw Annie and Polly looking at him. He could almost read the accusation in their eyes.

  You said she was just a tart! Just a cheap tart!

  ‘You say you are come to . . . ?’ Her slender face creased as she struggled with her English. ‘What is this you come for?’

  Bill’s smile was stuck rigidly on his face.

  She ain’t no cheap slapper. The woman didn’t have the wrecked look of a prostitute: the pallid skin riddled with sores and dry flaky patches, powdered and rouged to look tolerable; the florid blossom of burst blood vessels; the red eyes of too much drink and worry. That’s what he’d assumed. That, or she’d been some flirtatious housemaid who’d tempted her employer once too often.

  But this foreign woman, she almost looked like a proper lady. One of them ones you could see taking the air in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning, all bonnets and bustles.

  ‘W-wha’ you waitin’ for, B-Bill?’ snapped Annie quickly. ‘Do it!’

  ‘All right, all right!’ he grunted.

  The woman’s bemused frown deepened to concern as she looked from him to the other two. ‘Que est-ce que . . . ?’

  His hand tightened around the long wooden handle in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Bloody well DO IT, Bill!’

  ‘All right! ALL RIGHT!’ he snapped angrily. His hand was out of his pocket and the tip of the twelve-inch blade embedded into her petite waist before he realised he’d done it. The woman looked down at the army bayonet, her sleepy eyes wide awake now. She started to scream. His other hand clamped over her mouth.

  ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’

  He tugged the long serrated blade out of her guts, pushed her up against the hallway wall so hard the back of her head smacked against the plaster. He turned the bayonet blade sideways, then rammed it into her bare throat. He punched the blade so heavily into her neck that the tip crunched its way through vertebrae and ground into the plaster behind her.

  Her muffled scream suddenly became a wet gurgle, blood pulsing between his fingers as the heels of her feet thrashed and drummed against the skirting board below.

  ‘Shhhh,’ he whispered. ‘There’s a good girl. Nice an’ easy now.’

  Polly stifled her own muted cry and Annie swore under her breath.

  ‘What you two fuckin’ starin’ at?!’ snapped Bill. ‘Go an’ do yer business!’

  The two women, frozen to gawping statues by shock, finally stirred. They hurried past him, Polly crossing herself, while he continued to hold his hand over the French woman’s mouth as she squirmed, struggled and kicked against the wall, blood pouring down the front of her blouse and pooling on the wooden floor.

  Bill watched her eyes – such pretty eyes too – slowly lose their focus and begin to roll uncontrollably as she went into shock. All whites now as her dilated pupils seemed to fixate on something up on the ceiling.

  Last night, after he’d finished discussing the job with the girls, he’d tried to imagine what it would be like shanking a woman. Of course, he’d slapped around a few in his time, tarts trying to short-change him, tarts who really should know better. But he’d never stabbed a woman.

  It wasn’t as difficult as he thought it might be. Not now he’d started. Just a little more squirming from her and it was all going to be over.

  It was unusual though, to say the least: some gentleman actually putting a price on a tart’s head. Mind you, this one . . . she was clearly no ordinary tart. She had some class, some poise. He wondered if she was something more than a maid. Perhaps a governess? He knew some of the posh buggers in London – the really posh types – paid for educated ladies from places like France to come and teach their children a bit of culture.

  She finally sagged, her body’s dead weight suspended by the blade of his bayonet still wedged into the soft plaster wall. Bill looked at the small triangle of pale skin at the hollow of her throat: the only skin below her beautiful oval jaw not covered by a dark tributary of blood. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman of class, albeit a dead one. He grinned. An added little perk to the generous money that gent was paying him to do this. He could feel the bulge in his trousers pressing against her narrow-framed body. He was fumbling at his buttons before he knew it, wanting to enter her before the warmth of her body had begun to wane.

  Annie and Polly found the baby’s cot up a flight of stairs in a small front room. It was a sparse room with bare floorboards, but the woman downstairs seemed to have gone some way towards making it more homely. Several threadbare teddy bears and stuffed farmyard animals sat side by side beneath the small window.

  ‘Oh, lord, ’elp us,’ gasped Polly. ‘Look at it!’

  Annie was. It wasn’t freshly born as Bill had promised them. It looked to her eyes like a baby several months old. She steadied her resolve with a mantra, one she silently repeated over and over whenever she had to do a job like this.

  Not even properly human yet. That’s how Annie rationalised it. Not like her little daughter who died of meningitis a few years back. Two years old, a cheeky smile that melted her heart and a mouth always full of jibber-jabber half-words. A real little person. Not like this fleshy, slug-like creature.

  They ain’t human ’til they can walk an’ talk.

  ‘Oh god, Annie! It’s not freshly born!’

  ‘Just an unwanted, Polly, s’all it is, love.’

  ‘We . . . we . . . can’t—’

&nbs
p; ‘Ain’t even a proper baby ’til someone says they want it, right?’

  ‘It’s a little boy.’ Polly stared in silence down at him, legs and arms kicking fitfully as he lay on his back fast asleep. This wasn’t what she was used to. The brats her and Annie had disposed of looked no different to piglets: squirming folds of discoloured flesh that promised to suck a young woman dry like a parasite, promised to turn a young working girl’s life to shame and ruin.

  Every one of those bastards they’d gotten rid of had been unwanted; every one of them like a monster in the corner of a room, the mother cowering away from it in another. But this one – she looked at the row of soft toys – this baby was loved.

  ‘It ain’t right,’ uttered Polly.

  Annie turned on her. ‘The mother’s dead now, stupid! What you gonna do? Look after it yourself?’

  Polly shook her head silently.

  ‘Bill’s payin’ us good for this one.’ She glanced down at the baby in the cot, stirring in his sleep. ‘It’s just a fuckin’ crib-rat,’ said Annie. She reached down into the cot. ‘An’ what do we do with bloody rats, girl?’

  Polly shook her head as Annie tossed the blanket aside and grabbed the baby’s bare feet. She turned to look away as her friend lifted him out of the cot by his feet, the baby now wide awake and squirming in her tight grasp. ‘We bash their little ’eads in, is what we do!’

  A mewling wail spun through the air and ended with a soft thud against the wooden floor. Polly clasped her hands over her face and whimpered at the sound of impact. She heard a second, softer smack against the floorboards.

  Outside, the muted clatter and bang of the businesses opposite filtered through the grimy window, filling the silence of the room. Polly heard the rustle of Annie’s clothing, her letting out a breath of long-held air. More than just a sigh.

  ‘It’s done.’

  Polly opened her eyes and immediately shot them away from the pale little body on the floor.

  ‘You can bag it,’ said Annie dryly, ‘since it was me ’ad to do the thing.’

  Polly could only nod as she opened the canvas grocery bag she’d brought along for the job and knelt down beside the small corpse. She touched a bare foot, still warm, pebble-stone toes still flexing and curling post-mortem.

  How many times had she and Annie done this before? Too many times to count. Baby farming, that’s what the papers called their business, wasn’t it? All your troubles and worries gone, for a one-off payment. An assurance to the tearful and frightened young lady that their baby would be found a home, loving parents eager to adopt an’ all that. That’s what they were told. What they heard her and Annie say. Lip service. Polly suspected half the young women they’d saved from shame or a life of drudgery knew their assurances were an empty promise.

  The papers liked to portray women like her and Annie as wicked witches, monsters who no doubt cooked and ate the freshly born babies they spirited away into the backstreets of the East End. But as Annie quite rightly said, although what they did was for money, it was a service to the community. A good thing. The streets were choked enough with abandoned or orphaned children. Many starving to death. A slow and horrible way for a life to end. What they offered, to her mind, was a service not so far removed from the many backstreet abortionists she knew operated from grubby front rooms they deigned to call ‘surgeries’. All that differed was the matter of timing: a week, a day, an hour even, was all that separated her and Annie from those sorts.

  In or just out of the womb, that’s the only difference. They’re still unwanted.

  She lifted its foot, no longer than her index finger, and cradled its small lifeless body in her other hand. Its head, misshapen now, lolled on a shattered neck as she lifted it into the grocery bag.

  But this one, this little life, had been around for some time, maybe even several months. Long enough to have a name, perhaps. She glanced at the tin rattle in the cot. Long enough to have a few possessions of his own, even.

  Not ‘he’. ‘It.’ She chided herself. It. It.

  ‘Come on,’ snapped Annie. ‘We’re done here.’ She grabbed Polly’s arm and pulled her to her feet. They made their way out of the small bare room, the grocery bag swinging by its handles as they clumped noisily down the stairs to the hallway.

  ‘Bill? You there?’

  ‘I’m in ’ere,’ came his voice, muffled from behind a door off the hallway. Annie stepped towards the door and began to push it open.

  ‘Hoy! Don’t come in! I’m busy in ’ere!’

  ‘What you doin’?’

  ‘Finishin’ up. You done your business?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then off yer go with it. I’ll see yer tonight with yer share.’

  ‘Right. And dontcha be late with it. I mean it, Bill!’ Annie said.

  There was no answer through the closed door, just the shuffling, bump and slide of movement. ‘Bill? I said don’t—’

  ‘I ’eard! Now fuck off! I’ll see you two later!’

  Annie turned to Polly and nodded toward the front door. ‘Let’s go.’

  Bill heard the front door close and watched them through the net curtains, stepping out through the garden gate and walking back down Cathcart Street with their grocery bag swinging casually between them as if contained nothing more than several pounds of potatoes. He turned back to the work at hand.

  The head was completely off now and covered like a badly wrapped gift in a length of tarpaulin. The body was stripped naked, the clothes ripped and bloodstained and in a pile on the floor. He was going to have to bag them up and burn them later. The headless body he was going to roll up in the bloody rug on the floor and tonight, after dark, drop it into the Thames. The head? Well, he was friendly with a brickmaker who let him use his kiln from time to time for a few coins, no questions asked.

  Bill nodded. A very easy two hundred pounds earned, that was.

  Very easy indeed.

  He was rather pleased with himself, with the fore-planning, deciding to do the job in the middle of the day when all that noise from across the street was likely to cover a solitary scream. As opposed to the still of night, when a voice could carry.

  Well done, Bill.

  Two hundred pounds. A skilled craftsman might take half a year to earn that kind of money. And he’d earned it in the space of a few minutes. The girls were asking for ten pounds each, but he knew they’d done baby farming for far less. Tonight he was going to give them half that, and if they got all leery about it, maybe fifteen between them with the certain warning that if they asked for more, they’d be asking for a slapping.

  He hunkered down beside the naked form of the headless body and studied her pale, unmarked skin.

  She was such a beauty, though.

  Certainly no common tart. Slender but none of the sharp edges of the malnourished, none of the bruises, scratches and scrapes that came as normal with the whoring profession. Perhaps a maid, then – a household maid who’d managed to catch her employer’s eye? A scullery maid from one of them big tall houses in Holland Park?

  Bill knew not to ask questions. A professional didn’t ask questions. The gentleman who’d met with him had given him everything he needed to know: an address, a description of her and, in carefully nuanced language, what he wanted done with her and the child. But no one needed to be a genius to work out some west end toff had found his way into a very awkward situation. This unlucky girl presumably had been put up here for a while. She no doubt had assumed her fate had been sorted, the matter resolved; that her gentleman lover was going to provide for her like this indefinitely. A regular monthly allowance and a roof over her head. Never again having to work. But, the gentleman in question had opted for a far cheaper solution for this nameless foreign girl, presumably with no family in the country. To simply make her disappear. Another no one lost in the sprawling dim and dark beehive of humanity. London lost ‘no ones’ all the time. They pulled them out of the Thames nearly every day.

  The ge
ntleman hadn’t even bothered to ask what Bill would charge for his services. If he had, Bill would have, poker-faced, insisted on fifty pounds and not a penny less. Although, truth be told, he would have let it come down to thirty and still have been reluctant to walk away from such easy money.

  But two hundred pounds the gent had offered! Even a nib with education and decent clerk’s position would struggle to earn that over six months toil.

  He stuffed the last of her blood-soaked clothes into the bag. Not expensive clothes by the look of them, but certainly not the stained and second-hand frills and lace most working women wore to threads every day.

  He could imagine the girl in her new home with a crisp folded finny in her purse to spend on a brand new wardrobe, then taking herself on a hasty shopping trip along Oxford Street. Perhaps thrilled with the experience of possessing so large a denomination. Five pounds. A fiver! Being called ‘ma’am’ by some store girl her own age, who yesterday wouldn’t even have deigned to acknowledge her if she’d entered in her maid’s uniform.

  As he lifted the last of her things into the bag, something heavy slipped from the folds of material and thunked onto the soft rug between his knees. He reached down and picked it up, turning it over and over with his bloody fingers. He thumbed a clasp on one side that opened the item and saw within an image that took him several moments to register.

  An image that was going to allow him to ask for ten times the gentleman’s fee!

  A photograph. This woman, a baby and a man. A very important man with a face he vaguely recognised. Bill felt the first prickle of concern on his scalp. The gentleman who’d approached him for this job was doing it on behalf of this man – an important man? – in the photograph.

  There’s more to this than just one randy gent cleaning up his own mess.

  To his mind it meant one of two things: opportunity – or danger.

  Or perhaps a bit of both.

  CHAPTER 4

  12th September 1888, Whitechapel, London

  Mary’s fingers explored the dark folds of the man’s leather bag. It was like a cross between a sailor’s duffle bag and a school satchel; an odd bag for a gentleman to be carrying around with him. It looked old, the leather well-worn.