The Society of Blood

by Mark Morris

  ‘Come!’ called an imperious voice.

  I pushed open the door and marched in, Clover at my shoulder. I had decided on a no-nonsense approach; there was no point being diffident with someone like Willoughby. He was the sort of man who would see politeness as a terrier would see a rabbit – as something to be pounced on and torn to shreds.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Willoughby,’ I said before the surprise on his face could turn to indignation. ‘My name is Alex Locke and this is…’ I’d been about to say ‘my colleague, Miss Clover Monroe’, but then remembered that Clover had been introduced to Lacey as my wife. Hoping that Willoughby wouldn’t find my hesitation odd I said as smoothly as I could, ‘…Mrs Clover Locke, my wife. We’re assisting the local constabulary with their investigation into the murder that took place here last night, and we’d be grateful if you would allow us to ask you a few questions.’

  Willoughby’s surprise was now turning to indignation – but that was fine. It was defensive rather than offensive; we had him on the back foot.

  ‘Me?’ he spluttered. ‘What could I possibly tell you? I was nowhere within this vicinity last night.’

  I showed my teeth in a smile. ‘I don’t doubt it, Mr Willoughby. Even so, I’m sure you’ve been apprised of the details of the attack?’

  The actor, wallowing in his chair before the mirror, looked suddenly wary, his currant eyes darting between Clover and me.

  ‘Some of them,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you’ll know what a horrible crime it was,’ Clover said. ‘Brutal. Savage.’ She paused. ‘Cowardly.’

  Willoughby’s eyes fixed on her. ‘Cowardly?’

  ‘Very. The victim was a slip of a girl – young, helpless, innocent. She didn’t stand a chance.’

  Although he didn’t sweat, a flush rose from Willoughby’s collar, mottling his neck and cheeks.

  ‘Innocent?’ he scoffed. ‘I was given to understand that this unfortunate was a mere drab?’

  I felt Clover tense. ‘Are you suggesting the girl deserved to die, Mr Willoughby?’

  ‘I am suggesting, Mrs Locke, that the girl was fully cognisant of the dangers associated with her profession, and yet chose to defy them. I feel unable, therefore, to engender even the remotest scrap of sympathy for her.’

  Clover said nothing to this. When I glanced at her I saw she was glaring at Willoughby, her lips pressed together.

  Quickly I said, ‘Have you set foot in the yard during your company’s residency here, Mr Willoughby? Either before the murder or after it?’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Have any other members of your company been in the yard, to your knowledge?’

  Willoughby scowled. ‘I assure you that they too have not.’

  ‘You seem very certain of that,’ Clover muttered.

  Willoughby’s scowl curled into a sneer. ‘My knowledge of my colleagues’ movements within this establishment is absolute. It is my responsibility to ensure that decorum is maintained at all times.’

  ‘Rule them with a rod of iron, do you?’ she quipped.

  Willoughby’s black eyes receded to pinpricks. ‘I am not sure I approve of your manner, Mrs Locke.’

  If this had been the twenty-first century no doubt Willoughby would have been questioning our credentials, demanding documentation. There were times when I felt frustrated, even alarmed, by the flabby protocols and practices of the Victorian police force, yet there were other occasions, like now, when such flabbiness worked in our favour. Clover and I had found that if you said you were working with the police, most people tended to accept it without question.

  ‘I’m sure Mrs Locke meant nothing by her query, Mr Willoughby,’ I said smoothly. ‘Isn’t that right, my dear?’

  Clover’s smile couldn’t have been sweeter. ‘Of course no offence was intended. I do apologise, Mr Willoughby, for any misunderstanding which may have occurred.’

  Willoughby glowered, but said nothing.

  Briskly, as if the matter had been swept aside, I said, ‘Were you aware, Mr Willoughby, that the yard was being used for… illicit purposes?’

  Willoughby remained silent for a moment. Then he huffed a bullish breath from his nostrils. ‘I was not.’

  I gave a short nod, as if I accepted his statement without question. ‘Nevertheless you strike me as both a perceptive and observant man. Perhaps you can recall witnessing the recent presence of unsavoury or unusual characters within the vicinity?’

  My attempt to butter him up made no impression. The chair beneath Willoughby creaked as he shifted to look pointedly at Clover.

  ‘Present company excepted, you mean?’

  Clover’s response was a girlish laugh.

  ‘Oh, you are a card, Mr Willoughby. Have you ever done comedy? You would be a wonder at it.’

  Willoughby said nothing. I wondered if Clover’s antipathy towards him was as obvious to him as it was to me. His stillness as he continued to regard her (and she continued to grin at him) was unnerving.

  Could he be our killer? Could this heaving mountain of a man be one of the Wolves of London? If so, what was his aim? Had it been his intention to draw us here, as Clover had suggested? But for what reason?

  What no one had mentioned since we had entered the dressing room was the mouldy bread smell, which I had tracked from the murder scene last night, and which was still detectable.

  The elephant in the room, I thought, and had to stifle a smirk as the double meaning struck me. I cleared my throat and decided to plunge in.

  ‘Mr Willoughby, have you been aware of a peculiar odour in the theatre these past few days? A smell reminiscent of… mould? Of damp perhaps?’

  Willoughby’s shiny red face was inscrutable. ‘An odour?’

  ‘Yes. It was prevalent around the murder scene – and in this corridor last night.’

  Willoughby’s round shoulders raised in a shrug.

  ‘This is an old building, Mr Locke, and ill maintained. Such odours as you describe are commonplace. Rotting wood, damp plaster, burning oil, sweat-stained seats; even the malodorous breath of an attentive audience tends to linger… It is all part and parcel of the profession. If you find it offensive, I suggest you retire to your country parks and perfumed boudoirs, where the air is fresher, but perhaps less redolent of life.’

  He spoke wearily, though the spikiness underlying his words was obvious.

  Clover’s response was just as measured – and just as spiky.

  ‘Redolent of life? An unusual phrase for an odour that lingers around a murder site.’

  Willoughby’s eyebrows, as black and slick and carefully sculpted as his wavy hair, inched upwards.

  ‘You think so? But violence and murder is the stuff of life, is it not? It is life lived on the edge. It is the threat of sudden death which gives life its danger, its thrill, its flavour. The meat of an animal that knows it is soon for the chop is said to be more succulent than one that has lived a life of indolence and meets its maker without fear.’

  ‘People are not animals,’ Clover muttered.

  Willoughby’s black eyes shone as he leaned forward.

  ‘Oh, but they are, Mrs Locke. We are all animals. All of us ripe for the slaughter.’

  ‘Including yourself?’ I asked, wondering where this was leading.

  ‘Of course. All actors are slaughtered by their audience at one time or another. Did you not know that, Mr Locke?’

  I was startled to hear him chuckle. There was such an air of haughtiness and constrained hostility about him that he’d seemed incapable of humour. The laughter churned and rumbled inside him, and then, as the sound belched from his mouth, the air seemed to grow suddenly thicker with the stench of mouldy bread.

  No, not mouldy bread, I thought now; not exactly. In hindsight the smell was more like mulch, or rotting fungi; it made me think of poisonous mushrooms tumescing in the dark. I felt an urge to gag; to run across the room, pull the door wide and gulp at the fresher air in the corridor. The building was drau
ghty, unheated, the temperature outside hovering around zero, but even so I felt sweat beading my forehead.

  I decided to call time on the interview, but Willoughby beat me to it. As his laughter dribbled into silence he consulted his pocket watch.

  ‘And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a prior engagement.’

  I nodded, too nauseated to feel indignant.

  ‘Of course, Mr Willoughby. Thank you for your time.’

  He wafted a hand and turned away from us, the chair again creaking alarmingly beneath him. I would have loved it to break and spill him to the ground – though I didn’t much love the image that accompanied the thought: of his clothes bursting open and his unrestrained flesh oozing out like barely set jelly.

  As soon as the dressing-room door had closed behind us, the nausea I’d been keeping at bay rose up and I leaned against the wall, feeling sweaty and weak-kneed.

  ‘You all right?’ Clover asked – though she too looked a bit green.

  ‘Did you smell that?’

  ‘When he laughed, yes. It’s him, I know it. And he knows we know. And he doesn’t care.’

  I glanced again at the door to Willoughby’s dressing room and slowly straightened up. ‘Come on, let’s go. I don’t want to still be here when he comes out.’

  Our hansom was waiting outside the theatre. We climbed aboard, and I gave instructions to the driver to take us to the end of the road and conceal himself around the corner, out of sight of the Maybury. Less than a minute later, as soon as the cab was in position behind the high side wall of the house at the end of the terrace, Clover and I alighted and hurried towards the shelter of the low, snow-topped wall which enclosed the same house’s front yard. From here we could keep watch on the front of the theatre, which was about two hundred metres away.

  Although the neighbourhood was not exactly salubrious, it was quiet, tucked away like an afterthought. The redbrick buildings, edged with snow, looked festive despite their lack of Christmas decoration. The sharp, cold air was refreshing too, despite the hazy hint of smog that still softened the angles of walls and roofs.

  ‘Wonder what the Maybury is back in our time?’ Clover murmured.

  It was a game we often played. Clover had lists of places and people she vowed to look up online once we got back to the twenty-first century.

  I shrugged. ‘Offices maybe. Or a phone shop.’

  ‘Too big for a phone shop.’

  ‘Carpet warehouse then.’

  ‘My guess is this area was flattened in the Blitz.’

  ‘Cheery soul, aren’t you?’

  She grinned and hummed the opening bars to Monty Python’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.

  ‘Shh,’ I said, putting a hand on her arm. ‘This could be it.’

  A brougham had rounded the corner and come to a stop outside the theatre. Seconds later one of the double doors opened and Willoughby appeared, his bulk swathed in a thick black overcoat, a stovepipe hat perched on his head. He reminded me of Dr Caligari from the silent film. He waddled down the steps and climbed aboard the brougham, his weight causing it to creak and tilt on its springs. We were too far away to hear the instructions he gave the driver, but as soon as the vehicle began to move with a wet clatter of wheels we scuttled back to our hansom and leaped aboard.

  It wasn’t hard to follow Willoughby’s cab without being detected. Once on the main thoroughfares the thronging London streets provided plenty of cover. I’d never ceased to be amazed at how vibrant and varied Central London really was compared to Victorian street scenes reconstructed for TV dramas. The pavements were a constantly moving tide of people, the roads a clattering cacophony of omnibuses, hansoms, carts, broughams, trams, victorias… even the occasional early car chugged past, causing consternation and wonder. Small ragged boys weaved and dodged between the vehicles, scooping horse dung from the snow-slushy cobbles. Crammed together on street corners and against walls were stalls selling everything from candles and cloth to stewed eels and sheep’s trotters. Here and there knots of people gathered around musicians and street performers, which caused other pedestrians to spill on to the roads, slowing the traffic.

  What was perhaps most amazing was how multi-racial and multicultural the city was, even in this day and age. From the windows of the hansom, I saw Chinese men and women in brightly coloured silks, Indian gentlemen in turbans, straight-backed and beautiful African women whose dark skin contrasted with their white muslin gowns. In my business dealings I’d met Swedes, Russians, French, Germans and Spanish. Plus I’d encountered Malays and Lascars and Tartars, and once, at Hungerford Bridge pier, I’d even seen an American Indian in a dapper grey suit, feathers and beads woven into his long black hair.

  We trailed Willoughby’s cab north, through Camden – which at this time was nothing like the fashionable and bohemian enclave it would later become, but a grim little neighbourhood crammed with cheap lodging houses to serve the canal and railway workers. From there we moved into the more genteel commuter district of Stoke Newington, which, although the area had been absorbed into the seamless expansion of London in the past few decades, still retained something of the atmosphere of the village it had once been. With fewer people and less traffic to conceal our presence, I instructed our driver to fall back to avoid being detected, and was both relieved and intrigued when, at the top of Stoke Newington High Street, Willoughby’s brougham came to a halt outside the pillared entrance of Abney Park Cemetery.

  Judging by the black carriage and black, plumed horse waiting patiently on the snow-streaked cobbles outside the main gates, there was a funeral taking place inside. The carriage driver perched in his high seat, his top hat adorned with a silk mourning band, appeared to be snoozing, though behind him the drivers of a small procession of more conventional cabs were chatting quietly as they waited for their passengers – presumably the attendant mourners.

  Was Willoughby a mourner too? If so, it looked as though he was late. Perhaps his lateness was deliberate to enable him to make a dramatic entrance? Although I’d only spent a short time in his company, he seemed the sort of man who would want to be the centre of attention even at someone else’s funeral.

  Shielding my face with my hand, and hoping that Willoughby wouldn’t glance my way, I murmured to our driver to stop a little further along the road, out of sight of the main gates. This he did, whereupon Clover and I alighted from the cab and swiftly retraced our steps on foot.

  By the time we arrived back at the gates, Willoughby was a couple of hundred metres ahead of us, still visible on the main path leading towards the chapel. I’d been afraid we might already have lost him – Abney Park is a big, rambling bone yard, comprising a nature reserve and arboretum, with dozens of routes sprawling across thirty acres – but the actor, although he appeared agile enough on stage, moved like a vast black slug through the snowy landscape, a cane gripped in his meaty right fist.

  Due to the abundant cover – snow-draped trees and bushes, gravestones and other monuments edged in white – it was easy to keep out of sight as we sneaked along behind him. As it turned out, Clover and I need hardly have bothered trying to conceal ourselves; Willoughby didn’t look round once.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but even here in the open air and some two hundred metres downwind, I fancied I caught an occasional whiff of the mulchy smell that clung to him.

  Perhaps he’s ill, I thought. Perhaps he’s got some sort of infection – or worse.

  I swallowed and licked my lips, trying to put all thoughts of his fleshy bulk, of his unwashed folds and crevices, out of my mind.

  Moving as silently as we could across the slushy ground, Clover and I tailed Willoughby for ten minutes, maybe longer, until eventually, just as I was beginning to think the funeral might be over before we got there, we arrived at our destination.

  This was the first Victorian funeral I’d witnessed since arriving in 1890s London, but it was exactly the kind of thing I’d been expecting. It was, in fact, like watc
hing the opening scene of a Hammer horror movie, or a Dickens’ adaptation.

  In a dip below us, within a natural amphitheatre surrounded by pine trees and studded with grey headstones, twenty or so black-clad mourners were clustered, heads bowed, around an open grave. The men wore black suits, gloves and tall hats; the women wore long dresses in black wool or silk, their heads covered in hoods or mourning bonnets. Standing at the edge of the grave in a central position, as if about to jump in, was a middle-aged woman wearing a voluminous black crepe dress and a widow’s bonnet with a half-face veil. Weeping quietly, she was clinging to the arm of a young man, who I guessed must be her son. He wore a troubled but stoical expression beneath a bushy moustache that he might have grown in an attempt to look older and more authoritative than he really was.

  At the head of the grave, swaying slightly like a small tree in a high wind, was a priest in black and white robes, strands of wispy grey hair twisting in cobwebby zigzags around his head. A prayer book bound in black leather was clutched in hands so gnarled they looked like pale roots, though it seemed the book was only for show; the priest’s eyes were fixed on the black rectangle of the grave as he intoned what I presumed was the burial service in a muttering drone.

  I expected Willoughby to trudge down the hill to join the mourners, and so was surprised when he first came to a halt, then shuffled sideways to take shelter behind a thick clump of pine trees bordering the burial area. I glanced back at Clover, who raised her eyebrows, and then gestured towards a patch of trees about thirty metres behind Willoughby that would enable us to observe him side-on and still see what was going on at the graveside.

  As we crept towards our hiding place, I kept expecting Willoughby to turn and spot us, but he was intent on the funeral below. I wondered what it was that fascinated him – and more especially, why he was staying out of sight. Was the dead man a family member he was estranged from? An old enemy? A rival? Was Willoughby here to gloat? Or could this have something to do with the Wolves of London?