by Alex Scarrow
‘Five,’ said Geoffrey.
Warrington cocked his head. ‘What?’
‘Five tarts. The Kelly girl . . . ?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘And this Kelly lived in the same boarding house as one of the others?’ asked Oscar.
‘Yes, one of them. But these women change rooms all the time. They miss a rent, they lose their bed, they find another. It is not implausible that two of these whores might have shared the same lodging house at one time or another. We can use or dismiss these casual associations to whatever end we want.’
The room was quiet. Through the wood-panelled walls, they heard the faint sound of several raised jovial voices coming from the Chelmsford Room. In the club’s main lounge, an energetic game of poker was in progress. Warrington was sure the Lodge’s sergeant-at-arms would whisper quietly for the gentlemen in question to pipe down.
‘This chap will have to die. And this time, George, do please be sure he doesn’t slip through your fingers. And with regret, this Kelly girl, too. Do be very sure we have her whereabouts before you dispose of the man.’
Warrington nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘But – and listen closely, George – his body will not be presented as this “Ripper” character.’
Warrington’s head jerked. ‘Why ever not?’
‘If the police have a body, if anybody recognises his face – that concierge, for example, at The Grantham – then we’re leaving too many lines of enquiry open. I want you to kill him, George, and dispose of the body. That is all. He’s going to vanish and that will be all.’
‘But without the corpse, Henry, this Ripper story will just continue. You know what these awful bloody newspapers are like. The next tart who happens to die in a bloody manner will be the Ripper’s next victim; and so on and so on. We give them a body and this ridiculous story will die.’
‘If we give the public a body, we give this Jack the Ripper a face. And how long before some enterprising writer or journalist decides there’s money to be made in investigating and writing this Ripper’s life story?’
The others nodded at that.
‘I would like this matter concluded as simply, as cleanly and as invisibly as possible. By the time you have finished meeting him tomorrow, I want the body of one last Ripper victim and this Candle Man back in London, in a sack . . . at the bottom of the bloody Thames.’
CHAPTER 58
8th November 1888, Liverpool
The small balcony outside their hotel window looked out upon the Mersey. Even at night, the docks all the way along the busy waterway were still alive with industry. Orange gas lamps and burning pyres in metal bins dotted the quayside, their amber glow reflected on rain-slick brick and concrete.
The sky had cleared a space in the clouds for the moment, allowing the moon a chance to decorate the warehouse rooftops with its sparkling quicksilver reflection. A two-tone glistening industrial landscape of cool moon blues dotted with pinpricks of orange. Quite beautiful.
‘They never stop, do they?’ said Mary. Even up here on the third floor of the hotel, she could hear the occasional clatter and grind of cranes working and the echoing voices of men barking orders at each other.
‘Never,’ whispered Argyll into her hair.
She shifted within the comforting cradle of his firm arms, tilted her head backwards to look up at him. The moon picked out the firm, slender line of his nose, the line of his jaw, the diagonal twitch of a muscle across his lean cheek and poet’s eyes that glinted deep within pools of shadow. So very, very handsome.
I love this man. She was aware she said it aloud far too often. It cheapened the words and she worried it made her seem too needy. How strange a pair they were. Just over a month ago, it was she caring for him. She was the adult, the mentor, the one to be wholly responsible for the other. And now it was utterly reversed; now she was being taken care of. Almost like a child once again: carefree, unburdened with worries, able just to sit and play with fantasies whilst someone else worried about the mundane matters of tickets and payments and precisely which dock they needed to present themselves at, and when, and to whom, and so on.
John’s ‘soon’ had all of a sudden become ‘tomorrow’.
This evening they were staring out one last time from their hotel balcony at the rooftops and cranes, chimney pots and masts. This evening was a celebration. A bottle of nice red wine with a posh-sounding name. Mary had tried wines before, but always the cheapest, and found the taste quite revolting. But this wine was lovely. She sipped again from her china teacup, a two-piece set he’d bought her last week after she’d fallen in love with them in a shop window. Despite eating not so long ago, it had quickly gone to her head. She wanted to giggle with pleasure, giggle with excitement.
‘Tomorrow our adventure begins,’ she whispered.
‘Mmmmm.’ She felt his chest vibrate deeply.
‘I never even dreamed of America when I was young. The best dream I ever had was of escaping to London; can you believe that?’ She shook her head at how limited her imagination was, how parochial her dreams had been. It all seemed so far away now, the soot-black and hopeless warrens of Whitechapel. The ever-present smell of decaying rubbish, the sharp tang of burning coke, the meaty odour of a labourer’s sweat and the stale stew of alcohol on their breath. A dark hell of hopeless, rotting souls, grey-skinned mole men and women living, so it seemed, in an eternal twilight of gas-lamp nights and fog-choked days. And so much further away, the always wet, brooding valleys of Wales, embracing suffocatingly small villages of narrow streets paved with slate.
‘Tell me something more,’ she said. He knew the sort of things she liked to hear about. He’d told her pillow stories of all the wonderful things that they were going to see and do together in that big, wild country.
‘You’ll see that new statue they built in the middle of the bay,’ his deep voice softly rumbled. A soothing vibration. ‘That’s the first thing we shall see: Laboulaye’s lady, Liberty, golden bronze and holding her candle, towering above our ship. We’ll sail into New York harbour and you’ll see the Brooklyn Bridge ahead of you. And as many ships coming in and going out as we’ve seen here.’
‘Tell me about the wilderness, the frontier.’ She loved how he described it. The scale of it.
‘There’s so much sky, Mary. Horizons that seem to stretch to infinity. Out on the prairies, you can stand in the middle of a hundred square miles and not see a single tree. Just the sweeping hummocks of spurs and hills covered in grass, and nothing but the soft whisper of it all stirring . . .’
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. A world of deep blue sky and a rich, swaying carpet of olive green. And air so clean. And no sounds of factory whistles, nor the sharp brittle snarling of bad-tempered men returning home after work, nor the muted whimper of tears through a bedroom wall, the clunk of boots wearily undone and carelessly dropped on a bare wooden floor above. Nor the muted murmurs that suddenly, without warning, became a man’s bark and the sound of a fist making contact. A million miserable noises from a million desperate people living cheek by jowl in a man-made hell.
As he talked of the crystal white peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Platte River’s endless, looping energy, the haunting salt flats of Utah, he felt Mary’s weight in his arms and against his chest grow heavier. And finally, when he stopped talking, he could hear her breath, deep and even.
She’s asleep now.
He bent down and scooped her legs up with his right arm and stepped back off the balcony, back inside to their hotel room. Carefully, still wary he might wake her, he laid her on the bed.
You know exactly what to do.
Argyll nodded.
So do it, then.
He looked down at her, fast asleep, a half-smile on her face. ‘She won’t feel a thing.’
That’s right.
‘She won’t feel a thing,’ he said to himself again.
Best to get on with it. Hmmm?
Get the knife and get started. Remember, ‘John’ . . . you have a train for London to catch.
He looked at the room’s clock. It was five minutes past seven. His train down to Euston was due to leave at eight o’clock. Time enough to do what was needed and make his way to the station. Time enough if, like the pig was saying, he got started now.
Argyll stepped away from the bed and reached for what he needed on the small round table beside the balcony door.
He realised his face was damp with tears as he stood over her. He knelt down beside her and stroked her pale cheek. ‘I’m sorry . . . so very sorry,’ he whispered into her ear.
And then he began his work.
CHAPTER 59
9th November 1888 (12.00 pm), Blackfriars, London
Warrington was completely bemused by the man’s choice of meeting place. The very same place: the disused printer’s warehouse. If the fool had the intention of evading them a second time, then he was feeling particularly optimistic. This time around, all the exits were known about and covered with men.
This time he had his two remaining Lodge men – Orman and Robson, the latter still limping noticeably from his last encounter with the Candle Man – and also two dozen constables and a chief inspector, a member of their Lodge, commanding them. They were posted outside the building. They were going to see nothing of what went on inside and were under orders to prevent anyone leaving until told otherwise.
What was perhaps more odd about this meeting was the time he’d chosen for it: midday. Although one would describe it as gloomy in here beneath the roof of metal spars, there were enough holes and gaps in the moss-clouded glass tiles above that it was certainly not a darkness that this slippery bastard could take any advantage of. Pallid lances of light from the overcast November sky outside stabbed the gravel and concrete floor. It was a still and quiet place, save for the soft burble of pigeons in the rafters.
This time, we’ll see and hear him coming.
He checked his timepiece; it was a couple of minutes to midday, according to the small gold arms on its enamel face. Warrington stroked the handle of the revolver in his coat pocket. He was going to do it. He was going to be the one to pull the trigger.
It was his choice. He needed to do this. He needed to see the man dead.
The nights were becoming something of a problem. The sleeplessness. He realised it had very much been a mistake. Not the actual killing of those two tarts. No, obviously they had both needed to be hushed. But it was how it had happened. It was unprofessional, it was foolish, it was reckless, and he’d been angry, enraged, that Babbitt had slipped out of his fingers like that. Rawlinson was right: both women could easily have been throttled and dumped in some coal shed, or just bundled over a low brick wall into the Thames. But he . . . well, Warrington had no idea what he’d been thinking. ‘Shred them like the Ripper’s work,’ he’d told Orman. And good god, the man had done just that. Warrington had nearly vomited as he and Orman had emerged from that narrow passage to Mitre Square, covered in the second woman’s blood.
It had been dark enough that most of what he’d done to her had been little more than a wet glint here and there. But it was the sounds he’d not been spared. Her dying noises. It was the sense of bath-like warmth from the dots of blood on his cheeks. The glimpse of the catastrophic wound, the pulled out loops and coils of her still-tepid offal, draped across her chest and shoulder. Just like the Candle Man had done with the last woman. Warrington wanted to mimic that, to ensure Babbitt was seen as guilty for the deaths of those two. That’s what his thinking had been. And doing what they were doing – if only for the few quick minutes he’d been down that passageway – he felt like he had become him. Because – Warrington was absolutely certain of this – he couldn’t have ordered such horrendous butchery to be done while he was himself. Not as George Warrington, a good Christian family man with many charity projects and good public deeds to his name.
No. For a minute or two, he suspected some dark force must have entered him; whatever evil it was inside this chap had somehow found its way inside him.
That’s why he needed this. That’s why he wanted to pull the trigger. He was going to kneel over Babbitt’s dying body and look into his eyes so that he could know for sure that whatever had got inside him, and fleetingly turned him into a monster, was back inside Babbitt and dying with him.
They say that the last image caught on a dying man’s retina is an open window to his soul. Maybe, just maybe, in Babbitt’s eyes, he’d catch the faint glow of dying red embers, and that whiff of sulphur and evil inside the man.
Then, perhaps, his nightmares would stop.
A voice called out. It was Robson. ‘Someone enterin’ the delivery yard!’
No point trying to fool the Candle Man that he was alone. They’d tried that last time, with night on their side, and it hadn’t fooled him. Hadn’t turned out too well for either Warren or Smith.
‘All right!’ he called back, his voice echoing interminably across the empty building. It finally faded enough that he could hear the pigeons again, the tap of dripping water . . . and yes, faintly, the slow, deliberate crunch of boot heels across loose gravel, then a steady clack onto concrete floor.
Framed in a doorway, he saw the man’s tall figure silhouetted.
‘You’re exactly on time by my watch!’ Warrington nervously called out.
The Candle Man slowly crossed the vacant floor of the warehouse until finally, a few yards short of Warrington, he stopped. ‘Only an amateur would turn up late, George.’
‘I . . . I should warn you that . . . I’m not alone.’
Babbitt chuckled. ‘Really?’
Warrington needed to get this done. Get this over with. First order of business was that girl who’d run off to Liverpool with him.
‘Where’s Mary Kelly? You understand there’s no way we can conclude this business between us until we know where she is.’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know how much she knows, how much you’ve told her about all this; it really doesn’t matter. She represents too much of a risk to—’
‘I shan’t lie to you, George. She knows everything about me. Who I am, what I do.’ He cocked his head slightly. ‘What I am.’ He shrugged. ‘I can quite understand why you want her dead. She is such a chatty little soul.’
What I am? Those words struck home. Warrington realised that, for a while now, he hadn’t actually been thinking of this man as a him or a he. The Candle Man had become an it. A phenomenon, a principle. Almost a force of bloody nature.
He remembered Rawlinson’s reassuring words. Don’t mythologise him.
Easier said than done when you weren’t looking into these sunken, glinting eyes.
‘So then . . .’ Warrington steadied his voice as a finger caressed the smooth, warm metal in his coat pocket. ‘Where can we find her?’
Warrington watched as the Candle Man fumbled for something beneath the fold of his coat and, for a desperate moment, thought he was struggling clumsily to pull out a gun of his own. Instead he saw a flicker of movement and heard the slap of something heavy on the floor between them.
Please not another head. He didn’t think he could cope with that again, particularly the head of some young woman. He flinched involuntarily before he realised he was staring down at a worn leather satchel.
‘Why don’t you take a look inside?’
Warrington looked down at it. The bulge inside the bag was too small. He felt a small tickle of relief.
The Candle Man smiled; his straight thin lips were little more than the puckered edges of a wou
nd. ‘Go on, George, why don’t you take a look?’
Warrington found himself obediently stooping down and carefully, with one finger, flicking the flap of the satchel back. The leather, worn rough inside the flap, was wet and dark. Avoiding the wet, which was almost certainly blood, he lifted the mouth of the bag open and peered inside . . .
Jesus.
CHAPTER 60
9th November 1888 (8.00 am), Whitechapel, London
It was quiet this morning. Argyll had paid the cabby at the top of Whitechapel Road, ten minutes’ walk away from the address he had. The cab driver seemed quite bemused as to why a gentleman would want to be dropped in a place as grim as Whitechapel at six in the morning. The morning had yet to wake itself up, the sky still a half-dark, low, heavy and grey, and promising another day of spirit-sapping drizzle.
He’d passed dozens of men bundled up and huddled against the spit in the air as they shuffled through the half-light to work. Argyll made to appear likewise: just another worker in a thick coat striding towards a place he’d rather not be.
As he turned off Dorset Street and entered Millers Court, he picked out the house numbers, finally locating the one he was after. He took the three steps up off the narrow pavement and saw it was a door that had a corroding lock. He tried it, and yes, as Mary had told him, it wasn’t locked. The door swung gently inwards, creaking and wobbling flimsily. A front door thick with rot and held together only by layers of paint and rusting metal brackets nailed on the inside.
The hallway was oppressively dark, but by the wan light of the grey dawn, he could make out the doors on his left. The second . . .