The Candle Man (5 page)

The gentleman hadn’t even bothered to ask what Bill would charge for his services. If he had, Bill would have, poker-faced, insisted on fifty pounds and not a penny less. Although, truth
be told, he would have let it come down to thirty and still have been reluctant to walk away from such easy money.

But two hundred pounds the gent had offered! Even a nib with education and decent clerk’s position would struggle to earn that over six months toil.

He stuffed the last of her blood-soaked clothes into the bag. Not expensive clothes by the look of them, but certainly not the stained and second-hand frills and lace most working women wore to
threads every day.

He could imagine the girl in her new home with a crisp folded finny in her purse to spend on a brand new wardrobe, then taking herself on a hasty shopping trip along Oxford Street. Perhaps
thrilled with the experience of possessing so large a denomination. Five pounds. A fiver! Being called ‘ma’am’ by some store girl her own age, who yesterday wouldn’t even
have deigned to acknowledge her if she’d entered in her maid’s uniform.

As he lifted the last of her things into the bag, something heavy slipped from the folds of material and thunked onto the soft rug between his knees. He reached down and picked it up, turning it
over and over with his bloody fingers. He thumbed a clasp on one side that opened the item and saw within an image that took him several moments to register.

An image that was going to allow him to ask for ten times the gentleman’s fee!

A photograph. This woman, a baby and a man. A very important man with a face he vaguely recognised. Bill felt the first prickle of concern on his scalp. The gentleman who’d approached him
for this job was doing it on behalf of
this
man – an important man? – in the photograph.

There’s more to this than just one randy gent cleaning up his own mess.

To his mind it meant one of two things: opportunity – or danger.

Or perhaps a bit of both.

M
ary’s fingers explored the dark folds of the man’s leather bag. It was like a cross between a sailor’s duffle bag and a school
satchel; an odd bag for a gentleman to be carrying around with him. It looked old, the leather well-worn.

Outside in the passageway beyond the door to her rented room, she heard the clumping of heavy feet and the muted giggle of a woman. The tenants from upstairs returning from a night’s
drinking. She glanced at the net curtains that hung down in front of her small grimy window. The first pallid grey stripes of dawn were leaking into her room. She reached over and turned out the
wick of her lamp to save on the oil. In the grey gloom of dawn, she picked the satchel up and took it over to the stool by the window.

Outside in the street, through the broken panel of her window, she heard the clack of boots: men off to work.

The backstreet reminded her of home. Llangyndeyrn. The rows of terraced houses and cobbled roads. The threads of smoke from breakfast hearths from a thousand chimney pots rising to a horizon of
craggy peaks. Mary smiled wistfully at how far she’d risen and fallen in five short years.

Eighteen when she left Saint Mary’s convent with ideas in her head far too big for a modest Welsh valley town. No, it was
London
she wanted. Her parents, long used to dealing with
their stubborn, wilful daughter, could only plead tearfully that she be awful careful and write often as they emptied every last jar of coins they had into her travel bag.

Eighteen she’d been, travelling alone to London. She remembered that day so well: grinning with excitement with her bag clutched in her hands, staring out of the window as the train pulled
through the suburbs west of London. She saw the tall spires of factory chimney stacks, cranes on the horizon and workmen-like ants crawling along the rafters and scaffold of tall new buildings. She
felt the magnetic pull of the beating heart of the capital. The pull of the most powerful city of the British Empire. The very centre of the civilised world.

What a place to be. What a place for someone like her: young, energetic, with big ideas. Oh, she had plans, didn’t she? Naïve plans, looking back now. But back then, to that grinning
eighteen-year-old, they’d been plans that were perfectly plausible. She was going to offer her services as a piano teacher. She was going to knock on the doors of the richest houses in London
and present herself confidently and proudly. And soon after establishing herself as a tutor, she was going to find herself teaching some adorable young bachelor, with a bobbing Adam’s apple
and a dry tongue who was going to fall head over heels in love with her coy smile and her gentle, playful teasing.

Marriage would follow soon after that, of course, and her young husband was going to support her setting up a music school, which, naturally, she was going to run. Their home would become a
place to entertain musicians, composers, poets, writers, painters, even actors. The more sophisticated dailies would be filled with stories about their fantastic parties, and the glamorous hostess
in the middle of it all, Mary Kelly – or whatever surname she’d be using then.

She sighed.

Five years on and those grand ideas of her silly younger self were so ridiculous that she laughed every time she recalled them. A bitter laugh, and usually accompanied by a tear or two.
She’d got some of the way there, though, hadn’t she? Some of the way. Then she was stupid, careless, and threw it all away.

And now she was here, in this one room. In a room that reeked of damp wood and mothballs, and the vinegar-burn tang of stale urine from the tenant before who was either too sloppy with his
night-water bowl, or just too lazy to use it and so pissed in the corner.

She looked back down at the satchel in her lap. Her hand stole in again under the flap. A thief. Occasional pickpocket. That was her now. And a tart; not even an honest tart. She tried to
convince herself that the only thing which put her one modest step above all the other ‘girls’ she kept company with now was that a part of her old self was still alive somewhere
inside. Still believing there was a way out of this dead-eyed existence.

But then stealing this bag from a
dying
man? Was it possible to sink any lower? She wondered whether he’d died or whether that approaching cab driver had found him, perhaps even
done the
decent
thing and taken him to a hospital? Saint Bartholomew’s was just a stone’s throw away, wasn’t it?

Her cheeks burned with shame. She could have called out for help to the cabbie, or gone and looked for a patrolling policeman. But no. She’d taken this bag off him and run.

What’ve you become, Mary?

It was then that her fingertips found the feathery-fan texture of the end of a tight bundle of paper. She fumbled by touch, heard the rustle of paper inside the bag. Gently she pulled it out of
the satchel and held the bundle up in front of her face. She frowned, not quite sure of what she was looking at at first. She pulled the net curtain back a bit to allow a little more of the meagre
grey light into her room.

‘Oh my . . .’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘Oh my . . .’

M
ary Kelly turned in through the entrance gates of Saint Bart’s. The one-way arc-shaped driveway was already busy with traffic: hansom cabs
and private coaches bringing in hospital visitors or taking away patients well enough to return home; food vendors wheeling in hand-pulled traps to sell in the hospital’s foyer.

This morning had been an agonising tug of war for Mary. Money.
So much money
in that bag, she hadn’t even brought herself to consider counting it yet. But enough in there, surely,
that she’d never need to do a stitch of work again in her life. Ever.

She was troubled though. Not so much on the ethics of the situation. Bugger that, the money was hers. But, she was troubled by more practical matters. A lingering concern pricked her bubbling
euphoria. There was a lot of money being carried by that gentleman. She wondered whether it was being transported from one place to another. It was
somebody’s
money. Somebody who had a
lot more of it? Somebody powerful and rich? Somebody who was going to be looking for it? And god help the poor wretch holding onto it when that somebody found out who they were and came knocking at
their door.

Mary was almost certain that she was safe. As long as she was discreet and clever about it, she was going to be fine.
Almost
certain. She’d be a lot happier if she knew for certain
that the gentleman in Argyll Street had been brought in dead, though. He’d seen her. He’d looked at her. It would put her mind to rest to know for sure that he’d bled out.

If he’d been found by that cab driver or someone else later on yesterday morning, then the body would still have been brought here to this hospital, the nearest one. It was a matter of
careful enquiry. And if she found out that he’d not survived his wounds, then the matter was settled. The money was hers!

I mustn’t be silly with it.

She would need to be so very discreet. Pay her rent and leave. Perhaps come up with some sort of a cover story to tell the other girls. She’d tell them her parents had sent enough money
for a ticket to take her back home to Wales. She’d have to leave Whitechapel promptly and find herself somewhere else to live on the other side of London. Why London though? Perhaps even
another country. Some far corner of the empire? America? Africa? India?

Mary stifled an excited smile. She could become someone else. She’d have to come up with a new life story, a new name. Mary could do that. She could play at being someone else. Do all the
proper talk with a little practice.

She looked up at a starling swooping across the roof of the hospital. Flying free.

That’s me. Flying free.

But one last thing. This last thing. To be sure. To be safe.

She pushed her way through the large oak and glass doors into the hospital’s foyer, the high ceiling echoing and ringing with voices and the bustle of activity all around her. Weaving her
way through the hospital porters and food vendors, she passed by wooden benches crammed with seated, waiting patients clutching bloodied rags to foreheads, hips, arms, thighs. The usual casualties
of spill-out time from the public houses. She looked for her gentleman amongst them but saw no one who looked remotely like the man.

‘Help you, love?’ asked the sister manning the front desk. She look flustered and impatient.

‘I . . . I wonder if you can. I, well, I’m enquiring about a gentleman who might have been brought in late last night. Poorly thing. I think someone had stabbed him and beat his
head.’

The sister looked tired; end of a long night shift. ‘The one from near Soho? Argyll Street? Well-to-do sort?’

‘Yes!’ said Mary. ‘Yes, that’s right. It was very late, early hours even . . .’

‘That’s right.’ The woman checked an entry book. ‘Came in just after two.’

Mary steadied her nerves. She could feel her voice fluttering anxiously. ‘I wondered, how is he?’

The woman looked up at her and saw the anxiety written on her pale face. ‘Are you related?’ Mary sensed the woman evaluating. A few fleeting moments as the nurse took in the crisp
new bonnet that Mary had bought this morning, and the shawl that covered the threadbare seams of her jacket. ‘Are you family?’ There was a hint of cynicism in her voice.

Mary hesitated a moment too long to get away with trying to say ‘yes’. She realised she was trembling.

‘A friend then?’ asked the woman more softly. ‘A
close
friend?’

Mary nodded, even managing a tear that tumbled down onto one pale cheek.

The sister sighed sympathetically. ‘Shouldn’t really do this, love . . . not if you’re not proper next of kin, but—’

‘Oh my lord, is he—?’

‘Dead?’ The sister smiled, reached a hand over the desk and gently squeezed one of Mary’s. ‘No. But the poor chap’s feeling very sorry for himself this morning.
He’s very much alive, my dear.’