The Solitary House (26 page)

“Now, Jem, when is this match coming off?” he asks impatiently and despite the quick assurance that they’re at that very moment getting ready, Milloy starts threatening to leave at once if he’s kept waiting much longer. This seems a mite unreasonable, but it produces a flurry behind the bar and another milk punch, so perhaps it has the desired effect. Milloy proceeds to process around the room, looking at each animal in its turn, and exchanging a word here and there with the owners, who spread their dogs’ legs and bare their teeth so he can see them at most advantage. The gilt clock over the bar then strikes nine and the proprietor calls for order, announcing that the pit above is open for business. Everyone rises at once, and the crowd parts to allow Milloy to be first up the stairs. Wondering distractedly how a footman has established himself in such an exalted position—and how much money it must take to sustain it—Charles takes his place
in the line of punters streaming up the wooden staircase. The line pauses at the top and Charles retrieves a shilling from his pocket and places it in the proprietor’s clanking canvas bag.

The room that opens in front of Charles has a small circular arena in the centre, built from planks of whitewashed board, and brightly lit by an array of gas-lamps. There are chairs ranged round it in rows, and a recess on one side that’s clearly reserved for special guests; it’s no surprise, therefore, to see Milloy taking his seat there. The audience rush for the front row, and those who don’t make it clamber on the tables at the back to get a better view. The air is filled with speckles of sawdust, and the whining of the dogs straining on their owner’s laps. The proprietor brings out a rusty cage seething with huge black rats, and the noise rises to an unbearable cacophony of howling and barking. Milloy is in the arena at once to inspect the game, and one of the dog-fanciers takes the opportunity to try to sell him a spotted terrier he claims is a “very pretty performer, you mark my words.” Milloy calls for a dozen rats, and makes to drag them out of the cage himself, despite a stern warning from the proprietor.

“One of my lads was bitten bad by one of these blighters only yesterday and took so bad we had to send him home. Doctor said bits of its teeth was embedded in the boy’s thumb. Had to pull the bits out with pliers—you should have heard him scream. Never knew he had such lungs on him.”

Milloy laughs, but he takes a rather nervous step backwards all the same. By now the rats are swarming across the floor—one tries to run up Milloy’s leg and he shakes it free, to the loud laughter of the crowd. The spotted terrier is growing more and more frenzied, and Milloy climbs out of the arena and gives the signal for the dog to be loosed. The rats run in all directions, and the spectators start banging the sides of the pit in unison, shouting, “Kill! Kill!
Kill!
”

Some rats fight back, tearing the dog’s muzzle with their teeth,
others scramble frantically for chinks of escape in the smooth white boards, but all end eventually with their backs broken or their heads wrenched off. The dead are swept unceremoniously into a heap in the corner and another fifty loosed in their place, which the man next to Charles says are all sewer- and water-ditch rats, and certainly stink like it. They cluster and cringe and run blindly about as the impatient audience awaits the next dog. People start cat-calling and banging on the tables until the proprietor’s young son appears with a bull-terrier that’s already frothing at the mouth with excitement, and straining so far forward that its studded collar is almost choking it. The proprietor calls for a stop-watch and the dog is finally dropped into the pit.

“Rat-killing’s
his
game and no mistake! Where’d you get him?” shouts one of the men in the front row. The landlord grins. “I’d back him to kill against anybody’s dog at eight and a half or nine.”

The watch is stopped after four more raucous minutes and the boy catches up the writhing dog, its eyes bulging and its tongue bloody. The proprietor calls for more drink and as the waiter takes the orders, Charles takes the opportunity to slip down to the front. He reaches across to touch Milloy on the arm.

“Milloy? Remember me?”

The milk punch seems to be having an effect. Milloy looks at him a mite blearily for a moment and then slaps him on the back.

“Maddox, isn’t it? Good to see you, my friend! Are you here for the ratting?”

“No. I’m here for you. To finish our conversation.”

“Pity. Sport of gents, this, my lad. And you can win a pretty penny at it too. Take my word for it.”

Charles can well believe it; no doubt it explains both the footman’s flamboyant appearance and the impression he gives of not being unduly concerned to be no longer in paid work. It might also account for the handful of money he now takes from his pocket, in preparation for the next bout.

“It won’t take long,” says Charles quickly, seeing the proprietor
making his way across with another cage of rats. “I just wanted to ask if you’ve remembered anything more about those anonymous letters sent to Sir Julius Cremorne?”

Milloy is already counting out coins. “Can’t remember what I said—remind me.”

“That there were three of them. That they came through the post. And that the writing was rough.”

All of this information has, of course, been in Charles’s possession since that very first encounter with Tulkinghorn in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; what he’s after now is something else—something he
doesn’t
already know.

Milloy finally looks up. “Ah—now I recall. Though I am sure my memory would serve me better if—”

He smiles broadly and glances at the stack of coins in his palm. Charles doesn’t need to be nudged twice. He holds a sovereign over Milloy’s hand, then pauses and looks him in the eye before letting it drop. “This had better be good.”

“Oh it is—it is. I have no doubt of your complete satisfaction.”

Milloy catches the eye of one of the men in the front row and puts ten shillings—well over half his weekly wage in Curzon Street—on the next dog. Then he turns back to Charles and starts to speak. His voice is low, quick, and suddenly not at all slurred.

“There is one salient fact that seems to be eluding you. The last one wasn’t a letter. It was a
package
.”

Charles stares at him, then puts a hand into his coat pocket and pulls out the envelopes Tulkinghorn gave him.
That’s
what the cloth on the kitchen table had reminded him of. He can’t remember ever registering it consciously, but in the glare of the gas-lamps overhead he can see the same pattern on one of the envelopes—a network of creases so faint that someone must have used a hot iron to flatten it out. But it’s still there, and now he knows what it means. There was something inside that envelope—something neither the lawyer nor his client wants him to know about. Something, therefore, of desperate significance.

“Do you know what it was?”

Milloy shakes his head. The next round is about to begin and he has to raise his voice to make himself heard. “All I can tell you is that Sir Julius went as white as death when he opened it. Gave orders there and then that any more like it were to be put into his hands, and his alone. The butler told me afterwards it looked for all the world like he’d seen a ghost.”

Out on the street the fog is starting to come down, but even that’s a relief after the reeking atmosphere inside. As the mist gathers the buildings are starting to soften into looming abstractions, mere blocks of shadow without facet or feature. Charles stands for a moment, breathing in the night, then starts down towards the City Road. The street is almost empty of people, with here and there only a sleeping drunk, or a loud one. So there is no-one to see the slight figure in the long dark coat emerge from a doorway behind Charles and slip an arm about his neck. No-one to catch the glimmer of a blade in the yellowish light. No-one to see Charles stagger to his knees, and fall forward, gasping, into the mud. And no-one, I can assure you, anywhere near close enough to see the man stoop down over the body at his feet, and bring his face close and low against his victim’s ear.

“Whatever you’re playing at, it’s over. Do you hear me?”

Charles feels his wrist grasped, and winces as his arm is wrenched behind his back.

“This is by way of a warning. Next time, I won’t be so subtle.”

The blade is warm against the skin, the cut white cold, like an electric shock.

And then the heat.

The darkness.

SIXTEEN

Sharpshooters

W
HEN THE CLEAR
cold sunshine slides between the shutters of the attic at Buckingham Street the next morning the first thing it finds is a pile of jack-towels discarded on the floor. White towels they must have been, but they’re stained now with blotches of a rusty deadened red. Slowly, slowly, the sun inches obliquely through the silent room—the corner of a table, a chair, the beautiful coil of a sleeping black cat—until it finally edges across the bed, and touches the two bodies lying there. They are together, there is no doubt about that, but they lie now slightly apart, their naked limbs barely meeting. One is a man. His face and body show the signs of recent violence—old bruises ripened to a greenish yellow, weals and grazes all but mended—but there is also a new bandage bound tightly about his hand, and a smudge of deep scarlet where new blood is still seeping through. The other is a woman, her black skin luminous against white sheets bleached almost dazzling by the strengthening sun.

I suspect you’ve been expecting this. I suspect, in fact, that you’ve been expecting it for a good deal longer than at least one of the two people involved. But the fact that it
has
now happened is only half of the story. You will want to know how, and you will want to know why—or at the very least, why now.

So we will back-track, just for a moment. Charles clearly did not bleed out his life in the mud of the City Road as you might have feared. But by the time he came to, his assailant was long gone and he was staring, somewhat dazedly, into the face of one of the early morning coffee-vendors so common in that part of town. The man was shaking him vigorously by the shoulder, worried—clearly—that he had a corpse on his hands. His barrow was pulled up against the kerb behind him, smoke rising gently from the charcoal-burner, and even with his hand pulsing like underground thunder, Charles was almost overwhelmed by the glorious smell of freshly made coffee. The man helped him roll over and lever himself up, and it was only then—with the man’s staring eyes round with fear—that he realised, finally, what had happened. The little finger of his right hand was gone. Severed below the knuckle with one slicing incision. Strange what the mind does with such explosive irrevocable information—all Charles could think was how expert this cut must have been—how sharp the knife—not who did this, or what the consequences might be. You don’t die of such a wound as that, even in Victorian London, but there was a lot of blood on the pavement and more still throbbing from the wound. Was it the medical or the police training that kicked in next? Or merely the adrenalin? Who knows. Whichever it was, Charles managed somehow to staunch the worst of it with the coffee-seller’s handkerchief, and then stagger with him to the nearest cab-stand, where the man was clearly mighty glad to see the back of him. Nor was the cab driver particularly pleased at the prospect of a haemorrhage all over his hansom, and Charles had to pay well over
the odds for the fare—“You’re goin’ to get blood all over me seats, mate. That’ll take hours to get off. Three shillin’s to the Strand—take it or leave it.”

It was near five when he got back to Buckingham Street, and Molly had clearly just got up—she hadn’t yet put on either her apron or the ungainly cap that covered her hair. He loomed at her out of the night like a dead man, his coat drenched and the blood still running down his arm where he was holding it clutched to his chest. He’d seen terror on her face once before, but for some reason he didn’t have the energy to analyse, he did not see it now. His mutilated hand looked far worse in the glare of the lamp, but the girl did not flinch. The wound was bathed and cleaned, brandy poured, bandages brought, and hot water carried up to his room so he could wash. Only he could not wash, because he couldn’t use his right hand. So the girl came back and stood behind him as he sat in the tub and the water around him ran red and redder still. As the brandy kicked in and the pain dulled, he shut his eyes and tried to close his senses down to only the smooth rhythmic rasp of the cloth against his skin. He willed it to be neutral—willed it to be nothing more than an impersonal physical sensation entirely distinct from the girl—but every now and again he felt the quick edge of a fingernail, or the lightest skim of the fabric of her sleeve, and as his body started to respond he sensed the pressure shift to his shoulder, his neck, his chest, and knew that her face was only inches from his own. And then, without warning, the movement stopped. And when he opened his eyes he saw there were tears in hers. What could he do but what he’d once dreamed of doing, and touch that cheek? The girl, in her turn, pushed her face hard against his hand like a cat, and as the two moved slowly together, a rush of energy ripped through Charles’s body and all pain was forgotten in a surge of desire.