The Detective and the Devil (3 page)

But hadn’t he killed that Monster?

He had got into the Marr house from the back, he remembered, through a gap between the houses. And there it was, to his left this time – which meant Marr’s house, number 29, was just
the other side of the dark passageway. He felt drawn to that place, which was still empty.

He made his way through the little crowd. The small alley between the houses was unlit, as dark as a tomb, and the memory was so strong it almost carried its own smell.

He turned right at the end of the passageway, and counted along the rear of three houses. There were already a good many men inside the house, it seemed. He could see their shapes and even hear
their voices. Horton let himself in through the gate in the fence, walked across the scrubby little yard, and tried the door at the back of the house.

It was open, and he stepped inside. He saw a body lying face down in the middle of the little kitchen within and a familiar and unwelcome face looking up to greet him.

‘Ah, Horton,’ said Edward Markland, magistrate of the Shadwell Public Office. ‘I was becoming concerned that you would not be joining us.’

The kitchen’s dead occupant was lying face down on the floor. The position of the body suggested that no Shadwell constable had turned the body over, which meant there
was some chance that Markland had instructed his constables not to disturb anything in the house. Horton gave silent praise to whichever malignant deity presided over this place.

If he had ordered the body to remain undisturbed, it meant that Markland had anticipated Horton’s arrival, which in turn meant that the magistrate intended to let him investigate the
crime. So had his own magistrate John Harriott already offered Horton’s help to Markland? He had done so before. It was never a pleasant prospect. Markland only cared about one thing in the
world, and that was Edward Markland.

Horton took in the kitchen, turning around to view every corner. There were no signs of struggle. The room was clean, its most impressive feature a very new-looking Bodley range in the chimney
place. It looked expensive. The kitchen must have been recently used; there was a faint smell, as of almonds, hanging in the air.

He turned to the body. The dead man lay face down on the floor, his arms to his side, as if he had been standing in the normal fashion and had then suddenly crashed forward onto his face.

‘I instructed my men to leave the place as it was found,’ said Markland, startling Horton, who had been lost in his thoughts for some moments. ‘But somebody is going to have to
move these bodies soon.’

‘Bodies? There are others?’

‘There are two dead females in the front of the house. They await your inspection.’

‘My inspection?’

‘I have spoken to your magistrate, constable. You will work on this case with me.’

‘Very well.’

‘The bodies in the house. They are somewhat . . . disturbing.’

Horton looked at Markland, properly, for the first time, and saw how pale the man was.

He looks terrified.

He turned back to look at the body in the kitchen, and stood for some moments longer, forcing his eyes to imprint the position of the body on his memory. Eventually, he turned the dead man over,
and recoiled.

The face had been smashed to pieces. The body had promised no such horrors in its face-down state, and the constable attending Markland muttered an obscenity under his breath.

‘Were any weapons found?’ Horton asked.

‘A maul,’ said Markland.

‘Where?’

‘Upstairs. In one of the bedchambers.’

Did Markland attach any significance to that? Because Horton did.

He stood and investigated the dresser in the kitchen. There were knives in there, but they were all clean and not particularly sharp. In fact, their state was in some contrast to the immaculate
kitchen, their dull edges evidence of neglect. The woman of the house was not a cook, perhaps.

He went back to the body, checked the pockets of the dark coat and the waistcoat. He tried to estimate the man’s age, despite the injuries to the face. He thought him to be in his middle
forties, like Horton himself. The body was lean and the clothes well tended and relatively new. The hands were soft and white. Not a dock labourer or sailor or tradesman. Horton would guess at a
city clerk, but a fairly well-paid one, if the clothes and the new kitchen range were any indication.

‘We have names for the dead?’

‘We do. This is Benjamin Johnson. He worked as a clerk for the East India Company. His wife’s name was Emma. The other female was his daughter. She is in the parlour with her
mother.’

Horton stood and looked down at the body on the clean kitchen floor. A City clerk, financially comfortable in his newish house on the Highway. Apart from the wrecked face, the man could be
asleep, so untouched was his body and so clean his clothes. The spotless floor suggested to Horton that there would be a maid, though she did not presumably spend her nights in the house, which was
somewhat unusual. There were probably other husbands in other houses in similar postures, drunk from a night in a riverside alehouse, sleeping it off on the kitchen floor. Except someone had
smashed in the face of this one.

He went to the external kitchen door. It showed no sign of being forced.

‘I will inspect the other bodies and the maul. Were other weapons found anywhere else in the house?’

‘No,’ said Markland. He looked at Horton as if he were looking at an annoying but productive animal, one that he might decide to beat. ‘Have you finished in here?’

One more sweep with the eyes. One more deep glance at the body.

‘Yes. Your men may clear it.’

Markland bowed, sarcastically. Horton ignored him, and walked through the kitchen into the hallway.

There, three years before, he’d seen the body of Marr’s shop boy James Gowan, lying in the doorway to the shop at the front of the house, propping the door open. And there, under the
stairs, had been the worst sight of all: an infant in its cot, asleep, with a terrible ribbon of blood and skin where its throat had been slashed open. Horton breathed in and looked through the
door under the stairs, but saw only a cupboard containing some basic household implements: a brush, a shovel, two wooden buckets. A smell of damp. But no death.

He heard Markland barking orders from behind him. ‘Stay out of his way,’ the magistrate said. ‘Let him sniff around in his infernal way. Come now, out of his way, man. Get this
body moved. Yes, the table. We’ll keep them all back here until the coroner’s taken a look.’

Dark half-seen figures of men moved around the house, the shadows of Shadwell constables, irritation flowing off them in waves towards the unwelcome interloper. He ignored them.

He opened the door at the end of the hallway. A parlour, with a front door giving out onto the street. The animal noises from the shop next door were clearly audible. A tidy and well-cared-for
place, with some touches of affluence. A nice-looking clock, figurines on the mantelpiece, and underneath the mantelpiece a woman, face down in the ashy grate. In a chair by the fire, another
female, a girl of indiscriminate age, had lolled back, an awful red wound across her throat. Her face, like her father’s, had been smashed to pieces. Most awful of all was the smell that
infested the room, a stench of burned flesh rising from the fireplace.

Disturbing
, Markland had said. Horton agreed. Theatrically disturbing.

Other than the awful dead figures, there were no other signs of violence. Horton minded that, and looked at the room for several minutes in the same way he’d stared into the air of the
kitchen, letting the shape of the scene settle onto his mind like a white sheet drifting down on a complicated chair. He checked the front door. Again, there was no sign of forced entry.

The woman in the fireplace could not be avoided, though he would have very much liked to. The hair on the back of her head had been burned away, leaving only charred black scalp-skin, but the
fire had not burned her clothes. The clothes themselves were fairly well appointed, as the husband’s had been. From above and behind, the woman seemed fat, a distinct contrast to the slim man
lying dead in the kitchen, and the girlish figure of the daughter in the chair.

Horton sighed, and pulled the woman’s feet, such that her head came out of the grate and fell onto the stone of the hearth. He pulled her a little further until she was lying face down on
the parlour’s rug, and then he turned her over.

The face was another awful thing, a starched and leathery mess of sinew, muscle and bone. One eye peered madly from within; the other had burned away. The woman’s teeth leered at him,
delighted by some disgusting tale he had just related. His gorge rising, he stood to find Markland standing at the door, his eyes avoiding that awful ruined visage.

‘You may remove them,’ Horton said, stepping back into the hall and covering his mouth, still uncertain if he would avoid vomiting. He managed to contain himself, barely.

It seemed like all the men in the house were now gathering in the kitchen, leaving the rest of the house to the curious investigator from Wapping. He turned and walked up the stairs.

There were three doors off the landing, leading to three bedrooms. One must have belonged to the master and mistress of the house, and was undisturbed. Likewise the second, a smaller room with
deft feminine touches – the sanctuary of the dead daughter. And in the third, a bleak reminder of past transactions.

Markland had called this a bedchamber, but it had no bed in it, only a small bureau and a chair. The maul had been placed beneath the window, and the window looked out onto the space behind the
house. He looked out there, remembering the stories of the murderers escaping from the Marr household in 1811. He’d found a maul like this in that house, in this equivalent room, leaning
against a wall under a window.

I’m back
, he imagined the maul saying.
Did you miss me
?

Horton tried to imagine the intelligence that had stood here before him. A Monster had indeed returned to the Ratcliffe Highway – but was he an original, or a facsimile?

From the shop next door, something growled through the wall.

It had started with a small group of Amsterdam merchants. If you were Dutch and not English, their names would have been as familiar to you as Raleigh and Drake and Hawkyns,
but they weren’t as flashy as your English adventurers. These were careful fellows. Money was all they cared for, and they had as much daring as a newborn gosling. They’d come up with a
daring scheme, nonetheless. They just needed someone to supply the sinew. And that was him.

They’d grown rich buying pepper and suchlike from the Portuguese and reselling it in northern Europe. But Jacobus Aakster had never met a Dutch merchant who liked working with those
stunted, greedy and unreliable Lisbon dogs, and these were no different. The Dutchmen wanted a direct route to the East. They wanted to cut the Portuguese out of the trade completely.

So, being careful fellows, they sought knowledge of the Eastern spice trade. They paid for spies to be sent south, east, north and west, to gather intelligence on how the papists had been able
to monopolise this trade, how their navigators had inched their way down and around the black African coast for the past 150 years. By the time they met Jacobus, the merchants were well on the way
to establishing a Company with the Dutch monopoly on Eastern trade.

But that wasn’t what they had wanted to talk to him about. That was the legitimate business. That was for the daylight, for formal sessions with councillors and officials. What they wanted
from him was something altogether more illicit. As his own beloved Mina had put it, when he’d told her of their scheme: ‘You’re on your own, Jacobus. You’re no more than a
speculative investment to those Amsterdam crocodiles.’

This was the sum of the odd scheme: a story had reached the ears of these merchants. It related to an Englishman named John Dee, who had a house upriver from London where, it was said, he had
assembled a great library of esoteric and arcane knowledge. John Dee was a man of many parts: he lectured on geometry and advised on navigation, but it was said he also talked to angels and took
the shape of different animals. A sorcerer and a necromancer, was Dee, a player of secret games.

Jacobus had never been in a library, but when a certain type of fellow with a certain kind of education said the word ‘library’ it was like another type of fellow with a very
different kind of education saying ‘Spanish treasure ship’. The merchants had one of these scholarly fellows with them, a dusty old specimen who used words that didn’t seem to fit
into sentences that never seemed to end.

Dee’s library, this university fossil had said, was known to anyone in Europe who had an interest in the learning of the ancients and the new science. It was one of the largest in the
civilised world, but it had been neglected in recent years, because Dee had become obsessed with talking to angels. This new tendency had turned the English court against John Dee, so he had taken
his scrying to the Holy Roman Empire. His library was thus exposed and undefended.

And in that library was a manuscript. A very particular manuscript, with a very particular purpose. The old scholar’s dull eyes had glittered with young hunger when he talked of this text,
as if he’d have killed for it. The manuscript, if what was said of it was true, had the capacity to change everything. To make the merchants rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

‘What’s in it?’ Jacobus had asked, in his simple direct way.

‘The great secret,’ the scholar said, unhelpfully. ‘The celestial light,’ he added, no more helpfully. The merchants’ eyes glittered in the candlelight. When they
told Jacobus the great secret, his eyes glittered as well.

These merchants had put their plan to him. The main event was still the conquest of the East, in mercantile terms, but this delicious nugget was an irresistible sideshow and merchants do not
grow rich by ignoring opportunities, however obscure. Seize Dee’s library – a prize worthy of any group of ambitious men, worth riches in itself, droned the scholar – and at the
same time seize this secret text.