The Vice Society (9 page)

‘Which coffee houses were these?’ asked Mr Williamson, his pen poised above the notebook for a salient fact.

‘Dunno. Just coffee houses.’

‘Tell me, Nelly,’ said Mr Jute, ‘if you were to go to him now, where would you go?’

‘I never saw him outside the house. Truth be told, sir, I am mostly here in this very room, or in the rooms upstairs cleaning out the grates and suchlike.’

‘We have reason to believe that his name was not really “Mr Mann”,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘What did
you
call him?’

‘I called him “Mr Mann”. Missus says I am to call all tenants by their names so.’

‘But when you were alone . . . when madam was not listening . . . did you call him something different? You have no need to be ashamed.’

‘Well . . . I called him Andrew.’

‘Ha! A capital joke,’ expostulated Mr Jute.

‘Explain yourself,’ said Mr Williamson somewhat fractiously.

‘Well, it might be a coincidence, but “Andrew” comes from the Greek. It means “manly” or “man-like”. That would make him “Manly Mann”.’

‘Amusing, I am sure. A joke at everyone’s expense. May I ask you a delicate question, Nelly, now that your mistress is out of the house? Were you and the gentlemen more than conversational acquaintances? More than friends?’

‘Oh sir! What do you take me for?’ said Nelly (my Nelly!) with sparkling eyes and a leer that answered the question more honestly. ‘I am a
good
girl.’ She flashed Mr Jute a look that suggested she was indeed as ‘good’ as he might expect.

‘Hmm. I think we have gathered as much information as we can here,’ said Mr Williamson, standing. ‘Short of taking Nelly around every coffee house in the city in search of the man – and it might well come to that – I cannot think of anything else at present that will further our case.’

‘I could stay and press Nelly further if you think it might be of benefit,’ said Mr Jute.

‘I think not. I dare say the man has already imagined that we might one day question the girl, which is why he has told her nothing of consequence – including his true name. That is the extent of his foresight and duplicity.’

‘Do you think we will ever catch the man, sir?’

‘Patience, Mr Jute. Patience and reason. He is somewhere close. These gentlemen are parasites upon the body of the city. They need its journals and publishers to survive. Why, he is most certainly sitting in a coffee house somewhere fewer than two miles from this place.’

SIX

In fact, Mr Williamson was quite correct. After leaping from that window at Milton-street, I had fled to one of my habitual locations: the Cathedral coffee house, just a few steps from the writers’ paradise and purgatory of Paternoster-row and in the very shadow of St Paul’s. Assuredly, I would not be returning to that lodging house – not least because a constable of the Mendicity Society had been situated nearby (there, and at the false widow Burgoyne’s) lest I do so.

I am, as will have been discerned, a writer: of begging letters by necessity, of newspaper copy by inclination, and of novels by destiny. The reader may have been acquainted of late by a work of mine detailing a case in which Mr Williamson, then Detective Sergeant Williamson, was a prominent player. I would like to say the sensation of that work has made me a rich man, but I was obliged to sell my copyright at perilously short notice to save myself from an impending stay at Whitecross-street debtors’ gaol. The publisher, I hear, has become a moderately wealthy man.

So, once again, I had been thrown upon the cold and blackened bosom of the city to sustain myself. There, amid the cacophony of traffic, the choking smoke, the faceless crowd and the inhuman masonry, I was once more to chase stories to fill my stomach – at least until the Mendicity Society tired of pursuing ‘Mr Mann’.

O, there are bodies I could apply to for charity, but I cannot tolerate plaintive letters to the Literary Fund so that those ‘literary’ men can sneer at my body of work and deny me ten pounds because I am not a ‘writer’ in their eyes. I would rather chase the fire engine, loiter at the magistrates’ court and gain access to the public inquest than take
their
charity.

Thus, at the windowseats of the house, I ordered a tongue sandwich with plenty of mustard and looked absently through the day’s papers. Behind me, the noisy throng smoked and drank: penny-a-liners talking fantastical rubbish about the book of theirs that was sure to be printed by Such-and-Such publishers of Paternoster-row, or the article of theirs that was certain to run uncut in all of the following day’s press. At talking they are artists; at writing, they are talented talkers.

Before me, the city was framed within the plate-glass window – an animated canvas containing everything a man could desire to fill his nib: the omnibuses bristling with top-hatted and bonneted passengers; the magdalenes with their insinuating winks; the false beggars preying on tourists; the street boys always one penny away from the grave; the lonely death in the upper room; the fallen horse and the splintered bone; the duke with dung-splashed legs; the thief with the duke’s watch in his palm.

And the unnamed, unknown murderer walking there among the crowd – just another face, just another fare, just another man with the power and the intention to take the life of others. It could be any one of them, for any man or woman can kill. One might not think it, or will it, but there is evil in us all. It remains hidden and buried in those of a healthy mind, but if one should uncover even the outermost tip of that darkness within, it will grasp tentacularly and draw one in, deeper and deeper until wrong seems right and the most depraved longings are confused with the higher emotions. Lust, greed, ire, envy . . . these are the tips of the tentacles that lead to the rotting blackness at the core of everyone.

Take, for example, the young fellow sitting beside me. With a yearning and almost desperate gaze, he watched every attractive lady walk past, casting his eyes hungrily at their ankles. He scanned every torso in hope of the momentary movements of clothing against their forms. A bachelor, perhaps, or an unsatiated young husband. Such insensate desires take hold of a young man and, if unmoderated, motivate him to acts that would ultimately affront his morality, deny his religion, shame his family and bring calumny upon his name.

If I was in need of a story, I was to find it there in that index of fallible humanity. It would be some person, some incident, some crime, some phrase picked from an overheard conversation. Indeed, it was less than an hour later when Mr Williamson himself, fresh from his enquiries with Mr Jute, came into that very same coffee house and sat, alone, by the fire. Here was my story.

I watched him read through the newspaper: a man who carried his own dark space with him though surrounded by two dozen chattering others. The house became busier, but the seats either side of him remained empty. Was that a scowl, or a frown, that crossed his face as he read an account of the Holywell-street incident and its open verdict? Was he instinctively weighing the evidence for himself and deciding that he would have solved it soon enough?

Here was a man to whom stories cling as the smuts of the city air cling persistently to one’s clothes. Thus, it was only natural, when he finally left the coffee house, that I return his interest in me by following
him
.

He took an omnibus east past St Paul’s, and so did I, hiding my scrutinizing eyes behind a late-edition paper left on the seat. I was with him as he alighted at the top of Fish-street-hill, and I watched him, a seemingly diminutive figure inside his black greatcoat, as he stood looking up at the fuliginous finger of the Monument: a sombre digit disappearing into rain-laden grey.

‘Not much of a view today, Mr Williamson,’ said the attendant Mr Jenkins, taking the entrance fee from his most regular visiter.

‘Much the same as always,’ answered Mr Williamson. ‘Do you have any news for me?’

‘I have not seen any of the gentlemen,’ said Mr Jenkins, answering the question he had been asked, in many forms, over the last seven years.

‘Hmm. One day, Mr Jenkins.’

‘I hope so. Not much custom in this weather. It will be bitter cold aloft, if you want my opinion.’

‘Thank you, Mr Jenkins, but I think I will make the climb all the same.’

‘As you wish, Mr Williamson. I was to close shortly, but I will wait for you.’

And climb he did: two hundred and two feet up those spiralling black marble stairs, his own footsteps echoing back at him within that chill space, round and round, seeming ever more inwards and upwards, towards the dim light of the upper doorway.

On exiting that portal, the wind of the upper aether whispers inimically that you have left the temporal world, teasing your hair with frigid breaths and drawing you fatally towards the edge where you see it: the great city of London.

No glittering spectacle, this – no fascinating canvas, but a limitless tapestry of soot and ash and smoke. There is the Custom House and the Mint; there is the flat, dead river with its steamboat plumes; there is the industry of Southwark pouring forth smoke from its chimneys; there is Westminster-bridge vanishing into the swirling greyness. And there is the void disappearing below.

Of course, there is now a cage around the platform so that the very sky is barred and the urge to oblivion withheld by iron. The metal is cold to the touch, even in summer, but still few can resist approaching the limit to gaze upon emptiness.

Dusk begun to fall. The dying day was edging towards a thin band of light at the horizon and fog could be seen rolling in: one of those suffocating, swirling infestations that would, in a few hours, make the Monument a crow’s nest above an uncharted ocean, make church steeples angular peaks and Southwark’s chimneys the ribs of half-submerged wracks raking through murky and deceptive shallows. St Paul’s would become a leviathan drifting lost.

His breath hung still about him now in wraiths. Who can fathom what went through his head when he visited that place, this man who had seen death and cruelty countless times? As he stood there amid the swirling fumes of the city, did he too think of mortality? Was it eternal sadness that he felt, or was it revenge?

Finally, with the light fading, he descended into darkness.

‘Anything of note this evening, Mr Williamson? Any fires? Any collisions on the river?’

‘Nothing, Mr Jenkins. Nothing at all.’

The two paused momentarily beneath that broad plaque of unintelligible Latin on the structure’s base and the attendant locked the door. Then they shook hands once more and parted without further comment.

I followed Mr Williamson west.

He went on foot, as sure of the streets as only a policeman, or a criminal, can be. The night held no fear for him and the increasing fog did not disorient him as it cast haloes about the gaslamps. Onward he walked, following a pattern along Upper-Thames-street, to Bridge-street and then up Farringdon towards Skinner-street.

I need hardly tell the Londoner where he was bound, for one can smell the place well enough from a distance. Its noisome gases have shamed the city for years: those mephitic exhalations emerging as steam from the seething mound containing upwards of 80,000 bodies. It was Spa Fields burial ground.

Putrefaction poisons the air about this Golgotha, and morbific matter swells up from the earth – which is no longer earth but coffin upon coffin to the very surface so that the sexton must, under cover of night, rake bones from the surface and apply the long hand-drill to release noxious bubbles of rot that sting the eyes and coat the tongue with their coppery tang.

Such was the case as Mr Williamson entered the ground. The attendant – a being that appeared to be half clothing and half soil – looked up from his exertions with the drill and gave the merest nod of recognition. He could have been the First Man, or the last: a creature coughed from the clay partially formed and still lacking the higher reason of humanity, his feet clogged with the compost of decomposition and his features a loose approximation of his species. Both visiter and sexton were flickeringly illuminated by the sparking chimney of the squat bone house.

Mr Williamson raised the collar of his coat around his nose to mask the stench and walked to the modest gravestone in the ‘good part’ of the ground. A simple pewter vase containing a single flower had been knocked over at the foot of the stone and he righted it with cold hands. To his right, another attendant was at work heaping soil on to a barrow with a shovel.

‘You there – what are you doing?’ said Mr Williamson.

The man stopped, apparently startled by a living voice, and stared dumbly.

‘Did you hear me? I asked you what you are about.’

The attendant with the drill approached. ‘Bert dun tor. ’E clearn groan.’

Mr Williamson blinked and focused on the one who had made the utterance. The man’s face was as devoid of sapience as an ox, and almost as hairy. The other sexton with the shovel, if conceivable, seemed still less cogent: a piece of animated skin and sinew with a dull light in his eyes.

‘Mus clear owd wud. Mek spes fo’ new ded,’ continued the ox man.

‘You are clearing old graves?’

‘Yus’ser.’

‘On whose authority are you doing this?’

The ox man shrugged. It was not clear whether he had understood the question or whether he simply did not know the answer.