The Candle Man (31 page)

‘S
he’s in bloody rooms with ’im!’ Liz snapped. ‘She’s actually
living
with ’im, Cath!’

Even sleeping with him? She doing that, too?

Cath was standing out in the hallway, unwilling to spend another second in room 207, along with the human organ perched on the end of the desk. ‘No way! I ain’t goin’ to
’er bloody ’ouse!’

Liz stepped out and joined her. ‘We ’ave to warn ’er!’

‘The police! We should go to the police! That’s what we oughta do!’

They should. They really should. But Liz wondered how long it would take to convince them they weren’t hoaxers; two gin-breathing slappers looking to have a laugh at the police’s
expense and perhaps even hoping to make the next day’s newspapers. Liz left the room’s door wide open behind her as she walked swiftly down the hallway towards the stairs, the key still
grasped, forgotten for the moment, in one hand.

Cath caught up with her. ‘So? Police, right? We goin’ to see the police?’

Their boots clattered down the main marble stairs. ‘You go find some police, Cath. I’m goin’ to find Mary.’

They were down in the lobby. She noted it was busier now than it had been half an hour ago. They swept past the doorman, out onto the broad alabaster steps that led down to the Strand, busy and
noisy with the clatter and hails of mid-morning traffic.

‘Liz! You shouldn’t go! What if ’e’s there! ’E’s dangerous!’

‘He ain’t got a clue who ’e is, right?’ replied Liz. ‘His mind’s completely gone. That’s what Mary told me. Gone! Just like a big baby.’

Cath grasped her arm. The sight of the decomposing organ had spooked her completely. Liz could feel the trembling in the tight grasp of her hand. ‘He’s lying! Maybe he’s lying
to ’er?’

‘I got to warn ’er, Cath!’

‘Yer crazy!’

‘Listen, I ain’t bloody well goin’ in; I’m just knockin’, is all. Just gonna get Mary to step outside with me to talk, all right?’

‘Well, I ain’t going with yer! No fuckin’ way!’

‘Fine. Yer go do whatcha said – go find a police station. Tell ’em exactly all what we found.’

‘Everythin’ . . . Yeah, I will. I will.’

‘All right, then.’ Liz nodded. She looked down the Strand. She had enough money for a tram at least part of the way. She could bilk a free ride on a busy one if need be. One could
often get a crafty couple of stops before the conductor got round to dealing with you.

She clasped her friend by the shoulders. ‘I’ll see yer back at Marge’s later, right?’

Cath nodded quickly. ‘Oh, gawd, be ever so careful, Liz!’ Her voice scratched and rattled, like a cat in a box.

‘I will.’

‘It’s that Jack the Ripper, Liz.’

‘I know that . . . I know.’

Warrington watched them through the glass of the lobby doors. The two women were talking animatedly. A disagreement of some sort? They both looked over-excited. No, not
excited; they looked terrified.

Then the taller of the two – a woman Warrington imagined ten years ago must have been quite a beauty, a sight to turn heads – seemed to be giving the shorter one instructions.

Damn.

That meant they were probably going in different directions. The taller one grasped the other woman’s hands and squeezed them: a ‘see-you-later’. Then she turned away and
headed up the Strand.

Warrington muttered a curse and then turned to his two men. He pointed at Hain. ‘You follow the taller one. Don’t lose her, do you understand?’

The man nodded, put on his bowler hat and bustled out the lobby doors. Warrington watched him skip swiftly down the steps past the other woman who was still standing at the bottom on the busy
pavement. She looked undecided.

‘What about her?’ said Orman.

Warrington ignored him. He was watching her.
Come on, come on . . . What are you thinking, woman?

She was looking up and down the busy street, looking for something.

Looking for the Candle Man, perhaps?

Her manic searching suddenly stopped; her eyes had found something on the far side of the street. Warrington tried to follow her gaze, to see what she’d picked out, but a double-decker
tram clattered slowly past, blocking his view.

She stepped off the pavement, down onto the busy road, glancing right and left and then towards the far side, waiting for a gap in the traffic.

‘Sir? Mr Warrington?’

‘Yes, come on, we need to follow her!’

They pushed their way out through the double doors and caught sight of the woman as she hefted her heavy skirts above her ankles and darted perilously across the wide road, causing cart and cab
drivers to rein in their horses and swerve and hurl streams of colourful invective at her back.

Warrington and Orman followed in her wake, trying desperately not to lose sight of her burgundy frock coat and her grubby cream-coloured bonnet.

On the far side, back up on pavement once more, it was far busier with foot traffic. His glance flipped one way then the other, looking for her bonnet amidst a sea of bobbing heads; every other
one, it seemed, was yet another off-white cloth bonnet.

‘Over there!’ gasped Orman. He stuck out a thick butcher’s finger and pointed the way. Warrington followed his finger. He couldn’t see her but Orman was a good five
inches taller than him; he could see above the bobbing pedestrians’ heads. And he saw the dark dome of a constable’s helmet.

‘She’s talking to that constable over there, sir.’

PC Docherty sighed. ‘Sorry, love. Why don’t you just calm down an’ try sayin’ that all over again, eh?’

The woman looked to him like one of the usual Whitechapel dregs: breath like a bleedin’ brewery and teeth like a drawer full of broken china.

‘Me an’ Liz found ’im!’ she gabbled, her hand flapping at the front entrance of The Grantham Hotel across the Strand. ‘Over there! The murderer!’

‘Murderer, love? Which murderer’s that, then?’

She nodded, florid jowls flapping with a life of their own. ‘The killer what’s been doin’ over the women!’

Docherty rolled his eyes irritably.
Jesus, not another bloody one.
He’d wager a pound to a penny the next thing coming out of her flapping lips would be something about Jack the
Ripper. All week, since some idiot had decided to write a letter and post it into the Central News Agency, staking a claim to those two recent murders and then signing off with that provocative
name, their front desk sergeant had been plagued with silly fools like this one. Excitable morons claiming their neighbour, their cousin, their father, their son, their boss, their colleague, was
the Whitechapel murderer. The
Ripper
!

‘He’s bin stayin’ in that ’otel, ’e ’as. That killer, Jack the—’

‘All right, love. Come on, now, that’s enough.’

She snatched at his cuff with grubby hands. ‘Please! Come an’ see!’

‘Better let go, miss . . . I mean it! Right now or I’ll take you down the station.’ He’d spent a good half an hour this morning ironing the creases into his tunic; he
wasn’t going to let some old slapper, with fingernails dirty with god-knows-what, make a mess of his uniform.

‘Please! There’s ’uman bits up there! BLOODY ’UMAN BITS!’ She was almost screaming now. Heads of people walking past them were beginning to turn. Several had even
stopped to see how this amusing little scene was going to develop. She now had the kernel of an audience. PC Docherty realised he had better bring the matter to a close. The longer he let her yap,
the more out of control she was going to get.

‘Right! I think that’s enough nonsense from you, love!’ He twisted her paw off his crumpled cuff and was about to armlock and arrest her for causing a disturbance when a couple
of gentlemen pushed their way through.

‘Ah! There you are!’ said one of them. Posh gentleman in a smart morning suit.

‘Err . . . You know this woman, sir?’

The gentleman shrugged. ‘Don’t actually know her . . . she just . . . she . . .’

The other man – taller, broad-shouldered – stepped in. ‘This rascal just attempted to lift this gentleman’s wallet.’ He fished out the late Inspector Smith’s
warrant card and flourished it for Docherty to see briefly.

‘Oh, I see . . .’

‘I’ll take her off your hands, lad.’ He winked at him. ‘And she can make as much noise as she bleedin’ well wants back at the station. Right?’

PC Docherty nodded. ‘Right, sir.’ He let her arm go and passed her to the inspector.

‘Come on, you!’ he said. ‘Let’s get you all sobered up in a cell, shall we?’

Docherty watched them turn away with her and shook his head. The silly old bitch was trying her garbled nonsense about Jack the Ripper on the inspector now.

He shrugged.
Good luck to him
.

He sniffed the cuff of his tunic and wrinkled his nose, realising he was going to need to wash it again tonight.

D
amn, the woman can march!

Hain was struggling to keep up with her without breaking into a jog. Thirty feet in front of him, her head and neck visible above the pavement traffic, she was weaving with a sense of
urgency.

His eyes on her – he wasn’t going to lose her easily, being as tall as she was – he allowed his mind to ponder. He wondered what she’d found upstairs in that hotel
room.

Something grisly, no doubt.

This man they were after – he’d heard Warrington refer to him once as the ‘Candlestick Man’, or something like that – was a real
frightener
, and no doubt
about that. Hain had seen enough blood and savagery in his twenty-two years in the army. Particularly the tribal habits of those Pashtun barbarians in Afghanistan. And even more back here in London
working for various members of the Lodge in a variety of capacities. He’d seen what those godless scrotums in the shittiest rookeries of Whitechapel and Spitalfields could do to each other.
Beat each other to a pulp over the contents of a purse, the favour of some dirty poxed-up slapper, or simply because they figured they’d been disrespected in some way.

As if any of them scrotes actually deserve a shred of respect.

But this man, this Candlestick Man, was something else altogether. Fuckin’ evil. That’s what it takes to carve a man’s head off, like he did. To do what he did to those tarts.
Not the everyday brutish, selfish evil he saw in the East End. This was
bible
evil.
Old Testament
evil. This was bloody sulphurous down in the very depths of Hell evil.

Hain remembered a painting he once saw. Last summer, he decided to do a bit of the ol’ ‘High Art’ with his wife and two daughters. Bit of culture and learning for ’em.
Took them down for a family day out to the National Gallery off Trafalgar Square. And that’s where he saw that huge horrible painting. He forgot its title but he remembered the artist’s
name.

Hieronymus Bosch.

Hell
. That’s what he figured they were looking at: a depiction of Hell. An army of skeletal imps, chimeras and monsters, carving up the innocent like so many joints of beef. Hacking
at them, impaling them, dismembering them. The painting had stayed with him, disturbed him. Had, in fact, given both his little girls nightmares. They really shouldn’t have lingered so long
in front of it.

Ever since that night in the old abandoned warehouse, Hain had imagined this Candlestick Man to be a bit like one of those skeletal imps, those gargoyles. A mischievous demon who had somehow
managed to find a winding tunnel from the depths below and emerged in the darkest part of London, to play. Since then he, Orman and Robson had discussed that night in the warehouse with hushed
voices; met several times to discuss it over a pint in the quiet corner of a pub. The three of them agreed the man was most probably quite dead. But then Robson had half-jokingly wondered whether
he was even a man.

His mind was thrown back into the present. The tall woman had stopped walking. She was looking back this way.

Looking at me?
He wondered if she’d somehow figured out she was being followed.

Hain quickly dropped the pace of his urgent stride to a casual stroll. A slope-shouldered man behind him cursed as he almost collided with him.

What the hell is she looking at?

Hain resisted the urge to turn and follow the direction of her gaze. That would surely give him away. Instead, he decided to improvise a reason for his sudden halt and, feigning irritation, he
dropped down onto one knee and started fumbling with his shoelaces. Through milling pedestrians he could still see her, a couple of dozen yards in front, craning her neck, looking back down the
Strand.

Come on, what you looking for, love?

Then he realised, as he heard the jangle of a bell, the clatter of approaching hoofs. The shadow of a double-decker tram spilled over her as it slowed to a halt beside a stop. He lost sight of
her for just a second; a plump lady, arm in arm with her spindle-thin husband, blocked his line of sight. Cursing, Hain quickly stood up, just in time to see the tall woman squeezing herself onto
the back of the tram. A bell jangled again and the tram began to move off.