The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  The other unforeseen aspect of detective work with which I had to contend - more perilous in its way than a loaded pistol - was boredom. The reality of the job is that, for hours at a time, you are literally doing nothing at all; only standing and waiting and trying not to lose your concentration. To keep my mind active during these periods of inertia, I took copious notes. For the most part these notes consisted of geographical and temporal facts (the names of the streets upon which we travelled; the precise hour of our arrival at and departure from every destination) and irrelevant details such as the weather, the appearances of passers-by, and the tales of murder and disaster shouted out by newspaper vendors. Occasionally, however, my youthful fancy overtook me and I added speculative sentences about the nature of Miss Vierge’s character and prudishly admiring comments on her appearance. I can be quite precise about all of this because I still have the notebook in question. It is, for those who know how to read between its banal lines (in other words, only myself), the first and longest love letter I ever wrote.

  When the time came for me to be relieved by Ivan - in the same doorway where we had, thirteen hours earlier, first met - I was utterly exhausted. I was afraid he would make some joky remark about my shattered appearance, and thus reveal the folly behind my hunger, but - perhaps because he was about to begin his shift, perhaps because he guessed the truth and did not want to hurt me - he was less flippant than he had been that morning. He asked me if anything had happened during the daytime; I gave him a brief report. ‘What did I tell you?’ he said, ‘She’s a deadun.’

  A week later, I was put on the night shift. Ivan, I think, had a couple of days’ rest and was replaced by someone else; the details are unimportant. The point is that the nights were even duller and colder than the days. I remember wrapping myself up in blankets like a tramp and sitting in that doorway, staring at the glowing rectangle of her bedroom window with its hints of her shape - now bending, now upright - silhouetted behind the muslin drapes. I remember having to walk around sometimes to stop myself from falling asleep and my legs from going numb. I also remember how I felt, at eleven or twelve each night, when the light was put out: the intensified solitude mixed with a feeling that my mind was now free to dream what it wished. In general, during the nightshift, I wrote less and dreamed more; strong winds were blowing from the north that week, and the wild, irregular light cast by the streetlamps made it almost impossible to keep one’s eyes on a page of text without feeling like a seasick sailor. The eerie quiet and loneliness of my vigil encouraged the dreams too; they were like the flames of a fire by which my heart was warmed. And it was only natural, I suppose - one might almost say crushingly inevitable - that my dreams were fixated upon the sole human being whose form my eyes had regarded during the previous seven days, through rain and fog, through sunlight and twilight, from behind and in profile, from a distance and sometimes, thrillingly, from up close - close enough to smell the scent she wore, to touch (though I never did) the glossy black locks of her hair, the tender white skin of her throat, the delicate bones of her wrist that I glimpsed once between the lace cuff of her sleeve and the doeskin hem of her glove; this heavenly woman whose habits, whose smile, whose daily life, though I was to her a total stranger, were as familiar to me now as my own, yet who, despite my unceasing watchful-ness, remained to me a perfect mystery. Of course my dreams were dangerous, but I could never have understood that at the time. It was in absolute innocence that I descended - that I fell - into the depths of unrequited love.

  What it is to fall in love with someone into whose eyes you have never once gazed . . . to whom, by force of circumstance, you are invisible, anonymous, an unnoticed blur in the horizon of a crowd. It was madness, it was torture, and yet in some ways it was also ideal. In that way, nothing could ever be spoiled. I could not say the wrong thing. She could not look at me, then carelessly away. I could not hurt or offend her. She could not grow weary of my presence. In the popular romances it is not like this, of course - the man is a physical presence in the relationship, as solid and real and desired as she - but life is not books, and in truth I cannot imagine a more intense way of loving someone than this: because not once in those weeks of slow uncatching pursuit did I think of myself before her; not once was she out of my sight or my mind. I was the opposite of her fiancé, absent in another continent. I was always there, while she was awake; and when she slept, I slept too. It was different when I began the night shift, but it would be wrong to say that I felt less close to her. True, I could not actually see her, but all the same I knew she was there, behind the dark wall; and what is more, I was privileged to protect her while she slept. No one is ever more vulnerable, more innocently and utterly themselves than while sleeping, and I alone in the whole city, the whole world, was awake, in her presence, while she voyaged into the darknesses within herself, and her body, unclothed, lay still and warm and breathing, under blankets and sheets, less than a stone’s throw from my own.

  It was on the last night of my nocturnal shift that the deadun revealed herself to be a sleeper. The next day I was due to begin a five-day holiday; indeed Dr Lanark, though well pleased with my efforts, was thinking of taking me off the case altogether. I looked worn out, he said (and I suspect the vehemence of my denials only increased his certainty that it would be healthier for me to stop following Miss Vierge), and anyway it was clear - ‘happily, Thwaite’ - that he had been right about the lady’s innocence, and that what remained of the month’s watch would be no more than a routine case. I was, despite my very real exhaustion, in despair at this turn of events, but I had already resolved that I would not disobey my employer. The thought had crossed my mind, I admit - it was the kind of thing one read in detective novels, after all: the rebellious ex-policeman continuing to investigate the case even after he has been told to stop and rest, driven on by the power of his obsession - but I was still, at this point, sufficiently sane and ambitious not to take such a step.

  My notebook tells me this was a Thursday, and the absence of concrete facts amid the half page of lachrymose entries for that night tells me that it began as another quiet and lonely vigil, and that I had no expectation of it being anything else. According to the notebook, it was ‘another night of wind and fog, the one constantly battling the other so that one moment I am looking clear ahead of me at the black shape of the house, its face ghoulishly illuminated by gaslight, and the next I can see nothing but a solid wall of luminous mist, so thick that if I hold my arms out in front of me I can barely make out the shape of my own hand’. The notebook also informs, in a hasty scribble, that at 12.39 a.m. a female figure left the apartment building, alone and on foot, and that I set off in pursuit. There is nothing more in the notebook until 4.50 a.m., so the intervening hours I will have to recount based solely on my memory of them: a memory that is as vivid as any in my mind, and yet which seems at the same time to be barely believable; as wild and lurid as some penny-dreadful fiction.

  She was dressed in a black cape and hood, and indeed were it not for my familiarity with her shape and gait, and the certainty that I had seen her emerge from the door of that particular house, I would have been clueless to the figure’s identity. From thirty yards behind, I had to strain my eyes merely to keep the black shape in vision, wreathed as the night was with those clouds of fog - forever drifting, breaking up, remassing - so that I could not have sworn at that moment if it was even a woman that I followed. I would have liked to stay closer, but in Mayfair there was almost nobody afoot at that hour and I was afraid she would hear my step behind her on the pavement and take fright. Between looming mansions in the mist she walked, and I, like a lost fragment of her memory, a discarded piece of her past, followed, invisibly, inescapably. The only sounds to reach my ears, apart from the occasional clatter of a cab in an adjacent street, were my own footsteps and breathing, and the ghostly moan of the wind as it disturbed the bare treetops. I remember feeling that there was an air of unreality to the situation: these broad streets, t
he ever-shifting fog, the flickering lamplight, the sense of quiet endlessness; all of this had the quality of a dream. As for the shadow that I followed, its progress was slow but unhesitating, like a sleepwalker’s. Not until she reached Piccadilly and suddenly ran across it into the Green Park did I wonder at the strangeness and dangerousness of her behaviour.

  I will not deny that there was in my chest up to that moment a certain euphoria, a sense of triumph and excitement. After all, this was how I had dreamed the job would be: mysterious, daring, uncertain; a world away from the desk and its papers in Baker Street. When she disappeared into the park, however, my heart misgave me. I feared that she knew she was being followed - that she ran because she was afraid for her life - and I half wished to cry out for her to stop, to reassure her that I was here to protect her from whatever unseen dangers lay ahead. But of course I didn’t. I merely ran, as hard as I could, in front of a cab on Piccadilly, the driver yelling something at me, and into the black expanse of the park.

  For another hour, it seemed, we continued like this: the hunter and the hunted; the ship and the siren. Through the park, to Constitution Hill; down the Mall and into Covent Garden; past Charing Cross and to the embankment; and then, my heart pounding at the thought of her jumping or falling into the river, my mind dreaming of how I would rescue her from its black depths, across Waterloo Bridge and into the rat’s nest of backstreets behind the train station. This was a part of London I didn’t know, or rather knew only by reputation, but it seemed incredible to me that it could be known to this beautiful, innocent young gentlewoman. Watching her drift, with that serene grace, through narrowing and increasingly ill-lit passages, never once halting or turning back on herself, quite oblivious, it seemed, of the whole menacing, odious city that surrounded her - the drunks and panders, the thieves and whores, the whispering mouths, the molesting hands, the foul sulphurous air - I felt as though I were seeing an angel navigate its way through hell. It was uncanny, astonishing, and deeply disquieting. What weird truth could lie at the root of it?

  The deeper we descended into that spectral, fog-blinded labyrinth, the more uneasy I felt. I walked more and more closely behind her, gripped the handle of the revolver ever more tightly inside my coat pocket. I was afraid for her and I was, I confess, afraid for myself. The quality of dream had long ago given way to that of nightmare, and a premonition of doom enveloped me as we walked. Finally, in a dark, crabbed street whose name I never knew (I was by now hopelessly lost), she stopped in front of a low black door and knocked three times. I was close enough to hear her breathe. I watched in wonder as she waited, her face, in profile, seeming utterly expressionless. Then, in a sudden gleam, the door was opened and she disappeared inside, without a word. It shut behind her.

  I was sick at heart and no longer knew what to think. Could those vile accusations possibly be true? From inside the tall building I could hear the sound of women’s laughter and strange, lewd music. The street where I stood stank of vomit and urine. This was, I knew, a den of vice; at best a tavern and at worst . . . but it was too incredible. I wouldn’t allow myself to think any further.

  For what was probably no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but felt like much longer, I waited outside, in a welter of despair and panic. According to the rules of my engagement, this was the limit of my duties. I was tortured, torn between my instinctive obedience to the rules and my fear that something awful must be happening to the woman I loved. In the end my emotions conquered my reason. I knocked three times on the black door. It was opened by a woman holding a lamp, and at her silent beckoning I walked through the hallway into a subfusc firelit parlour. Behind me I heard the door close.

  The room’s air was heavy with perfume: a sweet, cheap variety of which one often catches hints in the less salubrious parts of London. I stood in the entrance to the parlour for a moment, pondering my next move, and slowly became aware of the two other men sitting in armchairs in its sepulchral corners: one young, one middle-aged, both with an air, it seemed to me, of quiet malice and depravity. The young man drank gin and met my gaze insouciantly; the older man studied the pages of a magazine as if transfixed. At length a tall, blank-faced woman - the same who had silently opened the door to me - entered the parlour, took my hat and coat, and gestured to an empty armchair. The chair’s stuffing was old and it sank beneath my weight, so that I felt I was being swallowed whole by some velvet-skinned, toothless monster. The woman offered me a drink and, to calm my nerves, I assented. When she had fetched me a glass of lukewarm gin, she nodded to the young man, who followed her through a curtained doorway.

  Time passed. I waited. From upstairs I could hear various noises: gasps and grunts and bursts of laughter. Despite my naivety, I guessed what those noises must mean - I knew the business of the place in which I waited - and my heart sank, even as its beating grew louder and faster. I drank the gin and tried to gather my thoughts: in vain because I was too agitated, too warm. Unable to think of any particular plan of action, I loosened my tie, removed my jacket, smoothed back my hair. It was a cold winter night and the fire in the hearth was small, but to me that room felt infernal. The middle-aged man belched and I smelled stale beer and pickled onions on his breath. Eventually, to my relief, he too was called through the curtained doorway and I was left alone.

  It is an embarrassment to me, how long I waited in that parlour, docile and silent. I knew I ought to have raised a stink - that I ought to have pulled aside the dark curtain and run through the doorway, calling out Miss Vierge’s name, threatening the law on any who barred my way - but somehow the oppressive warmth and dimness and sour-sweet smell of that room unmanned me. And I must also confess to the odd, betraying, impure thought. At any rate, by the time the tall woman reappeared and nodded in my direction, I was more zombie than man. I levered myself out of the chair, picked up my jacket and stiffly walked towards the archway where the curtain had been held back for me.

  I passed into a corridor much darker and colder than the parlour. A large man held out a hand; without the need for speech, I handed him my purse. He withdrew a sum of money and returned the purse to me. He moved aside and I saw that the tall woman was now ahead of me in the corridor, and that she was beginning to ascend a flight of stairs which I could just make out in the gloom. I took it that I was meant to follow her. At the top of the first flight she turned down another dark corridor, though this one had pools of candlelight coming from below two or three doors, and lively sounds, including that throbbing, repetitive, disquieting music which I had heard earlier from the street. The tall woman stopped outside one of these doors and knocked. A voice came from within - a coarse, unladylike voice. Finally, at this moment, I mustered enough courage to speak. I don’t remember my precise words, but I made it plain through my stutterings that there was only one woman in this establishment whose company I desired, and that was she I had seen enter some quarter-hour before myself; and I proceeded to describe her. Troublingly, there was no hesitation or perplexity in the woman’s face; she merely nodded and held out her hand. I gave her my purse and she withdrew some more money. I knew what this had to mean, and yet all my reason and instinct rebelled against it. I felt sick with anticipation as the woman returned my purse and pointed me up a second flight of stairs.

  How well, and how strangely, I remember that staircase. For some reason its dozen or so steps seemed to me an ascent as strenuous and fear-filled as the near-vertical summit of a mountain. I began to feel dizzy, as it were with vertigo. I took, I suppose, a couple of steps and then suddenly the close dark walls were rearing up either side of me, the vista of slightly curving wood slipping in and out of focus. For the briefest of moments my mind was a blank. I had, as it seemed, no idea who I was or where I stood or what I was in the process of doing. It was the weirdest sensation. I could smell warm flesh and dried blood and excrement, I could hear someone coughing from behind a closed door; and yet these facts, these present realities, gave me no clue to my whereabouts. At that moment
, one might say, I was not even I. And then . . . how to explain the rush of doom that entered my chest? It was as though I suffered a premonition of my own fate. It was as though a future ghost of myself passed through me. I realise that must sound fanciful, but I swear I do not know any other way to describe the feeling. It was like déjà vu in reverse: I glimpsed the future and it looked back at me, its eyes horror-filled and pitying. Long seconds passed. Sweat poured from my forehead, and ran into my eye. It stang and I blinked, and suddenly the fog of confusion cleared. My memory returned and a vision of Miss Vierge, alone and vulnerable, flashed inside my mind. I began climbing the stairs two at a time, ignoring the vast dark bubble of fear that now filled my chest. Presently I came to another door. I knocked twice and entered. The door fell shut behind me.

  To my surprise, the room appeared to be empty. It was a small, bare space with grey walls, lit by a few large candles. The air was smoky and sweet, though I noticed it was a different sweetness to that which had pervaded the parlour. In the wall to my left was a tiny window which looked out on to the sidestreet where I had stood before. In the wall facing there was a small hearth with a fire burning, and a bucket of coals. To one side of this was a vanity cabinet, on which the candles stood, and a cheval-glass, and to the other a linen screen. And, in the centre of the room, unveiled, unornamented, brutally clear in its purpose, was a bed. It was a bed without pillows or blankets; and, though the sheet was clean and pressed, various dark stains could be discerned on the mattress beneath. I stared at this bed for quite some time, as if paralysed; I could hardly believe it was there, and that it was as it was. And yet, as I said, the room appeared to be empty, which puzzled me. I was badly startled, therefore, when I heard the creak of a floorboard beside me. I turned to see the figure of a woman emerge from behind the screen.