The Candle Man (15 page)

Her old clothes. She looked at them: desperately sad attempts at feminine glamour. Second-hands and throw-aways. She’d managed to lay her hands on a fox-fur stole turning bald, a lace
shawl shedding threads, and a soot-stained ruffle she had intended to stitch to the hem of her skirt when she could be bothered.

My old life.

To walk away from this, her old life, to let the room go; she’d thought of nothing else this morning as she’d taken several different trams across London. There was nothing about
this old life she wanted, but if John’s memory suddenly came flooding back and he realised he was being looked after by a tart attempting to trick him, then surely he’d turf her out, if
he didn’t call the police first. If she didn’t end up in prison, she’d end up back here. And if her room and possessions were all gone, she’d be on the street.

Mary realised she was taking an almighty gamble. She was hoping, desperately hoping, that some lasting bond would have developed between John and her; that even as his mind came back into sharp
focus, there would still be an affection there for her.

That’s a terribly big gamble.

It was. But she knew, this wasn’t a life she wanted to come back to. These four tight walls through which, almost every night, she heard a scream of pain or a slap, the snarl of a
drunk’s voice, pitiful moaning or, even more pitifully, the fake-cheer of drunken singing, and in the early hours, the soft sound of someone sobbing.

Not now. Not now she wore these clean, new clothes. Clean clothes without a rip or a tear or a stain. Not now she slept in a room that was restful at night, a room that didn’t stink of
stale piss and damp, a room that led onto a hallway and washroom that wasn’t shared with a dozen others taking turns washing themselves down after a night of work.

And wasn’t there more to this simple equation now? It was about the money at first. The smell of all that money in his satchel, and the intoxicating thought that this poor tourist
gentleman must have a great deal more of it elsewhere.

But now . . . ?

Now there was something else. She daren’t put a label on it. But it was a feeling that felt good, that was honest, even if she wasn’t prepared to admit the word. A feeling that
wasn’t rotten to the core, that didn’t smell like this whole house did, of desperation and selfishness. Of doing anything for enough coins to buy another bottle or spoon of cheer.

It felt wholesome and naïve. Hopeful and, quite probably, doomed.

‘Love’ was perhaps too strong a word at the moment.

Mary realised she felt affection for this stranger. This poor man who now swore blind his name was John Argyll; this man whom she’d named in a moment of panic. She felt something for him;
actually wanted to care for him, to nurse him back to being a complete man.

And perhaps, just perhaps, when he finally discovered he’d been lied to by her, that she’d been exploiting his lost and broken mind, he might still forgive her. Even love her back
and take her with him, home to America. She saw flashes of a fairytale ending. A brightly painted stone house with a grand portico and front lawns surrounded by white picket fences overlooking a
fashionable and busy thoroughfare. And her on John’s arm as he introduced her to New York’s polite society as ‘the English rose he fell for on his last business trip to
London’. A spotless, clean household full of lovely things and chambermaids calling her ‘ma’am’. And John: polite, charming, handsome in a distinguished, silvered way, and
oh-so worldly. Her lover, her protector, her provider and her mentor.

No matter how things went, she knew she couldn’t ever come back to this. If she did come back here, she knew the last of her resolve to do better for herself would evaporate. She’d
end up like all the others: drunks, addicts and eventually, one day, end up as a carcass down a backstreet, a floater in the Thames, a small article in a parish newsletter, a nameless entry on a
policeman’s notebook.

Actually, this room could go fuck itself. The money in her bag she’d brought to pay up her rent was going to stay right where it was; let that bitch Marge Newing toss out her things into
the street. There was nothing here of any value anyway, except a few personal things to remind her of better days, a childhood that promised to be so much more than this.

She began to gather them up. A hand basket, half a dozen penny-packets of tea and sugar, a hairbrush – once her mother’s, a small, cracked porcelain-handled mirror – her
grandmother’s.

One last look at the grimy cell, the dark, peeling walls, the threadbare evening wear on wall-nail hooks, stained by the few drunks she’d stooped to selling sex to at her most desperate
and hungry. She was burning a bridge she planned never to use again.

Outside, in the gloomy hallway, she heard the clop of shoes on bare floorboards.

‘Mary?’

She turned to see one of the women who kept a room on the floor above. Cath Eddowes. One of the regular crowd of girls down the Firkin.

‘Mary? That you, love?’

‘Uh . . . hullo, Cath.’

‘Look at yer! My god! All posh clothes an’ all!’ she exclaimed, reaching for the sleeve of Mary’s blouse and rubbing the cotton between her fingers. ‘New clothes!
What, you done a bit a hoistin’ up Chelsea way?’

Mary shrugged. ‘Come good on a bit a swag. That’s all.’

‘A bit? You look like a right toffer in that get up!’

Cath’s hands were all over her clothes, feeling her lace shawl. Her eyes wide and enquiring, a grin spread across her lips, revealing a piano keyboard of yellow ivories and black gaps.
‘Gawd, look at yer, love. So how’s all this brass come yer way all of a sudden?’

Mary felt a shade of shame steal onto her cheeks. Cath, a friend, along with Long Liz, Sally, Bad Bess, all the other girls who regularly gathered down the Firkin to seek solace in each
other’s company – they were friends she needed to walk away from. They were as much a part of the squalid prison she’d been living in as the walls of this room were. Drunks, most
of them, and addicts at least half of them. Bit by bit, they were pulling her down, trying to make her one of them. Doing Marge’s work for her.

‘Come on! Don’t be all coy! What’s yer fiddle?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, shrugging off Cath’s hands and pressing past her for the front door.

‘Piss off! Yer got yer ’ands on a load a brass, didn’t yer? Whatcha been up to?’

‘Actually, I just got a bit lucky.’

Cath’s eyes widened. She laughed. ‘
Ac-tu-ally!
’ she mimicked grotesquely. ‘Listen to yer! Yer even blimmin’ talkin’ all
la-di-dah!
’

Mary reached for the handle on the front door. ‘I’m not coming back anymore. I’m all finished here. Tell Marge she can have her piss-’ole room back.’ Mary realised
she was subtly shifting back to her adopted version of an East End accent.

Cath put her hands on her hips. ‘Oh, it’s a man, innit? He got some brass?’

‘I got lucky is all,’ replied Mary. ‘Found me some money.’

‘Well, ain’t yer gonna share it with the girls? One in, all in?’ The motto they shared – that is, the motto they shared towards the end of an evening drinking. With the
sound of closing time bells ringing and men shouting their orders over each other. One in, all in. The sisterhood of street girls. The code.

It was all just talk, though. They’d happily screw each other over if it meant getting their hands on a free bottle of liquid cheer.

Mary tugged the door open. ‘Goodbye, Cath.’ She said that in her new, very deliberate, accent.

But it angered Cath. ‘Hoy! You! Mary! What’s yer fuckin’ game? Yer think yer better than us, dontcha? Think yer can jus’ walk out on us like that!’

Mary looked around the grim walls of the hallway, the faded wallpaper and curls of peeling paint, the floorboards stained with spilled booze and, in one or two places, dark spots of what she
suspected were probably blood. ‘I can’t live like this anymore, Cath. I never wanted this to be my life.’

‘None of us does, lovey! But yer takes whatcha gets.’

Mary smiled; a small, wan, apologetic smile. She turned to go. ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

Cath’s face darkened. ‘Well, go fuck yerself then, yer stuck up bitch. Go on! Piss off an’ leave us!’

Mary hovered, feeling a tendril of guilt. Her hand stole into her bag and pulled several coins out. She offered them to Cath. ‘You and the others . . . this is for you. Have a few rounds
on me.’

‘Fuck me!’ gasped Cath, wide-eyed once again. ‘Fuck me! That’s a . . . that’s a
shilling
?’

Her grubby fingers snatched it suspiciously from Mary’s hand, eyeing her warily like a pigeon feeding on breadcrumbs. Despite what she’d been saying about ‘one in, all
in’, Mary very much doubted whether Cath was going to share that coin around. But it didn’t matter; that was up to her. Mary took Cath’s moment of bug-eyed amazement as she stared
at the money in her hand to excuse herself and step outside into the heavy grey day, down the steps onto the cobbles, greasy now with the first spit of rain.

‘T
here you are, Mr Babbitt,’ said the porter, bringing into the room a silver tray with a pot of tea, two smoked mackerel and a piece
of toast.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and passed the young man a coin.

The porter grinned, thanked him and bowed out of the room, leaving him alone.

He settled down at the small breakfast table in his room. Positioned by the bay window, he had a pleasing view out onto Oxford Street below. A very nice hotel suite. As good as the best in New
York.

His eyes, cold and grey – a demon’s eyes, an Indian had once told him – watched the to-ing and fro-ing of carriages and milk carts, top hats and the fluttering plumes of
ostrich feathers. The sounds coming up from the street below reminded him of Manhattan; the cry of street vendors, the clatter of metal cartwheel rims on stone, the hubbub of voices, the endless
coconut-shell applause of horse hooves on stone.

I am Mr Babbitt.

Every job came with a different name. A name usually chosen quite randomly; perhaps one overheard in a conversation, a sign above a business, a name in a newspaper. On the steamship from New
York to Liverpool, he’d come across the name on someone’s travel trunk being hoisted into a cabin.

A G Babbitt. And just like that, he had a name to adopt.

The man he’d met a few days ago in the station, the nervous gentleman with a voice rich with privilege – ‘George’ – had explained in a low, faltering mumble the job
they required him to do. A local shiv man from the East End by the name of Bill Tolly. A relatively easy man to locate, Babbitt imagined. The New York underworld was noisy with men like Tolly:
blowhard thugs who boasted far too loudly about their handiwork after a few drinks. The trick was simply knowing which bars – he smiled, corrected himself – which
public houses
to frequent. To sit quietly in a corner and listen to the traffic of conversation. George had given him the name of one of the places this man regularly frequented. That was enough to get
started.

Quietly taking a knife to Tolly was, frankly, a job any hired killer could do. But there was more to the task than just that. The man apparently had several accomplices, one of whom presumably
had an item on him or her that his clients very much wanted returned. Tolly, therefore, was required to do some talking before he died and that’s where some degree of professional experience
was required. Again, any thug with a pair of pliers and a few basic instruments for inducing extreme discomfort and pain could extract a screamed confession of one sort or another. The trick of it
was ensuring that the extracted information could be verified, cross-examined, confirmed. Very necessary before the final business of finishing off the fellow was carried out.

And he was extremely good at that sort of thing.

The other matter was making sure that Tolly, and whoever else was involved, were disposed of in a way that could be attributed to whatever background violence appeared to be going on in the
locale. Babbitt had been in London several days now. Enough time to pick up the local papers and read about all manner of grisly, gang-related violence, crimes of passion, crimes of a sexual
nature. It appeared the East End of London was every bit as debased as New York: full of shallow-minded fools stabbing and hacking at each other for the price of a pint of ale, for looking at them
or their girl in the wrong way. Like New York’s dark underbelly, a place populated by animals with no grace, or ethics; insects with no communal purpose.

Recycled life, returned souls. That’s what they were. That’s why the world they all lived in seemed a far less moral place than it once was. Too many souls now were made of bad
stuff. No place in God’s afterlife for the rotten, and the only place to send them was back here.

No surprise then that this world was becoming a thickening soup of rotten minds and souls. Effluence. Nothing more.

The faster they killed each other for their petty, selfish gain, the faster they made new bastard babies that would inevitably grow up and one day throttle a whore, or open someone’s belly
with a knife just for the glistening silver timepiece in their waistcoat pocket.