‘Please sir. On the bed.’
Horton took the old man over to the bed, and laid him down upon it. Once horizontal, the old man’s eyes opened again, and his hands reached for Horton’s throat.
‘Jacques! You’re not taking me in your machine! No, Jacques! I’ll bloody kill ye!’
Horton felt a scratch as one crooked finger flicked over the skin of his neck, but then the man’s eyes closed once again, his hands fell back and his head lolled into the foul-smelling pillow. He began to snore. The girl sat in the armchair and put her head into her hands.
‘Oh, forgive him, sir! Forgive him! He is overtaken by strange fancies.’
‘Pray, do not concern yourself, miss. There is no damage done. But who is this Jacques? And what is his machine?’
Her hands dropped to her lap, and she looked at her father. It was an awful look in one so young: full of the desperate love of the mother, but infected by the helpless despair of the young burdened with impossible responsibility.
‘They are fancies, sir. I know not where they come from. He believes a Frenchman named Jacques is to come for him in a flying machine. When he comes, the roof will fly away, and he will be taken into the sky, leaving me behind.’
‘Should he not perhaps be seen by a mad-doctor? Perhaps at Bethlem . . .’
‘Oh no! No, sir! Not that place!’
‘It is not so bad, now it has moved to new premises.’
‘You can have had no experience of madhouses, sir.’
She was wrong in that, but Horton said nothing of it.
‘Miss Beavis, I wish to speak to you of the Johnsons. I understand you were a domestic servant to them.’
She looked away from her father and directly at him. She really was astonishingly beautiful. Her eyes were an Irish green, and her dark hair, worn loose this morning, had more lustre in it than anything else in this benighted building.
‘What am I going to do?’ She glanced at her snoring father, and then back at Horton. He might, if she’d asked just then, have offered to take her in, so gloomy was her pretty countenance.
‘Miss Beavis, I understand your situation is poor. But I must seek to . . .’
‘They were all dead when I found them.’ She spoke without looking at him; those green eyes were fixed on something not in the room, not even in the moment. Perhaps she could hear the beat of Jacques’ flying machine. ‘They had been away for some days. Mrs Johnson had taken to going away. She liked to rent rooms by the sea. Said it did her complexion the power of good.’
‘They did not take you with them?’
‘No, because Mr Johnson usually stayed in town. He worked, you see.’
‘At the East India Company?’
‘Yes. He worked hard, did Mr Johnson. Always bringing home files and papers and suchlike.’
‘So Mrs Johnson and her daughter would take the sea air regularly?’
‘Oh yes. Four or five times a year.’
‘How long have you worked for them?’
‘Three years. I was their first servant. Mrs Johnson said she was very proud of me. Bought me clothes. Even paid for me to have a tutor.’ She looked at him directly now. ‘I didn’t always speak like this. Mrs Johnson said it was proper for a lady like her to have a well-spoken servant. And she wanted me to be a friend to Jane. Oh God. Jane.’
She cried.
‘She was . . . he had . . . oh my God. Oh my God.’
Horton moved towards her and squatted on his haunches in front of her. She grasped his hand, as if it were a rope and she were floundering in the sea.
‘When did Mrs Johnson leave?’
‘Two weeks ago. She said Mr Johnson would be staying, but then he told me he’d decided to take some time off, and was going with her.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two days after she left.’
‘Mr Johnson told you himself that he was going?’
‘Yes. I was at the house. I was cleaning. It was the middle of the day. He came into the house, and packed a bag of clothes. He said Jane had taken sick, and he was leaving immediately. I was to keep an eye on the house, he said, and clean it every third day, prior to their return.’
‘So when you visited yesterday, that was the first visit for three days? And, what, your third or fourth visit since Mr Johnson left?’
‘Yes, sir. My fourth, I believe.’
‘Were you concerned by Johnson’s news?’
‘Concerned for Jane? Yes.’
‘Did Mr Johnson also seem concerned?’
‘Yes. He seemed greatly disturbed.’
‘Was he alone? When he visited you?’
‘He was alone when he came into the house. But when I saw him to the door, another man was waiting. In a carriage.’
‘Did you recognise him?’
‘No.’
‘Did he introduce this man?’
‘No. I only caught a glimpse of him in the carriage. Then Mr Johnson climbed in, and they left.’
‘Did they have any other family? Mr and Mrs Johnson?’
‘Mr Johnson, no. At least, none that he ever told me of. Mrs Johnson had a sister down in Putney. She spoke of her often, but never visited, as far as I know.’
‘Did Mr Johnson speak of his work?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Did you notice if anything was missing from the house?’
He noticed something in her eyes when he asked this, something that hadn’t been there before. A different kind of fear. A watchful variety.
‘No, sir. I do not believe anything was missing.’
Had she taken something from the house? She would not be the first servant girl to do so. He wondered what she had been paid by Mrs Johnson. Then he thought of her in that house, alone with the dead, terrified and upset, and despised himself for his suspicions. But those suspicions, once winked into existence, would not quite subside.
‘Was anything disturbed?’
She breathed in, sharply.
‘My apologies. Of course things were disturbed. I mean, in those rooms where there was no violence. Did you notice a disturbance?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Did Johnson keep a safe? Anywhere he might have locked up valuables?’
‘No, sir. He had a desk in his bedroom. A bureau, with a lock on it.’
‘It was closed when you attended?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the key?’
‘I know not, sir.’
She looked again at her father, and seemed very small indeed in the ancient armchair. But her look seemed oddly mannered, as if intended as a distraction.
‘What am I to do now, sir?’
She turned those green eyes on him. He noted, mournfully, how much those eyes and that face would be worth to a Covent Garden panderer, and feared for her.
‘If I can help, I will,’ he said, knowing how little the words were worth.
There was still a substantial crowd outside the Johnson house, and it would only swell. In two days the coroner would bring his inquest jury to look at the house and the bodies, just as he had done with the Marr family. They would be marched down the Highway between crowds, and it may yet prove necessary for the Bow Street magistrates to send a few uniformed patrolmen to calm the crowds with their presence. Horton knew how ceremonial such a show would be. Bow Street patrolmen did not wear uniforms other than to intimidate the public.
The Shadwell magistrates had improved one thing since the first Highway murders – there were now officers in front of the house to stop people going in to gawp. The poor dead Marrs had been laid out in their house like fish down at Billingsgate, for all and sundry to come and view. The Johnsons had, at least, been spared that posthumous humiliation.
The house in daylight was clean and peaceful. The shutters were up for the day’s business on the shops either side. He could see, for the first time, that one was a fishmonger which seemed to sell mainly oysters, while on the other side of Johnson’s house was that odd confectio
n of a place with the animals, which turned out to be a kind of chandlery which also contained a menagerie of creatures for sale. A marmoset monkey sat in a cage in its window looking forlorn in an ugly green outfit. It screamed at Horton as he walked up, and there were other growls and screeches from within.
He went into both shops and asked if they had heard or seen anything suspicious on the day before the killings. Neither had. The wife of the fishmonger confirmed what Markland had said about the family, while the old Irishman who ran the chandlery-cum-menagerie said he’d argued with Mrs Johnson many times about the noise from his shop. When a carriage pulled up outside the shop, almost blocking the Highway as it dropped off even more squawking creatures, Horton imagined being the shop’s neighbour. ‘I don’t go outside much,’ said the proprietor. I’m not surprised, thought Horton. You’d get the rough side of most of your neighbours’ tongues. He went to the rear of number 37, as he had the previous night.
He had to do some persuading of his own to get through the door, though he suspected the constable knew perfectly well who he was and, like so many of his fellows, resented him for what he did and how he did it.
The bodies had gone from the kitchen and the parlour – Salter must already have arranged for their transport to the Wapping office. There was still a lingering humanity to the place. Mrs Johnson had been a house-proud woman – the rugs looked like new, emphasising the total absence of any blood to stain the fabric or the wood beneath.
Flies had made themselves known. It took a minute or two for the low buzzing to become obscene, and Horton pondered opening a window to let in some air. But the only window was facing the street, where onlookers waited. They would only be persuaded to climb inside if he gave them an entrance.
So. A quiet scene, it had been: the daughter sitting in the chair, the mother . . . what? Was she in here already, or was she brought in here? The girl was tied to a chair, was killed. The mother was driven into the fire – so was she alive when her daughter was killed? Did the killer hold her face into the flame while she struggled? Did he make the daughter watch?
He went to the door into the hall. The only rooms downstairs were the parlour and the kitchen. He stepped out into the hall, and walked upstairs. There, he went first into the smallest bedroom: that of the daughter. He checked under the bed, looked in a drawer or two, opened the wardrobe. Jane Johnson had few things, but they were all well looked after and of decent quality. She had inherited a care for things and an eye for them from her mother.
He went into the main bedroom. He had given instructions to Markland that nothing be removed from the house, but had little confidence that this will have been observed. Anything of obvious value would have been liable to being picked up by a poorly paid parish constable. In this, Shadwell’s parish constables were no different to anyone else’s.
He sat on the bed, looked around the room: the bed, the cupboard, a little set of drawers, an elegant and unexpectedly expensive dressing table.
He got up and looked at the table. It was a very fine piece of furniture, even to his untutored eye. There were bottles of perfume upon it, and he took the most expensive-looking one and inspected it, but it said little about Mrs Johnson beyond its obvious value. Various mysterious ointments and waxy-looking substances were hidden in containers which may or may not have been made of ivory and ebony – expensive again, but all built for uses which Horton could not understand. The dressing table occupied a female world in which he was an ignorant tourist. But it seemed Markland’s constables had behaved themselves; he would have expected the items on this table to have found their way into pockets by now.
The dressing table had three drawers with locks, all of which were open. In one of the locks there was a key attached to a heavy-feeling gold chain. Again, it had been left untouched. The clasp of the chain was broken, and there was a tangle of blonde hair wrapped within it. Horton opened the drawer. It was empty. He opened the other two drawers, and saw they contained an untidy collection of letters and bills.
He imagined Mrs Johnson sitting here while her husband sat in his own little office, poring over his own books and correspondence, while their daughter slept in the other bedroom.
He placed the key in his pocket and went out of the bedroom, and into the third little room. He had seen the small bureau as described by Amy Beavis on his first visit to the house. The room was as calm and tidy as everything else in this place. The desk of a City clerk, and a meticulous one at that.
He tried the lid, expecting to feel his fingernails bend against its unyielding weight. But to his surprise it opened. It was unlocked.
Within, no letters remained to be sent, or even to be read. Benjamin Johnson had not been disturbed in any work here. The desk had an end-of-day appearance, as if a careful man had tidied up his place of work after its completion. A quill lay next to an inkpot and some paper. Three books sat in an orderly pile. At the top of the pile was the first volume of the Reverend Daniel Lyons’ The Environs of London. Beneath that sat a thin and rather old volume with a grand frontispiece written in Latin, and, perhaps, in Greek. He had neither language. The final volume was also thin, but more recently published, it would seem. It bore the title Mathematicall Preface, and its pages were much scribbled upon. The author of this book was given as ‘Dr John Dee’, a name which tickled at the edges of his memory, but did no more.
It was an eclectic set of titles. He picked the books up. They felt heavy in his hands and oddly warm, as if Johnson’s reading of them had left behind some memory of itself. He noticed that pages had been torn out of one of the books, The Environs of London. He put the books in a satchel he had brought with him, and then turned to the final object in the room, the one he had been avoiding until now.
The maul leaned against the wall under the window, exactly where he had found it the night before. As if it were on guard. Horton picked it up in both hands, felt its malignant weight and inspected its face and handle, remembering that other maul which he himself had retrieved from number 29.
But that maul, the property of a sailor, had been old and worn. The handle of this one was shiny and new, and although its flat face was too covered in the matter which once constituted the mind of Benjamin Johnson, its pick-axe face was untouched and clean. The maul was brand new.
An unlocked drawer. A pile of books. A terrible instrument. Clean floors and walls. The stories of the house whirled round his head while he stood in front of the window holding the maul, as if he might smash his way outside.
ABIGAIL AND THE DOCTOR
The day after their aborted theatre trip, Abigail walked to St Luke’s hospital at Moorfields. For three months now she had been working at the place, unpaid, as a nurse. The job was part of a careful effort to place her feet back down on the normal earth and begin her life anew.
The previous year, she had taken herself to a madhouse, Brooke House in Hackney. She had been plagued at that time by terrible dreams, and these dreams had begun to bleed into her waking hours, such that she could barely leave the rooms she shared with Charles in Lower Gun Alley in Wapping. Her mind had become an unreliable and tearaway thing, and she had been forced to mislead her husband in order to get it seen to.
She had come out of Brooke House cured, or at least it had appeared so to her. The dreams had ceased. They had been replaced, though, by a lingering discomfort with her memories of the madhouse, which were murky at best and in some instances, it appeared to her, full of queasy blanks. She went in disturbed (she avoided the word ‘mad’, even when thinking to herself) and she came out relatively calm. Of what happened in between she had little idea.
It was this as much as anything that had taken her to St Luke’s, the great asylum formed the previous century by William Battie and intended to be a progressive and humane place for the treatment of madness. Its great rival in all matters relating to mad-doctoring was Bethlem, which had just moved to an enormous new building in Lambeth, such that these gargantuan temples to the infirmities
of the mind seemed to bracket the metropolis, to pinch it between their stone fingers.
Abigail had worked as a nurse at St Thomas’s before she ever met her husband, so her skills were in some demand at St Luke’s, but she never asked for any money, nor was it ever offered to her. St Luke’s provided her with something more valuable – an education in madness, and access to its investigators.
She watched the inmates while she cared for them, and tried to understand their lunacies: their manias, their melancholies, their hysteria. She spoke to the nurses and, when she could, she spoke to the senior doctor at the place, whose name was Drysdale, and who had taken a particular interest in this intelligent woman who worked for nothing and asked such penetrating questions about mental disorder.
He had become particularly interested when she mentioned Brooke House during one of her early visits. He knew something of the place, of its own Dr Monro and its former consulting physician, Dr Bryson.
‘I have heard strange stories about the place,’ Dr Drysdale had said to her.
Abigail had not heard stories, but she had imagined them.
‘They say Bryson was involved in some odd investigations there. Involving mesmerism.’
‘Mesmerism?’ Abigail asked.
‘Yes, though I cannot think why a qualified doctor would indulge in such quackery. It is said Bryson had come to believe that one might be able to guide another’s thoughts using a species of mesmerism. He called it moral projection. Did he speak to you of it?’
‘I . . . I do not recall.’
‘You do not recall his theories? Or you do not recall the doctor?’
This seemed an oddly penetrating question, and Abigail found herself wondering if Drysdale might help her understand things from the previous year somewhat better.
‘I do not recall the theories. The doctor . . . Well, I recall a doctor, of course. But none of his details. His face, his voice, how he treated me. None of it.’
The Detective and the Devil Page 4