I nodded shakily.
He stood before removing his jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. His roughly tattooed forearms were broad, probably even wider than my legs, and I thought about the punishment to come, a punishment that I would undoubtedly not survive. ‘Now then, son. What will it be? Me or him?’
I could not speak for fear of what was to come and braced myself for his onslaught.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘So, no answer is it? Then I think it will be me.’ The leering smile left his face, to be replaced by the stern look of a man intent on murder. ‘Could I ask a last favour of you, before you go? Could you not flake on my first strike? Let me have a little fun first.’
His fist hit me like thunder, hard on the left-hand side of my face, bursting the skin. I was knocked from the chair and landed in a heap on the floor. He knelt down beside me, gripped my hair and lifted my head in one hand, before punching me a further five times with the other. I felt the cracking of bone and knew that my cheekbone had been broken. I groaned as he lifted me up again and placed me back on the seat.
‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘Still with me for a while yet.’
He struck me again, this time in my stomach, forcing all of the wind in me to wheeze from my broken lips in a fine mist of red over his clean, white shirt.
I was not strong. To most eyes I was little more than a child, and I knew that I would not last much longer at the hands of old Harold. Tears ran from my closing eyes as I felt my fate rushing towards me.
Before the next strike came my attacker was brought to a pause by the sound of voices from beyond the door. It would be his master, and I prayed then that I would die quickly rather than suffer more at the hands of this supposed torturer of men, Harold’s employer.
‘It would seem that my dear boss will have his fun with you yet, boy,’ said Harold as he withdrew from me and awaited our grim visitor.
The door opened and the silhouette of a tall man stood framed in the doorway.
‘Harold!’ he snapped. ‘Is this the wretch that murdered my Isabelle?’
Although my head swam with pain, the voice of the man made me lift my head towards him, as he entered the room and stepped into my sight.
I allowed myself the most ironic of smiles that my broken face could afford and let out a croaked reply.
‘Yes it is, Father,’ I said. ‘It was me who killed her.’
***
The journey back to my room was hurried. Head down and holding the ledger tightly underneath my coat, I bustled my way through the busy streets, fearful of the slightest noise around me. At any moment I expected to hear a police whistle and turn to see uniformed officers running towards me shouting, ‘Murderer!’
I shook uncontrollably. I had taken lives before; I knew this, of course. But never in this manner. I had finally turned into a monster. After stripping off my bloodstained clothes and washing myself, I picked up the ledger and opened it for the first time. What if Alice’s name was not written in it? Had I killed an innocent man? The answer was resolved quickly, however, as I found her name within.
She was listed on the previous day’s date, Thursday 1 November 1883, as Miss Alice Griffiths, Service Maid required for large dinner party at a gentleman’s club in Cavendish Square. In that moment I knew Alice’s fate. The club in question was the very same one that I had watched for days: the Dolorian Club, home of Lord William Falconer. I slammed the ledger shut and, after hiding it underneath my mattress, I put on my coat and left for the police station.
I was fully aware of the difficult position that I might be about to put myself in. To report Alice as missing would only lead the police to the Marylebone Service Agency, and of course to the mutilated body of Tandry, but I had to know if she still lived. I could have taken another route to discovery and gone to see George Purkess; surely he would have heard if there had been another servant girl murder, but if my theories regarding the Dolorian Club’s influence were correct, then any such murder would have been hushed.
No, what better way to put myself in the clear for the death of Tandry than to lead the police straight to his body? I would report Alice missing with the police and hope that my hard-earned relationships with the lower-ranking officers on the streets might bring about news of her.
I reported to the desk at Marylebone station and saw the familiar face of Josiah Grant, a desk sergeant of long association. As I approached him he scoured me with dark eyes.
‘Josiah,’ I said. ‘I have something to report.’
His eyes continued to bore into me and I could tell that something was amiss. He looked back down at the large book in front of him and continued to write.
‘It is a missing person,’ I continued. ‘I have a missing person to report… Josiah… Sergeant Grant. I am here on police business.’
‘Name of missing person?’
‘Alice Griffiths. She went out to work yesterday evening and has not returned.’
Grant had begun to write her name but stopped himself as I spoke.
‘Come back in two days,’ he intoned drily. ‘She is not a missing person unless she has been gone for three days.’
‘But, Sergeant, I fear that she has come to harm. Girls are being killed in the area; you know this.’
A wry smile broke onto his face.
‘Oh yes, of course girls have been killed, Mr Weaver. We all knew that – and you made sure that the whole world knew about your supposed ‘golden woman’. In fact, I think you’ll find it was not a golden woman who’s responsible for the crimes as you claimed, for we caught the real culprit. Your musings have been very well read in these parts and make us look fools. Then of course came the deaths of Abe Thomas and young Jim Worthing in the park. There are many around here who blame you personally for that.’
‘But the man you caught was not the killer,’ I implored.
He brushed away my pleading with a stroke of his hand.
‘The killer was captured, Weaver, and he sits now in Newgate awaiting the noose. If this girl of yours has gone astray then it will be purely to rid herself of your stain, nothing more. And if she is dead then it’s another on your conscience. Now leave here, before your attendance is noted by my colleagues and you find yourself in a cell with harsh company.’
I needed no further encouragement. There was nothing for me there, no hope of comfort nor concern from the law. If Alice were indeed dead then I could not expect any help from the police. They would raise their heads soon enough when the body of Tandry was discovered.
Of Tandry’s murder I felt no remorse. He was an agent of evil and was responsible for his own fate. If he indeed was under the employ of Falconer and the Dolorian Club then I was sure that, given their contacts in the police, no stone would be left unturned in the search for his killer, but without his ledger there was nothing to lead them to me.
I returned home, stopping off only to buy a bottle of brandy. I needed time to think, time to work out my next move. I was sure now that Alice was indeed dead and my only hope at retribution was to bring the whole fetid organisation, from Falconer downwards, to its knees.
Uncorking the bottle, I poured myself a large glass and began to look through Tandry’s ledger. It was unremarkable at first glance, merely a list of names and jobs spread throughout Marylebone and the surrounding area. I sought out the entries regarding Alice and found detailed notes of her work, the role she was required to perform by the employer and the address where she was needed. Each of these entries was correct, in terms of what Alice had told me herself about where she had been and what she had done. It was upon finding and noting her first job and moving to close the book that my eye was caught, however.
‘Felicity Moore.’
There in bold letters, recorded for work on the night before her death, was the name Felicity Moore, the girl nailed to the tree in St Peter’s Park whilst I was in Pluckley. Stunned now, I studied the book more earnestly, finding that nearly every page revealed a new victim: Eloise Dav
ison, the dark-haired girl jointed and left in a heap in the middle of the road; Catherine Davies, left crucified on the railings on Cuthbert Street. As I turned each page, more names were revealed to me, names of the women whom I had seen laid out on the floor of that terrible house in Boston Place: Florence White, Patricia West, Annie Flanders… until finally I saw her – Mary Pershaw, the girl whom Abe Thomas himself had sent to the Marylebone Service Agency; the girl who had, for some reason, murdered her only child before being sacrificed in Boston Place’s ungodly ceremony. Binding all of these names together was the final truth: each of these girls had at one time or other worked at Falconer’s home in Cavendish Square. I was sickened by what I had discovered, but I knew that, in the right hands, this ledger would be enough to bring the culprits down. I resolved to visit Mr Purkess the next day, ledger in hand. He would know what to do with this evidence; he surely could not deny me now. I would tell him everything – of the Dolorian Club, of the Golden Woman, Bethany and Tom Finnan; he would know it all.
I drained my glass and poured another. Tomorrow I would free myself of this knowledge and I would watch Falconer be brought to justice, but tonight? Tonight I would drown my misery at Alice’s demise.
It was as I collected together all of my drawings of Boston Place and the subsequent servant girl murders that I came across the battered tin box given to me by the owner of the Princess Alice, meant to be passed on to Tom Finnan. For some reason I had almost forgotten about it, caught up as I was with events after returning from Pluckley. It was large in size, quite deep and it rattled when shaken. Suddenly I felt a maddening urge to get inside it, to find out its secrets. After searching my rooms for a suitable implement, I took at it with a hammer and the iron spike that I had taken from the tree in Regent’s Park. The lid bent back, until finally the lock snapped and the contents of the box were revealed.
I had acquired a number of mementos from Sibelius Darke’s reign of terror: the odd photograph taken by him in his role as a post-mortem portrait photographer, letters written in his own hand, even a fire-damaged Frodsham’s pocket watch, bought from a very shady gentleman who swore that it belonged to the beast himself. I had no reason to doubt the seller; the watch seemed genuine enough, and it even had a foreign inscription which I later discovered was in Suomi, the native tongue of Finland, where Darke’s family originated before settling in Whitechapel.
Of course the words were all nonsense to me, but the meaning of the inscription did not get any clearer once I had it translated. The only translation I could find was: ‘Don’t paint the image of a demon on a wall.’ The man who interpreted the phrase for me said that he understood its meaning fully but said that you would have to be of Finnish descent to appreciate its sentiment. I remember at the time being fascinated by the importance placed on the phrase by a ‘demon’ such as Darke and spent hours staring at the watch trying to break the code, as if it were the key to understanding the man. Such time was wasted.
As I looked inside the tin box meant for Tom Finnan, however, I realised that all of my mementos were worthless when compared to the treasure that I had kept undisturbed under my bed and had only now uncovered.
There, inside the box, was a camera with two nameplates attached to it. The first plate stated the name of the manufacturer, Ottewill Collis and Co, London. It was the second plate, however, which attracted my attention the most, for it read: Property of Sibelius Darke, Osborn Street, Whitechapel. Never had I dreamt that one of Darke’s own cameras would have survived him. I had enquired after Darke memorabilia since arriving in London and had been told on countless occasions that nearly everything owned by Darke had been destroyed in the fire which had consumed his studio. To find a piece such as this together with – as I found on further investigation into the contents of the box – previously unseen photographic plates, was beyond my imaginings; a real and valuable treasure. I held the camera in my hand and considered its beauty. This was the tool of Sibelius Darke’s trade, the man himself had held and used this very item and, for the first time in my long obsession, I felt a real connection to him. I lifted the camera up to my eye and chanced a look through the viewfinder.
I had never had cause or want to use a camera before. Other than their use by Darke, they did not interest me in the slightest. To my mind, they could not capture a moment, evoke emotion or look into the soul of the subject in the way that a beautifully constructed painting or sketched drawing could. They had their place, I supposed, in recording and documenting a person or place, but that was all I thought them useful for. I had not yet seen a photograph that had really fired my imagination or filled me with interest as much as a quality piece of art could, and I knew for a certainty that they would never replace the much finer art form at which I excelled.
As I peered carefully into the wooden box, a sudden sense of nervous energy rippled through me. The beast himself had repeated this very action with this camera, and I felt his dark soul flood into me as I looked through the lens and saw the other side of my room inverted before me. A wave of tension coursed through my body and for a moment I felt quite dizzy. I put the camera down. Was it my imagination or had Sibelius Darke, child killer and cannibal, left a part of himself in this object? Did it sense my own hidden darkness and see a kindred spirit with which to join? The thought made me feel sick to my stomach which, combined with the head-spinning faintness, sent me lurching to my feet and running for the sink, retching in nausea. Once purged, I sank to the kitchen floor, bathed in sweat and riddled with a gnawing anxiousness. Thoughts rushed through my mind; memories of chocolate factories, of my bedroom and Victoria, of brothels with sweeping staircases, of bright hot metal and of a man dead in my wake, his face torn apart and his skull fragmented by my hand. Darke had not infected me with anything that was not already in place. I was as much of a killer, worse even, as I was heedless of the destruction that I had brought on those around me.
I wept.
I sobbed uncontrollably, wracking howls of penitence and humiliation, as the guilt and self-hatred of what I had done was finally revealed to me.
I do not know how long I sat there, but eventually I pushed myself to my feet and made my way back to the tin box, almost reluctant to see what further horrors it would bring me.
The rest of the contents of the box comprised various letters and notes written in Darke’s hand. Normally these would have sent me into a frenzy of excitement at my discovery but, in truth, I had not the energy left within me, nor the lust for knowledge, to bring even the spark of a smile to my lips.
Underneath the letters was a photographic plate, which I withdrew and examined. The plate contained the image of a newborn child, seemingly dead and sitting upon the lap of a woman wearing a large cloth of black velvet over her head. I had seen pictures such as this before and was aware of the fashion among post-mortem portrait photographers to conceal the face of the mother when capturing the image of a recently deceased child. I brought the plate closer to me and studied it. At first glance there seemed to be nothing amiss, but as I looked more closely at the babe, and more notably at its face, I could see that all was not quite right. There was something about the eyes of the child that was unnerving to me. Normally in such pictures the eyes took on a glazed and rheumy appearance, a sign to all but the most ignorant of viewers that the subject of the photograph was quite dead. This child was different, though. There was something about the shadow under the eyes, the shine of the pupils and the furrow of the brow, a desperate malevolence, which made me feel as though this child had seen and tasted death – but had somehow returned and hungered for more. I found myself entranced by the image, drawn in to staring at this fey babe’s eyes, unable to pull my gaze from them.
I do not know how long I held the plate in front of me, lost in time and place, and, if it had not been for the creeping fear which snaked its way up my spine and lit up my mind with terror, I feel sure that I would have become trapped within its power forever. The torment, however, the sheer dread
and cold turmoil which the sight of the babe instilled within me – it built. A ball of anguish developed inside me, churning its way up from my stomach until it reached such an unbearable level that I found myself screaming out loud in shock and hurling the plate across the room, where it shattered on the far wall.
Cold, bilious sweat dripped into my eyes as I sat shaking and staring at the broken pieces of the plate, which even then held something of a magnetic hold over me. I reached for my brandy glass and drained it, the sharp bite of the alcohol cleansing my soul of the horror that I had witnessed. Was this the foul magic to which Darke had succumbed and had it directed him in his spree of murder? I continued to drink voraciously until the power of the spirit took over me and I slumped into unconsciousness.
***
I slept fitfully and full of torment. Many times I woke myself with loud cries and pitiful sobs. My dreams were full of the dead, the dead I had created, such as Hiram Osborne, his thin body plastered in brown tar as he leaned into my cowering form and spat words at me, his breath rasping into my face. ‘Drown a man, will you boy?’ he hissed. ‘Strike a man and send him to the bottom. Is that how it is?’
Sweet plain Victoria stood at the end of my bed, dressed in a gown once white but now soiled with dark red blood. In her cupped hands she held something, and at first I could not make it out. I leaned in closer and saw that it was small, bloody and… raggedly breathing.
‘Look at our boy, Sam. Look what that man did to our special boy. We would all have been so happy together, just as you promised we would. We could have been a family but you lied to me.’
I tossed and turned in my bed, my sheet a sweat-soaked shroud which suffocated and strangled, pulling itself tighter around me until I felt that I would disappear within it and leave nothing behind. I fought to wake myself from my nightmares, but I had neither the strength nor the power to escape; I was weak and slow, brought low by my crimes.
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