Tom All-Alone's

by Lynn Shepherd

  He is, suddenly, a small boy again. Standing at the entrance of this same room, summer sunlight glancing through the half-closed shutters. No damp in the air then, but the delicious aroma of baking drifting up from a kitchen that boasted not only a cook but two kitchen maids and a scullion: in those days it was Maddox’s business to know and be known, and some of the most eminent men in the land would eat regularly at his table, and count themselves privileged in the invitation. Charles remembers being surprised at finding this door open, and pausing at the threshold, tentative and fearful, knowing he shouldn’t be there. Then catching sight of the book open on the table and creeping forwards to look at it. Struggling at first with the handwriting, but making out a word here and there, and so engrossed in doing so he never heard his uncle’s tread.

  ‘And what, exactly, do you think you’re doing, young man?’

  Maddox’s face – when Charles summoned the courage to look up at it – was unsmiling but not unkind.

  ‘Prying into my papers, I’ll wager, or so it would seem.’

  Charles can remember, even now, the hot flush of shame, and the lurch of his stomach as Maddox laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Do you not recall what I told you?’

  A nod, then another, quicker.

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘That all that passes between a detective and his client is confi— confi—’

  ‘Confidential,’ said Maddox, with emphasis. ‘Quite so. And what does confidential mean?’

  ‘Secret.’

  ‘Exactly so. Secret, and not to be shared with anyone, however small, and however inquisitive.’

  Maddox had sat down on the chair then, and lifted Charles on his knee, the wood creaking beneath their weight. ‘One day,’ he said, touching him lightly on the brow, and smoothing his hair, ‘one day, young Charles, when you are older, and the people in these files dead and gone, I will let you read about these crimes, and show you how I resolved them. But not today. Today I am too occupied, and you are still too young. So run along now, and have Cook give you a glass of milk. But ask politely, mind.’

  Charles moves now towards the shelf and works back along the spines, wondering if he can find that same book, and read the pages he read that day, such a long time ago. He pulls out the volume for 1834 and is struck for a moment by the coincidence: it was this same year that Chadwick’s grand-child went missing from the Convent of the Faithful Virgin orphanage. Not that he expects to find anything so commonplace here. Here it is all forgery, and coining, and housebreaking, and theft. Profitable investigations, as the neatly noted fee receipts demonstrate, but rather lacklustre, from a purely professional point of view. He closes the book and pulls another at random from the shelf: 1811. Now this, it seems was quite another story. He spends half an hour enthralled by an extraordinary murder case at a Northamptonshire mansion, only to turn the page at the end and find himself confronted by what will prove to be one of the most infamous crimes of the nineteenth century: the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Charles already knows the bones of this story – the savage and apparently inexplicable murder of Timothy Marr and his family in their East End draper’s shop, followed twelve days later by a second equally brutal killing spree, which left the landlord of the nearby King’s Arms with his throat cut, and his wife and maidservant likewise. Charles – like most of his contemporaries – has always thought the man arrested for these murders was in all likelihood the one who committed them, even if he killed himself in jail before he could be tried. But as he winds deeper and deeper into Maddox’s notes, he finds inconsistency after inconsistency in the evidence, and failure after failure in the official police investigation – inconsistencies and failures that are amply and fascinatingly described, by the way, in a more modern account of exactly the same events by one of our most revered crime novelists (though the Baroness of Holland Park does not come to quite the same conclusions as the master thief-taker of Buckingham Street once did). By the time Charles is a dozen pages into Maddox’s notes, he’s already questioning whether the same lone killer can possibly have committed all these crimes, and is starting to wonder how on earth his uncle got drawn in—

  ‘The Home Secretary asked for my help.’

  He looks up, just as he looked up all those years ago, only the man in the doorway now is bent and grey and leaning heavily on a stick. Though Billy’s good offices are clearly in evidence, for his hair is brushed, and his dressing-gown newly washed.

  ‘That was indeed what you were thinking, was it not?’ says Maddox, coming slowly into the room. ‘How I came to be involved in the Ratcliffe Highway case?’

  Charles starts forward and helps Maddox to the chair. ‘Are you sure you should be on your feet, Uncle?’

  Maddox waves his hand dismissively. ‘Don’t fuss, boy. You’re as bad as that damn Stornaway – man’s turned into an old mother hen. Show me the book.’

  Charles slides the volume towards him, and the old man looks at it for a moment, turns back a few pages, reads a paragraph here and there, then returns to where Charles left off.

  ‘So what have you concluded thus far?’

  Charles scarcely knows what to say, caught between his bewilderment at this utter and unlooked-for change in his uncle’s demeanour, and a dizzying sense of being still that same little nine-year-old boy, frantic to gain his great-uncle’s good opinion but never quite measuring up to the task.

  ‘Well, I—’ He hesitates. ‘From what I’ve read, I think it likely that the second murders were the work of other hands.’

  ‘The latter plural was, I take it, intentional?’

  ‘There were two men seen running from the inn soon after the attack.’

  ‘Indeed. Go on.’

  Maddox’s tone is cool, non-committal; Charles can’t tell whether he agrees with him or not. He swallows, and plunges on.

  ‘I think the first murder was a robbery that went wrong, probably committed by someone with a grudge against Marr. That’s the only way I can account for the degree of violence involved. I also think this man must have been involved in some way with the Marrs’ servant girl – she was rather too conveniently out of the way when it happened, and seems to have behaved rather suspiciously thereafter.’

  Maddox nods. ‘And the second murders?’

  ‘Made to look like the Marr killings, and in that respect almost entirely successful. But this crime was far more methodical in its execution, and seems to have been driven by something quite other than passion or revenge.’

  ‘Or robbery,’ says Maddox. ‘The only item missing was the landlord’s watch, which would have been next to impossible to sell, since it bore an engraving of a man’s name. Bravo, my lad, you’ve made noteworthy progress since I saw you last. Indeed you seem to be applying my principles with no small success. After all, there is no problem, however intractable, that cannot be resolved by the steady application of—’

  ‘Logic and observation,’ finishes Charles with a smile. ‘I can still remember the very first time you told me that. I was six years old, and you were visiting us in Berkshire. I’d found a broken window in the stable-block, and came rushing back in to tell you we’d had a burglary in our midst.’

  Maddox, too, is smiling now. ‘But having conducted a thorough inspection of the scene, we were able to determine that the glass had fallen outside the building, not in, and the breakage was therefore far more likely to be down to a stable-boy’s carelessness than a determined assault on your father’s property.’

  He sits back in the chair. ‘I recall we undertook a number of similar “investigations” that Christmas – the Strange Death of the Vagabond in the Ditch being one of them. Though I seem to remember we concluded he had merely had the misfortune to become intoxicated and fall asleep on the high road on an unexpectedly cold night. Did I not set you to write me an account of that?’

  Charles grins. ‘Indeed you did. I have it even now. It took me a whole week – I was so desperate to impress you.’


  ‘As you did. As you do still.’

  Charles flushes, just as he did when his uncle caught him in his office all those years ago, but now it is from pleasure, not guilt. They sit in silence for a moment, feeling the old relationship returning, the old closeness reinstating.

  ‘So was I right?’ says Charles at length. ‘About the Ratcliffe Highway murders?’

  Maddox sighs. ‘As correct as my own conclusions at the time, and just as likely to be disregarded. If you had finished reading my account, you would have found that I was unable to persuade the authorities to pursue my theory of the case, and after the hapless Williams was found dead in his cell, they were only too eager to draw a line under the whole unfortunate episode.’

  ‘But you don’t believe he was the killer.’

  ‘Certainly not at the King’s Arms, because he had a perfectly robust alibi. And when I examined his remains in the prison mortuary, the corpse bore all the signs of a violent struggle. I suspect it was not suicide, as the turnkey claimed, but murder. Indeed, by that point I was firmly of the opinion that a large part of the evidence against Williams had been fabricated, and I had my own suspicions as to who might have done so. But given who those men were, and the public standing they enjoyed, I could not hope to convince Bow Street without concrete proof. Which I never found.’

  Charles turns to the end of the case and finds a single final word. One he has never seen in these pages before: ‘Unresolved’.

  ‘They buried him like a felon on the public highway,’ says Maddox quietly. ‘With a stake through his heart.’ He looks away, his face troubled now. ‘It was my only other failure. That – and Elizabeth.’

  Charles starts. He has not said her name since he left his father’s house for the last time six years before; has not heard it said since he was last in this house a twelvemonth before. Hearing it now, so unexpectedly, he feels the iron close again about his heart. This is what he has been evading, all that time; this is what he feared, coming here again. And yes, there was some tiny, hidden, shameful part of his mind that saw his uncle’s madness as a relief. A guarantee that they would not – could not – ever speak of her again. Only Maddox is not mad. Not any more.

  Charles takes a deep breath. ‘You did everything you could. You weren’t there when it happened, and by the time you arrived it was too late to—’

  ‘That is no adequate excuse. If anyone could have found her, I should have been the one to do it. Taken like that, in the middle of the day, barely yards from where her mother was standing—’

  Charles says nothing, knowing, just as Maddox does, that his mother never forgave herself for that moment’s distraction, those few minutes when her infant daughter was out of her sight.

  Maddox strikes his hand against the arm of the chair. ‘I should have found her – what use are skills like mine if I cannot use them to spare my own family from a lifetime of regret and self-reproach?’

  Charles shakes his head, but the memory, so long stifled, will be suppressed no more. And as if in revenge for such long denial, the pictures in his head are more vivid now than the day it happened – the sounds more intense. He sees the soft curves of his sister’s face, and the tiny golden curls escaping – as they always did – from under the edge of her straw bonnet. Sees himself being told to watch her by his mother. Hears the taunts of the street-boys because he was holding her hand. Feels himself letting that hand go, and turning away to play, his back to her all the while despite her tears. Hears then, and now, and ever after, his mother’s agonized cry. It was his fault. It had always been his fault. Not just what happened that day, but what it led to. It was all his doing. And he has never had the courage to confess it.

  ‘Is that why you did it?’ His uncle’s voice breaks into his thoughts, and Charles looks up – not flushed now, but white in the face. Maddox wasn’t even there that day – surely he cannot possibly suspect—

  Maddox is watching him thoughtfully. ‘Is that why you took the Chadwick case? Because you hope to find not only a lost grand-child, but a lost sister too?’

  Charles turns away and walks to the window. On the other side of the street two children are playing with a ball, and a little grey dog is racing around them, barking and wagging its tail.

  ‘I took the case because I need the money. That’s all.’

  Maddox turns, rather laboriously, to look at him. ‘I suspect, my dear Charles, that you are not being completely honest in that response. Not least to yourself. You know what I have always said—’

  ‘That a detective must never allow his own feelings to become engaged by an investigation, for they will only impede it. I know, I know, but I have never been as consummate a professional as you always were.’

  It may be that Maddox himself has not always followed his own dictates as strictly as this might suggest, but of this the old thief-taker gives no sign.

  ‘Take care, Charles,’ he says eventually. ‘I fear you will find neither child now, after all these years—’

  ‘You’re not the first to say that.’

  ‘But you run a very grave risk of losing yourself.’

  The old man watches as the young man by the window stiffens, and then drops his head. Maddox has, in fact, long suspected what really happened the day Elizabeth Maddox disappeared, and is saddened that the boy has never felt able to confide in him. But he knows better than to probe. His great-nephew resembles him in far more than merely name and intelligence; neither is adept at intimacy, and both are very well-practised in the evasion of emotion. It may even be – though Maddox has never considered this – that the protégé has patterned himself on the mentor in this, as in so much else. And with the past Maddox knows he has, and the secrets Maddox knows he keeps, is it any wonder Charles finds it easier to keep people at a distance – to investigate them as suspects, or study them as species, or even buy their bodies by the finite hour. Anything to avoid an equality of exchange.

  All this while Charles is still at the window, but Maddox can see now how rigidly he’s gripping the window-frame, and he thinks again of the image that has come to him so many times in the presence of this young man – an image of a bright sheet of smooth paper, folded and folded and folded again until it is nothing more than a hard tight knot, closed into a fist.

  A moment later Charles has turned to face him again. Their eyes meet, but the old man barely has the time to register the look on the younger’s face before Charles turns quickly away and leaves the room. He can hear Maddox calling after him, but it’s only when he is halfway up to the attic that he hears the thud from below, and when he looks back down over the banisters, he sees the old man sprawled on the lower landing, his stick flung from his grasp. And then pandemonium breaks loose. Molly with bandages, Billy with brandy, and – last, but worst – Abel Stornaway, who deciphers what has happened in a moment.

  ‘What was he doing on the stairs all by his’sen?’ he says, as he lifts his master’s head. There’s a graze to Maddox’s cheek, and a wildness in his look now, that makes the eloquence of the last hour seem like a distant dream. ‘He bain’t as steady as he was, Mr Charles – he needs watchin’ all the time.’

  Charles has nothing to offer by way of excuse, and there’s an accusation in Abel’s eyes that he cannot counter. Between the four of them they eventually manage to get the old man to his feet, but by the time they get him back to the drawing-room he’s already starting to mutter and struggle.

  ‘Should we send for the doctor?’ asks Charles meekly, as Stornaway settles Maddox into his chair.

  Stornaway tucks a rug over the old man’s knees and shakes his head. ‘The cut is not sae bad. And that doctor would only scare him the more. Leave him be, Mr Charles, just leave him be.’

  Sunday morning, and all the bells in London are ringing. Some near, some distant, this from Christchurch, Endell Street, that from St Paul’s, Covent Garden; all marking a different moment for the passing of the hour. Charles is still asleep, despite the noise, one arm th
rown back, his legs tangled up in his sheets much as we saw him once before, only this time someone else is managing his laundry, and the sheets are clean. There may have been a tap, there may even have been the sound of the door opening. Something of the sort there must have been, because when he opens his eyes he sees Molly standing at the end of his bed with a letter in her hand. He sits up with a start and feels, for a moment, absurdly embarrassed, as if she had caught him atop a whore. The girl sets the letter down on the table by the bed and leaves the room, her bare feet almost silent on the wooden boards. She does not smile; she merely delivers the message and is gone. Charles rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, aware, for the first time, of the smell of hot rolls and bacon that has drifted in through the open door. Letter first, then wash and breakfast.

  Lincoln’s Inn Fields

  Sunday morning, eight o’clock

  Mr Maddox,

  If it does not interfere unduly with your devotions, I should like to see you this morning at your earliest convenience. I have the two letters that you requested at our last meeting.

  Your obedient servant,

  Edward Tulkinghorn

  Attorney-at-Law

  Charles looks at the note, and then sits back, his face thoughtful. The domestic demands of the last two days have not left him any time to set about the practical task of tracking Tulkinghorn’s culprit, but his mind has been hard at work all the same. Only what it’s finding for him so far are not answers, but more questions.

  Charles has, on the face of it, no obvious reason to be so sceptical about such an unexpected and well-paid commission, but sceptical he is, and even more so now. He’s always had an excellent instinct for a lie, and his time in the Detective has done nothing to dull it. And what that instinct is telling him now is that a man like Tulkinghorn would never deign to deal personally with such a mundane affair, even for a client as consequential as Cremorne. The fact that he is so doing – and that even such a trivial matter as the delivery of supposedly insignificant letters cannot be delegated – is as eloquent, to Charles’ mind, as Tulkinghorn is taciturn. Charles, of course, did not see what we saw, and cannot know what we know, but he’s certain all the same that there’s something the old lawyer is not telling him. But what that is, and how deep it goes, even we cannot yet fully imagine.