‘She’s probably still in shock from the attack.’
Whitelaw shook his head in exasperation.
‘Probably.’
Tom Drummond was loitering at the foot of the stairway.
The sergeant stepped towards him. ‘You made that cup of tea for her?’
Drummond nodded his head in the direction of the scullery. ‘One of the women is makin’ it.’
Whitelaw stared at him intently, and the husband appeared to shrink under his scrutiny.
‘How long you and her been married?’ he asked.
The question seemed to throw Drummond. ‘Near as you like five months now. Why?’
‘Your wife’s just been attacked,’ he said. ‘She’s had a very lucky escape. She could have been dead by now – or worse – but you don’t seem too concerned about any of it. Is there something you’re not telling us, Tommy boy?’
Sweat glistened on Drummond’s upper lip. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘I’m asking if you have any idea why someone would attack your wife. You haven’t been upsetting anyone, have you? Someone likely to take it out on Bessie?’
Drummond looked at his feet, then shook his head. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, copper. You think I know who beat up my Bessie?’
From behind him, a girl appeared carrying a tray with a pot of tea, cups and small jugs of milk and sugar. Even in the darkness of the passageway, there was something striking about her: a vitality at odds with the decrepit surroundings. Her brown hair was swept back and fell over the shoulders of a plain white blouse, buttoned to the neck. She was attractive, in a dark, foreign sort of way, and if I had to guess, I’d have said she was about nineteen.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and Drummond moved aside, eyeing her as she passed up the stairs.
Whitelaw gave a growl of a laugh. ‘What I’m saying, Tommy, is that if someone attacked my wife, I’d want to find out who did it and maybe smash their teeth in. I certainly wouldn’t be standing in my hallway watching a Jewess take her up a cup of tea. What I’d be doing is searching the streets, making sure the bastard never tried anything like that again.’
For a moment the words seemed to form in Drummond’s mouth, but he seemed to think better of it.
‘You want to say something?’ urged Whitelaw, but Drummond refused to take the bait.
‘As I said, I ain’t got a clue who attacked her.’
Whitelaw and I stepped back out into the rain. I looked over my shoulder to see Tom Drummond watching like a wolf in the doorway. We walked in silence. Both of us knew our odds of catching whoever had attacked Bessie Drummond had disappeared the moment I’d lost my man at Shoreditch. Indeed, if anyone was likely to find out who’d attacked her, it was probably Tom Drummond. He had connections we didn’t have. Rumour had it he did the odd job now and again for the Spiller brothers, two very large, very persuasive Yorkshire lads, who’d found God’s own country to be too small and had relocated to London’s East End. If you believed the stories (and why wouldn’t you?) they had their fingers in pretty much every illicit activity that centred on the docks: from prostitution to protection rackets, by way of a nice line in smuggling everything from bootleg booze to drugs. If it passed through the docks, the chances were the Spillers took a cut.
What was beyond doubt was the network they controlled throughout Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Limehouse, Poplar and all the way down to the far side of the Isle of Dogs. If Tom Drummond really wanted to find out who’d attacked his wife, and assuming he was in their good books, all he had to do was to ask Martin and Wesley Spiller to put the word out. Of course Whitelaw knew that too, and as we trudged back to the station house in Leman Street, I got the feeling that his final remarks to Drummond had been to encourage the man to do exactly that.
SIX
February 1922
Assam
I filled my cup once more from the cauldron of herbal tea, then followed Cooper back to our dormitory.
A single hurricane lamp hung limply from a rusty hook on the ceiling, bathing the room in its dim glow. The lamp shuddered as I closed the door behind me. There was no electricity in the monastery. Indeed, there was precious little of the stuff anywhere in the country east of Calcutta.
Most of the occupied beds were now shrouded under the fine mesh of mosquito nets, their occupants ensconced like moths in their cocoons. The exception was the Belgian, Le Corbeau, who lay there thrashing from side to side, his face, hair, chest and clothes all doused in sweat. I doubted he was in any state to stand let alone hoist a mosquito net.
‘Don’t worry about him.’
I turned to see Adler, inside his gauze sarcophagus, his back propped up against the wall and a book in his hands.
‘He’s going to be like this all night. A mosquito won’t even be able to land on him, let alone suck him dry. Besides, you put a net over the bed and in his state he’s liable to get caught in it when he tries to get up. He’d probably trip and break his neck.’
Le Corbeau let out a scream and flung his hands over his ears.
‘He’s almost a week in but it always seems to hit the young ones hardest.’
I made my way to my own bed.
The old man sat up, untucked one side of the net from under his mattress and lifted it so that he had a clear view of me.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Not too bad.’
It was a lie, but a healthy one. The pint of herbal tea I’d just drunk hadn’t done much to reduce my cravings, and the truth was I felt as though I’d been stepped on by a bull elephant, but it was important to keep a stiff upper lip about these things.
He nodded. ‘I hope you continue to hold up. To be on the safe side though, I’d suggest you too dispense with your mosquito net tonight.’
It seemed like good advice, if only because in my current state, I doubted I had the wherewithal to hoist the damn thing.
Adler returned to his book, and I made my way out the back of the dormitory to the washroom under the stars where I splashed cold water from a bucket onto my face. I looked up to see the tapestry of the night sky and searched among the constellations for that one special point of light, the talisman that was Venus, brightest of all. Napoleon, on the eve of battle, had taken it to be a portent of victory, and I too, while in the trenches, had on more than one occasion turned my head skyward in search of it. Tonight, once again, I looked for it, scouring every inch of sky, but found nothing, and its absence felt like abandonment.
The hut was dark by the time I returned, bathed only in the pale blue light which fell through two small windows. As for the hurricane lamp, the smell told me that its weak flame was put out not by human hand but by having exhausted its supply of paraffin. Slipping off my sandals, I lay down on the mattress as the wooden cot creaked in complaint. I pulled my blanket tightly around my shoulders as the chills started and my teeth began to chatter.
Across the aisle, I heard Adler snore. Beside him, Le Corbeau was grappling with his sheets and groaning like a man fighting a fever. Of the others, I couldn’t see much but the odds were that they, like me, were awake, each battling their individual demons.
I waited in anticipation of the torture to come. The agony, the fear, the half-formed pleas to God for relief or even just a quick death … I’d been here before of course. Twice before to be exact. Twice I’d tried to kick the habit, and twice I’d failed, crawling wretchedly back into the all-forgiving embrace of the O. There is nothing like opium withdrawal to make you realise your own weakness. The pain, both physical and mental, is absolute.
It would be worse here, in front of other men, even if they were going through their own hell. I wished my limbs could be bound to stop me from thrashing and my mouth stuffed with cotton to stifle my screams. But screams and thrashing, however undignified, were only the tip. Withdrawal brought with it nausea and vomiting, and uncontrollable excretions of a sort that made death seem preferable to shaming oneself in such a fashion.
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Under my breath, I began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, over and over again like a mantra, not through any religious conviction, but because the rhythmic repetition helped to stem the growing panic within. And with this home-made hypnosis, I settled in for what would be one of the longest nights of my life.
Next came the sneezing, then the opium cold: the rhinorrhoea, the goosebumps on the flesh, and the uncontrollable shivering. My head pounded in time with my pulse, every heartbeat spearing a shaft of white pain through my temples and my convulsing, sweat-soaked torso.
It could have been five hours or fifty minutes, but at some point I cracked. Pain coursing through every sinew, I fell from the bunk onto the cold cement floor, then dragged myself to my feet and out to the latrines. Leaning over the porcelain-clad hole in the ground, I vomited bile as black as the sky above.
The events of the rest of the night are little more than a tableau of scenes from a moving picture. I must have hallucinated: I was in the courtyard, surrounded by shadows, then back on the concourse at Lumding station, running, fighting my way through the bodies, not in pursuit of the faceless man, but sprinting for my life, pursued by an unseen presence. Running till the crowd became too thick, enveloping, suffocating. The sky went black, I saw a crow, falling to earth and lying on wet ground with its neck broken, and I heard the laughter of a dead man. I clutched at my ears, screwed my eyes shut, called out to heaven. It must have worked because I opened my eyes to the sight of an angel, all golden hair and beatific face. She ministered to me, led me back to the dormitory. Then next thing I recall is Adler’s face. I remember shouting something at him. I remember him dragging me out into the courtyard, fetching me a cup from the cauldron of herbal tea.
Convulsing with pain, I knocked it from his hands, cursing and hurling obscenities at him. I must have been screaming my head off for one of the Indian monks came running over. He shoved something between my teeth and the two of them forced me to swallow. And that’s all I remember.
The gong sounded at 5 a.m. and I opened my eyes to daylight. The cold, grey dawn of the hill country seeped through the dormitory windows. The pain in my head and limbs had receded somewhat, as it always did with the passing of night. Opium fever, like all fevers, is worse at night, preying on our fears in the darkness.
Around me, my room-mates were rising. For a moment, I lay there, wondering what they’d made of my antics. Slowly I sat up. Across the aisle, Adler was already on his feet, fiddling with his mosquito net. He looked over and smiled.
‘So, you survived the night?’
‘Possibly.’
He unhooked the net from above his bed and began to fold it.
‘Are you well enough to get up?’
‘Only if it’s for breakfast.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s not for another few hours yet, but if you can, you should get up all the same.’
I did as he advised. The others in the dorm were also up, all except the Belgian, Le Corbeau, who lay with the sheet over his head like a shroud as though he were already dead. Cooper in particular looked full of the joys of spring. He walked over to my bunk.
‘Still with us then, old man? That was quite some aria you treated us to last night.’
His tone wasn’t malicious, and he must have sensed my embarrassment.
‘Don’t worry,’ he continued. ‘Every one of us in here has given our own rendition of that particular song. Yours was, if anything, one of the milder efforts. Shame on you.’
He proffered a hand and helped me up from the cot and patted me on the shoulder.
I slipped on the pair of ashram-issued sandals and then examined the state of my ashram-issued shirt. Other than a few dried stains, there was surprisingly little to point to the fun and games of the night before.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Welcome to your first full day of the cure.’
SEVEN
February 1905
East London
The first we knew about it was the roar of the crowd heaving at the entrance to the house. Less than forty-eight hours after the incident in Grey Eagle Street, I was shouldering my way through a mob towards Bessie’s door. Sergeant Whitelaw was less circumspect, waving his truncheon and clearing his path with a cheery ‘out of the bloody way’ and a degree of vigour that suggested more than his usual level of animus. But then, he wasn’t keen on people, especially foreigners, and if there was one thing Whitechapel wasn’t short of, it was foreigners: Irish, Chinese, Jews, Armenians; Whitelaw cursed them all – but especially the Jews, and especially the denizens of the streets and alleys around Brick Lane.
I caught up with him in the unlit hallway where we’d stood two nights earlier, his face in the half-light, set in the rictus grimace of distaste. Perspiration beaded on his forehead and mutton chops, and the sharp tang of sweat hung over him like an aura.
We’d been on our usual beat: from Shoreditch back towards Leman Street station by way of Brick Lane, killing thirty minutes en route through some of the piss-poorest streets in London. We were ten minutes from home and a cuppa when we heard them: individual shouts coalescing into the massed clamour of a crowd. It was hard to tell what was going on. Brick Lane was always mobbed with men and beasts, which made it difficult to see what was happening on the pavement opposite, let alone a couple of hundred yards up the road. But the noise had us sprinting to the mouth of Fashion Street, and it was there that we saw them, six deep and seventy strong, crushed around a doorway a few blocks down.
Even as we ran, I knew it involved Bessie, and somewhere within, I already feared the worst. Sure enough, it was around the black door of number 42 that the crowd had massed, and for a split second I froze in my tracks, only to be reanimated, snapped back to my senses, by the roar of Whitelaw’s voice.
The sergeant leaned against the banister and exhaled. A ragged, wheezing breath. ‘These people,’ he said, directing his glance at the old woman who now stood, uncomprehending, in front of him. Her small, weathered mouth gaped open in fear, as she pointed to the first floor.
‘Up. Up stair.’
Whitelaw shook his head. ‘Bloody hell, woman. English! Does anyone here speak English?’
The old woman turned and called out in a confused, faltering voice, ‘Rivkah!’
A door opened and a figure appeared: a feminine outline in the dark hallway. As she came down the corridor, I realised it was the same girl who’d made the tea for Bessie two nights ago. Her eyes were red and puffy.
The older woman fired off a panicked sentence in a foreign tongue.
‘I speak English,’ the girl said.
‘Saints be praised,’ said Whitelaw. ‘And what’s your name, love?’
‘Rebecca.’
‘Well, maybe you can tell us what the devil’s going on.’
I steeled myself.
‘It’s Mrs Drummond,’ said Rebecca. ‘She’s been attacked.’
Before I knew it, I was halfway up the stairs, Whitelaw puffing his way up behind me. The grey day penetrated through a skylight, illuminating the first-floor landing. Two more women, middle-aged and shawl-wrapped like Russian dolls come to life, were standing at the threshold to Bessie and Tom Drummond’s room. The door hung limply on its hinges as though forced open by a gale.
I pushed past the women, then stopped dead.
Yellow light fell through thin curtains. The canary clung to the iron bars of its cage, and stared out. In years to come, it would be this scene and this light that would stay in my memory, frozen in amber.
Bessie lay atop the old brass bed, her face hidden beneath a mass of dark curls and her head framed by a halo of crimson blood. Her skin was grey, her body limp. The vital spark that was Bessie Drummond seemed to be seeping away before my eyes.
I was kneeling beside her by the time Whitelaw made it to the doorway.
‘God’s teeth. Is she …?’
I took her wrist. It was already displaying that strange, clammy chill which heralded death.
‘She’s
still alive,’ I said, then turned. Rebecca stood behind Whitelaw. ‘Have you called for a doctor?’
‘Yes, sir. Dr Ludlow. His rooms are round the corner. He’s been sent for.’
I knew the doctor: a Christian gentleman who ministered to the poor and had a reputation second to none, but I feared that there was little even he could do for Bessie now.
Despite the proximity of his surgery, the crowd had managed to arrive at the front door before the good doctor had. But then bad news had always travelled quickly through the streets of Whitechapel. It had been the same in Jack the Ripper’s time. A sinister bush-telepathy faster than telegraph.
‘Where’s Tom Drummond?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca. ‘Out looking for work, I expect.’
‘Who found her?’ asked Whitelaw, now standing beside me, peering over Bessie’s prone body.
‘I did,’ said the girl. ‘That’s to say, me and Mrs Rosen from downstairs. It’s she who’s gone to fetch Dr Ludlow.’
Before she could continue, there came the rumble of noise from below. I heard the front door open and the sound of boots on the stairs. Soon the tall, bespectacled frame of Dr Ludlow entered the room, his Gladstone bag in his hand.
‘How is she?’ he asked, throwing off his overcoat and dropping it to the floor, then coming to kneel beside me.
‘She’s a pulse,’ I said, moving aside, ‘but it’s faint and her breathing is …’
Ludlow carried out a cursory examination, then turned towards Whitelaw and me. ‘I can’t tell where all this blood is coming from. Help me move her onto her side.’
I steeled myself and took hold of her shoulders. Whitelaw held her legs. At Ludlow’s instruction, we gently rolled Bessie onto her side, and immediately furnished the doctor with the answer to his question. The back of her head was matted with blood, the skull staved in.
Ludlow’s composure faltered.
‘We’ll need to move her, and quickly.’ He turned to me. ‘Go out and hail a cab. We need to get her to the London.’
Death in the East Page 5