The Candle Man (20 page)

Mary nodded at Ramsey as she weaved delicately through the patrons taking tea in the front parlour, heading towards the back room. He knew her face, if not her name, and his eyes widened at the
sight of her.

‘Blimey!’ he uttered. ‘You gone an’ nicked the crown
jools
or something?’

She ignored the question. ‘The girls in back?’

‘Aye.’

She continued towards the rear of the tea shop, down a hallway, past the water closet and then pushed her way through a heavy curtain into a room with its own small window and a door onto the
tea shop’s backyard, filled with sacks of tea leaves, flour and suet and stacked wooden pallets laden with freshly baked bread and an iron keg of milk.

She smiled. There they were. The girls.

‘I’ll be fucked!’ gasped Cath Eddowes. ‘It’s Lady Muck ’erself!’

The others gawped at Mary’s clothes, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Then all of a sudden she was confronted by the noise of questions and exclamations; a mixture of squeals of delight and
caustic put-downs, and jealous hands reaching out to appraise the texture and quality of her skirts.

She picked out the face she was after. Liz . . . Long Liz. A clay pipe bobbed from the corner of her mouth as she chewed on the stem and muttered something to Cath.

‘Liz!’ Mary’s voice cut over the noise. She tipped her head at the backyard. ‘Can I have a word in private?’

Liz shrugged, got up off her stool, pushed her way round the girls’ table and stepped out through the open door into the yard.

‘Excuse me!’ Mary squeezed her way past the others. ‘Could I just . . .’

‘Ooh! Listen to ’er!’ said one of them.

‘Oh, ’scuse me awfully muchly, my lay-dee!’ giggled another, with a mock curtsey thrown in for good measure.

Outside in the yard, four walls of soot-covered brick surrounding just enough space for them to perch amid Mr Ramsey’s supplies. Above them the sky hung grey-white and featureless, as if
London existed permanently beneath a drape of old sailcloth. Over the head-high yard walls, the clack and rattle of hooves and wheel rims echoed. Just another morning’s business.

Liz was sat on a stack of empty pallets; Cath, uninvited but there all the same, sitting beside her. They came as a pair, those two. Partners in crime, always looking out for each other. They
always solicited for business together. But Liz Stride was the prettier one of the pair. Tall, fair and fine-boned, whilst Cath was short and heavy.

Mary closed the back door, muting the giggles and mocking ‘la-di-da’s coming from inside.

‘Cath told us yer come into some money,’ said Liz. ‘Howzat, then? You rob a bank?’

Mary laughed self-consciously. ‘Maybe I did.’

Liz eyed her through a thin plume of smoke. ‘You was always gonna get lucky. I knew summin’ like this would ’appen for yer. What is it a gentleman client payin’ yer
good?’

Mary had decided to keep news of Argyll to herself. She sidestepped the question. ‘I need your help.’

‘You don’t look like you need no one’s ’elp,’ said Cath. Mary ignored her as she fished around in the small bag on her arm and pulled out the key on the brass
fob.

‘This.’ She held it out for Liz to see. ‘It’s a key . . .’

Liz made a face. ‘Well done, love.’

‘It’s a key to a . . . room. A hotel room, I think.’

Liz plucked it out of her hand and quickly examined it. ‘Looks that way. So?’

Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know
which
hotel. It could be any.’

Liz, nearly forty years of age, was the know-things person amongst the girls, almost the mother-figure amongst them. Once upon a time, Liz had even a run a tea shop much like this one. Mary
hoped she might recognise the hotel’s mark on the fob, or at least know someone who would know.

Liz looked up at her. ‘What’s goin’ on, Mary? You disappear for several weeks, an’ me an’ Cath an’ the others was starting to get bloody worried about you,
what with them nasty murders goin’ on. And now, here you are, turnin’ up dressed like Lady Muck. What’s been goin’ on?’

On her way across the city, she’d rehearsed this, answers to the questions the girls were inevitably going to bombard her with. But she’d resolved not to tell them a thing about her
man. Because they would undoubtedly want in on her scam; a share of him, a piece of him. But this, all of this, her ‘scam’, wasn’t about taking a vulnerable man for every penny he
had. Silly and impractical though it sounded, a little feeling inside her was telling her this really wasn’t about the money anymore.

‘I ain’t saying. It’s my business.’

‘Well maybe I ain’t inclined to ’elp, then,’ Liz replied curtly, her slender fingers closed deliberately around the fob.

She’s not going to give me that back.

‘I can pay you. I got some—’

Liz slowly shook her head. ‘I ain’t after yer money, Mary. I’m worried for yer, love. All us girls is. Yer don’t get money like yer got without a bag full of troubles
comin’ wiv it. Tell me what’s been goin’ on with you.’

Mary felt the wall of her own firm resolve begin to wobble, crumble.

‘Did you steal it, love? Is that it?’ She reached out to her. Stroked her lace shawl. ‘All this . . . the nice clothes and the proper talkin’ – it ain’t you,
is it? What’s goin’ on? You in trouble now?’

Mary felt like crying for some reason.

Liz’s voice softened. ‘You in some trouble, dear?’

Lying, lying and more lying to John; she felt exhausted with the effort of it. Maintaining a fiction that with every new probing question of his was growing that much more elaborate and
difficult to sustain. Trying to keep all that in her mind so that she didn’t contradict herself. Coupled with that, this contrived make-believe version of herself. This act. She liked feeling
‘posh’, and she knew a man like John wouldn’t ever consort with a common street tart, not even in the wildest fiction she could construct, but it was yet another layer of burden.
To constantly keep in mind how to speak, how to step, how to hold herself. The daily trips out of the rented house in Holland Park to buy things for their supper weren’t just shopping trips;
they were an opportunity to draw a breath, to compose herself, to recuperate. To catalogue and order every little lie she’d told John, to be sure she wasn’t going to trip herself
up.

She realised she was exhausted. Worn down to a nub.

And the first tears began to roll down her cheeks.

‘Oh, dear, oh, dear, come on,’ said Liz. She grasped Mary by the arms. ‘Sit down, poppet.’ She pulled her down to sit beside her.

Mary didn’t resist. She nodded.

‘Now then,’ said Liz, gently stroking her shoulder, ‘why dontcha tell me what’s been goin’ on?’

Mary glanced up at Cath standing over them in the yard like Liz’s guard dog. Liz seemed to pick up on Mary wanting to speak to her alone.

‘Cath, ’ow about you join the others for a bit?’

Cath pouted like a child and then, with an irritable huff, she turned and headed for the back door. She pulled it open and, for a moment, the muted hubbub of conversation from the back room died
away. Mary briefly spotted half a dozen curious faces from the gloomy back room craning across the cluttered table to get a look at what was going on outside. The door clattered closed and the
muted murmur of voices inside continued once more.

‘Now then,’ continued Liz. ‘What sort of a pickle ’ave yer gone an’ got yerself into?’

M
ary told her everything, the whole lot: finding the nameless gentleman on Argyll Street and then tracking him down later in St Bartholomew’s
hospital, his mind wiped clean. She told Liz that none of it had been planned, it had just come as a sequence of opportunities, and she’d taken each one as it presented itself to her.

And now, perhaps the worst thing of all, she felt something for him. Instead of vanishing like she should have done with his bag of money, leaving him alone in the Frampton-Parkers’ home
to finally figure out he’d been abandoned by her, she was now hankering to get back to him, worried that he’d been on his own this morning far too long already.

‘But I don’t really know nothing about him, Liz,’ she said. ‘He . . . he might have a wife or . . . someone else lookin’ for him. I just need to know because . .
.’ Because maybe the sensible thing
was
to take the rest of his money and run, to forget about him and her silly dreams of being Mrs Argyll. Not that she would ever be a Mrs
‘Argyll’. He had another name that was sure to surface one day soon.

Silly dream. Nothing ever came of dreams, not really. Not outside of the fairytale books she’d read as a child in her convent school.

Liz looked down at the key still in her hand. ‘And you want me to find out for you?’

Mary nodded.

‘Do yer feel safe with ’im, love?’

‘Oh, god, yes, Liz! He’s as gentle as a lamb, so he is. Like a baby, in a way. I’m almost like his mam.’

Liz nodded sagely. As Mary had talked, she’d been intrigued by the notion of a person’s mind wiped clean. ‘Gentle he may be, but he’s still a man, Mary. A man yer
don’t know nothin’ about, really. Yer don’t know nothin’ about the man he is.’ Liz shrugged and corrected herself. ‘Or was. You got to be careful,
Mary.’

Mary nodded quickly. ‘But listen, Liz. Just you, all right? Don’t tell the others, please. Just you.’

‘I won’t tell no one nothing. Promise.’

Mary fumbled in her handbag, into her purse, the coins jingling heavily. ‘I’ll pay you—’

Liz nodded. ‘I’ll take a florin. I think I know a bloke who’d take a look at this key and might know the ’otel. Dylan, ’e’s a locksmith, ’e might
recognise the fob, or the handiwork.’

‘Let me give you something too.’

Liz shrugged. ‘A sixpence for me troubles, I s’pose, wouldn’t go amiss. But look, Mary, this man—’

‘He’s fine, really,’ she said. ‘Like I said, he’s like a lamb.’

‘You ’eard about ’em recent murders, though?’

She’d seen large type on the front of some of the papers and whispers of gossip from passersby. She vaguely knew of the killings. Not that her mind had been on London news recently. But it
was hard to completely ignore the large headlines, the imaginative illustrations on the front of some of the pennies that made creative use of the few lascivious details bribed out of the mouths of
Scotland Yard’s detectives working the case.

‘Oh, lord, not him!’ Mary almost laughed at what Liz was suggesting. ‘He wouldn’t last no more’n two minutes here in White-chapel before some shivering Jemmy ripped
him off.’ She laughed. ‘Gawd, no. It’s certainly not him.’

Liz shrugged. ‘Yer know ’im best, I s’pose. Just yer be careful, though.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Tell me, Mary – ’ave yer let ’im ’ave
yer? Yer lifted yer skirts for—’

‘No! It’s not like that!’ Mary frowned. ‘He’s been a perfect gent, so he has. He’s treated me nicer than any other man ever has.’

Liz nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘So, I’ll take this key with me? You all right with that?’

‘Yes.’

‘An’ I’ll see what I can find out. If I find out which ’otel ’e’s in, yer want me to knock on the room? See who’s there? Find out ’bout
’im?’

Mary wasn’t sure she wanted that. The truth. It would almost certainly spell the end of her little fantasy world with John. There’d be a new name, wouldn’t there? This time,
his real name. And there’d be the reason he was in England and – for some reason she was certain of this now – there’d be an anxious wife called ‘Polly’.

Mary nodded slowly. ‘All right . . . yes. I s’pose I have to know.’

Liz cupped the warm bowl of her pipe in her hand and sucked on the stem. A faint curl of blue smoke twisted into the cool morning air in the yard. ‘Cath tells me yer not stayin’ in
yer room in Millers Court no more?’

‘I ain’t paid my rent for a week. So maybe my room’s gone by now.’

‘So where yer livin’ now?’

‘Holland Park.’

‘Holland Park?!’ Liz’s eyes widened. ‘Posh ’ouse, is it?’

Mary shrugged.

‘Want me to come to yours an’ tell yer what I find out?’

She wasn’t sure she wanted to give Liz the exact address.

‘Yes, but . . .’

Liz smiled. ‘I’ll be discreet, love. Knock an’ try an’ sell yer summin’, eh? And maybe there’ll be a note amongst a posy of flowers for yer.’ She
winked. ‘Somewhere you an’ me can meet.’

Mary understood. Liz was smart. The only other girl amongst their informal sisterhood, apart from herself, who could actually read and write.

‘All right, then.’

She told Liz the address in Holland Park and stood up to go. Poor John would be wondering where she’d got to and she had still yet to visit the market to buy something for their evening
meal.

‘You be careful,’ said Liz. ‘Remember, there’s two girls like us out there been gutted like butcher’s meat by the same mad man. Just you be careful,
love.’