The Candle Man (19 page)

Her mouth was suddenly very dry.

He knows. He knows! His memory’s come back!

She was about to say something, to fumble for some kind of desperate explanation as to why she was down here, who she was and why she was looking after him, when John’s mouth slowly
flopped opened.

‘I . . . I . . . think . . . I’m . . .’ He cocked his head and frowned, looking quite confounded. Befuddled. ‘Is it morning yet?’

Mary could have almost laughed with relief. He was sleepwalking.

‘No, John.’ She smiled. ‘No, it’s the middle of the night still.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Oh . . . right.’ His dark hair fluffed up on one side, his face puffy with sleep and standing barefoot in his pyjamas, he looked like a small boy roused from
sleep.

‘Come on, love, let’s get you back to bed.’

A
rgyll watched her lay the breakfast out on the table in the front room. She worked with quiet efficiency: tablecloth, crockery, coffee pot and
finally bread, butter and a boiled egg. Not one word said, not even a smile. So unlike Mary.

What’s wrong with her?

‘Mary?’ he said, reaching out for her hand. She stopped her fussing and unnecessary fiddling with place mats and crockery. ‘Mary?’ he said again. ‘What’s the
matter? Have I done something wrong?’

She looked so unhappy. So worried. Apparently anxious to talk about something but reluctant or unable to find a way to start.

‘Something’s the matter, isn’t it?’ he persisted.

She sat down at their breakfast table and looked out through the net curtains at the milk float
clip-clopping
past their house. ‘John . . . you were talking in your sleep last
night.’

He smiled apologetically. Apparently he’d been doing it every night, according to her. The dreams he woke up in the morning with were little more than fast-fading wisps of disjointed
imagery. They often seemed to be jam-packed with bits and pieces he couldn’t quite make sense of.

‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you again, Mary?’

She poured coffee from the pot; something for her fidgeting hands to do. ‘You said a woman’s name.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you remember?’

Argyll remembered absolutely nothing. That was the problem. ‘No. I’m sorry, I don’t.’

She wanted to say the name – it was on her lips – but she was waiting to see if he could come up with it. He shook his head. ‘What was the name I said?’ he asked
finally.

‘It was Polly.’

He stared down at the coffee he’d been stirring, the spiral of creamy milk twirling like a Catherine wheel.

Polly?

Like the rest of his lost life, the name meant absolutely nothing to him. But yet . . . the name triggered
something
in a shadowed corner of his mind. Just as the breaking crust of a
stale loaf attracts a cloud of pigeons, or the smell of roasting chestnuts will pull an audience of hungry children, the name caused something in the darkest attic corner of his mind to uncurl from
its roost and slide forward.

Polly? Hmmm?

‘I . . .’ He frowned, still watching his coffee spiral.

Polly, is it?
That voice again. There was a harshness, an unkindness in its tone. Disapproval. Disappointment. Like an ambitious father let down by an unambitious son.

You know Polly . . . don’t you? Oh, yes, you remember Polly.
The voice offered him a fleeting image, just a momentary flash. Dark red, splattered in commas and dots across skin as
white as unbaked pastry; an opened-up cranberry pie.

He felt sick. He shook his head, feeling a headache coming on. The voice returned once again to its dark corner, to its roost, satisfied with its morning’s torment.

‘I . . . I honestly don’t recall a Polly,’ he uttered. ‘The name means absolutely nothing to me, Mary. Honestly.’ That half-lie tasted like bile in his mouth.

Mary tried to hide a look of relief from him. She acted busy, buttering him some bread. ‘Well, perhaps she’s an auntie or cousin or something. You know, back home in
America?’

‘Yes, perhaps that’s who it is.’

He tapped the egg with his spoon, breaking its crown and scooping it off to one side of his plate.

‘How is it? The egg? Done how you like it?’

He kissed his fingers like an epicure. ‘Done to perfection, my dear.’

She giggled with delight at his saying ‘my dear’. The other day she’d told him the way he said those two words made him sound ‘all dashing an’ heroic, like one of
them gentleman adventurers you read about in books’.

‘I never get my eggs right normally.’ She buttered some more bread and spooned jam generously on top if it. ‘John?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘I shall have to go to the shops for our supper again today. Is there anything in particular you fancy?’

Argyll stared at the open crown of the egg, his mind a million miles away. ‘Oh . . . uh . . . no, whatever you think is best, Mary.’

B
abbitt stared at the cracked and opened top of the egg. He’d once seen a head that had looked very much like that. Been responsible, in
fact, for a head that looked very much like that. A troublesome juror who’d taken a very generous bribe but then made the foolish mistake of being greedy and asking for more.

That job had been one of the more satisfying ones. The man was rotten to the core.

‘Everything all right, Mr Babbitt, sir?’

He looked up at the waiter. ‘Yes, yes, quite fine. The egg is done to perfection, thank you.’

He’d decided to take breakfast this morning in The Grantham Hotel’s morning room. It was agreeably quiet this late in the morning. A trim and po-faced woman with her two young
daughters sat on the far side of the laid tables, clucking in a whisper at how they should sit at the table, how they should peck at their food; two miniature versions of her, destined to be
pickle-faced shrews like her one day. A solitary, portly, ruddy gentleman sat by the crackling fireplace, making a copy of the
Times
last as long as possible.

Babbitt’s attention returned to his own paper. His work of several nights ago had made a mere paragraph on the seventh page. One of a list of briefly reported murders and assaults. Just as
he’d hoped they would, the police were assuming the killing to be a revenge attack perpetrated by some other villain with a grudge or a debt to settle. Tolly’s landlady had found his
body later on the next day and had commented that she wasn’t entirely surprised that her tenant had come to such a violent end.

He found himself chuckling at the flowery prose used by the paper. No different to the press back in New York, squeezing every adjective for all its worth:

Now, on to more important matters.

Tolly had helpfully given him the name of a couple of public houses and a woman. His best guess was that it was a pub in the same locale as he’d found Tolly: Whitechapel. Yesterday,
he’d walked the area, noting them, their names, the names of the streets they were on, and annoyingly discovered that there were five ‘Rose and Crown’s within streets of each
other and seven pubs with ‘Firkin’ as part of their name. Babbitt decided the one closest to the Turpin was where he was going to start. Just as he had with Tolly, he would dress the
part, find a quiet corner and listen to the back-and-forth chatter. None of it was ever quiet. It always seemed to be bellowed out at full volume as if these people had only ever learned to
communicate with a bawdy shout. And the trick of it was to arrive early in the evening and listen carefully to each new instrument as it arrived and added its tune to the orchestra of voices. And
there was always a greeting from somewhere hurled out above the noise whenever someone entered, wasn’t there?

He would listen specifically for that.

Polly Nichols, if she was a tart, would have her regulars; a dozen or more pockmarked and raspberry-nosed old men letching at her and wondering if she was ‘up for it this
evening’.

It was all about listening. Listening and watching and, most important of all, never ever being noticed. Just the slumbering drunk at one end of the bar.

If he had no luck tracking her down that way, he could ask amongst the men he spotted disappearing outside with other tarts. Those types had their favourites, didn’t they? Babbitt could
affect the behaviour of a maudlin old soak asking after the whereabouts of his favourite ol’ girl.

‘Luverly Polly. You seen her, mate? You seen my luverly Polly Nichols?’ But asking around was an alternative he preferred not to resort to. Even drink-hazy memories could sometimes
recall a distinctive face, a manner slightly out of the ordinary.

‘Aye, sir, ’e was tall, so ’e was. Tall with a dark barnet, an’ a pointy nose bit like ol’ Boney. An’ thinkin’ ’bout it, ’e spoke
different to normal. Foreign. Irish maybe. American p’raps? An’ I ’member he was askin’ for Polly that night. Wanted to know where to find ’er, ’e
did.’

He dipped a soldier of buttered toast into the yolk. It really was done perfectly, just as he’d asked for it: firm white with a soft, liquid yolk. He made a mental note to tip his waiter
and the kitchen staff generously when it finally came time for him to check out and return home. They were looking after him wonderfully.

Polly. Hmmm.

The trick wasn’t going to be tracking her down. He anticipated that was going to be a relatively straightforward task. No, the trick was going to be convincing her to trust him enough to
take him back to her place. The tarts here in the East End preferred doing their business in the open: backstreets, rat-runs, park benches. It kept business brisk and there was some notion of
safety being outside where a scream or a shout would carry – and quite likely send an abusive client shuffling hastily away with his trousers and undergarment around his ankles.

The promise of the right money – no, showing her the right money, and exhibiting a manner that wasn’t going to unsettle or worry her – that’s how he was going to convince
her to take him back to her lodgings.

M
ary had a good idea where to find her old acquaintances at this time of the day. Mid-morning, it’s where they usually congregated:
Ramsey’s tea shop. Half a dozen of them usually sitting together around one table in the back, a thin veil of pipe smoke hovering above, and a table crowded with tea cups, a bottle of
absinthe in the middle for those after a hair of the dog.

Henry Ramsey, the owner, was quite happy to have the tarts’ business in the back room, away from the rest of the decent customers who sat in the front with the big shop window looking out
onto Goulston Street and where the tables all had nice linen and lace tablecloths. The girls were usually quiet, not too bawdy, generally nursing sore heads from the night before and most of them
starving hungry for his stodgy potato pies and pastries.