by Andy Conway
“What is it, man?”
“I was just thinking, how Tom might write a great gallows ballad about me.”
Arthur quailed inside, but took a cue from Daniel’s bitter grin and faked good humour, patting him on the arm. “Good show, fellow. That’s the spirit! A little humour might take us half way there. Now, let’s go and investigate.”
Daniel stood reluctantly, sighing with the effort. “Where?” he said. “Where are we to go and investigate?”
Arthur thought wildly, cupping his chin again.
Where, indeed?
What would his hero do?
He might go straight to the police to see what information they had gathered and thereby gain a fuller understanding of the simple things they had missed. But they couldn’t go to the police. Because the police would be looking for Daniel. He found himself in the strange position of being the detective protecting the chief suspect. Which left only one place to go.
“The murder scene,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Louisa Gill was murdered at home you said?”
“Yes. She lodged in Balsall Heath.”
“Then we must go there.”
“Why?”
“To gather evidence, dear boy. Look for clues.”
Daniel puffed out his cheeks, like a boy being dragged to Sunday School, but he descended the couple of steps that brought him face to face with Arthur.
“Good man,” said Arthur. “Let’s get the train.”
“Do we have to?”
“Time is against us. Come on!”
He took a firm grip of Daniel’s arm, just in case he changed his mind, and propelled him across New Street.
No amount of guilt could assuage the excitement that stirred inside him now.
They were going to solve a mystery.
16
TOM CONWAY FOLLOWED as Catherine Eddowes and William Bury headed north towards the city. He followed at a distance, keeping them in sight. Neither of them looked back, and they occasionally engaged in animated conversation. She turned to him and waved her arms once or twice. It looked as if she were shouting at him, but Tom couldn’t hear.
Over the hill and down the rise. Wasn’t this where Daniel said he’d appeared? Somewhere here. A man with no memory. Different then. A country lane, he said. Now a gritted road with tram lines being laid, lined with houses. Imagine that, you appear on a strange country lane with no idea who you are or where you are. Like a butterfly climbing out of a caterpillar’s dead husk. Do you think it knows it was once a caterpillar?
Anger rose in his chest again and he coughed, wheezing. Stress inflamed his bronchitis. He needed to stay calm.
Catherine and her man walked past the Moseley Institute building and onwards. Tom paused and glanced up at its busts of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, making a mental note to include them in his Lives of the Famous chapbooks. Popular sellers. Wasn’t there a story about Michelangelo getting his nose broken by a rival artist? That was the sort of stuff people liked to read about. Blood and snot stories.
He crossed the Brighton Road into Balsall Heath, which was growing beyond all recognition. He remembered the area only vaguely from his previous short stays in Birmingham, when he’d become a friend of Daniel Pearce, but he could see that it was so much more overcrowded now than it ever had been.
Just a huddle of hovels the last time, and now multiplying, like a small city itself, like a virus. Growing inch by inch every day, like the tower they were building in Paris. The Eiffel. Daniel said he’d seen it. A giant tower of metal reaching into the sky. Man becoming God, challenging His dominion.
The further down the road they walked, the less salubrious the surroundings. It was one long straight road, like an arrow, shooting for the heart of the city.
Funny lot, the French, though, he thought. Daniel loves it there. But a country where the president has a duel with a general, while anarchists and communists have shoot outs in a cemetery. Those artists who duelled as well. Fancy that. A duel. Over art. You would never have that here. Like with Michelangelo who got his nose broken in a punch-up under a fresco.
They passed the Camp Hill and Balsall Heath station, and turned west down the hill. Were they in Birmingham yet? He wasn’t sure where the official boundary lay. Balsall Heath had definitely not joined the growing town that would soon be a city, but once you were in Highgate you were in Birmingham proper.
Pony traps and Victorias and carts rattled past. The rank odour of horse manure. His legs were tiring, knees aching, hip too. Rheumatism playing up. If only they’d taken a trap, he could have flagged one down and followed. How much longer would they walk? Surely not all the way to Birmingham?
He swept his felt hat from his head and flapped it at his face. Thirsty too.
It was all changing so rapidly. The city was testament to that. How could you question it in art, politics, religion, science, when you could see it happening all around you in the streets every single day? The forward march of life.
Perhaps a book about those two chaps Michelson and Morley. Their experiments on the speed of light, and somehow they were destroying the idea of a fixed universe. And that fellow Mach in Vienna saying it is no longer possible to believe in absolute space and time.
No. Too complex. Too abstract. People want to read about daring deeds and artists fighting. You couldn’t easily get across abstract notions of time in a book about a life. Perhaps a story was better. Yes, what was it Robert Louis Stevenson had said? Something about fiction is closer to truth than the dazzle and confusion of reality. Yes, in fiction you could make a normal person understand those ideas. A story with a hero who might transgress time and space. A time traveller. Like himself. And like Daniel.
He caught the glint of sunlight off the giant glass roof of New Street Station — a tiny jewel in the distance.
Was he in Birmingham now? It had all taken on the aspect of a slum, dour and fetid, even the bright sun failing to compensate for the grime and the muck and the stench of industrial poverty.
So thirsty.
Such an appalling way to live. Thank God my Annie is out of it. And my boys too. My pension will give them a start in life. Catherine would have dragged them down into this mire.
That American astrologer who’d predicted the end of days this year. The sun will turn to blood in 1888 and one universal carnage of death. You could believe it in a place like this.
And in January, the snow so deep and the frost so ferocious that they said it was happening. The end of the world. Brought Europe to a standstill. Daniel posted, they were saying it here in Birmingham: the Day of Judgement had arrived.
Tom had sent a postcard back. Do not fear, dear friend. Remember old Mother Shipton’s prophecy! The end of the world will come only when summer turns to winter.
Summer had not yet turned to winter. But they still thought the world would end this year. 1888. Perhaps because absolute time and space had been destroyed. Was there a symbolism in the three eights? But it wouldn’t end. He knew it. He’d seen it.
He turned and found himself in a dirty row of miserable dwellings, just in time to see Catherine and her man enter a beer house.
His heart sank.
He walked to its door, gasping, aching, so wanting to sit down just to rest a while, and to drink something to slake this thirst. What to do? It was a squat building, little more than a couple of cottages knocked through, and he thought they might see him the moment he walked through the door.
But it was hot and he was thirsty and his limbs were aching. But he knew they would sell no temperance drinks inside. He knew they might laugh at the suggestion, even throw him out face first into the mud.
But he was thirsty, and Catherine was inside, and he might discover what her game was.
He hadn’t entered a beer house in years. Proper public houses were fine because they catered to teetotallers and had a token selection of temperance drinks — and even then he found them forbidding places. The Prince of Wales was the first he’d en
tered in years, knowing Daniel and Arthur would keep him from drinking. But there were no token temperance drinks in beer houses. They sold alcohol, for alcoholics, and they sold it cheaply.
But he was hot and so, so thirsty.
He walked in and found himself in an open room with bare floorboards. The bar was nothing but a flap in a doorway to the back room. He glanced around. Catherine was sitting on a bench in the corner with her new man, both facing the wall. There were a handful of others dotted around the room, all drinking silently. Two men were talking in low tones.
They might not see him. If he bought a drink with no undue fuss and took a seat, they might not even turn and see that he was there.
He walked to the flap. There was sawdust and straw on the floor and it smelled like a stable. The bored, fat man leaning on the flap, nodded to him.
“Good day,” Tom said, in a low voice.
“Beer, is it?”
“Well, no, thank you. Would you have something lighter?”
“Lighter?” The man looked like he’d been asked for a slice of the moon.
Tom thought of the many temperance drinks he’d tried — Montserrat Limetta, Hires’ Root Beer, Wheatley’s Hop Bitter, Blackbeer and Raisin, Ginger Beer, Blood Tonic. None of them would hold any sway here. He knew that asking for something ‘non-intoxicant’ would only draw attention to himself.
“A beer, please,” he said.
The beer house owner shook his head as if his ear was blocked with wax, and sloshed a foaming pint into a tankard. Tom slid a coin across the table and carried the tankard to a seat within earshot of Catherine, but hidden behind the chimney alcove.
The fat pint of beer twinkled and sparkled, as if calling to him. He stared into its golden depths, transfixed, his hands gripping the edge of his seat in case his mutinous fingers lifted the tankard to his lips.
He swallowed, his throat creaking.
“But there’s money to be had, you mark my words.”
Catherine’s voice. Tom closed his eyes and tried not to smell the sweet fragrance of hops.
“What if he’s on to ya?” said the man. “What then?”
“He ain’t all that keen,” she said. “And anyway, I know how to get what’s mine. I know things, see? I know things that’ll pull the rug from right under him, and in a month we’ll be dead rich, if you’ve got the guts for it.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I’ll show you what I can do. I’ll rip him for the jollies.”
“William Bury, you’re a bad un all right. My old mum was right about you.”
“And my grandma said a few things about you and all, Catherine Eddowes. You’re no angel.”
Tom craned his neck to hear more, leaning closer to the beer, the smell of it bewitching him.
Intoxicating. That’s why they call it that.
He jerked his head back, his fingers fumbling, the tankard rocked, beer lurching, slammed back straight, spilling on the table, on his fingers.
Don’t lick them. Wipe them. Don’t taste it or you’ll fall into the abyss with her.
“So here you are!”
He looked up to find Catherine standing over him, hands on hips, her mouth twisted in a smug smirk.
17
IT SEEMED TO DANIEL that it was only a minute later they were stepping off the train at the station for Camp Hill and Balsall Heath.
He looked all about him, blinking, trying to wake himself from his stupor. It was as if he’d been punched. He was punch drunk. He needed to wake up or he really would find himself at the end of a hangman’s rope.
Standing on a train platform, pointing a pistol at a clock, fading from sight.
He slapped himself in the face and blinked himself to consciousness.
“Are you all right, Daniel?”
Arthur squeezed his arm again, glancing around the station, perhaps worried that his charge was becoming uncontrollable, or worse still, conspicuous.
“I’m fine as can be, Arthur.”
And this made him laugh again. It really was absurd. Arthur led him across the tracks via the barrow crossing, through the ticket office and down the slope where they emerged on Highgate Road, Daniel taking in great gulps of air, relieved to be off that station platform.
And yet even though Arthur had dragged him through the station in an instant, he remembered almost every detail. He could sit down right now and draw it from memory, every stone of it, from the sign for the First Class Ladies Room to the advert for Melrose Whiskey to the weighing machine. He could even say which train was due next at which time, because he’d glanced at the timetable as they’d passed through the ticket office.
“Now, which way?” Arthur asked, eyeing him with concern.
Daniel nodded to himself, emerging from his daze. There was work to do. Arthur could not do it alone. He had to help. He pointed up Woodfield Road and they walked along it, turning into Ombersley Road and heading the full length of it. It was the long way around, but something told him to avoid the busy thoroughfare of Highgate Road, where police constables might be walking.
As they walked he noticed that Balsall Heath seemed quite respectable. If you listened to everyone in Moseley, it was a morass of vice and destitution, lapping at the foot of respectable Moseley and threatening to engulf it. They turned onto Ladypool Road and then sharply into Bewdley Avenue which seemed to be nothing but an alley behind Ombersley Road.
They crept along the alley and were surprised to find a pleasant mews of tiny gardens facing each other. Further on the houses backed on to the next mews, their squalid back yards abutting. Milford Avenue was next.
“It’s the third,” said Daniel.
The final mews was Albert Avenue.
Arthur halted and held him back. “We don’t know if the police are there,” said Arthur.
“We won’t know till we knock the door.”
“I suppose not.” Arthur was tapping his lip with a forefinger, something nagging at his brain. “Daniel? How do you know where she lives?”
Daniel was surprised. “I... I don’t know.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No! I swear it. I suppose I know it from the school records. I suppose I could rattle off the addresses of half of my students.”
Arthur nodded and stared at the house again. “Very well. We might as well knock the door. If the police are there, we can always say we’re calling out of concern, having heard the news. She is your student, after all.”
Daniel led him to the house and pushed the garden gate open with a loud creak. A few yards of unkempt garden, neglected, and a front door with flaking paint told the story of Louisa Gill’s circumstances. Arthur rattled the knocker with an authoritative rat-a-tat.
The door opened. A middle-aged women in a dirty blouse, a ragged apron tied around her waist, billowing skirts, hair tied up in a bun, forearms bulging like a sailor’s. She was a woman used to hard work and it had perhaps added ten years to her face. She looked in her fifties.
“It’s you back again, is it?” she said. “The photographer chap’s only just gone. I suppose there’s to be a parade of you all day long!”
Arthur raised his straw boater. “Good morning, madam. Sorry to intrude. Doctor... Watson. And this is my colleague, consulting detective, Mr... Holmes.”
“You’d better come in,” she said, flouncing down the dingy hallway.
Daniel looked at Arthur, who winked, and they followed the woman inside.
“I don’t know how I’m to cope with all this palaver. I suppose you’ll be at it for days on end. Don’t touch the room they said. Well, how can I clean it without touching it, eh? You answer me that.”
“We’d just like to take a look,” said Arthur.
“Examine the crime scene,” said Daniel.
“Terrible business,” said the woman. “Could have all been killed in our beds. No police to be seen last night when they was needed. Now we can’t move for the bleeders. Top of the stairs. Front bedroom.�
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She pointed up the stairs and they climbed up them.
“Don’t know what use a doctor is now, though. They took her to the morgue hours ago, the poor soul,” she shouted up after them. “And I’ve not gone anywhere near it!”
“Very good,” Arthur called back down.
The woman humped through to the kitchen to continue her work.
“Doctor Watson and Mr. Holmes?” said Daniel.
“We couldn’t very well use our own names, dear boy. The names are from my story.”
Daniel remembered the copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual which Arthur had sent him. His first mystery story, published at last. “Ah. Yes, of course.”
“You haven’t read it, have you?”
“I keep meaning to get round to it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry, you’re in good company.” Arthur paused before the green door to the front bedroom.
“Are you sure you want to see this?” Arthur asked.
Daniel nodded.
Arthur took the door knob and turned it. The door creaked open and revealed a dimly lit room. Daniel gasped with recognition. He had seen it, even though he had never been here before.
They stepped inside and closed the door behind them. Light came in through the curtains, which were open only by the width of a palm.
The room was small, with just enough space for a brass railed bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, a wooden chair.
Their eyes fell on the bed and the deep impression Louisa Gill’s body had left. The white sheets were crimson stained, the blood already dark and dry.
Arthur lifted the pillow, revealing a white nightdress, neatly folded. “She undressed but didn’t put on her nightgown.”
Pinned to the wall above the bed, a pastel sketch of Christ Church, Birmingham, a great spray of crimson across it.
Daniel gagged and took out his red silk handkerchief, covering his mouth. Arthur patted him on the shoulder and peered closely at the contents of the dresser, a pile of newly bought pencils at the centre.
“What are we looking for?” Daniel asked.