The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘That is most odd. Mrs Horton, I wonder if you would indulge me.’

  ‘In what way, doctor?’

  ‘I would like to examine you, in the mental sense. When you are here, perhaps we could spend some time talking about Brooke House and your memories of it. I am fascinated by the odd wisps of rumour I have heard. Bryson’s theories, while fantastic, do in some way overlap with some of my own ideas. You are an intelligent woman who may have experienced something unique. Might I make use of your brain, as it were?’

  Drysdale had smiled when he said this, and while Abigail found his request odd, she also discovered she wanted to know more of what had happened to her. Wasn’t that why she had come to St Luke’s in the first place? She would learn by talking to the inmates, and Drysdale would learn by talking to her, and who could say? Perhaps they would both learn things of interest.

  So she fell into a pattern of working at the hospital and being spoken to, once or twice a week, by Drysdale in his consulting rooms. They spoke of many things – of her past, of her husband, of her terrible dreams and of her oddly fractured memories of Brooke House. Some things that had happened there began to reveal themselves; other things stayed hidden. But she found her intellect reviving and her mind calming under the regular activity, like a weakened leg recovering from injury. Charles knew of her working days at St Luke’s, of course, but she did not share with him those sessions with Drysdale, because she knew his concern would be painful to her.

  Abigail Horton had returned from St Luke’s and was reading inside the apartment, which she had freshly cleaned, when her husband returned from his work. He was still wearing the clothes he had put on the previous day for their trip to the theatre. Indeed, she smelled him first rather than saw him.

  ‘Good afternoon, husband,’ she said, looking back down to her book. ‘How was the magistrate?’

  He kissed her, and sniffed her hair as he often did, holding the curve of her skull in his hand, such that she wondered if he thought he could cradle the mind inside, protect it from its old disturbances. Abigail lifted one hand from her book and placed it on his forearm, with an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘What is your book?’ he asked.

  She smiled.

  ‘Ah, so you will give no answer on the magistrate. Keep it to yourself, then. It is a recent novel. By a woman named Austen.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘I do. I like to read of clever people living in circumstances different to ours. Her world is full of wealthy soldiers and summer rain. She writes beautifully. I would like to meet her.’

  ‘You sound besotted.’

  ‘Besotted? No. Intrigued by another woman’s voice.’

  ‘And does Mrs Austen make dinner for her husband?’

  ‘I would be surprised if she were married. She seems to find men oddly amusing creatures. I cannot think why. Wash yourself. You smell disgusting. I will prepare you some food instead of writing my own novel.’

  She stood and went into the little kitchen and looked out of the window into the street outside while she worked. Some boys were playing an elaborate game down there, watched by a fellow puffing on a pipe. He shouted something to them and they laughed and scattered.

  She went back into the parlour with a pot which she placed on the fire. She set a tray down beside his chair – a plate with bread and jam and a bowl of apples she had bought that morning. Charles sat down to eat. Abigail returned to her book, and for a few minutes there was peace and a comfortable silence.

  Abigail looked up from her book, and noted that her husband was in his turn looking at her. She examined him. Abigail was widely read in matters relating to chemistry, botany and anatomy. She could, she believed, cut open his chest and take out his heart. She would hold it in her hand and watch it beating, but she would still have little idea of what it contained.

  ‘My husband has the stench of consideration about him,’ she said. ‘Which means my husband is working. Even while he sits with me.’

  ‘You are a more skilled investigator than I, wife.’

  ‘I think not. You are a dedicated sniffer of secrets. How goes this new case?’

  ‘It is a sad one. I do not wish to labour your peace with discussion of it.’

  ‘You do not? Do I have no say in the matter?’

  She smiled as she said it, but there was a deliberate edge to her words. She wished to talk of the case, whatever her husband thought.

  ‘Well then. The case has some unique aspects, but the most remarkable of them is its similarity to the Marr and Williamson killings. There is a good deal of panic in the neighbourhood that the same killer has returned.’

  Abigail was no longer smiling, and the mention of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter chilled the air in the room, but she was listening closely. He continued.

  ‘The whole family was slaughtered: father, wife, daughter. The man was in the kitchen, laid out on his front. The mother was face down in the grate. The daughter was tied to a chair, her throat cut. All the family members seem to have been attacked with a maul.’

  She was distracted by the awful details. She had asked him, almost a year ago, that he share such details of his work when she requested it: ‘However grim, I wish to hear it.’ When he had asked why, she had said she needed to test her own mind, to ensure its hardiness. It was a fragment of the same experimental regime which had been taking her to St Luke’s. It involved frequent prods at her sensibility and understanding, probing for weak spots. She knew it made Charles uncomfortable.

  ‘Benjamin Johnson was the name of the husband and father,’ Charles continued. ‘He was a clerk with the East India Company. I spoke to the maidservant this morning, at her father’s lodgings in Spitalfields. The maid told me Mrs Johnson and her daughter had been taking the air down in Brighton in the fortnight before their deaths. Mr Johnson had joined them there shortly after they left, saying his daughter had been taken ill.’

  ‘His employer let him go?’

  ‘I imagine so. I have not yet spoken to anyone at the Company.’

  ‘John Company, they call it. Or the HEIC. H as in Honourable. And as I hear it, taking time off in such a way could be grounds for dismissal. The Company is not renowned for its treatment of its clerks.’

  ‘You hear a lot, wife.’

  ‘Well, it is books that I hear it from. They speak, in their own manner. So, Johnson took some time off work, and in that time somebody killed him, his wife, and his daughter. The maidservant saw nothing?’

  ‘No. She was told to visit the house every third day. She did so, and on one of these visits she discovered the bodies. And then, there is this.’

  He took the gold chain out of his pocket, and handed it to Abigail. She held it in her cupped hands as if it were liquid that might run through her fingers.

  ‘The wife’s?’

  ‘Yes. It locked a drawer in her dressing table. The drawer was itself empty.’

  ‘My God, Charles, is that her hair on it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Abigail gazed upon the gold chain and the hair wound within it.

  ‘The clasp is broken. Like it was torn from her neck.’

  ‘Such was my reckoning also.’

  ‘A woman with a key around her neck. A key to an open drawer. A woman with secrets, Charles.’

  ‘Indeed. Secrets which someone else now possesses.’

  ‘Was she killed for these secrets?’

  ‘That is my task to uncover.’

  ‘Shall we keep this here?’

  ‘Yes – I imagine you have some secret place of your own in which it will be safe.’

  The remark was in somewhat bad taste, and Abigail did not respond to it. She placed the necklace in a pocket of her dress.

  ‘Well, husband. You have been busy since leaving me at the Hermitage stairs. What next, do you think?’

  ‘I must visit the offices of the Company. I have no experience of dealing with such institutions. I know not how it will develop.’


  ‘Your magistrate will accompany you, surely.’

  ‘Doubtless. He is a former Company man, after all.’

  ‘Indeed. The Indian service.’

  ‘You have read his memoirs.’

  ‘As I say, husband: books tell me many things.’

  ‘Well, then – what of these?’

  He reached down to his satchel, and pulled out the three books he had taken from the house on the Highway. He passed them to her, and she looked over them.

  ‘Hmm. I know this one’ – she held up the Environs of London – ‘but the other two are a mystery to me. This one I cannot make head nor tail of, as I have no Latin, but I know someone who perhaps can. And this one – “Dr John Dee”. The name is familiar to me. At least the book is in English.’

  ‘There are pages missing from the first book – the Environs of London.’

  ‘Ah, interesting. I wonder who tore them out. I assume you wish me to consult these books? To see if they might speak to me of something or other?’

  ‘It would be of great benefit to me.’

  ‘Really?’ She put her head on one side, like a dog weighing up its owner. ‘Are you humouring me, husband?’

  ‘By no means. These books were left in Johnson’s desk.’

  She looked at him, her head still on one side. Her measuring was not quite finished.

  ‘Poor husband. It must have been an awful scene. All those slit throats. The blood must have been on everything.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. There was little blood. None at all, in fact.’

  Abigail frowned.

  ‘But how can that be? A slit throat will send blood in arcs all over the place. The heart pumps it into the air through the open wound. It is a basic matter of circulation.’

  ‘Indeed? Well, how would you explain the lack of blood?’

  ‘Perhaps the place was cleaned after the murders.’

  ‘Yes. But I do not know why anyone should have done that. And there would still have been marks, surely.’

  ‘Or they were dead when their throats were cut. A stopped heart will pump no blood.’

  She frowned.

  ‘What state were the bodies in, husband? If the maidservant visited every third day, they may have been there for almost three days.’

  ‘There was little sign of decomposition last night. More this morning; there were flies in the house then. But none last night.’

  ‘So, the bodies were fresh. There was no blood. An obvious explanation presents itself.’

  ‘Yes. That they were killed somewhere else, and brought back to their home to be discovered, after the blood had drained from them.’

  ‘And brought there immediately after their deaths.’

  Horton nodded at the book in Abigail’s lap.

  ‘What would Miss Austen have to say on this?’

  It was a poor quip, and in the universal way of wives Abigail did not even acknowledge it.

  THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

  East India House dominated the corner of Leadenhall Street and Lime Street like a public school bully watching for new arrivals. The buildings around it, shabby by comparison, hunkered down. It took up two hundred feet of pavement, an ordered symmetry of columns and wide wings, topped by a pediment peopled by three gigantic figures. Horton recognised Britannia sitting on a lion, but had no idea who the other two figures were supposed to be, the one sitting astride a horse, the other on what looked like a camel.

  The building was like a whale bearing down on him, its mouth open, its teeth made from fluted columns. Dark-suited men swam up its steps, throwing themselves into its maw with only papers and files to add flavour.

  He knew, because his magistrate John Harriott had told him as they rode up Leadenhall Street, that this frontage was relatively new, that it masked a maze of old buildings – warehouses and stables, clerks’ quarters and meeting rooms – which John Company had assembled over two hundred years. The classical front was like a fine suit on a body disfigured by age and war. An application of rouge on an old, scarred hog.

  Steps went up behind the pillars to a set of wooden doors which must have taken almost as many trees to build as would a frigate. The steps were shallow but even so presented difficulty to Harriott. The old man was virtually lame in his left leg, and grimaced as he made his slow way up. Horton found himself unaccountably upset by this: the wealthy building glaring down as its old servant struggled upon its face. Harriott had given his healthy leg to John Company, but John didn’t care to acknowledge the gift.

  Was it possible to hate a building for its character rather than its appearance? Horton was beginning to think that it might be.

  He attempted to help Harriott, but was angrily waved away. He had not wanted Harriott to come; a simple letter from him would have sufficed. But Harriott had been adamant.

  Eventually the old man reached the top of the steps, and they went inside. Beyond the doors, a wide corridor stretched into the building, pierced with doors and windows and staircases. The throat of the whale, leading down into its many stomachs. Dark-suited men scurried from one place to the next, all of them carrying papers, the single ones peering at something in their documents, the groups whispering in urgent tones to each other. A frenzy of information and intelligence filled the air, the great Leviathan’s body filled with these paper-carrying corpuscles with their missives from its brain to its extremities.

  From somewhere within the building Horton heard a great crowd of men shouting and growing silent again, and then shouting once more, as if there were a cock-fight. He and Harriott were accosted almost immediately by a man wearing the dark clothes of a servant.

  ‘Is there something you need assistance with?’

  The sentence was elegantly formed. It said Horton and Harriott were dressed better than men of the street who might have stepped in out of the cold, but not well dressed enough for anyone in this building to immediately assume they were on Company business. Perhaps Horton was an unemployed clerk, seeking deferment, accompanied by his old father, a fat man with a lame leg and a red face.

  ‘Fetch Mr Robert Ferguson, immediately,’ said Harriott, adopting a practised tone of brusque authority for which Horton was quickly thankful. Harriott had been right to come, after all. ‘I am John Harriott, the supervising magistrate of the Thames River Police Office. We are here on a criminal matter.’

  The servant did not move. Harriott’s introduction placed him and Horton more effectively, but this servant apparently needed more evidence before heading in to speak to whatever internal brain operated this place.

  ‘Are there any more details? It is a busy day for us, sir. There is an indigo sale. A great many brokers and dealers are within.’

  ‘Is that the cause of that infernal racket?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Are there any more details?’

  ‘There are none. Fetch Ferguson, and tell him John Harriott is here to see him. Hand him this note. Do not open it yourself.’

  Harriott handed over an envelope, and the servant took it rather as if he had been handed an Eastern spider. He looked about to say something, but then thought better of it.

  ‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave you to wait here in the corridor, sir,’ he said, though his tone contained no apology. ‘All our rooms are taken up with the Sale.’

  ‘We will wait. Now go.’

  The man turned and left them. Harriott pointed at some old leather seats underneath a window which was frosted and seemed to look on some interior space rather than the world outside.

  ‘Let us sit and wait, Horton. We may be some time.’

  Various people came and went and, as Harriott had predicted, the two of them were kept waiting. Every man Horton saw seemed to be engaged in the most important business on God’s earth. Benjamin Johnson had been just one of these busy men. How could Horton possibly construct a personality for a dead man who had been just one among legions of scribbling, scrabbling drones?

  When somebody did arrive, he did not come fro
m within the building. Horton saw him arriving through the gigantic street door: a man in a black frock coat with black breeches and white stockings, an expensive but conservative wig on his head. He looked like William Pitt might have done had he aged beyond his early death: thin, pale, cold, more of an intelligence on legs than a person. Horton took him for sixty years or more, and observed the stick on which he seemed to depend for balance – it was topped with a small and exquisitely done golden dog’s head.

  ‘Harriott?’ the pale man said to Horton, who shook his head.

  ‘No, sir. This is Mr Harriott.’

  With some difficulty, Harriott was rising from his seat. A dark cloud had set upon his face. He seemed to have recognised the man.

  ‘Ah. Of course. Harriott, my name is Burroughs.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ replied Harriott. The newcomer blinked his pale blue eyes, while Horton took in his clothing, which was, on closer inspection, of supremely fine quality, despite its very deliberate conservatism.

  ‘This is most irregular, sir,’ said Burroughs. ‘I am led to understand that you are the magistrate of the River Police. You have no jurisdiction in this place. None whatsoever.’

  ‘And you, sir, I recall, are among other things the alderman for this ward?’

  ‘Indeed I am. Have we met?’

  ‘Several times. I see I made little impression.’

  Burroughs ignored this.

  ‘You know, of course, that as alderman I also represent the magistracy and hold responsibility for criminal matters. The City preserves these responsibilities seriously.’

  ‘Indeed. The City polices itself very carefully indeed, I find.’

  ‘It has always been thus, sir.’

  ‘Word reached you quickly, Burroughs.’

  Harriott’s disdain for the man ran through every sentence he spoke. Horton had seen this before. When the magistrate did not care for someone, he had no means to hide it.

  ‘I have been asked to attend your meeting here, as a representative of the City magistracy,’ said Burroughs.