People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  Now that his knife was clean to his satisfaction, he pointed it at me as he spoke. ‘Your husband – badly chosen, I might add – knew everything. He had that housekeeper of his track down a woman from the Nichol and the woman told the housekeeper all about the little brown-eyed girl who had to be dragged out screaming, by her feet, from under a bed in a puddle of her own piss. As I said before, your Dr Lancaster and I weren’t drinking partners until recently, and even then it was business.’

  He glanced up at Thomas, who was still swaying between us. I’d been trying not to look, but when I did, I saw that his eyes bulged like a frog’s and his tongue protruded from his mouth. How humiliating Thomas would have found this; a man so precious of his appearance was now so ugly in death.

  ‘What of the specimen then, the baby in the jar? I saw that here, in this attic, the night I was pushed down the stairs, and yet when I came to see you, it was in your office, on the shelf in your collection.’

  ‘Is that why you missed the appointment?’

  ‘I had no one left to trust.’

  ‘I rescheduled other patients for that. Who else have you told about your theories?’

  ‘Who else have I to tell?’ I said, shaking my head at the bizarre situation I now found myself in. ‘I thought the specimen had been cut from Mabel and that was why she hadn’t written, because she’d died and that’s how you came by it, and I had sent her to you.’

  ‘She was treated by a friend of mine, a Romanian, as qualified as myself – more so, in the practice of such procedures. You’ve met her: my housekeeper, Irina. She informed me that your friend left that place alive, and that there were no problems.’

  ‘And yet she hasn’t written,’ I said.

  ‘The girl got what she wanted, why would she write? You have been causing me headaches, Susannah, with your wild theories and indiscreet husband. You aren’t mad – a little off the mark, but not mad. I was sent here to deal with the issue at hand and dispatch whoever I found in the house with him. You know, I haven’t been sleeping, Susannah.’

  Thomas’s body had finally stopped moving. I had a fear that Dr Shivershev was only telling me all this, explaining things to me, to alleviate whatever guilt he would suffer by killing me, as if I would skip to my death so long as I had an understanding of his motive, so long as it had been explained to me. I was still thinking on what I could do to change the inevitable outcome, so I let him speak and didn’t interrupt.

  Dr Shivershev and Thomas worked for the same organisation, unbeknownst to each other at first. Dr Shivershev had been recruited many years ago, but Thomas had only recently been invited to join the secret brotherhood of scientists; he was very much on probation, a foot soldier in a hierarchical organisation. The brotherhood operated as a selective band of brothers; they helped each other in all things and swore loyalty to one another and their cause. At its core, their cause was about true freedom. A man could be who he wanted: the rules that applied to ordinary people were not for them, and no religious or moralising theories were assumed. But this camaraderie was not to be abused. Rules may not have applied in the normal sense, but a man was expected to keep his own house in order and remain discreet. Both edicts Thomas would come to find impossible to uphold.

  The foetus specimen, found by Thomas, was an attempt to ingratiate himself with Dr Shivershev. He wanted a favour.

  Thomas had complained to anyone who would listen of the difficulties he was having with his ‘common’ wife. He’d been seduced by a temptress, so he told his colleagues, who had her sights set on bettering herself. He needed to be free, and so he foolishly complained to his fraternity of brothers long before he had earned the currency to do so, establishing himself as a whining pain. He asked that they order Dr Shivershev, as his wife’s physician, to help him have her certified a lunatic, so she could be interned in an asylum.

  The brotherhood did indeed assign Dr Shivershev to assist, but his real task was to deal with Thomas. Thomas had become a liability: unpredictable, unreliable, and most of all a risk. A squawking parrot of a man-child. He had been overheard speaking about the brotherhood socially, and his work was sloppy and lacking in the professionalism and rigour expected of a loyal brother. It was therefore agreed that he would have to be dispatched, and his troublesome wife along with him. The removal of the servants in his household was an absolute requirement to ensure that the evidence matched the motive. It must be clear that Thomas had gone on a murderous spree before hanging himself due to humiliating financial and professional difficulties.

  Dr Shivershev said that this was to be his last assignment for the brotherhood in London. He would be removing himself to America. He wished to create a distance and had obtained special permission to leave. As a Jew, he had never felt truly accepted into the heart of the circle. His work was commended, admired, and he was respected, but he could never truly become one of them. In a way this worked to his advantage, and he obtained permission to leave as a reward for his loyalty and discreet service.

  What Dr Shivershev had kept to himself was that he could no longer align himself with the direction the brotherhood had taken. It had become far removed from its original purpose; the brotherhood had lost its way. It had turned into a perverted enterprise whose main function was the harvesting and selling of organs for private sale to rich old men. Their principal customers, Dr Shivershev said, were a certain breed of English gent with a fetish for collecting things, the more novel and outlandish the better. The sort of man who had everything already but who would always want more, especially when it came at the expense of another.

  I thought of Thomas and his own mania for collecting things; of that shrunken head from South America that he obtained just for the pleasure of hearing me shriek, how he acquired me and clothes and the cigars he didn’t smoke.

  ‘What was the purpose of this brotherhood in the beginning?’ I asked.

  ‘It was about knowledge! We wanted to understand how the body worked, so we could fix it when it went wrong. Why leave it to God, when he was doing such a shoddy job of it,’ Dr Shivershev said, his eyes glistening, his voice rich with passion. ‘Nearly fifty years ago, the first collective was a group of outcast scientists, enlightened scholars and astronomers, supported by free-thinking members of the aristocracy who invested money in secret. They all wanted to see what could be achieved with medicine, how far it could go. They wanted to explore the human body without interference from the Church, without religious or cultural morality defining what could or could not be done.’

  My mind flitted back to my grandmother’s church in Reading, to the stultifying hours I’d spent there, and to my grandmother herself. She loathed the idea of humans ‘playing God’ with a person’s body. One of the many reasons she took against my ever becoming a nurse.

  ‘Medical experimentation is not something everyone approves of,’ continued Dr Shivershev, as if he could read my thoughts. He was all but lost in his enthusiasm for his topic. ‘We understood that. Innocent people died and we made some difficult decisions, but we believed it was for the progression of humanity.’

  What did he mean by ‘innocent people’, I wondered. Did the brotherhood really go about committing murder and digging around inside people under the guise that it would save lives in the future? It seemed it might not have been so wild a theory that my husband the surgeon was the Whitechapel killer. If not Thomas, what of Dr Shivershev himself? My pulse began to race again. It was imperative that I try to find a way out. I could never physically overpower Dr Shivershev, I must talk my way to freedom. But how?

  ‘Hospitals are wonderful places, Susannah, but they are administrative nightmares run by meddling bureaucrats who want nothing more than to push paper around their desks and feather their nests and who don’t give a damn about real science. They go home and sleep in their beds without imagining what could be possible. There were things we achieved in those early years that would never have been permitted in a hospital, and now they are common practice.’
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  He sighed now, and glared disparagingly at the dangling corpse of my husband. His neck had begun to stretch, the tongue swollen. I had to look away.

  ‘The problem, as so often, was money. Once certain members of our brotherhood realised the obscene profit that could be made from private collectors, nothing else mattered. There was a sudden mania among the rich for everything from shrivelled hearts to kidneys in wine and virgins’ breasts, and medical science was forgotten. This suited your husband very well. He wasn’t faring too happily at the hospital, and barely had any private patients, but he did at least know the rudiments of surgery. He had quite serious money concerns, I believe?’

  I nodded, thought of Abbingdale Hall and the inheritance Thomas was no longer eligible for, being dead. Mrs Wiggs had counselled me about that. After all my efforts to remain in his house, to remain married for my own security, it didn’t seem as if I would achieve this after all.

  ‘The problem was that he would go to his clubs and houses and boast, tell people, in that obsessive need he had to talk of himself. But he didn’t realise who was listening, which is why he had to be silenced. The man at the Café Royale you mentioned, with the medals, I knew who he was instantly, and I’m afraid he is rather high up in the brotherhood. So when you told me about their conversation, I knew you were in danger. Why do you think I told you to find a safe place to go?’

  ‘Then, as it’s not about me at all, but my husband, why not let me go? I will keep my mouth shut – you know I can.’

  ‘The missing wife of a gentleman who has killed himself… The brotherhood can influence the investigation, they have links to the Home Office and there will be no problem with the police, but a missing wife from Chelsea is a story worthy of the news, and these journalists, you see, they have not been… adequately penetrated, as of yet, shall we say. The brotherhood will be left feeling exposed and they will blame me for attracting attention. There would be the potential for scrutiny, and scientists do not like scrutiny…’

  The beginning of his explanation gave me some hope; my grandfather used to tell me it never mattered how desperate a man’s situation was, he will always cling to the faintest sliver of hope, as I did now, though I made sure to keep my face expressionless. Dr Shivershev was taking the time to make me understand, so I would sit and listen.

  ‘I also have another problem,’ he continued. ‘Namely my friends you saw me with in the Ten Bells. The man, Walter, a common man, my driver, will leave the country with me, but the woman, Mary, they will never let her go. Her role is to procure the live specimens. She started as a whore – she has a varied past, as we all do – but she deserves better and I want her to come with me. Once the brotherhood realises that she is gone, they will know she’s with me. They will not be happy, though I suspect they will not be surprised. I will need to use all the currency I have earned during my service if we are to survive. They will never let a common prostitute leave. There is hypocrisy there, of course. The brotherhood prides itself on being free of cultural tyranny, but when it comes to women, I’m afraid you are still very much considered to be men’s property. There is theory, and then there is practice…’

  He inhaled and came to a stop.

  I didn’t need a lecture on hypocrisy but I let him give it. I was livid now, furious at myself for having got into this mess, worse than the one I had found myself in before, but how simple that seemed now. ‘I courted him in hospital and I simpered over him as he lay like the martyr in his bed…’

  Dr Shivershev started and glanced at me with interest. ‘Ah, so that’s how you grew close, was it?’ He gave a little laugh. ‘You know Thomas was suspected of starting that fire at the hospital?’

  ‘What? Why would he do that? That doesn’t sound like Thomas at all, why would he want to burn himself?’

  ‘There was another doctor, a man called Dr Lovett.’

  ‘Yes, I know him. I mean rather I met him, Richard Lovett was best man at our wedding. Thomas carried him out from that fire.’

  ‘Well… he was Thomas’s best man in a variety of ways, for a while at least. You understand, of course?’

  I coloured at this; I couldn’t help it. It made sense as I’d seen Lovett at the mollies’ house.

  ‘The night of the fire, Thomas and Lovett had argued – a lovers’ quarrel, I assume. Later, Lovett came to believe that Thomas had hit him over the head before the fire started. One minute he was awake and the next…’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Lovett is the nephew of the man with the medals you and Thomas bumped into at the Café Royale. After their affair had ended, the spurned Lovett didn’t waste any time reporting back to his uncle on Thomas’s indiscretions. The final straw was when an article appeared in the newspapers about a man who’d been making enquiries about the purchase of a fresh uterus on behalf of a client. The information came from Thomas, who’d apparently been talking while under the influence at a mollies’ house. And the person who witnessed this—’

  ‘—was Dr Richard Lovett.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  It was time to change direction, I had had enough of being done to. As Dr Shivershev had been talking, I had been thinking and I had an idea, that sliver of hope had made me somewhat creative. ‘I know you don’t want to kill me—’ I said.

  ‘You deserve better.’

  ‘—and, besides, there is a way I think I can help.’ I looked him straight in the eye, made sure I had his attention.

  ‘What if the newspapers had a bigger distraction than that of a missing Chelsea housewife? What if Mary were believed to have been murdered? And if there was a body, no one would know she’d run away with you.’

  My obsession with the Whitechapel murders might be put to practical use. I knew all the gory details, every last one of them. ‘You say Mary was a… well, that makes her ripe for being murdered by Jack the Ripper, does it not?’

  I saw Dr Shivershev’s eye shift towards me and I knew immediately that he got it, understood there could be value in this.

  ‘What if we were to swap Mary’s body for another’s?’

  His mouth twitched. ‘I take it you aren’t offering yourself as the substitute body, Susannah? Are you suggesting I wait for Mrs Wiggs and kill her instead?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘because she is dead already.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, shifting in his chair. His face broadened into a smile. ‘I see.’

  Marie Jeanette: la Grande Blonde

  Mary’s heart leapt and fluttered. She wasn’t frightened, but she was desperate, and she knew her time was running out. She had caused many of her own troubles, but she only had a temper when she drank, and she would defy any woman to spend her youth as she had, underneath men flopping on her like pigs snuffling for truffles, and not take what they could to lighten the load, alcohol or otherwise. She was trapped between the impossible, between the men who had owned her and those who owned her now, dangerous men who would not be humiliated by a defiant piece of cargo.

  At five foot seven and with long fair hair, Mary had been compared to all the famous beauties – Venus, Salome, Cleopatra. The name that stuck was Marie Jeanette, La Grande Blonde: the clientele in Paris had bestowed that on her. It was a testament to the shit men let tumble from their lips in the pursuit of fucking. The one man who hadn’t drooled over her or even said she was beautiful, had barely seemed to notice her at first, was the doctor, Robert. Meeting him had been her only solace. If everything went as Robert had planned, both of them would be gone by tomorrow. For the first time in her life, Mary would be really, truly free.

  There was a rustle of skirts and a familiar bout of coughing, and through the door barged Lizzie Albrook, come down from upstairs to Mary’s room to hear about Sally’s flit. Mary was irritated by the intrusion, but it would be a useful sighting, once Mary had disappeared. All those who had spoken to her on this day would be asked to give an evaluation of her demeanour, so she mustn’t give a clue that anything other than business a
s usual was on her mind.

  As luck would have it, she had another interruption, even while Lizzie was still visiting. Today of all days! Joseph knocked on the door, which annoyed her even more, for he well knew the door could easily be opened from the outside, since it was he who had lost the bloody key.

  ‘Hello, Mary, how are you keeping?’ he said, sidling round the door like a lost puppy.

  Those earnest eyes, and that fair hair, sticking out in all directions and giving him an impish charm. He was handsome, even if he was starting to wrinkle a bit. His skin had darkened from working outdoors, and he had lost some fat from lack of nourishment. Joe could not keep a penny in his pocket when there was beer to be had.

  ‘I’m well, thank you, Joe. I wasn’t expecting to see you. Did you lose something?’

  Mary said this to slice at the man. Joseph had lost her because of his inability to provide as he had promised, but she was no longer his and he could forget creeping round her, the bright-eyed sprite.

  Lizzie Albrook sucked her teeth and pulled her shawl around her as if Joseph Barnett had dragged in the cold air with him. ‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ she said. She heaved her creaking bones up on her fists and pursed her lips at Joseph, like a cat’s arse.

  Joe, for his part, stood on the threshold of what had once been his own home, holding his cap in his hands like a virgin holding his cock.

  Mary ushered him in and he remained standing as Mary sat back on the bed, an ageing fossil of brass and screaming springs that threatened to sink to the floor. She let her legs fall apart and arched her back, held herself up by her locked elbows, head to one side, no bonnet, all blonde tendrils, round cheeks and open lips.

  ‘What is it you want, Joseph? If you have come to see what I’ve done with the place, it will be a short conversation.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Mary, I only came to see how you’ve been getting on.’

  ‘Well, how have you been getting on?’