by Andy Conway
“Nice pint of ale they do in here, old cock, and no mistake. Better than that swill where we’re staying. Better than what they dish out in the Ten Bells and all. I was there with Emily Birrell this one time and ...”
And on and on it went with no rhyme nor reason and no chance of escape. This is what Hell must be like. Just the endlessness of it. The endless torture and no way you would ever get out of it. A stupid whore yapping at you every minute of every day for all eternity.
“... and anyway, what’s the clacking point of following that Charlie home with his bleating daughter all in bits just because her fellah got arrested. Hell, if I did that I’d have overflown the Thames. London’d be like Venice. Silly pampered cow. What was all that in aid of?”
Bury supped his ale and left a silence, wondering if she’d fill it anyway, not wanting an answer just wanting to hear herself talk.
“Go on. What?”
“I’ve got a plan,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Well, I don’t see how it’s gonna flush Tom out. He’s scarpered.”
“He’ll come. He’ll come for his old friend.”
She pulled her shawl around her and prodded him, trying to focus. “Anyway,” she said, like it was a brilliant idea. “We ought to hang around the police station. That’s where he’ll show up. As soon as he knows his friend’s in the clink. The day before the wedding and all. What a turn up. Poor sod. Who knew old Tom the ballad hawker had posh friends? And now he’s gone and got them both in the clink. I bet they love him, they do.”
“He’s a painter.”
“How do you know?”
All snooty, like. As if she was the only one in the world that knew anything, the stupid drunken bitch.
“I saw his paintings. They were like nightmares. They were like death. They think he’s that killer. They think he did those murders.”
“Blimey,” she said. “And him all respectable and all.”
“Those girls that got cut up. He did it.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“I know more than you think, Catherine Eddowes. You’ll see.”
And then she changed subject, like it was normal to just change like that, like a train jumping onto the other track. “I bet Tom’s made a run for it. Always did run when he saw me coming. We should have done it sooner.”
“He’ll come. I’ll make sure of it.”
“We should just go and get that pension book and leave him be.”
“That’s no good. You always said that. If he’s alive, it won’t work.
She seemed sad now. She still felt for him, the silly cow, even though she’d dreamed up the whole scheme to get his pension book and knock him off and go on claiming the money.
“We should just get the book and leave it,” she said.
Did she even listen to a word anyone else was saying? “He’s got to be sorted. I don’t trust you not to go all soft and look him up again and say sorry to get him back.”
“What do you take me for?” she snarled.
Nearly four sheets. It was close. She could barely keep her eyes open. But then she would blink the fog away and attack like a snake.
“Anyway,” she sneered, with sudden malice. “What’s to say that once he’s out of the way, you don’t disappear yourself and go on claiming that pension with me not knowing where in the world you are?”
He couldn’t stop a sly grin smearing his lips. “You’re a very mistrustful person, Catherine Eddowes.”
“Well don’t you think about doing it either, “cause you know what I’d do if you did.”
“Oh yeah, and what’s that?”
“I’d be straight round to the police and tell them everything.”
Now it was he who pounced like a snake, spitting venom. He rounded on her, grabbing her arm, twisting it to the side. She winced in pain but her eyes blazed defiance. She was a game bird, all right.
“And then they’d arrest you for concocting it, wouldn’t they? You tell the peelers and they’ll put you in gaol too.”
He let her go and she rubbed her arm, drunken tears stabbing her eyes. She played the hurt damsel for a while and then came back at him with the kind of derisive laugh that made him want to kill her. She didn’t look drunk anymore. She looked deadly.
“Don’t you know anything about women, William Bury?” she hissed. “All I do is I just go to the police and I turn on the waterworks, and I tell them how I tried to get in touch with my husband, and found this imposter drawing his pension. This strange man who must have killed him and taken his place. I fear the worst, Inspector. I fear that beastly man might have killed my dear old husband!”
She flinched back as he sprang up from his seat, knowing he was going to lamp her one, and he laughed to see the terror in her eyes. By the time she looked up he was already walking out of the saloon, out into the night, the insane, raucous chatter of the pub fading behind him as he stalked through the night.
If he didn’t put as much space between him and her he knew he would kill her. It was some time before he stopped walking and took a deep breath and let his jaw relax. He’d been grinding his teeth with hatred.
He’d left his jacket behind. The stupid cow had made him do that. Still, he had on his deerstalker, and it was a reasonably warm evening.
He paused under a gas lamp and dug into the hip pocket of his trousers, pulling out the ornate miniature photograph frame. She looked different now that he’d seen her in the flesh, seen her wailing and crying, rather than the grim, fixed expression necessary for a photo portrait. The artist’s sweetheart. The one he was to marry, but couldn’t now that he was arrested for murder.
He chuckled, and it rose and bubbled up in his chest and blurted out of his throat into a roar of laughter.
He’d taken it from his studio. And the artist hadn’t even noticed. Weren’t they supposed to see things that other people couldn’t see? Well, he’d showed him. Showed him good and proper. Turned his back on him, blocked his view, and snatched up his precious sweetheart into his pocket.
And now the artist was in the nick, and they were going to pin the murders on him.
He wheezed his laugh out, trying to suppress it in case anyone heard him.
And now he owned her. She belonged to him.
And he was standing right outside the house where she lived, looking up at the window of the room where she slept.
26
HE HAD BEEN HERE BEFORE. That overwhelming sense of déjà vu. He had been here before.
He thought that he must have been in prison before — at some point in the void of his life before his awakening. But he knew it wasn’t that. He had not just been in any police cell; he had been in this one.
But that made no sense. Because if he had been in this very cell before, that meant he had not been a stranger to Moseley before his awakening. And yet no one had known him. No one had recognized him as the man who’d once been arrested. Surely that sort of thing would be remembered? Someone in the village, one of the police constables certainly, but perhaps even a respected member of the community like Mr Palmer, would at least have had an inkling of this stranger’s former criminal past before engaging him to tutor his daughter.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to lie on the wooden bench, his back aching; every part of him aching. It was not a place you could sleep. And he knew that. He knew it like it was a memory. Like it had happened before.
The other reason it was impossible to sleep was the sound of the woman imitating a fire engine again from the other end of the building; wherever it was they had the women’s cells.
“Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling! I’m a fire engine! Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling!”
Someone would shout, “Shut yer hole!” — one of the constables, or the desk sergeant — and she would go quiet for a while, but then start up again, as if she’d woken from her drunken stupor and a recurring dream of fire engines.
“Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling!”
Arthur’s voice
came through the gloom, from somewhere in the neighbouring cell, although it was really just a cage with nought but a wall of bars between them.
“They’ll release us in the morning, Daniel,” he said. He sounded so certain of it. “Don’t you worry. They will go through the bag and find the evidence against Conway. They’re probably doing it right now.”
He wanted to ignore his friend. Talking about it only pained him. But it was churlish to rebuff his friend’s optimism.
“What evidence, Arthur? It’s just a bag full of murder ballads.”
“His razor? The fact the pawn ticket was under the bed of the latest victim.”
“They only have our word for that. It’s hopeless.”
“They can interview the pawnbroker. He will verify that Thomas was the man who left the bag and you and I were the ones who redeemed it. Just as in our testimony.”
Daniel wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Laugh at the notion that there could be anything but despair. This morning he had awoken as a man with everything before him: a man with a career, a house and a bride. And in the space of a few hours, the entire edifice of his dreams had crumbled, like the walls of Jericho, or like... and here he saw a vision, from one of his many dreams — he had a sketch of it somewhere: two giant towers, perfectly square, made of glass and metal, collapsing from the top right down to the bottom; collapsing and releasing a cloud of dust and debris as each floor of the edifice fell onto the one below, and screams and howls of horror as the towers fell.
He had dreamed it and felt it and seen it somehow, even though there were no such towers anywhere in the world — there were no buildings of any such shape and size. They were mere nightmare creations of his haunted mind.
And everything he’d built in his life had collapsed just like those twin towers.
“The evidence against me, Arthur, is much more compelling than anything in that carpet bag.”
“Nonsense, dear boy. We know you are not the killer.”
“What is it you say, Arthur? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And at the moment, however improbable it may seem to us, it looks very much like I am the killer.”
“But we know you are not!”
“I’m beginning to doubt it myself.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I have no idea what’s inside me! If I can black out the first twenty years of my life, is it so impossible that I can black out a single night when I kill a woman?”
There was silence from Arthur’s cell, and just the echo of a chair scraping somewhere down the corridor, where the police had processed them as they entered.
“I can’t believe it of you,” said Arthur at last.
“Why not?”
“Because I know what’s inside you and I know you to be a good man.”
His faith was touching, but it made Daniel want to laugh: laughter that he knew would become tears of despair. “How can you, dear Arthur? When I don’t even know my own self?”
Arthur did not respond, and both men sat in the darkness listening to the faint sound of the woman imitating the fire engine again.
“Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling! Do you hear me, Jack? I’m a fire engine!”
She shut up later, after a constable’s rebuke and silence fell on the station once more.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Arthur.
Daniel sighed. There would never be a wink of sleep in this place.
“The murder weapon must have been planted there by Conway, to incriminate you, or simply to hide it. Did you not hear him come in that night, after murdering Miss Gill? He must have sneaked in where you slept and placed it in the drawer.
“I heard nothing. And I’m a very light sleeper.”
“But you had drunk rather a bellyful of ale. That can make a man sleep heavily.”
“He didn’t enter the summer house. Not while I was there.”
“In the morning, then. Perhaps after you had awoken. Was there any moment when you left him alone and he might have stolen to the summer house to plant the weapon?”
“I don’t believe so, Arthur.”
There was the sound of a slap. Arthur had slapped his thigh.
“Of course! I left him in the house. He had all the time in the world. You left for work. I followed not long after to see Birmingham, leaving him alone in the house, with the key. That’s when he did it!”
It was true, Daniel thought. But even though so much of the evidence pointed to Tom, he still could not believe it of his friend.
“I don’t think he did it, Arthur. The summer house was always unlocked. Anyone could have placed it there.”
“Good Lord, man. What are the chances that a random killer chose your particular summer house to dispose of his weapon? It makes no sense! Unless the killer was someone known to you. Who came into the studio?”
“Arabella.”
“I say, Daniel, you can’t possibly be suggesting...”
“No of course not. But it is logical evidence and we must consider it, dispassionately.”
“Then there is, of course, you.”
“Evidently. I think we have established that all the evidence is pointing towards me.”
“Who else?”
It hit him with the force of revelation. With the force of the visions he suffered, the sudden, violent attacks of déjà vu, the living nightmares.
“Oh my God. Bury.”
“Bury? That awful street hawker?”
“He walked into the summer house, while Tom was talking to his wife in the parlour. He examined my paintings.”
“Did you see him put the knife in the drawer?”
“No. I wasn’t really looking.” He tried to remember what had happened but all he could remember was how overwrought he had been. “He was being nosy. That’s what made me angry. He opened the drawer. I remember now.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. I’m confused. I might simply have created that memory. You see, Arthur. All of the evidence points to one person. Me.”
“There’s certainly something not quite right about Bury,” Arthur said. “He’s a ruffian. But that does not explain how it was Conway’s ticket that ended up in Louisa’s bedroom.”
“It certainly doesn’t.”
Arthur was pacing now. Daniel could hear his footsteps scraping the cinders on the floor. There would be no sleep tonight.
“But there is certainly a link between them,” said Arthur. “What do we know? Bury arrives with Catherine, who is Conway’s former common-law wife. He apparently met her by chance when she arrived at Snow Hill to seek out her ex-husband. Doesn’t that strike you as rather odd?”
“Everything strikes me as odd.”
“But does it not strike you as odd that all three of them arrive on your doorstep the same morning?”
“Tom came to see me. Catherine followed Tom. Bury followed Catherine.”
“What if all three are in it together?”
“What do you mean?”
“We know that Tom is the murderer. We know that Bury might have placed the knife in your drawer. We know that the unfortunate lady who connects them is, in the politest terms, untrustworthy. What if all three of them are in it together?”
“I don’t see how.”
“That’s what we must work out.”
“I don’t see why. What’s the motive?”
“They murder your student and frame you for the murder.”
“But why?”
“You have something they want.”
Daniel curled himself up into a ball, clutching his jacket closer to him, as if he might shut out Arthur’s barrage of logic. “There’s only one thing I have of any value and I have already lost it.”
“What’s that?”
“Arabella,” he said.
27
ARABELLA. The name called to him, like a siren song, luring him through the cold night air, as if on the breath of an angel. Thi
s sensation of floating again, like a gull, the gas lit streets passing silent below.
Is this a dream? Or am I truly shaking off my bonds and flying through the night? The landscape beneath so strange, with no landmark to guide the way.
A tower in the distance. The battlements of a turret atop a church, a dark graveyard surrounding. St. Mary’s, at the centre of Moseley.
Swooning, soaring, careening, on and on, he found the dark shadow of the house he sought and plummeted to the hungry jagged mouth that spewed smoke from the roof, twisting and turning in the blackness to be coughed out of the cold fire grate, rising like a cloud of smoke in the dark room.
She slept. She was a dark landscape against the wall, framed by brass, moonlight glistening on the surface. Her dresser, and his own dark face leering back at him from her mirror, as he had seen it in the painting.
A portrait of a death foretold.
He stood imperious in the centre of her room and breathed in time with her, taking in the odour of chrysanthemums, the scent of death.
No one knows I am here. No one shall ever know I was here, until my destruction is wrought. Then all shall know.
He pulled the knife from his pocket, where he knew it would be. How did it get there? Am I really here? Is this now, or what is to be?
The blade glistened, catching the moonlight, and he crept towards her in the blackness. If only the lamp were lit, all the better to see her with. He would light it after the first cut, after she was dead, so he might see all the cuts to come, see the beauty of each one, see his masterpiece take shape with each stroke and slash.
He stepped forward to deliver the first cut, to her throat. Sweet Arabella shall breathe no more.
The floorboard creaked.
“What?”
She woke. He stumbled forward, slashing blindly with the knife.
“Murder!” she screamed.
Has this... Has this happened before?
His hand was knocked askance. He slashed again. His arm held back in the air, a magnet pulling him away from her. She held his hand. Strong. Stronger than he’d imagined.
Screaming. Her terror waking the night. Footsteps rampaging down the landing. The door flung open. The yell of a man.