The Vice Society

by James McCreet

  ‘Tell me everything, Eusebius. What have our detectives been detecting?’

  ‘Sir. They visited a man called Jessop, a bookbinder of King-street. I spoke to the man afterwards and he was quite open about it: he had been at Colliver’s the night of the incident and had been rudely awoken in his sleep by an unknown assailant who threatened to murder him if he spoke of anything he had heard. I led him to believe I was a member of the press.’

  ‘Fine work, my boy. Let us hope the policemen will be aided by that information.’

  ‘They also visited the brother and sister of Mr Sampson, but they both declined to speak to me, whatever lies I manufactured.’

  ‘People can be impolite. I suspect they have their reasons.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The detectives also visited the deceased’s home and place of work. I am afraid I do not know what they saw or heard there.’

  ‘You are a good boy. Is there more?’

  ‘Inspector Newsome has, alone, made enquiries at Mr Sampson’s club, the Continental, though he has not so far gained admittance.’

  ‘And will very likely not succeed in doing so.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Never mind. Tell me, Eusebius – you have seen much: what do you make of the two detectives on this case?’

  ‘The older of the two, Mr Newsome, is a shrewd investigator. He is not like many senior policemen; I mean, he does not seem much like a gentleman. I believe there is more of the street than the library in his character. I would not underestimate him. The other man, Cullen, is a lower policeman. I cannot understand why he is in the Detective Force at all.’

  ‘Has either man noticed your presence?’

  ‘I am sure they have not.’

  ‘Good. How you would feel if you were to have the opportunity to work alongside Inspector Newsome on this case, Eusebius?’

  ‘I do not believe that would happen, sir.’

  ‘Do not tell me what could happen or not happen. Would you like to work with the police on this case? To attend each interview, hear each word, follow each new development, and be my eyes as the story unfolds?’

  ‘I think I would enjoy that.’

  ‘As I thought. You are a good boy.’

  A door opened and a man entered: the physician. He looked at Eusebius and then at the recumbent form of ‘J.S.’, who nodded in approbation. Whatever was to take place, the spy would be a witness to it.

  ‘I have an unfortunate condition, Eusebius. I come here twice a month to see the doctor and he attempts to purge me of the poison in my blood. Do not be embarrassed – I feel no shame.’

  The doctor lifted the sheet from the legs and Eusebius beheld the fat, black leeches feasting upon the pimply flesh. Each one was glistening and gorged on blood.

  ‘It is not a fashionable treatment, but it is one with a long and illustrious history,’ said ‘J.S.’ as the doctor applied a dull edge to detach each one.

  With each audible de-suction, Eusebius felt hot bile rise in his throat.

  ‘I understand that you were collected by my carriage on Holywell-street near Poppleton’s bookshop, Eusebius. Perhaps you will tell me all that you witnessed there,’ said ‘J.S.’.

  Half mesmerized and half nauseated by the procedure taking place before him, Eusebius Bean narrated all he had seen in a tone that wavered only when the sheet was raised above the waist, revealing things for which not even my pen would deign to find vocabulary.

  ELEVEN

  . . . Thinning of the blood is followed by a progressive softening of the brain and the attrition of the mental faculties so that the intelligent man becomes simple, and the simple man little more than bestial. In all cases of persistent and prolonged cases, the result is incarceration in the lunatic asylum, usually combined with the necessary restraint of a strait waistcoat to prevent what has become a reflexive, obsessive disorder. Even periodic self-abuse can lead to impaired eyesight, cranial pressure, anaemia and facial disfigurement, by which the guilty may be known. (See figures 1, 2, 3).

  Mr Williamson looked at the figures printed in Dr Mullond’s Diseases of Venery and beheld a series of faces deformed horribly by self-inflicted sinfulness. Eyes stared madly and mouths flapped open like those of idiots. He crossed his legs, rubbed his eyes in the dim light of his fireside chair, and placed the book on the table beside him. He had not slept. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw images of Charlotte that enraged his blood.

  Distractedly, he looked again at the letters he had received that morning after his affecting Golden-square experience. One was from the Secretary of the Mendicity Society asking, in subtly urgent tones, when he might expect Mr Williamson back at his desk in Red Lion-square to address the accumulating cases of letter fraud. The other was from his erstwhile colleague Harold Jute, who was highly enthusiastic about pursuing ‘Mr Mann’ and who had been thinking of ways they might, together, pursue the fakement writer. Neither letter could distract him from the other thoughts that occupied the investigative part of his brain.

  One singular fact of that otherwise disastrous meeting with the young magdalene would not leave him: her mention of the curious deaths by prussic acid. As a policeman, and later as a detective, he had smelled the bitter-almond smell often enough to recognize it. And he had smelled it on the mouth of his dead wife.

  Now it seemed there were other notable cases of the poison being cited as the cause of death in suspicious suicides. There had, of course, been hundreds of straightforward prussic acid suicides in the intervening years – wasn’t the substance available in every apothecary? – but these were not just any deaths. One had occurred on the same street and on the same morning of the murder that was supposed to be linked to his wife’s, while the other was also connected to a prostitute.

  For at least a year after Katherine’s death, Mr Williamson had excised columns of the Police Gazette and the Times relating to poisoning suicides, though no pattern or hint had emerged from his private enquiries. That evening after returning from Charlotte’s room, he had spent further hours going through his collection of past editions of the Gazette, hoping to find something – anything – to verify what the girl had told him.

  And Charlotte had been telling the truth. At least, he had found mention of the women she had described, Kate and Mary, but the detail had been perfunctory, as it often was when prostitutes died. The logical next step would be to pursue the link and talk to all of those unfortunate women (and perhaps the men) who had known the dead prostitutes. Perhaps they would also know the elderly benefactor of Lou, or the final days before her false suicide.

  And yet, though this might have been his only opportunity to prove or disprove ‘Persephone’s’ letter, it was a line of investigation he would rather not have pursued. These women were treacherous, and he knew he lacked the skills to defend himself against them. His rigid moral architecture found itself on foundations of sand in their presence, especially when, like Charlotte, they were such expert manipulators of men.

  A woman – any woman, he reflected – could dissimulate with a greater facility than the most accomplished male criminal. A woman could keep a secret so securely that the greatest detective would never discern that it was hidden – at least, not a man like Mr Williamson, to whom virtuous women were idealized creatures seldom found in reality.

  Further thought on the subject was interrupted by a knock at the door, which he attended only to find the step outside empty. A folded piece of paper at the foot of the door, however, was quite clear in its instructions:

  Temple Bar at twelve noon today. Alone.

  Mr Williamson looked at his pocket watch and immediately reached for his coat and hat.

  Is there another monument in our city as illustrious as Temple Bar? No doubt some will point to St Paul’s, which indubitably has the advantage of height and grandeur. Others might put Somerset House in the pre-eminent position, while those of an architectural tendency may argue for the new Parliament buildings. They are all fine structures in their way, but none
has the historic romance of Temple Bar.

  ‘Romance?’ I hear the reader challenge. ‘Where is the romance in severed heads displayed on poles from the apex of that Portland stone edifice? Where is the romance of almost two centuries of thunderous traffic, both human and equine, passing ceaselessly through its three arches? Where is the romance in a mere city gate?’

  I reply that the romance lies exactly in those things. There is not another monument in this, the largest and greatest city in the world, that so many have passed through. Like the slender neck of the hourglass, it has channelled multitudinous grains of existence. It is the needle eye through which innumerable threads of destiny have slipped. Who has not walked or driven beneath it? Kings, queens, poets, playwrights, beggars, murderers and saints – all have come this way on their individual paths to fame, posterity, notoriety or oblivion.

  And yet . . . and yet is it not also in some way invisible in the way that a doorway can be invisible among the walls around it? We move from one side to another without pausing to stop in that central nowhere – for why would we? Our origin lies behind and our destination beyond – in the middle is a limbo: not east, not west. There is only movement here.

  It was at Temple Bar, then, that Mr Williamson was waiting at twelve that same day. Only, it made for a highly imprecise rendezvous as an actual address. ‘Temple Bar’ commonly referred to all of the businesses and thoroughfares thereabouts, so the only solution was stand conspicuously beneath one or other of the pedestrian arches under the gate itself. This might have been easy at two o’clock in the morning, but the flood of humanity at midday was such that Mr Williamson was jostled and tossed like driftwood upon the spume.

  By ten past twelve, his composure had quite fractured and there was no sign of anyone else waiting. He decided to visit a coffee house on the Strand (from where to observe the gate) and walked through the arch to the west side . . . whereupon he noticed the door built into the wall left of the arch. Here, the masonry of Temple Bar continued into the adjoining building, but the door seemed to be part of the arch itself. No doubt he had seen this door on uncountable occasions, yet only now did he think of it as a possible access to the mysterious upper room above the arches.

  He looked around and saw that he might well have been invisible to the rushing crowds entering and exiting the arches in a blur of urban purposefulness. It was as if that door and the small space before it were little more than shadows to the human flow. Suddenly he understood, and he knocked.

  The door was opened immediately with a rattle of the lock. He could see nobody in the relative dimness within, but he stepped in regardless. The door closed. And a figure behind the now closing door caused him to take a sharp intake of breath.

  The man was an unnaturally tall Negro with a face to frighten anyone who did not know him. Even in the poor light, Mr Williamson was able to discern the flat nose and scarred temples that spoke of the prize ring, and a terrible left eye that was covered entirely with a milky membrane. In that musty vestibule echoing with the reverberating throb of the traffic all around, Mr Williamson could not quite see the hideous scar about the Negro’s neck, although he knew of its existence.

  ‘Benjamin – you startled me. I am glad to meet you again,’ said Mr Williamson, watching his own palm disappear into the meaty paw and smiling, despite himself, at the other man’s broad white grin. ‘Is he here?’

  Benjamin nodded, pointing upwards, and the two men ascended past a grimy circular window and then outside onto a leaded shoulder of the edifice so that they were standing atop the pedestrian arch of Temple Bar itself. Mr Williamson paused for a moment to look on the torrent of London passing beneath his feet: hundreds of faces and dozens of carriages charging along, but with not a single face upturned to see his gaze. It was a curious and beguiling perspective that captivated even this most austere of men.

  Benjamin pointed to the door ahead of them, which was ajar, and Mr Williamson was first to enter a close, murky room lined entirely with shelves of ledgers and books of assorted sizes. There was a dusty reek of antiquity about the place and it occurred immediately to the investigator that he must have been one of just a handful of men ever to have entered in almost two centuries – this room that a million people looked up at each year.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Williamson. Will you take a seat?’

  The speaker was sitting at the table in the centre of the room. Before him was that day’s edition of the Times, a frontpage notice circled boldly in pencil. To one unacquainted with him, he seemed an unusual specimen indeed. Though attired as a gentleman, his face seemed to be that of a wily street character, its crooked nose evidence of at least one violent encounter, and his intelligent smoke-grey eyes suggesting a good education – whether at the university of the London gutter or at Cambridge, one might not have said. His grin was sardonic but friendly as he stood and held out a hand.

  Mr Williamson shook it warmly and took the offered seat. ‘Mr Dyson. I am glad to meet you again, though I believed I never would. This is a most curious location.’

  ‘Is it not? Mr Cornwell of Child & Co. bank holds the only key to this room and he was kind enough to lend it to me for this meeting. Think of it: there are two sets of leaded windows each side of us – one facing east and the other west. There are two circular windows above us – one facing north and the other south. Where are we? We are nowhere – neither of the land nor of the air. We see all and nothing sees us. It is a Divine seat, is it not?’

  ‘I will thank you not to blaspheme, Mr Dyson.’

  ‘Ah, Sergeant! Your rigid moral backbone has not relaxed a bit. And I believe you could call me Noah after all we have been through together.’

  ‘I am no longer a sergeant – nor a policeman, as I am sure you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I had heard as much. Was it Inspector New-some’s doing?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘A pity. You were the better detective.’

  ‘I am surprised that you have not heard more from the inspector.’

  ‘He knows that my invisibility is something he should not seek to expose.’

  ‘I gather you had to leave your house in Manchester-square as a result of that business. Are you still resident in the city?’

  ‘It was indeed a regrettable, and expensive, course of action – but necessary for me to escape the observation of the Metropolitan Police. You will forgive me if I do not reveal my current address to you at this moment.’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  ‘Now, George – what is this notice in the Times all about? I congratulate you on your witty conceit: referring to the costumes – or rather, the disguises – we wore at that Vauxhall Gardens masquerade when last we collaborated.’

  ‘I thank you for responding . . . for trusting me sufficiently to do so.’

  ‘Trust has nothing to do with it – we can see everything up here and we observed your approach with half a mind that it might be a trap of the inspector. In truth, I replied to your message in the Times partly out of fancy and partly out of the knowledge that you are no longer a detective. In fact, Benjamin and I were highly curious as to why George Williamson might want to see us once again.’

  Benjamin had not joined them at the table, but was reclining upon a lower rung of a library ladder and reading a cobwebby volume on his knees. He smiled and said nothing, primarily because his tongue had been violently extracted some years before.

  ‘Mr Dyson – I will be frank: I need your assistance.’

  ‘You recall, of course, that the Metropolitan Police have “asked” for my assistance once before? That ended badly for a number of people, including me. I lost my house at Manchester-square in the name of anonymity.’

  ‘I have told you that I am no longer a policeman. This is not a police matter. It is personal.’

  ‘Then I am intrigued, albeit still uncommitted. Tell me the story.’

  ‘My wife was murdered seven years ago, though the inquest called it a suicide from the Monum
ent. Two days ago, I received a letter informing me that it was indeed murder and that the solution lies in the solution to another crime: that of Jonathan Sampson who fell from a window in Holywell-street five days ago.’

  ‘I have heard about your wife and I am sorry for your loss. I am also aware of the ambiguity surrounding that inquest. As for the incident on Holywell-street, it was certainly most unusual. Do you have the letter with you now?’

  Mr Williamson took it from his breast pocket and pushed it across the table to Noah.

  ‘Ah, an amusing classical allusion,’ said Noah after scanning the text.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Persephone: the queen of the Underworld, the bride of Pluto.’

  Mr Williamson noted the curious pronunciation: Per-SE-phone-ee. ‘You know the woman?’

  ‘I forget that you have no Greek. She is a figure from mythology, tricked into spending a season in Hell, during which winter reigns on Earth.’

  ‘Why would somebody choose such a name?’

  ‘Who can guess? I doubt that it is the writer’s real name, but the choice of it here is interesting for a number of reasons. It seems she claims to be a voice from beyond this world (but below it rather than above): the same world where the truth of your wife’s death resides – and evidently Mr Sampson’s also. It is a mere metaphor, but a telling one if we expand upon it in the context of the letter. The writer is in a position of possessing privileged and possibly secret knowledge. She (for it is certainly a she) is a woman of grace and power, as well as one of considerable erudition. And – if we are to follow the allusion still further – one in thrall to a power greater than her own: a power of evil. Fascinating, Mr Williamson. It is truly a mystery for a man of your talents.’

  ‘Hmm. I spoke to Mr Blunt at the Haymarket Theatre and he had never heard the name. Why do you know it and not he?’

  ‘That is what I mean. “Persephone” is from the Greek. We are accustomed to using the Latin deities: Pluto for Hades, Vulcan for Hephaestus, Proserpine for Persephone. Only a true classical scholar – very likely one who has knowledge of the ancient language – might recognize the Greek deity.’