The Vice Society

by James McCreet

  So, once again, I had been thrown upon the cold and blackened bosom of the city to sustain myself. There, amid the cacophony of traffic, the choking smoke, the faceless crowd and the inhuman masonry, I was once more to chase stories to fill my stomach – at least until the Mendicity Society tired of pursuing ‘Mr Mann’.

  O, there are bodies I could apply to for charity, but I cannot tolerate plaintive letters to the Literary Fund so that those ‘literary’ men can sneer at my body of work and deny me ten pounds because I am not a ‘writer’ in their eyes. I would rather chase the fire engine, loiter at the magistrates’ court and gain access to the public inquest than take their charity.

  Thus, at the windowseats of the house, I ordered a tongue sandwich with plenty of mustard and looked absently through the day’s papers. Behind me, the noisy throng smoked and drank: penny-a-liners talking fantastical rubbish about the book of theirs that was sure to be printed by Such-and-Such publishers of Paternoster-row, or the article of theirs that was certain to run uncut in all of the following day’s press. At talking they are artists; at writing, they are talented talkers.

  Before me, the city was framed within the plate-glass window – an animated canvas containing everything a man could desire to fill his nib: the omnibuses bristling with top-hatted and bonneted passengers; the magdalenes with their insinuating winks; the false beggars preying on tourists; the street boys always one penny away from the grave; the lonely death in the upper room; the fallen horse and the splintered bone; the duke with dung-splashed legs; the thief with the duke’s watch in his palm.

  And the unnamed, unknown murderer walking there among the crowd – just another face, just another fare, just another man with the power and the intention to take the life of others. It could be any one of them, for any man or woman can kill. One might not think it, or will it, but there is evil in us all. It remains hidden and buried in those of a healthy mind, but if one should uncover even the outermost tip of that darkness within, it will grasp tentacularly and draw one in, deeper and deeper until wrong seems right and the most depraved longings are confused with the higher emotions. Lust, greed, ire, envy . . . these are the tips of the tentacles that lead to the rotting blackness at the core of everyone.

  Take, for example, the young fellow sitting beside me. With a yearning and almost desperate gaze, he watched every attractive lady walk past, casting his eyes hungrily at their ankles. He scanned every torso in hope of the momentary movements of clothing against their forms. A bachelor, perhaps, or an unsatiated young husband. Such insensate desires take hold of a young man and, if unmoderated, motivate him to acts that would ultimately affront his morality, deny his religion, shame his family and bring calumny upon his name.

  If I was in need of a story, I was to find it there in that index of fallible humanity. It would be some person, some incident, some crime, some phrase picked from an overheard conversation. Indeed, it was less than an hour later when Mr Williamson himself, fresh from his enquiries with Mr Jute, came into that very same coffee house and sat, alone, by the fire. Here was my story.

  I watched him read through the newspaper: a man who carried his own dark space with him though surrounded by two dozen chattering others. The house became busier, but the seats either side of him remained empty. Was that a scowl, or a frown, that crossed his face as he read an account of the Holywell-street incident and its open verdict? Was he instinctively weighing the evidence for himself and deciding that he would have solved it soon enough?

  Here was a man to whom stories cling as the smuts of the city air cling persistently to one’s clothes. Thus, it was only natural, when he finally left the coffee house, that I return his interest in me by following him.

  He took an omnibus east past St Paul’s, and so did I, hiding my scrutinizing eyes behind a late-edition paper left on the seat. I was with him as he alighted at the top of Fish-street-hill, and I watched him, a seemingly diminutive figure inside his black greatcoat, as he stood looking up at the fuliginous finger of the Monument: a sombre digit disappearing into rain-laden grey.

  ‘Not much of a view today, Mr Williamson,’ said the attendant Mr Jenkins, taking the entrance fee from his most regular visiter.

  ‘Much the same as always,’ answered Mr Williamson. ‘Do you have any news for me?’

  ‘I have not seen any of the gentlemen,’ said Mr Jenkins, answering the question he had been asked, in many forms, over the last seven years.

  ‘Hmm. One day, Mr Jenkins.’

  ‘I hope so. Not much custom in this weather. It will be bitter cold aloft, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Jenkins, but I think I will make the climb all the same.’

  ‘As you wish, Mr Williamson. I was to close shortly, but I will wait for you.’

  And climb he did: two hundred and two feet up those spiralling black marble stairs, his own footsteps echoing back at him within that chill space, round and round, seeming ever more inwards and upwards, towards the dim light of the upper doorway.

  On exiting that portal, the wind of the upper aether whispers inimically that you have left the temporal world, teasing your hair with frigid breaths and drawing you fatally towards the edge where you see it: the great city of London.

  No glittering spectacle, this – no fascinating canvas, but a limitless tapestry of soot and ash and smoke. There is the Custom House and the Mint; there is the flat, dead river with its steamboat plumes; there is the industry of Southwark pouring forth smoke from its chimneys; there is Westminster-bridge vanishing into the swirling greyness. And there is the void disappearing below.

  Of course, there is now a cage around the platform so that the very sky is barred and the urge to oblivion withheld by iron. The metal is cold to the touch, even in summer, but still few can resist approaching the limit to gaze upon emptiness.

  Dusk begun to fall. The dying day was edging towards a thin band of light at the horizon and fog could be seen rolling in: one of those suffocating, swirling infestations that would, in a few hours, make the Monument a crow’s nest above an uncharted ocean, make church steeples angular peaks and Southwark’s chimneys the ribs of half-submerged wracks raking through murky and deceptive shallows. St Paul’s would become a leviathan drifting lost.

  His breath hung still about him now in wraiths. Who can fathom what went through his head when he visited that place, this man who had seen death and cruelty countless times? As he stood there amid the swirling fumes of the city, did he too think of mortality? Was it eternal sadness that he felt, or was it revenge?

  Finally, with the light fading, he descended into darkness.

  ‘Anything of note this evening, Mr Williamson? Any fires? Any collisions on the river?’

  ‘Nothing, Mr Jenkins. Nothing at all.’

  The two paused momentarily beneath that broad plaque of unintelligible Latin on the structure’s base and the attendant locked the door. Then they shook hands once more and parted without further comment.

  I followed Mr Williamson west.

  He went on foot, as sure of the streets as only a policeman, or a criminal, can be. The night held no fear for him and the increasing fog did not disorient him as it cast haloes about the gaslamps. Onward he walked, following a pattern along Upper-Thames-street, to Bridge-street and then up Farringdon towards Skinner-street.

  I need hardly tell the Londoner where he was bound, for one can smell the place well enough from a distance. Its noisome gases have shamed the city for years: those mephitic exhalations emerging as steam from the seething mound containing upwards of 80,000 bodies. It was Spa Fields burial ground.

  Putrefaction poisons the air about this Golgotha, and morbific matter swells up from the earth – which is no longer earth but coffin upon coffin to the very surface so that the sexton must, under cover of night, rake bones from the surface and apply the long hand-drill to release noxious bubbles of rot that sting the eyes and coat the tongue with their coppery tang.

  Such was the case as Mr W
illiamson entered the ground. The attendant – a being that appeared to be half clothing and half soil – looked up from his exertions with the drill and gave the merest nod of recognition. He could have been the First Man, or the last: a creature coughed from the clay partially formed and still lacking the higher reason of humanity, his feet clogged with the compost of decomposition and his features a loose approximation of his species. Both visiter and sexton were flickeringly illuminated by the sparking chimney of the squat bone house.

  Mr Williamson raised the collar of his coat around his nose to mask the stench and walked to the modest gravestone in the ‘good part’ of the ground. A simple pewter vase containing a single flower had been knocked over at the foot of the stone and he righted it with cold hands. To his right, another attendant was at work heaping soil on to a barrow with a shovel.

  ‘You there – what are you doing?’ said Mr Williamson.

  The man stopped, apparently startled by a living voice, and stared dumbly.

  ‘Did you hear me? I asked you what you are about.’

  The attendant with the drill approached. ‘Bert dun tor. ’E clearn groan.’

  Mr Williamson blinked and focused on the one who had made the utterance. The man’s face was as devoid of sapience as an ox, and almost as hairy. The other sexton with the shovel, if conceivable, seemed still less cogent: a piece of animated skin and sinew with a dull light in his eyes.

  ‘Mus clear owd wud. Mek spes fo’ new ded,’ continued the ox man.

  ‘You are clearing old graves?’

  ‘Yus’ser.’

  ‘On whose authority are you doing this?’

  The ox man shrugged. It was not clear whether he had understood the question or whether he simply did not know the answer.

  ‘You are not to clear this plot. Do you understand? This part of the ground is to remain undisturbed. No digging here.’ Mr Williamson looked from one grave-digger to the other. In that dark and enfogging place, he thought he could see a strand of glistening drool hanging from the chin of the shovel wielder.

  ‘Here – I have a shilling for each of you. Now go about your business elsewhere.’

  A coin dropped into each filthy palm and the two trudged towards the bone house with the barrow. Presently, a fresh plume of sparks erupted from the chimney, casting a feverish red glare across the vaporous atmosphere of the burial ground. A nauseating pall drifted over the neighbouring properties.

  Mr Williamson bowed his head momentarily before the grave and then turned to leave. But as he did so, he was startled by a large black dog barring his path to the gateway. It did not growl or bark, but sat looking at him with an uninterpretable gaze. He stepped boldly towards the animal, yet it did not move. Rather, it maintained its unnerving stare as if trying to communicate some canine intelligence.

  ‘Bruce!’ yelled a voice from the bone house, and the dog stood to trot over to his master without another glance at the departing interloper.

  Still, I followed: south now towards the river and over Blackfriars-bridge. He arrived home just as the fog was reaching its impenetrable limit: a moist, almost viscous opacity wrapping all in its choking cloak. Bricks wept with it; timbers absorbed it; horses snorted at it; gaslight disappeared in it, and it clung in droplets to his coat as he stepped over the threshold to see the envelope waiting for him.

  There was no stamp or postmark; evidently it had been hand-delivered. He took off his coat and started a fire in the cold grate, postponing the opening of what was likely to be a message of little consequence from the Society – perhaps something from the enthusiastic Mr Jute, or a bulletin from one of the ongoing investigations.

  Only after he had made a pot of tea and eaten a supper of the previous day’s beef and potatoes did he sit in one of the two empty chairs before the fire to examine the letter. Following the rituals of experience, and to fill the hollow, silent time before he slept, he turned the envelope in his hands, smelled it, held it before the light and attempted to discern what he could.

  There was no writing at all on the envelope, which was curious enough and suggested that it was not from the Society or, indeed, anyone who knew him. The quality of the paper was exceptionally fine. It was scentless and there was no trace of hair, fabric or other matter caught anywhere in the folds – in fact, it was quite pristine but for some minor marks where it had been slipped under the door.

  He carefully opened the envelope with his pocket knife and folded out the letter, which was but a few lines written in a simple script. Brief it may have been, but the contents were to prove cataclysmic, leaving him sitting there, immobile, long after the fire had burned out and the chill of the night had crept into the house to sit beside him.

  Detective Sergeant Williamson

  You do not know me, nor is it necessary that you do so, but you may take it on the highest authority that what I have to tell you is the truth. You will soon learn as much.

  The death of your wife Katherine seven years ago was not suicide. She was murdered.

  No doubt you have read of the Holywell-street case of Jonathan Sampson. Follow this murder to its conclusion and you will have the solution to both crimes.

  Sincerely

  Persephone

  SEVEN

  We may be assured that Mr Williamson’s bed remained unslept-in the night he received that letter.

  Is it possible to conceive what thoughts entered his head when he saw those words stark and unequivocal: ‘She was murdered’? His instinct and logic had always told him that this must have been the case – had not the details of that inquest seven years previously provided evidence enough of it? But to see it written thus must have made the outrage as fresh and painful as if it had happened the previous day.

  Did those words cause him to imagine her there, atop the platform seeing all and being seen by the murderers – those three gentlemen – standing there with her? Did he imagine her face turning to meet the eyes of the others? Despite all she had heard from her husband about the evil of men, she would no doubt have exchanged pleasantries with her co-viewers. When had her smiles turned to a mask of horror?

  Murder. The act – even the word itself – was an abhorrence.

  Of course, he had done everything he could in those weeks and months following her death, including re-questioning all those appearing at the inquest (in his own time), and haunting the base of the Monument itself for a glimpse of those three men. But hard proof had been lacking, regardless of his certainty.

  He had not wept that evening he received the letter. His lachrymal facility had withered years ago and been replaced with a stoical carapace nothing could penetrate. Rather – as the night had stretched out slowly towards the dawn – he had called upon his cool analytical powers and applied himself to the letter with more focused precision than he had ever used with the begging fakements he saw day to day. It was, as yet, his only significant clue in Katherine’s murder.

  The letter had been addressed to his previous rank of ‘Detective Sergeant’, denoting that whoever had written it knew of him from his days with the Metropolitan Police. Since his official position was barely known to the newspapers (the Detective Force being necessarily subtle in its operations, and keen to protect its anonymity), this person must have garnered the information from another source – but one infrequent enough to be unapprised of his recent change in fortune. That is, unless the letter was intended for, and accordingly addressed to, a man who was known as an illustrious investigator.

  This thought immediately prompted the logical next: the writer’s reason for sending the letter in the first place. If simply an act of good faith, the mysterious delivery and origins would seem unwarranted. What else was being hidden along with the sender’s identity? Could it be that they had a personal interest in the case which might be served by Mr Williamson solving it?

  Following the argument through, the initial insistence that ‘You do not know me’ was rendered quite unnecessary by the unfamiliar signature and the lack of o
riginating address. Why mention that Mr Williamson did not know the writer when this was self-evident? One assumption was that he did indeed know (or know of) them, and that they had stumbled over their own earnest attempts to disguise this.

  An alternative, of course, was that the writer wished simply to disassociate themselves from the case, a supposition reinforced by the phrase ‘nor is it necessary that you do so’ – a curious addition. If true, it suggested that the writer had no personal involvement and that any investigation would not need to touch upon their identity. What, then, was their interest in, and connection to, the two cases?

  Admittedly, the whole thing could have been a tasteless hoax. If this were the case, however, it was the most convincing Mr Williamson had ever seen: one full of nuance, and credible because of its complex seeming simplicity. Its insistence on the ‘highest authority’ was intriguing. The high authority of the writer? Or of the source of information? Or of the murderer’s identity?

  Mystery then piled upon mystery: ‘You will soon learn as much’ said the letter. Mr Williamson’s first thought was naturally that the writer was assuming he would re-start the investigation and discover the claims to be true. But was a further reading that something would happen shortly to confirm the letter’s veracity? He considered possibly related cases he had worked on recently at the Mendicity Society and could think only of the particularly clever begging-letter writer he had so lately pursued. A connection seemed unlikely.

  Whatever else in the letter was dubious, it had indeed been almost exactly seven years since Katherine Williamson had died. True, the incident had caught the attention of the whole city at the time, but how many remembered with such precision one date among many once the newspapers had been thrown away and the next scandal had trodden over the last? Perhaps the letter writer had personally made time to check the date – or perhaps they, too, had some more personal reason to remember it.

  A grammatical conundrum next presented itself. Where the letter said ‘this murder . . .’, was it referring to the murder of Katherine, or, as correct grammar suggested, to the case of Mr Sampson? If the latter were true, this was a stupendous piece of news! What few newspapers that had reported the Holywell-street case had presented it as nothing more than a curious accident. Even so, Mr Williamson, who had spent years considering the facts of his wife’s death, could not immediately discern any conceivable link between the two cases other than the lack of key witnesses and a death by falling.