“What’s his name?”
“Bowman.”
“Your condition is serious, Mr Bowman. You need to be treated. What do you remember?”
His muscles were stiff and aching. He raised an arm, but it fell back before it could reach his face.
“Bristol. I took the train . . .”
“Had you been drinking, Mr Bowman?”
“Huh?”
The doctor turned back to the nurse.
“Given the colour of his eyes, not to mention the smell of his breath, he’d obviously been drinking. Keep him under observation, I’ll drop by later. How is Briggs?”
Bowman heard the nurse’s voice as if through a door.
“Not too good. He really smashed his head this time.”
The doctor sounded amused:
“Probably the best treatment for him.”
The nurse laughed.
“What shall I give this one?”
Bowman closed his eyes.
“Nothing for the moment. I’ll see about that later. Let him sleep. What was he saying, when he was talking to Briggs?”
“I didn’t really understand. But he did seem to know what had happened to him. He kept saying it was over and they’d come back. Something like that.”
“Interesting. The same delirium as Briggs.”
“Yeah, and that’s not all.”
Bowman felt hands on his chest. He kept his eyes closed and let them do it. They opened his shirt.
“Fascinating! Exactly the same mutilations.”
The nurse added: “We found this on him.”
“Why would he come here with a weapon like that?”
“No idea.”
“Keep it somewhere safe. I want to know more about this man.”
“Alright, Doctor. Shall I put him in a cell?”
“We’ll decide that later. He can stay here for now.”
Bowman heard them leave the room, waited a few seconds, then opened his eyes.
He rested for a moment, just long enough to collect himself, tentatively moving his arms and legs, one after another. The muscles responded a little better. He rolled onto his side, letting his feet fall from the bed, and sat up. He put his hand to the back of his head, felt a bump and looked at his fingers, which were stained with blood.
He had to get out of here.
Bowman put his hands in a bowl of water with bloody gauze pads floating in it. He splashed water onto his face, and drank some, which tasted faintly of his own blood. His tongue was swollen where he’d bitten it, and the water brought the pain back.
He walked over to the door and turned the handle as slowly as possible. A long corridor swam before his eyes. No-one around. He sneaked out of the infirmary, walking until he reached another corridor and soon became lost, wandering around the hospital with the peak of his cap over his eyes, trying to hold himself straight whenever he passed any guards or nurses. He ended up opening a door that led outside, and found himself in the park. He walked around the building until he reached the main entrance and the driveway that led to the gates. The man in the sentry box stopped him, looked for his name on the register, wrote down the time and looked up.
“Well, you don’t look too good. It’s really something, that place, isn’t it? Every day, I see people coming out of there looking like you do now! You want some advice? Have a drink – it’ll make you feel better.”
Three days later, Arthur Bowman was at Euston Station, boarding a North Western Railway train to Birmingham. For this trip, he had bought a leather bag, which he had filled with food and a bottle of wine, along with the book that the schoolteacher had given him.
Pursuing our journey, as we were passing through a forest, we were met by a forlorn half-famished dog, who came rambling along the trail, with inflamed eyes and bewildered look. Though nearly trampled upon by the foremost rangers, he took notice of no-one, but rambled heedlessly among the horses. The cry of “Mad dog!” was immediately raised, and one of the rangers levelled his rifle, but was stayed by the ever-ready humanity of the Commissioner. “He is blind!” said he; “It is the dog of some poor Indian, following his master by the scent. It would be a shame to kill so faithful an animal.”
Bowman read all the way through the journey, not stopping until the train arrived four hours later. His head cleared by wine, his stomach settled by the food he’d eaten, Bowman took a cab through the city.
Morgan was from this particular area of Birmingham, and though he was no longer living at the address that Reeves had located, Bowman found him a few streets away. The neighbours knew him and told Bowman where to find his new lodgings.
Morgan had not left his bed in nearly a year. He was dying, his body poisoned, after four years spent working in a foundry where they made cutlery, lead wires for stained-glass windows, and ammunition for the British army. His wife explained that many other employees from the factory had the same illness, and that it was caused by the lead vapours, which entered the body and never left it. Her husband’s body was twisted by cramps, his fists permanently balled. His teeth had fallen out and his skin was peeling off. He lay there groaning, incapable of saying a single word.
He was the first man on the list not to recognise Bowman. The illness had weakened him to the point that he no longer even recognised his own wife and children. Bowman made up a story for their benefit: that he had worked with Morgan years ago, that he was passing through the area and happened to remember him. His family survived thanks to money from a charitable organisation. Bowman left them two pounds, and for the first time the money he gave away seemed to serve its purpose. The woman thanked him at great length.
After the encounters he’d had up to this point, the visit to Edward Morgan’s deathbed came almost as a relief. But the poverty in this house and the rotten stench of this still living body weighed heavy on his heart. He drank some wine, just enough to make him feel better, and hailed a cab to take him to Coventry, twenty miles away. Bowman hoped that his meeting with Horace Greenshaw would be as simple and uneventful as this one.
Only a few fields separated the factories in the suburbs of Birmingham with those in the suburbs of Coventry. The city was expanding at a phenomenal rate, and there were whole muddy streets in the process of being built, rows of brick houses rising from the ground as they were around all the cities in England now.
When he found the address, it was indeed occupied by the Greenshaw family. They were peasants who had recently moved to the city, and they looked at Bowman, descending from the horse-drawn carriage in his suit, as if he were a captain of industry. They got rid of the children by smacking them, cleaned off the kitchen table, and invited their visitor to sit in the best chair. Bowman was given a glass of wine, which he didn’t even touch, then he asked them where he could find Horace. The family seemed disappointed that this visit was for their cousin. They hesitated, fearing that Bowman would leave straight away, then pointed out the cemetery to him. Horace Greenshaw, the cousin who had been a soldier, had been buried there since 1856. When Bowman asked how he died, they replied that it was progress that had killed him. He had fallen into a steam-powered combine harvester.
“All that came out was some dung that smelled of booze.”
*
Back in Birmingham, Bowman managed to catch a evening train. Sitting under a lamp in his compartment, he started to read again, taking refuge in the words of Washington Irving in order to forget Briggs’s screams and the stink of Morgan’s poisoned body.
Several Osage Indians, visitors from the village we had passed, were mingled among the men. Three of them came and seated themselves by our fire. They watched everything that was going on round them in silence, and looked like figures of monumental bronze. We gave them food and, what they most relished, coffee; for the Indians partake in the universal fondness for this beverage which pervades the West.
Irving wrote of the Indians with sympathy. Bowman remembered the stories told by Big Lars, who had met some and said they were lik
e all the other savages in the world: dirty, stinking thieves whom you should never turn your back on. But there were several different tribes. The Osages, who drank coffee with Irving, and the Pawnies, whom he and his troop avoided like the plague. Bowman doubted that the indigenous tribes of America were any better than those of Asia, but the way Irving recounted his voyage aroused a longing in him. Especially the landscapes he described.
When he arrived in London, he had not slept for twenty-four hours, but he did not feel tired. From Camden, he walked to Limehouse, his travelling bag slung over his shoulder.
The next morning, after a few hours’ rest, he unfolded the list and crossed off another two names. He only had one journey left to make – to the south, this time. Norton Young, one of Wright’s men, whose address was in Southampton, and then the last man on the list, Edmund Peavish, the preacher, whose address was in Plymouth.
Bowman looked at the page with all its crossings-out. When he had seen it for the first time, the idea of searching for all these men had seemed an impossible task. A few weeks later, there were only two names left. Bowman remembered what Captain Reeves had told him. That there would not be any truth and that it would take him time to understand.
And already time was running out. Soon there would be no-one left to look for and the certainty that he would not find someone but discover something was slowly penetrating his head. If Young was not the killer in the sewers, he could not imagine that the preacher would have murdered anyone in that way.
Bowman felt profoundly depressed, though he did not understand the – too subtle – difference from the despair he usually felt. He did not feel like reading, so he sat on the wooden crate, pulled the inkwell towards him, smoothed out a sheet of blank paper and dipped his pen into the ink. With his hand in the air, hesitating, he tried to remember the first lines in the book by Irving. In small letters, at the left-hand top of the page, he traced the first words.
Arthur Bowman. London. 1858.
26 September.
I have found seven addresses.
Another two to go.
He paused to look at the words, impressed. He could continue if he wanted to. Write down everything that went through his mind. He thought some more, and realised he’d written today’s date when, in fact, it had all begun long before that, and he had to tell all of that too. He wanted to cross out the first words, but in the end he decided to leave them and continued below.
It was Wright and Cavendish who told me to find ten men on the Healing Joy.
The first one I found . . .
Bowman crossed out the word “found” and replaced it with “chose”, though he wasn’t sure how to spell it.
The first one I chose was the preacher and now he’s the last one on Reeves’s list. But I didn’t find Penders.
The lettering was clumsy, the page full of crossings-out and (he felt certain) mistakes, but he leaned back a little bit and proudly observed the two lines he had written. He reread them several times, not knowing what to write next. He thought for a long time, drank some wine, shovelled some coal in the stove, and looked out of the window at the wasteland between the warehouses. Then he went back to the crate and picked up his pen again.
The list is almost finished and I don’t know if I’m going to find anything. Or what I’m going to do if I don’t.
Bowman folded the page and carefully put it away with his belongings: the mother-of-pearl powder horn, the book, and his clothes. He took the money and the bond from their hiding place, buried under the hut’s earth floor. Of the original fifty pounds, he still had two ten-pound notes and three pounds in change. He had spent half of it in barely a month, but he still had the bond, a veritable fortune.
The next day, he would prepare his last journey.
10
Bowman had not bought another knife. The weapon, hanging from his belt, had disturbed him as much as it had reassured him, and the one time it would have been useful to him – when Collins had attacked him – he had not been capable of using it. On the way to Waterloo Station, he wondered if it was worth writing this: that he was going off to find Norton Young and Edmund Peavish, unarmed.
An employee of the South Western Railway told him that there was a line to Southampton and another one to Plymouth, but that the train line between the two cities was not yet finished. He would either have to come back to London or travel from Southampton to Plymouth by carriage or boat. There was a regular boat service and the journey took twenty-four hours. Bowman bought a one-way ticket for Southampton and decided to make his decision once he was down there.
The train reached its destination in less than three hours.
In Bristol, he had only smelled the sea’s presence; here, he found himself facing it. The station was on the docks, at the end of the bay. As the travellers left the terminal, they came out into the middle of a trading port. Bowman asked a station employee for directions to Hamble.
“It’s pretty far off, sir. You have to take a ferry, which’ll take you over the Copse, and after that you have to go through Weston, then West Wood, and then keep going until the Hamble estuary, where all the canneries are. After you’ve taken the ferry, you’ll be able to get a carriage on the other side. Otherwise, it’s a good six or seven miles on foot.”
Bowman put the strap of his bag over his shoulder and started walking towards the landing stage for the ferry. He paid three shillings for the crossing and, once he’d reached the other shore, decided to walk.
He walked past the docks, seeing four-masted ships and steamboats going up and down the bay. Sometimes he moved away from the sea, taking little side-streets, walking among workers’ houses that backed onto fields and marshes. He stopped on the way to have a bite to eat. The earth here was mixed up with the water from rivers and the sea. Hundreds of birds gathered and, in the cool September air, stuffed themselves with food before their long journey south. Bowman remembered their arrival, in October, over the African coast. He started walking again, a little faster now. The afternoon was passing and he wanted to get there before nightfall.
He reached the canning district after a three-hour walk. At the address for Norton Young, there was no response; the house was empty. Bowman knocked on the door of the neighbours’ house. A man opened and looked suspiciously at Bowman’s clothes.
“I’m looking for Norton Young. Do you know him?”
The man had huge hands and a blotchy sailor’s face.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Does he still live here?”
“Why are you looking for him?”
Bowman did not react to the man’s aggressive tone. He lowered his gaze, then turned towards the street.
“I know him. I’m looking for him.”
“Well, I don’t know where that bastard is. You’ll have to figure it out yourself.”
“I don’t want any trouble, sir, but I have to see Young.”
“Round here, knowing Young means trouble. Don’t come back here.”
Bowman crossed the road to a tavern, from where he could see Young’s house. The place was empty when he went in and he sat at a table near a window. He ordered a beer. As night fell, the tavern filled up. Workers on their way home dropped by for a pint. When there was no room left at the bar, they sat at tables, and the last arrivals remained standing.
Bowman listened to their conversations. They kept glancing over at this well-dressed man, whom no-one seemed to know, sitting alone with his beer. Amid the hubbub, he heard some men shouting louder than the others. Something about a strike in a canning factory. Wage cuts, six-day weeks, ten-hour days. Trays of beers were carried over heads and as the night went on, the voices grew more raucous, the yelling more aggressive. He observed the drunken crowd, discreetly checking out everyone who entered and left, but he did not recognise Norton Young. He continued watching the street, on his guard, and finally saw a figure sidle up to the house, open the door and disappear inside. Bowman waited a few minutes. No light came o
n in the windows of the house across the street. He finished his beer and left the tavern.
He knocked three times, without a response, and at last called out: “Young? Norton Young?”
Behind him, he could hear the noises of the tavern.
“I know you’re there. Open up! It’s Bowman. Sergeant Bowman.”
There was a light on in the house next door. He saw a corner of the curtain lifted up, glimpsed a silhouette behind the window, and called again: “Young?”
He hammered at the door and listened. More noises from behind him, and then a very quiet voice. Someone was answering him, someone who did not want to be heard.
“What is this shit? Who’s there?”
“It’s Sergeant Bowman.”
There was a silence. In the neighbour’s window, the curtain twitched again, and the silhouette disappeared. The voice came again from behind the door: “Bowman? Is that really you, Sergeant?”
“It’s me.”
“Ah, this is bullshit. Who is it, for fuck’s sake?”
Bowman said, in a quieter voice:
“I was with you on the junk, with Collins and Penders and the others.”
The door quickly opened.
“Come in. Fucking hell, don’t just stand there.”
Bowman walked into the dark entrance hall and felt a body brush past him. The door closed and the lights of the street vanished.
“Come this way.”
Bowman followed the footsteps ahead of him. They passed a door. He bumped into some furniture, a chair and a table, then there was another door and a glimmer of light. In a tiny room at the back of the house, a candle was burning on a shelf. Young stood aside and smiled, a lead ’cosh in his hand.
“Bloody hell! Is that really you, Sergeant?”
Young was tense as a bowstring. He kept hopping up and down.
“It’s bloody good to see you!”
Bowman, unsure how to respond, tried to smile.
“What are you doing here, Sergeant?”
“And you?”
Young burst out laughing.
“It’s heating up here, Sergeant! It’s all going to blow up soon. I just came to fetch a few things and then I’m out of here.”
Retribution Road Page 18