‘Get her shawl,’ I growled, crouching beside the poor woman whose head lolled sideways. The cut was bad and blood pumped from the slash, but she was still alive. I doubted we could save her, but still I had to try, and as Charles shakily handed me the tatty material I wrapped it as tightly around her neck as I could without strangling her. She murmured and muttered as I carefully pulled her up.
‘Take the other side,’ I snapped. Hebbert stood before me like a chastened child who had been caught stealing apples, awkward and ashamed.
‘Thomas, I—’
‘We can talk later. First we must find a hansom cab – we’ll take her to my house, but we need to hurry.’
The three of us stumbled forward, the woman still mumbling as she drifted towards unconsciousness, and I could imagine her warm blood seeping into my dark jacket, invisible in the night. Hebbert ran ahead and hailed a cab and we pushed the woman inside, seating her between us. I forced Hebbert into a jovial and lewd conversation, as much as the very thought disgusted me, so we looked like nothing more than two gents who were taking away a drunken unfortunate for a night of depraved pleasure. I kept my glove gripped firmly over the wound as I continued our charade. On the other side of her, Charles Hebbert looked as if he might cry as he forced himself to laugh along with me. My skin itched, and I thought of red eyes and a slick black tongue winding round my neck to try and reach this dying woman’s blood. I fought back a fit of coughing, barely breathing through my nose, all the while willing the horse to trot faster before our façade fell apart and the cab seats were slick with blood.
We called the driver to a halt close by my house but not outside it, and as Hebbert distracted the cabbie with payment and small talk, I made a pretence of flirtation with the dead weight of woman I could barely keep upright.
‘I wouldn’t give ’er any more to drink,’ the cabbie said to Hebbert, ‘not if you want your money’s worth.’ He laughed at that, and Hebbert joined in. The sound made me shiver. The jovial laugh I had known for years was now a stranger’s laugh.
We maintained our awful pretence at merriment until the front door had closed behind us.
‘The kitchen,’ I said. The woman was still breathing, but her skin was deathly pale. ‘Then go upstairs and get my medical bag.’ Charles looked at me for a moment, still dazed. ‘Go!’
‘Thomas,’ he started, and then thought better of whatever he was going to say and ran to the stairs. I was glad. We had plenty to talk about, but it had to wait.
I heaved her onto the table and then pulled off my sweaty, blood-soaked coat and threw it to the floor before carefully unwrapping the crimson shawl and peeling it away from the wound. The dirty material clung stickily to the loose skin on her neck at the edges of the gash, and once I had forced it away, I could see the damage clearly. I had known the chances were slim, but I doubted very much that there was anything left we could do to save her. Although he had missed the carotid artery, the cut was three inches wide and deep. Her clothes were soaked in her lost blood.
She gargled, trying to speak, and I leaned over her. ‘I am a doctor,’ I said, stroking her hair out of her face. ‘I am going to take care of you.’
It took her a moment to focus on me, and then her eyes widened slightly, her gaze shifting to my shoulder. Claws scrabbled at my back and I twisted around, instinctively trying to shake whatever it was away. But I could not. The weight of the thing that clung to me could not be shaken off.
On the table the woman tried to scream with the last of her breath, but a wet rattle was all she managed. I was filled with darkness, and tendrils of something thick, wet and rank slid up my neck and wrapped around my head confusing my thoughts and forcing me to look her way again.
Her eyes shone in terror and as she gasped her last I saw in their reflection the Upir, moving jerkily up over my shoulders, its terrible mouth open hungrily, its eyes two tiny pinpricks of soulless red. The air stank of the river and of all the things that had ever rotted in it.
‘Thomas.’
I jumped and turned, for a moment with no sense of who I was or who the plump, awkward-looking older man in front of me was. He was holding out my medical bag.
‘I have your bag,’ he said, and suddenly the weight shifted and the air cleared of the stench and I trembled, my face flushing as I panted, desperate to regain my composure. For those few minutes the Upir – I could not consider it a simple infection, not in that moment – and I had been one and I had felt its hunger and wicked delight and the ages of all the years it had existed. I was seeing through my eyes and Harrington’s and all who had gone before us. It was overwhelming and terrifying and enticing all at once.
I fought the urge to vomit. My hands were cold and clammy.
‘Thomas?’ Hebbert said again. He looked afraid of me, and that almost made me laugh aloud. What had become of us? What would become of us?
‘It’s too late.’ I pulled a chair out and sank down into it, exhausted. I nodded towards another. ‘There is a bottle of wine in that cupboard. Fetch it and sit.’
He did as he was told, a biddable servant. In any ordinary situation I would have found his behaviour disturbing – the switch from violence to such passivity – but this was no ordinary situation. We were both locked in something beyond our obvious control.
‘Thomas …’ His hand shook, the wine threatening to spill over the edge of his glass. ‘I wish I could explain. I don’t know what has happened to me – what happened to me before. I had hoped – no, I had prayed for it all to be nothing more than dreams … nightmares.’
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked. There was no need for elaboration, for the use of the name. He knew whom I meant.
Tears rolled from his eyes and ran down his blotchy cheeks. ‘I do believe it must have been – but I cannot explain it; truly I cannot.’ His eyes met mine, desperate for some kind of understanding. I said nothing but sipped my wine and let my blood settle back down while my mind freed itself from the image of the thing I had seen in the dead woman’s eyes. There was no need for me to ask a question of him, for he had started speaking, and it was my experience that when a man began to bare his soul he rarely stopped until he was free of his burdens.
‘When I was young – very young – I sometimes … I had thoughts. Urges.’ Shame hung heavy in his stilted words. ‘Ones that I would never act on, Thomas, I promise you that: they disgusted me. But they were violent and angry. It was a lust, that is really the only way I can describe it: a terrible lust to hurt – no, not just to hurt, but to terrify women. To have power over them. I knew I could never give in to those lusts – I would not. I would not be that man. I met Mary and we married and I swear by all I believe to be good and holy that I never raised so much as a finger against her, nor against Juliana. I loved them both very much – Juliana is the world to me, you know that. That other part of me, well, I locked it so far down inside me that I had almost forgotten it existed. And then somehow, back in that terrible summer, the box opened.’
He leaned across the table, his voice suddenly urgent. ‘I was not myself. There was no intent in my actions – you must believe me. Even as the – the events were occurring, it was as if I was in a dream – a nightmare. There were spaces in my memory that I could not reach, or I would not allow myself to reach. I convinced myself the things I saw were simply that, bad dreams, and I tried to drown them with drink. But all the time I was terrified that there was something more to them.’ He shrugged, helplessly. ‘And then Harrington died and I was so worried about Juliana and her pregnancy that the nightmares simply stopped and I was myself again. You cannot understand the relief I felt. Until this past two months or so when they returned.’
He paused to drink. ‘Perhaps I should just throw myself in the Thames and be done with it, Thomas. I cannot bring the shame of a trial on Juliana. She has suffered enough. She could not bear—’
‘I am not going to tell Henry,’ I said, cutting him off. ‘We will find another way.’
&nbs
p; He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘But … I don’t—’
‘Why did you kill Elizabeth Camp?’ I cut him off. ‘I know it was you, Charles. The pestle that killed her matches the one missing from the set in your study. Did she know something? Did she recognise you?’
He trembled visibly then. ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘she did not know me. But when I saw her one day while I was on the train to see Juliana, I recognised her. It was like being thrown into freezing water. I watched where she alighted and I followed her. I watched her return. Once I knew that this was probably a regular visit to her family I knew when I could strike. I just needed to wait for her to be alone in a carriage. One day she was. And then it was done.’ His eyes darkened with the memory of the deed.
‘You knew her from one of those times in Whitechapel?’ I avoided using the word ‘killings’. Charles’ mind was on the edge of broken, and with the wrecked body on the table in front of us there was no need to say more.
‘Yes.’ He could barely whisper the word.
‘And you thought she might implicate you, all these years after?’
‘No.’ He shook his head and more tears came. ‘No, it was not that.’
‘Then what? What could possibly have made you carry out such an attack?’
He stared at me for a long moment, two mad men locked in a world of insanity. Finally, he sighed, a terrible empty sound, as if releasing the last of his damned soul into the dark.
‘She made me remember.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘I could not bear to remember.’ Neither of us spoke, the clock ticking the minutes of the night away.
‘What am I to do, Thomas?’ he said, eventually.
I already knew the answer. He could not stay in this city – not while the Upir was here. I would have no more deaths on my hands, nor would I be faced every day with my complicity in his evasion of justice.
‘You must leave, Charles – go abroad. Australia or America, somewhere far from here.’ I was tired and my heart was heavy. We had all been cursed in some way or another, and perhaps this time I was partially to blame. My curiosity had driven me to Kosminski, and that had been not only my downfall, but Charles’ too, and tonight it had cost an innocent woman her life. ‘Have Christmas with your family, but then you must go. You will feel better out of London, I promise you.’
‘Leave Juliana? And little James?’
I said nothing more, for there was little fight left in him. I could not hate him. He had been my friend for many years, and there were none who could loathe Charles Hebbert more than he must be loathing himself.
‘I shall,’ he said. ‘I shall start my preparations tomorrow.’ His eyes finally fell to the corpse he had been so studiously avoiding.
‘What will we do about—?’
‘I will take care of her. And now you should go home. Sleep tonight, and then start your travel plans. And you must try and maintain a normal façade. Blame your desire to leave on exhaustion, or a wish to travel now that Juliana is settled, before you are too old.’
He said, ‘Thank you, Thomas.’
I did not want his thanks. I did not want him in my sight, nor this woman before me.
He washed his hands and face and then, with his shoulders still bowed, finally left.
I did the only thing I could do. First I drank some laudanum to steady my nerves, and then I picked up the woman and dragged her down to the cellar. The weight scratched urgently on my back and once again I felt the cold tightening around my head and a terrible hunger overwhelmed me.
God help me, I gave in to it. I was too tired to do otherwise.
*
In the morning, when I went back down to the cellar to parcel up the dissected remains, I tried not think about the parts of the woman that were missing – the pieces I had vague recollections of slicing off with a demented glee and cramming, bleeding and fatty, into my eager mouth. I kept the room in virtual darkness as I wrapped each part in paper and sacking cloth, pausing now and then and sobbing aloud at what I had done – at what some part of me had enjoyed doing. I would not feed the river with this one, however; the Upir would not have that. I would wait until nightfall and bury her in the patch of unused earth at the back of my garden, hidden from sight by an overhanging tree. If her body was found and Hebbert or I were called in to examine her, I feared I would go truly insane.
Despite my awful horror, I could not deny the energy that filled me once I returned upstairs and my house was scrubbed clean of blood. I felt revitalised, and I fell suddenly into a wildly good humour which was entirely at odds with the events of the previous night. I loathed myself for it, for I knew what it meant: I had not killed the woman myself, but I had allowed the Upir to feed from her. I had taken one step towards becoming the monster I had vowed not to; one step nearer to allowing the parasite into me, and God help me, enjoying it.
That night, when my labours in the garden were done and my ageing body ached in every muscle, I found a hansom cab and wearily made my way to Bluegate Fields and the respite of the poppy. I needed to forget. I needed to find myself again: Dr Thomas Bond, police surgeon and respected member of society. I would not let the Upir win. I would not.
32
London. Christmas Day, 1897
Edward Kane
Edward Kane had returned in good humour, eager to see not only Juliana and James but the rest of the friends he had made in London, including his erstwhile rival, Thomas Bond. It seemed, however, as he sipped his brandy and observed the room, that the world he had left behind while in New York had slid slightly off-kilter while he had been away. It was clearer than ever on Christmas day, only a week after his return.
Juliana had yet to tell Dr Bond that she was no longer interested in his marriage proposal but that didn’t bother Kane – he understood that it would be better when he was here too, rather than looking as if he had run back to America and left her to break the old man’s heart alone. Now that the game was won he felt a little bad about it. Bond was not himself, although he declared he was perfectly well. There was something distant about his manner, and over dinner, as they all feigned merriment, Kane wondered if perhaps Charles Hebbert and Bond, old friends that they were, had had some sort of falling out. They were as polite as ever, but their eyes slid over each other’s and there was none of the easy camaraderie that had been between them before, the result of years of friendship. They spoke to each other through Walter Andrews, rather than directly, and then when the conversation shifted, one or the other would turn their attention to Juliana or James rather than talk to each other.
Little James too seemed despondent. He had been excited to see his American ‘uncle’, but his small brow furrowed when he was left alone and even the abundance of toys he had been given – Thomas Bond was apparently determined to win Juliana’s heart through becoming more affectionate and generous with the boy – only lifted his quiet mood for an hour or so, then he would return to playing with a piece of rope and tying knots around one of his toy soldiers. Juliana was doing her best to provide a cheery façade, though Edward knew that she wasn’t happy about her father’s sudden travel plans, and it felt like only he and Andrews had approached the day in seasonal good moods. Now he was struggling to maintain it in the oppressive atmosphere that hung over the brightly decorated house.
‘You’ll miss Charles when he leaves, I imagine, Thomas,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and allowing the big meal to settle in his stomach. ‘You two have had a lot of adventures together.’
‘I shall,’ Bond said, sipping his brandy, ‘but a man must follow his heart and there is a lot of world beyond London. As time ticks on we all have unfulfilled dreams to chase.’ He glanced at Hebbert. ‘When does your ship leave? It must be soon, surely?’
‘Two weeks, Thomas.’ Charles Hebbert smiled, but it wasn’t the open jovial expression Edward had come to know. ‘And then I shall be gone.’
‘If it’s an unfulfilled dream, then you never mentioned it to Mother or me,’ Juliana said.
‘It sounds more like an old man’s folly to me.’ She had drunk more wine than was usual and her words had a bite in them – bite caused by hurt, but a bite all the same.
‘Oh, your father has mentioned a wish to travel many times over the years. To me at least,’ Bond cut in, patting her hand. ‘You should be happy for his new start. After all, you have the business and James and me—’ His eyes darted in Edward’s direction, and there was more than a touch of wariness in them, but he covered it with a gentle smile. ‘We will always be here for you. Isn’t that right, James?’ He ruffled the boy’s hair and the child nodded.
‘You can go and play, James,’ Juliana said softly. ‘And then we shall sing some carols.’
‘Our new world has become smaller, my dear,’ Hebbert said. ‘I can send you telegrams and letters, and perhaps you can all come and visit me when I am settled. It’s not an unfeasible idea. I have become tired of London and I fear it is becoming no good for my health.’
She smiled at that, never liking an argument, but her lip trembled slightly and Kane could see she was fighting back tears.
Walter Andrews looked awkward and Kane leaned in towards him. ‘I think a smoke in the fresh air might help my digestion. What do you say to joining me?’
‘I most certainly shall.’ His relief was almost visible and he followed Kane to the garden, where they stood in the freezing cold of the dark afternoon, the blaze of their matches and the escaping light from the house highlighting the frost that had lingered on the grass since that morning. Kane glanced back through the window. It all looked much more festive from the outside than it felt on the inside. He wondered if Juliana would allow him to stay tonight and take her passionate rage out on his body, or whether she would insist on his return to the hotel and the pretence of respectability.
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