The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (12 page)

“Like us?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I’m like you. I’ve gotten close to death as well. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do. Because I
know.
”

She settled herself back in the sofa a bit and adjusted the folds of her complicated outfit.

“Where I grew up, in Yorkshire, there was a man who lived down the road from us who ran a television repair shop. I never liked him. I always felt like he was looking at me strangely when I walked past. I never actually thought there was something wrong with him, just that I didn’t like the feeling I got when he looked at me. One night, around this time of year, it was late, and I was walking back from a friend’s house. I took a shortcut across a bit of field. That sort of thing never worried me.
Nothing bad happened in our village. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. He was walking behind me. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d seen me and followed because he wanted to make sure I got home safely. And I think I knew then. I think I knew that if someone follows you at a few paces, you’re in trouble. It’s our animal instinct. When I heard him speed up, I ran. There were woods on the edge of the field, and I went for those. He overtook me.

“I’ll tell you, he didn’t expect me to fight like I did. There was a thick bit of downed tree branch on the ground, and I picked it up and gave him a right old thumping. I’ll never forget it, because the moon was so bright that night, and I was beating a man with a tree branch, using a strength I didn’t even know I had. I almost had him, too. But he managed to get the branch away from me. I ran and started screaming. The other houses were fairly far, but I think my scream must have carried over those fields. It certainly gave the sheep a start.”

Time was moving very strangely. My absorption in her story was total. It was like I was there. I knew what it was like to run across that field in the moonlight.

“Oh, he hit me good,” she said. “Knocked me right on the back of the head. I was quite dazed. I think he was in a panic by then, because he was swearing and panting for breath. He dragged me across the field, through the mud and the dung, then he gave me another good whack and rolled me into the small pond there, the one the animals drank from. It was only a few feet deep, but that was deep enough. I was unconscious for a few moments, I think, but some part of me said, ‘Stay awake.’ And I did. I fought, and I stayed awake. I was a good swimmer, and I could do a dead man’s float, so that’s what I did. I made
him think I was dead. He ran off in terror, and I pulled myself out of that water and fell on the grass, and I looked up at the sky…and everything was different. After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things other people didn’t know. Do you know this feeling?”

I could only nod. There was a gentle throbbing in my mind—I needed to get back. It was getting late.

“I should really go,” I said. “I…I feel better now.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

Jane walked me to the door. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and the sky was dark and bright. The streetlights glimmered and refracted the light. London was beautiful, it really was. And it smelled so clean after the rain.

“I’d like to speak again,” she said. “I have a policy. Once I’ve taken someone on as a client, I make myself available. You can always come here if you’re having a bad day.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it. I hope to see you again. Take a cab back.”

She put two twenty-pound notes in my hand.

“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to, Rory. I want to.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me tell you one more thing. After the night of my attack, I was never the same, but in a good way. I left home. I came to London. I did the things I dreamed of doing. I met rock stars. I met wonderful people. I’ve had a wonderful life. And all because on that night, in that field, I
saw something very powerful. I
felt
something very powerful. I survived. And so did you. What most people will never tell you, or might never understand, is that what happened to us can have a very positive effect. It can make us strong.”

A strange thing happened as I walked away from Jane’s house—I was finally thinking
clearly
. I could see what Charlotte meant. Jane knew how to fix people. Now that I’d talked through some of my issues, I’d blown the dust and garbage out of my brain and I could think for once. I could smell the rain, heavy with iron. The cold woke me, but it didn’t sting. My breath puffed out in front of me in a great white plume, and I laughed. It was like I was breathing ghosts. I wasn’t in the land of long highways and big box stores and humid, endless summers. I was in London, a city of stone and rain and magic. I understood, for instance, why they liked red so much. The red buses, telephone booths, and postboxes were a violent shock against the grays of the sky and stone. Red was blood and beating hearts.

And I was strong.

10

T
HE NEXT MORNING WAS THE WETTEST I HAD EVER SEEN IN my life, and I’ve been through a few hurricanes. I don’t know if there is actually more rain here in England, or if it was just that the rain seemed to be so deliberately annoying. Every drop hit the window with a peevish “Am I bothering you? Does this make you cold and wet? Oh,
sorry.
” The square was now a mud pool, and the cobblestones were slick, so I almost killed myself about six times just getting to class.

My first class was further maths. Further maths had gone further into some incomprehensible zone of mathyness. From there, French, where I discovered that my class had started reading a novel. A
novel.
In French. Not only hadn’t I started the novel—I didn’t have the novel. So I sat there while everyone else went through a book I didn’t own. Gaenor sat next to me and shared her copy, but this wasn’t much help. I hadn’t read the story so far, and I couldn’t translate fast enough without a dictionary. I sometimes drift a bit in class on the best of
days, but today I was tired, it was raining, and people were reading something I didn’t understand. The words oozed together on the page, and the rhythm of the rain beat in my head. The room was so warm…

I woke when Gaenor nudged her elbow into my side. She actually nailed me right in scar territory, and I think she realized that, because she clapped a hand over her mouth. It was fine—it didn’t hurt me. Our teacher was looking directly at us. She had to have seen. I rubbed at my mouth and tried to act like that had never happened. Maybe my eyes had never closed.

Who was I kidding? I’d been
out.

“Feeling all right?” Madame Loos asked at the end of class.

“I had to…um, painkiller,” I said. “I had to take one. I’m sorry.”

I was such a liar. It was disturbing how quickly it came. But
painkiller
was the magic word. I got a terse nod, and nothing more was said. No one was going to ask stabby girl about her painkillers.

Then I went to English literature and had the same experience all over again. I was so far behind in all the reading, I couldn’t get any of the references. I thumbed through the anthology that was our main textbook and counted how many pages I seemed to be behind. It looked to be about 150 pages. There was only one solution: I would have to read. I would have to read and read and read until my eyes went dry. Because reading essays and poetry written in 1770 is not quite the same as blowing your way through a novel written in the last few years. It requires more concentration, more stopping to figure out what they’re talking about.

So I nervously doodled a picture of a horse farting a rainbow
and tried to look deep in thought. I was going to have to start drinking a lot more coffee. All day, every day.

What was strange, though, was that I really
did
feel better about my general situation. Jane had done something. The facts had not changed, but my feelings toward them were more positive. So I was tired and behind. Big deal. I had survived. I was getting on with things. I would take my laptop and drink coffee and embed things into my brain. Coffee was supposed to make you smart. And I had the afternoon to work. You could do a lot in an afternoon if you put your mind to it.

I walked down Artillery Lane on my way to get the coffee. I paused by the Royal Gunpowder and looked at the various tributes that had been left to the dead man. There were bottles, but there were also notes and some dead and dying flowers mixed in with a few fresh ones. Just inside the window, facing out to the street, was a photograph of a man. He looked middle-aged, big and friendly, with a very red face. There was an unlit votive candle next to the picture. On the brick wall, just under the window, someone had written in what looked like black Sharpie
JUSTICE FOR CHARLIE
.

The rain picked up a bit, and I hurried along so my computer wouldn’t get wet. It was in my bag, and I was under an umbrella, but I always get paranoid about things like that. Once I was safely in the coffee shop with a large cup in front of me, I logged on to their Wi-Fi and decided to look up some articles about what happened at the Royal Gunpowder. There were plenty of these to choose from.

England has some pretty seedy newspapers, and there were several headlines like this:

PUB OWNER PAYS PRICE FOR CHARITY

Charles Strong knew about the dangers of drink. A recovered alcoholic, fifteen years sober, he managed to maintain his pub without touching a drop of his wares. “He believed that the pub was the centre of the community,” says daughter-in-law Deborah Strong. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t drink. He was there for the customers. He was there for the people.”

But Charles never forgot what it was like to recover from an addiction. He made it a policy to hire people in recovery, to give them a chance to get back into the working world. He was proud of his employees, many of whom went on to other jobs. But it may have been Charles’s altruistic nature that caused his death. On the morning of 11 November, Charles was beaten to death with a hammer by his employee, Sam Worth, a former drug addict with a history of violence. Worth called the police and led them to his employer’s body. Worth claimed innocence at the scene but, in the face of overwhelming evidence, changed his plea to guilty. He has offered no explanation for his actions. No motive has been determined, but the suspicion is that it was an argument about money.

All of this has come as a shock to an area of East London still reeling from the Ripper murders. Only two days before the death of Charles Strong, a student at the Wexford School was attacked on school property, just one street away from the Royal Gunpowder. The Metropolitan Police have increased their presence in the area. A Met spokeswoman offered this comment: “While these two unfortunate events are unconnected…”

The BBC offered something a little less sensational in tone.

NO MOTIVE IN PUB SLAYING

Police are still searching for a motive in the murder of Charles Strong, 56, owner of the Royal Gunpowder public house. Strong was murdered on 11 November by one of his employees, bartender Samuel Worth, 32, of Bethnal Green. Worth had previously been convicted for GBH and possession of narcotics, but had been clean and sober for over a year. There was no known argument between the two men, and police have found no evidence of a criminal motive in the attack.

Worth is currently under observation at the Royal Bethlehem Hospital following a suicide attempt. Worth initially denied any role in the murder, but changed his plea in custody. He is now being evaluated to determine whether or not he is fit to stand trial…

When Jerome had explained it, it sounded much more straightforward: a man had killed his boss. These articles painted a slightly different story. A man killed his boss
with a hammer
for no apparent reason. Maybe I was a little paranoid, but I knew things now—I knew, for instance, that an entirely fake story had been built around the Ripper to explain the whole thing away. And sure, maybe this guy was just unstable. But…
two days
after the Ripper and just around the corner from Wexford? What were the chances? London was a big and bustling place, but people generally didn’t go around murdering each other at rates like this.

I took Artillery Lane on the way back, stopping in front of
the pub. I walked around the two exposed edges of the building. The pub was closed for business and dark inside. I peered in the windows, but there was nothing other than tables and chairs and a bar all waiting in the dark. Such an ordinary place, too. Table tents advertising a drink special, a trivia machine in the corner, quietly waiting for a player.

As I made my way back around to look at the photograph in the window, something on the ground caught my eye. I knelt down and pushed some of the flowers and bottles away, revealing the edge of the building and the sidewalk.

A hairline crack ran across the sidewalk and butted into the side of the building. The crack was narrow near the street and widened as it hit the wall. I positioned myself against the wall and turned in the direction it pointed, just across the street, slightly to the right. There was another building in the way, but there was no mistaking it.

The crack pointed right toward Hawthorne.

A crack in the sidewalk is nothing to get excited about. London is full of cracks. It’s got a lot of sidewalk. It’s old. But that creepy old rhyme kept running through my head, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back…” (Who even thought of that? Why would stepping on a crack break anyone’s back? Why specifically your mom’s? Was it an early, failed attempt at a “your mom” joke?)

But there was a crack in the sidewalk, and there was a crack in the bathroom floor.

I thought about it all night. I zoned throughout all of dinner, excusing myself early to walk back around the corner to the Royal Gunpowder afterward. It was too dark to see the crack
now, but a sign had appeared in the window saying
REOPENING TOMORROW LUNCHTIME
.