by George Mann
CHAPTER
4
It wasn’t that she enjoyed killing.
Indeed, she took no pleasure whatsoever in the act. The sensation of her sword tip sliding into the soft flesh of a target; the spurt of crimson blood as she severed their vital arteries; the expression of terrified anguish on their face as it dawned on them that their final moments would be spent writhing in agony, impotent to prevent their own demise … none of these things elicited even the slightest hint of emotion in her.
Indeed, it was this utter and complete absence of feeling that had led her to the role of murderess, mercenary, executioner. She had long ago lost her heart. Now, she was little more than a cipher, a shadow, a leftover trace of the person she had once been. She was undying and immoveable.
She still remembered the first time she had killed. She expected to be overwhelmed with disgust, horror, remorse. She imagined she would vomit and keen into the long nights in the weeks that followed, that she would vehemently hate herself for what she had done and be unable to reconcile her actions with her understanding of herself.
As she sat in the darkness planning every detail of the momentous act—where it would take place, at what time, with what weapon—she quietly accepted that she would be crossing a line she could never return from. Her motive might have been revenge, but in killing the man who had created her—who had turned her into a monster—she would also be killing something inside of herself. By carrying out this act of violence she would inadvertently be continuing his work, and finally giving up the last of her humanity.
She came to this realization as she lay in wait for the man, two curved blades clutched in her fists. The room was silent other than the incessant ticking of the clock on the mantel, measuring the seconds until he would arrive home and the deed could be done.
Everything had unfolded as she’d anticipated. The man stumbled in drunk at close to eleven o’clock. He fumbled to light a candle to guide his way. As the flame took hold of the wick and cast his face in sharp relief, she stepped out from behind the open door and slid the first blade through his belly.
Even now, she could see the look of absolute confusion on his face, how it slowly transformed to an expression of horror and desperation as he realised what was happening, and how the sorrowful realisation finally dawned in his eyes as the second blade bit home, piercing his heart and causing his body to convulse and fall limp to the floor.
She knelt over him as he faded, her breath coming in short, quick gasps. She waited for the welling feeling of loss, for the panic, for the burning shame. Perhaps even for the relief or the exhilaration that she had finally taken her revenge. But none of this came.
At first she rationalised this absence as shock; that the immediacy of what had occurred had rendered her numb, that everything else would follow later. Yet the only thing she felt as she crouched over the corpse of the man who had created her, watching his blood seep from the horrific gashes in his torso, was an acute sense of curiosity.
She had lived a lifetime since that day in Montmartre in 1826. Almost eighty years. Yet it was still vivid in her memory, like an old, stubborn stain that refused to be scrubbed away.
The next death followed a week later, driven by that same intense sense of curiosity: a need to discover whether there was any part of her that could still feel. This time it was a stranger, and she discovered that the fact that she did not know the person, did not understand their hopes, fears, and desires, made no difference to her whatsoever.
A string of murders throughout the streets of Paris had followed, but nothing she did—no matter the means of death, the condition in which she left the bodies, the manner in which she allowed them to beg or scream—could touch her.
She understood that this was not normal, that the people who found the corpses she’d left strewn across the cobbled streets in her wake were disgusted by what they saw. She read the newspaper reports about the hunt to find the killer, who the reporters had dubbed “the Scourge of Paris” or “the Executioner,” how the city’s populace cowered in fear that this shadowy killer might come for them in the night. She recognised the impact of her actions, but found herself entirely unable to care.
For a while after her murderous spree, she joined a travelling troupe of acrobats (for she had always been athletic), quitting Paris and touring from city to city across the continent. This had proved to be a distraction, for a time, but it did not last. She grew tired of being dragged from one unfamiliar town to another, and the initial lustre of a life on the road was soon eroded by the weariness in her bones and the emptiness where her heart had once been. She longed to have her pulse quicken with excitement, to feel alive.
One night after a show, she happened across one of the acrobats cursing and thrashing about her caravan in a blind rage. Earlier that day, the acrobat had discovered her lover rutting with another of the girls from the troupe. When confronted, he had simply laughed and carried on.
The girl begged her to help, and together they plotted vengeance through the night. The next day, the acrobat woke to find her lover’s heart on the pillow beside her. The girl never spoke a word about it to anyone.
The Executioner—a name she had embraced by this time—fled to evade discovery. But still she felt no sense of triumph, of fulfilment. There was nothing but a void in her soul, a deep sense of emptiness at the core of her being.
She had not sought this strange, nomadic existence, but it found her regardless, drawing her in—out of necessity, perhaps, and as a result of her dispassion. She had fallen into this life because she didn’t care enough not to, and because, in some ways, she was still searching, still hoping to find that glimmer of a reaction in the empty space where her own heart had been.
She held her breath as the door opened. Her next victim had arrived.
CHAPTER
5
Sometimes, Veronica caught herself wondering why it was that the majority of her encounters with Sir Charles Bainbridge involved a visit to the morgue.
Was it that she was simply a glutton for punishment? After all, she might simply choose to abstain from such distasteful pursuits and receive a report detailing all of the necessary findings later. Did she really need to force herself to attend these trips to that detestable place, with its thick stench of blood and carbolic and its grisly occupants, most of whom had died violent or miserable deaths, their remains mangled by weapons or disease?
Of course, both Newbury and Charles would have accepted her choice to stay away without comment. She was, after all, a woman, and the morgue was certainly no place for one of those. Indeed, she knew that both of them, while perhaps more accepting of her independence than many other men might have been, felt a need to protect her from the more gruesome elements of their shared profession. And that, she concluded, was precisely the reason that she did force herself to go through with it, despite the fact that it turned her stomach and left her feeling quite unwell.
The current situation was a case in point. There were three corpses in the chamber, each of them laid out on wooden trestles. The attendants hadn’t bothered to cover them with the thin cotton sheets they often used to preserve the dignity of the dead. The bodies had simply been wheeled out and dumped on the trestles like unwanted animal carcasses in a butcher’s shop, spoiled and riddled with decay.
Veronica couldn’t stop staring at them. She wanted to look away—to focus on anything except the grotesque cadavers—but she felt strangely compelled to look on regardless, unable to tear her eyes away. She supposed it was a form of macabre fascination, a reminder of one’s own tenuous grip on life. She’d come close to ending up like that herself on more than one occasion. She wondered who might have gathered around her butchered corpse to poke and prod at it in an attempt to tease information from its lifeless lips. Who might yet…?
The nearest of the corpses, a man who had been in his mid-twenties from the look of him, had a terrible fixed grin on his face. Veronica couldn’t help feeling he wa
s laughing at her. It was as if—even dead—he knew some secret that she did not, and was lording it over her from beyond the grave, amused that she was so appalled to find herself in the presence of his battered, bloody corpse. She wondered what he’d been thinking when he died, and whether the bodies of the dead ever did retain the memories of the people who had once inhabited them. The thought gave her a chill.
Memories or not, a corpse could nevertheless tell a story. She’d seen Newbury examine them before, and was always amazed how much he could extrapolate from any given injury or mark, from an eviscerated belly to the pinprick of a needle in an upper arm. He could unravel what had happened to a victim simply by reading the direction of their wounds or the objects in their pockets.
Not that it was difficult to see what had happened here. Just like the others—the elderly man and the middle-aged woman with whom he now made uneasy bedfellows—the younger man’s chest had been cracked open and his heart ripped viciously from within. Even now his rib cage yawned open, split into a ragged-edged wound. Around the gaping hole the flesh was puckered, waxy, and spattered with gore. His hands were fixed like rigid claws by his sides, as if he’d been raking at something in the moments before he died, either in self-defence, or more likely in abject pain. Perhaps both. His shirt and jacket—now little more than ragged, bloodied strips—still hung loosely from his shoulders. They had clearly been torn open in a hurry to provide access to the flesh and bone beneath. It seemed to Veronica that the makeshift surgery had been performed while the man was still alive.
The smell, of course, was horrendous. The corpses had already begun to decompose, particularly those of the two men. The woman was a more recent addition, a victim from the prior evening, Veronica had been told, although her flesh had already lost its pinkish hue through so much blood loss, leaving the body looking pale and doll-like.
She wondered what Bainbridge had found at the scene. She could only begin to imagine the amount of spilled blood. It must have been everywhere, pooling on the floor, sprayed up the walls, dripping off the furniture. She shuddered as she thought about these pale, violated corpses in situ in their homes. Here, as harrowing as they were to look upon, they seemed to belong. Here in the morgue, that was where corpses like these were supposed to reside. But in their own homes, butchered like swine and surrounded by the accoutrements of their lives, they would have been utterly incongruous, somehow even more awful to witness.
She’d seen their like before, of course, more times than she cared to remember, and each and every occasion had left an indelible impression upon her.
Sometimes she wondered if her life would always be steeped in death.
She laughed at herself. Now she was just being maudlin. Although it was difficult not to be while surrounded by the remains of the recently deceased.
She tore her eyes away from the body of the young man, looking for Bainbridge. She needed a distraction.
He was standing beneath the tiled archway at the other end of the antechamber—really nothing more than a screened off section of passageway—deep in conversation with another man, a Professor Archibald Angelchrist.
Veronica wasn’t quite sure what the man was doing there at the morgue, but she harboured a growing sense of suspicion. He had never been properly introduced to her, and ever since he’d arrived he’d been speaking with Bainbridge in hushed tones, evidently intent on excluding her from the conversation. She’d gathered he was a government advisor, although she was not yet entirely sure in what capacity. She’d also gleaned that he already knew Newbury, which had come as something of a surprise. Newbury had never mentioned him, not even in passing. Whatever the purpose of his attendance, it was obscure and left her feeling a little uncomfortable. Well, more uncomfortable.
Clearly, though, he and Bainbridge were close. Veronica suspected the man had something to do with whatever secretive business Bainbridge had been getting up to with the Home Secretary these last few months. He was always heading off for meetings of an undisclosed nature, waving away her questions on the matter as if they weren’t important. This was despite the amount of time they had spent together over the summer while she’d assisted him on a number of unusual cases.
Newbury had been busy with that Lady Arkwell business—which, as far as she knew, remained unresolved—so Veronica had put herself forward to assist Bainbridge on a number of matters in Newbury’s stead. There’d been that whole scandal about the vicar who’d been disinterring freshly buried corpses to feed them to his son, who’d contracted the Revenant plague, and the matter of the Gozitan midget and his “spiritualist” automaton, who they’d caught fleecing gullible members of the gentry for hundreds of pounds. Those were just two of the more memorable cases they’d investigated together in the last few months. There were numerous others, besides. Yet, for some reason, Bainbridge was more distant from her now than he had ever been before. She couldn’t understand it, and she hated feeling suspicious. She wondered if perhaps she should discuss it with him, but dismissed the idea, at least for the time being. Bainbridge had never been particularly good at discussing such personal matters. He’d probably only take offence.
The two men turned suddenly at the sound of echoing footsteps in the adjoining room, and she turned to follow their gaze. Two figures were striding purposefully towards them: the willowy mortuary attendant—a weasely, odious man at the best of times, who seemed to revel in his disdain for the police—and Newbury, who looked immaculate in his freshly pressed black suit. He was clean-shaven and appeared to be bursting with energy as he hurried along beside the slightly taller man, beaming at Veronica despite the gloomy, funereal air of the place. She felt her spirits lifting.
Bainbridge stepped in to intercept Newbury’s path. “You took your time,” he said, morosely.
Newbury grinned, clapping a hand on Bainbridge’s shoulder as he came to a stop. He caught Veronica’s eye with a sly, mischievous look. “My apologies, Charles. I wouldn’t have kept you waiting in this miserable place if it hadn’t been for the Prince of Wales.”
Bainbridge raised an eyebrow. “The Prince of Wales? Have they finally managed to get you up to the palace?” The incredulity was evident in his voice.
Newbury shook his head. “No. He called on me, just a few hours ago.”
Veronica almost laughed out loud at the expression on Bainbridge’s face as he received this news. “What? At Chelsea?” he blurted out.
“Indeed so.”
“Good God. You’ve reduced the monarchy to making house calls, Newbury! What the devil did he want?”
Newbury smiled. “We can discuss that later. Let’s get this business over and done with first.” He turned to Angelchrist. “Good afternoon, Archibald,” he said.
“Likewise, Sir Maurice. Always a pleasure.”
Newbury glanced over at Veronica. “I take it you’ve been introduced to Miss Hobbes?”
Both Bainbridge and Angelchrist looked utterly crestfallen. “Oh … how utterly inconsiderate of me,” said Bainbridge, taking two strides towards her. “My dear, I’m so sorry. I’ve rather let myself down. I just got caught up in the conversation…”
“I fear we’ve neglected you, Miss Hobbes. We’ve been a little preoccupied, but nevertheless, it’s utterly unforgivable.” Angelchrist came to join her and Bainbridge, taking her hand. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Veronica lowered her handkerchief and smiled. “Indeed, Professor. I’ve heard a great deal about you,” she lied, studying his face to gauge his reaction. He nodded thoughtfully, as if the idea didn’t overly concern him.
Now that he was standing before her, she had to admit he didn’t seem all that sinister. He was a smart-looking man in his early to mid-fifties, just a little older than Bainbridge. His hair was thinning and grey, and his moustache was neatly trimmed and still mostly black with a few flecks of white. He was shorter than Bainbridge by a few inches, and his face was careworn and friendly and creased easily around the mouth when he
smiled. His eyes were a deep, warm brown.
“Right,” said Newbury, coming up behind the two men and clapping his hands. The sound ricocheted off the tiled walls. “Tell me about your corpses, Charles.”
“You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic about it,” said Veronica, although she was careful to keep any disapproval out of her voice.
Newbury laughed as he followed Bainbridge over to the three trestle tables and their gruesome occupants. She decided to wait with Professor Angelchrist, who, like her, was content to watch the proceedings from a safe distance. She noted the mortuary attendant had slipped away during their conversation.
“Three victims,” Bainbridge began, indicating each of the corpses in turn with a swift chopping motion. “All killed in the same fashion within the space of a week. No obvious links between the victims, although we are continuing to explore that possibility. Each of them has been opened up in the same way, and their hearts removed.”
“Hearts removed?” Newbury echoed, leaning over so that he might peer into the open chest cavity of the nearest victim, the young man who had so fascinated Veronica earlier. He wrinkled his nose at the festering scene inside.
“Yes. We’re wondering if there’s any ritualistic or occult significance,” said Bainbridge. There was a tinge of hopefulness—even desperation—in his tone. Veronica felt for him. It was an awful job, and an even more awful responsibility, to be the one accountable for bringing the killer to justice. More so, for explaining to the victims’ families exactly why their loved ones had been so brutally executed.
“Where were they found?” asked Newbury, circling the grisly diorama, drinking in the facts. “Indoors, evidently.”
“In their own homes,” Bainbridge confirmed. “The first one, the young man, here, had been dumped in his bathtub for the servants to find the next morning. The makeshift surgery had clearly been performed in the same bathroom, too; the walls had pretty much been redecorated with the poor bastard’s blood.” He sighed heavily as he moved round to stand over the corpse of the older man. “This chap, Mr. Geoffrey Evans, was found in his kitchen by his wife, who woke up in the middle of the night, realised he wasn’t there beside her, and went downstairs to look for him. He was spread out on the tiles in a sea of his own blood. And this last woman was discovered by her maid this morning on the floor of her expensive library. This one’s slightly different, though. The victim clearly put up a fight. There were signs of a struggle at the scene, and you can see the wounds on her forearms where she raised them in self-defence.”