The Incendiary's Trail (2 page)

‘Well, I have not seen the likes of
this
since the London visit of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng,’ he said with the forced jocularity used by a surgeon instructing a
tremulous student. ‘A real rarity, Williamson: two spinal columns, joining . . .’

But the detective was barely listening. He looked ill at ease. Though confident amongst pickpockets and magsmen, bullies, procurers and drunks, nothing here was familiar to him. It was a world
he had never ventured into – one of many worlds within the world of London. Still, there was a procedure to be followed.

‘Is she dead, doctor?’

McLeod reached out to feel for a pulse, hesitating briefly before choosing the unharmed neck. He held his lamp to the wound.

‘Hmm. Dead. A single strike, probably with a razor. Made with extreme force. It has severed the artery, of course. The body is still warm. The killer cannot have gone far, Mr Williamson.
Perhaps your men will catch him hereabouts if they are sharp. And if he is not already here among us.’

The detective looked from the body to the other people in the room. Though fearful in aspect, they were unthreatening. Indeed, he reflected, they had more to fear from the world than it from
them. Now they huddled together against the wall like rats before a dog. He addressed them:

‘You have nothing to fear, unless you are part of this grisly crime. I will conceal you from the crowds and protect you from their gaze. And I will question each of you in turn. Who is the
master here? Where is Dr Zwigoff?’

Fearful faces looked back at him. From among their number, the tiny figure emerged: a strangely proportioned homunculus no bigger than a child, but with all the facial attributes of a man. When
he spoke, it was with a high, rasping voice:

‘Henry Coggins is our protector, sir. He styles himself Dr Zwigoff, but he is no doctor that I know of. He is out drinking, sir. He often returns at dawn.’

‘Does he? Well, I will be speaking to him also if he returns and proves able to converse. We will remove the body and begin questioning directly. But first, I believe we would all
appreciate a cup of hot tea. Dr McLeod, we must move everyone out of this room to preserve it intact. We will adjourn to the kitchen.’

Outside, the handful of people had grown. Others had heard the stories, which had now achieved levels of horror barely credible even to those who wanted to believe. They spoke
not only of a murder, but of many-headed monsters and giants, demons and wolf-children – things all too easily believed by those superstitious folk from the country or those raised on the
myths of the city. They muttered the latest ‘knowledge’:

‘It is the secret progeny of a priest and a nun, hidden from human sight!’

‘It is a warning from Heaven against our Sin – the Apocalypse is near.’

‘It is Spring-Heeled Jack, returned with others of his kind!’

The clamour for news was a hunger among them. Here, on their very doorstep, the most outrageous crime of the decade (of the century, even) had been committed: the brutal, bloody murder of a
human abomination – one of many such creatures lurking in a den of hideous natural accidents.

They could not know then, of course, as they puffed on their clay pipes and shuffled their feet for warmth, that it was merely the first in a chain of events that would shock and fascinate the
city as never before, setting it alight like one of those periodical conflagrations that reduce all to ashes. It was the spark to an inferno that would be fanned uncontrollably by the winds of
rumour, speculation and print – a story as famous as the city that bore it.

TWO

London: the greatest city on earth, the beginning and end to numberless journeys, and the setting for infinite stories – the modern Babylon.

Should the provincial or rural reader cast an eye over the metropolis from the heights of St Paul’s, he would see more factory chimneys than spires, more ships’ masts than chimneys.
Moored there at St Katharine’s, there at the East and West Indias, there at the old London docks and the Thames Pool are the ships of the world, those copper-sheathed brigs and cutters, those
packets, colliers, schooners and barks listed daily in that great organ,
the Times
. Here is the
Spartan
of St Domingo, the
Eagle
of St John’s, the
United Kingdom
of Honduras, and the
Jane May
bound directly for the Barbadoes.

In those thick-walled warehouses and cellars is stored the produce of the globe: spices of India, tobacco of Virginia, rum and sugar from the Indies. In musty vaults lay rows of bottles, bales
of tea, boxes of pungent horn and hides, bolts of silk and bags of cotton. The songs of sailors ring out as barrels roll and tackle takes the strain of multitudinous cargoes. Negroes, Chinese, and
coffee-skinned Arabs haul on ropes or wait for the tide to carry them away to sea.

From his vantage of St Paul’s, the visiting reader would hear the city speak: the infernal, interminable rattle of wheels and hooves on roads, the street seller’s yells, the
hammering and digging of ceaseless construction on new streets, new sewers, new railway lines and warehouses. And above this entire clamour, the noise of the people themselves: a million and more
souls inhabiting the streets and clogging the bridges. The solicitors, tidewaiters, fellmongers, patterers, coal-whippers, watermen, milliners, lightermen, costermongers, beggars and police. Not
only English, but Italians with their greased hair and earrings; robed Hindoos of India; magdalenes of Spain, Belgium and France – a veritable glossolalia rising from those busy
thoroughfares.

Let us descend there from our observation point, pinch our noses and enter the same air: thick with smoke, pungent with equine effluvia and scented with the city’s industries. The vagaries
of the wind evoke the unspeakable tannery, the yeasty brewery, the foundry, the distillery and, of course, the river, whose muddy swell has fattened London since Hadrian’s time and
before.

This multiplying behemoth consumes all who approach it, reaching ever outwards with exploratory tentacles of streets, encircling villages and turning green to grey. Unsleeping, it regenerates
from its very detritus: picked clean by ragpickers, mudlarks, pure-finders and dredgers – all of whom comb the streets and rivers to make anew what was discarded.

Who can know the city? Who can map it? They may try, but it challenges comprehension and encompassment like the Paradox of Zeno. It is divided by the river into Middlesex and Surrey, north and
south, then cut further, into quarters, by the affluent west and working east. The parishes come next, partitioning the streets by church and parochial finance; then the wards and police divisions,
the Ragged School boundaries and the contracts allocating dust collection. Even the Thames itself is chopped and segmented by the bridges from west to east.

One may map the many streets, but not see them. Yes, we know broad Oxford-street and Regents-street with their bustle, clatter and advertising. We know the quiet and arboreal avenues of the west
where carriages ride on straw and the fine people dress in silks for the Season. But the shoulder-wide alleys and foetid yards of the rookeries are invisible to almost all. For who would wander
voluntarily into the shadows of St Giles or Bermondsey? Not even the police are willing to enter some uncharted cellars and courts of those
terrae incognitae
.

To cartographers and statisticians, such areas might well be blanks. The rookeries of London are cities within a city, a country within this country – but one barely touched by modernity,
learning or religion. There, in their own world, they survive in wretched poverty and filth. Unlit streets of overflowing gutters and ramshackle tenements are home to multiple families, shoeless
and dressed in rags. Not for these people the latest advances in science and the arts; they find their amusement at the dogfight, the penny gaff and the gin palace. No great future monuments for
these people – merely the gaol, the river, transportation, the gallows and the grave.

And it is here among the rank odours of the manufactories and beside the slime-slick river steps that crime breeds like a contagion. Here are the coiners, cracksmen, pickpockets, bullies and
prigs. Here are the marine stores and pawnbrokers where gentlemen’s watches and ladies handkerchiefs find new homes. You will not see earnest tables in
the Times
documenting the
fluctuations of ‘business’ in
these
markets, but crime is the epidemic feared by all of its readers . . . feared
and
craved.

For who attracts the attention of the newspaper and the broadsheets hawked in the street? Who is it that appears in the peep-shows, back-shows and dumb-shows? Who is the subject of the patterer
that stands and recounts stories to the crowds? One may often read of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, or venerate Lord Nelson and Mr Peel, but true renown is reserved for the names of
Courvoisier, Greenacre, Rush and Mr Daniel Good:

Murderers!

Nothing galvanizes the metropolis like a murder. They are discussed earnestly in the clubs in the west, editorialized in the newspapers and recounted breathlessly on the omnibus. Though ignorant
of world affairs, scripture, law or even their own written language, the common populace knows every detail of the latest murder – even more, perhaps, than the detectives who hunt the
killers. Every detail, every splash, stab and gruesome fact is brought to light with equal shock and guilty pleasure. And until the bloody hand is discovered in their midst, while death hides in
every unknown face, the people live in prolonged hiatus.

Then capture brings rapture. The visiter to London on the day of execution would think himself at Greenwich or Smithfield fairs rather than in front of Newgate prison. No coronation or victory
brings such crowds as people flood to finally cast their eyes upon the face of the murderer of their imaginations. Only by seeing his death can the story be put to rest – at least in the
present, for his fame will last for generations in print.

Like the miasma of cholera, the news of this recent crime spread by word of mouth: ‘Have you heard? . . . A terrible murder in Lambeth . . . A horrible, inhuman act . . . monsters living
together in an unholy coven . . . black magic and witchcraft here in the very heart of London.’

Naturally, the ‘news’ was embellished. Having not seen it for themselves, they pictured the scene in the peep-show theatres of their mind, fed on a legacy of shocking murders past.
This one, as every one before it, was undoubtedly the worst, the most brutal, the most morally debased and bloody. Indeed, it had to be – for otherwise it would attract barely any attention
at all in this city where murder is commonplace.

So this is London: a city divided and hidden, but with no discernible borders. It is both Jerusalem and Gomorrah. Charity bodies may catalogue and writers may research, but its secrets remain
hidden. They arrive from the country and change their names; they are born and die unrecorded and nameless. The protean metropolis has many faces and disguises. Is that well-dressed fellow a
gentleman shopping, or a professional pickpocket about his work? This woman descending from her carriage in black silks is beyond reproach as she tenders her counterfeit notes. Look closely at that
leprous beggar . . . and discern that his ‘sores’ are manufactured from soap and vinegar.

The very mechanisms we use to know a man are here made nonsense. A change of clothes or accent, a letter of trust or a £100 banknote and the criminal is re-made a swell. Lord Russell no
doubt had the utmost trust in the references of his valet Courvoisier, until the Frenchman killed him. Might not every chambermaid, cook and butler hold a knife within the walls of one’s
home? Might not every pawnbroker be a blackmailer, every drinking partner a confidence trickster and every night-lurker an incendiary?

We may tabulate the minutest change in the wool trade, or the markets of Birmingham and Manchester. We hold the globe in the palm of our hands as we read of China, France and the United States.
But who is to illuminate the shadows that hide our fear? Who can make visible the invisible and venture where no other dare go? Who?

I.

Some call me a ‘penny-a-liner’: a newspaperman. Others are less kind, preferring the epithets of scamp, blackguard, rapscallion or drunk. I am a writer, though they call me a
fabulist and accuse me of mixing fiction and fact. They impugn even my style and the ‘verbosity’ of my copy. They do not know – and cannot comprehend – that the man on the
street wants to
see
his story, wants to feel its cold fingers up his back and hear its footsteps echoing down dark streets.

In the newspapers, my pen is concise. In the broadsheets it is exclamatory. In my stories it becomes the very city itself. Who else can sniff out the facts as I can? Who else is at home in the
public house, the dockyard, the watch house and the gaol cell? Only I can reveal the city to those who would see it, pulling aside the veils of smoke and darkness to light the anonymous courts. I
seek out and find even those secrets that are not written in official ledgers. Everybody speaks, and I am there to listen. In this modern Hades, I am the Sybil to Virgil, the Virgil to Dante
Alighieri. I follow the story wherever it may go, and I tell it.