The Candle Man (2 page)

‘Whitechapel?’ For a moment she hesitated, placing the name in some vaguely recalled context. ‘Is that . . . is that not where those horrible, ghastly murders took
place?’

He nodded slowly. ‘That very year.’

She stared at him with eyes wide, her small mouth slightly open. ‘Is it
about
those murders? Is that it? Your story? About . . .
Jack the Ripper
? They never found him, did
they? He just vanished!’

He sipped from his glass and savoured for a moment the burn of alcohol on his lips. A passing consideration as to whether it was prudent after all these years to tell a perfect stranger about
those few weeks, months, those things . . . regrets . . .

‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I . . . I think I just spoke out of turn. I’m sorry.’

He found himself smiling. Perhaps that too was the brandy at work. ‘It’s quite all right,’ he continued. ‘Quite all right, my dear.’

Her cheeks coloured. ‘It was a foolish notion . . . to tell stories like this.’ She leant forward in her wheelchair and placed a hand lightly on his. A gesture emboldened by the
drink. ‘I’m so very sorry. You must have lost someone?’

‘Not really.’ The smile remained on his lips, but slowly changed form. An expression that shared both regret and satisfaction, rival thespians sharing too small a stage.

‘As for the Ripper? Let’s just say . . . I
knew
the Ripper . . .’

M
ary hastened along the alleyway: a dirty rat-run, little more than two shoulders in width of uneven cobblestones between dark, damp brick walls.
She could hear the man calling after her, an angry foreign-accented voice promising to gut her like a fish when he caught up with her.

She lifted her long skirts as she stepped across a backed-up drain thick with faeces and the prone hump of a drunkard, or just as easily a corpse.

The man’s shrill voice bounced off the brick walls, lost amidst the warren of gas-lit backstreets.

‘Bitch! I cut you nose off . . . you bitch!’

She glanced back down the alley she’d darted into to see a dark shadow cast by a lamp slowly rise up the wall opposite. It loomed and wobbled, and then finally she saw the man’s
lurching outline as he passed by, not giving the dark alley a second glance. She listened to his slurred voice slowly recede as he staggered on, each new promised threat of mutilation growing
fainter, each scraping footstep more distant.

Finally sure she wasn’t going to have to run again, she slumped against a wall, almost immediately feeling its clammy dampness through the thin material of her shawl.

Mary hunkered down to a tired squat, all of a sudden robbed of the adrenaline that had helped her escape . . .
this time
. And in the dark space she was sharing with a stream of shit, and
with the light tapping of feet nearby of countless rats, she allowed tears to tumble down her cheeks.

Thruppence. This . . . for just a thrupenny bit?

She couldn’t imagine for one moment what her parents would make of the pitiful wretch she was now. A girl with convent schooling, a girl who once upon a time wrote home weekly, a clever,
bonny girl who enjoyed Austen, Dickens, even Mrs Beeton, and loved playing a few of Gilbert and Sullivan’s easier parlour ballads on the school’s upright piano. A young woman who had
managed to talk herself into that job with such a wealthy, prestigious family . . . and now? In five short years she had fallen from being the bright, young girl from the Welsh valleys with dreams
and goals, to being this twilight creature squatting in shit. This
thing
that offered to lift her skirts to any man for a quick fuck for no more than thruppence.

Often she couldn’t bring herself to do it. On some occasions, with a man too drunk to manage it, she could get away with her modest fee by doing little more than tolerating several poorly
aimed prods. Sometimes, clamping her thighs tightly around a probing member, she could fool a drunk man into thinking he’d made penetration and wipe the semen from her stockings later on. But
occasionally, as on this occasion, her John was less drunk than she’d thought and quite well aware of some of the tricks tarts at the cheaper end of the market were prepared to pull to dodge
their part of the contract.

This one had quickly realised in the darkness that she was presenting him with nothing more than the tops of her bare thighs and had angrily pulled a knife on her. Mary ran, taking the coin
he’d paid, for services yet to be properly rendered, with her.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your little song go?

She replied with nothing more than a mewling whimper.

She knew that one of these nights she wasn’t going to be able to escape. One of these nights she was going to end up like the prone form further back down the alleyway: another bundle of
threadbare clothes lying in a drainage ditch. Ignored. Not missed by anyone. Forgotten.

All this for thruppence.

The price of a spoon of laudanum. A little alchemy. A little dose of cheer.

She wiped a string of snot from the end of her nose and the tears from her blotchy cheeks. She needed another couple of customers before the last business of the night was gone. Two more and
she’d be able to buy some scran as well.

Mary pulled herself to her feet and began to pick her way carefully towards the far end of the alley where faint amber blooms of flickering gas light promised a little more business.

She was about to step out into the wider street, still a narrow back road, but at least wide enough to have its own grime-encrusted sign post –
Argyll Street
– when she heard
a low moan.

Light pooled beneath two gas lamps and faded away across drizzle-wet cobblestones into darkness. On the periphery of faint light, she thought she could make out the huddled form of someone. A
man, by the timbre of his keening voice, sitting on his haunches, rocking backwards and forwards with his head in his hands.

The clocks had chimed midnight nearly an hour ago and the public houses were all but emptied now. Dock workers and market traders had stumbled back home to their anxious wives, Dutch and
Norwegian sailors back to their moored ships. The only potential customers she was likely to find left were
connoisseurs
; men who knew exactly what they wanted from a tart and were sober
enough to make sure they got their money’s worth. The type of customer she detested.

She watched the dark shape, gently rocking to and fro, moaning softly, and whimpering almost like a child. She decided he was drunk. She stepped into Argyll Street towards him. She had to walk
past him anyway, but a closer look couldn’t hurt. Her shoes clacked lightly on the greasy cobbles as she approached him.

Closer now, she could see he was no dock worker or market trader. He wore smart boots that glinted with polish, a dark, well-cut suit, a waistcoat and a cape draped over his shoulders. The dim
light picked out the white rim of his shirt cuffs, dotted with dark, almost black, spots.

Mary had seen blood by gas light before. It was as black as ink.

She stopped opposite him. ‘You all right?’

The rocking stopped.

‘Sir? You all right there?’

Slowly his head came up from his hands and she couldn’t help but gasp as she saw the drying blood on his hands, down the right side of his face and matting his hair in a thick, gelatinous
tangle.

His eyes seemed to focus on her for a moment, then to roll with a will of their own. ‘I don’t . . . I . . .’ The rest of his words became a confused mumble.

Mary took a step across the narrow street towards him, confident that he looked to be in too bad a way to pose a threat.

‘What happened?’ she uttered softly. ‘Were you jumped?’

She hunkered down in front of him, like a schoolmistress consoling a lost child. ‘You been robbed? That it?’

The man’s eyes swivelled back onto her. Not really focusing. Judging him from the side of his face that wasn’t caked in drying blood, she guessed he was a man in his late thirties.
Fashionably cut sideburns and a well-trimmed and cared-for moustache. A gentleman.

His eyelids flickered, his eyes rolled upwards until she could see only the whites and slowly, like a mature oak being felled, he slumped over onto his left side.

‘Hoy . . . hoy, mister?’ she prodded him. ‘Mister?’

She leant over his head and could hear his breathing bubbling through mucous. Still breathing. Still alive. He’d passed out was all. She leant closer and in the flickering gas twilight
thought she could see a deep gash in his matted hair.

A cosh, or a club, even a dull-edged hatchet, could have done that. She suspected she was right: some young hoodlums must have cornered and mugged him. Without realising it, she found her hands
were thinking for themselves. Already probing his pockets. She hated herself for doing that. Hated that this was now her first instinct: to see what the muggers might have left behind that could be
lifted off this unfortunate bugger, what could be taken and pawned.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she whispered as she probed the folds of his cape and jacket. ‘See, I need the money. I need it.’

The man’s voice groaned a thick syrup of lost words.

Her hand found dampness on the side of his torso. She pulled it out and saw it was sticky with dark, cloying blood.

He’s been stabbed too.

She fancied the poor gentleman was going to bleed out on Argyll Street before the morning came and some early trader on his way to work found him. She resumed her hasty search of his clothing
and, just as she was about to give up, her fingers chanced upon the edge of a leather strap. She followed it down to his hip where the strap met the soft worn leather of a satchel flap.

Her hand probed cautiously inside and immediately felt a variety of things: the cool metal of keys on a ring and the smooth leather of what felt like a bulbous, well-fed wallet.

‘Bleedin’ Jesus!’ she muttered.

Mary was about to probe deeper, to pull out her find one item at a time and examine them, when she heard the distant clacking of hooves on stone. She decided she’d chanced her luck enough
for one night and eased the leather strap off the man’s shoulder and quickly tugged it over his head.

She got to her feet and, with one last glance back at his slumped form, she hurried on down Argyll Street, the small satchel already over her own shoulder as if that’s how she
always
wore this masculine-looking bag of hers.

Her quick steps took her onto Great Marlborough Street, far better lit and overlooked on both sides by tall townhouses with lace-curtained windows that still, here and there, glowed the soft
amber of midnight oil.

Several carriages clattered past, taking gentlemen home from their drinking clubs. A hundred yards up the street, where wispy skeins of early morning mist covered the stone cobbles and small
islands of horse manure, a dozen noisy young lads ambled drunkenly in the middle of the carriageway, hurling abuse at each other and laughing like chattering monkeys.

Mary hesitated. A pang of guilt stopping her where she stood. Once more she glanced back down Argyll Street at the faint hump of the man’s body and knew leaving him like that, she was
surely leaving him to die.

‘Oh bugger,’ she whispered.

H
e was awake for quite a while before he realised it. Looking up at a high plaster ceiling, discoloured a faint vanilla and riddled with the
porcelain-fine cracks of drying and peeling paintwork.

Turning his head slightly on a pillow that rustled noisily beneath him, he could see a row of tall windows draped with net curtains that shifted in a gentle breeze and glowed the soft grey light
of approaching dawn. His head throbbed at the movement and he lifted a hand to soothe the pain, finding a thick swathe of bandaging around his forehead.

His eyes flitted around the other things he could see without shifting his head again: he saw a row of beds opposite him, most of them occupied, he presumed, from the chorus of wheezing and
snoring that echoed off the high ceiling.