A Rush of Blood

by David Mark

  The man on the hook is unmistakably the ringleader from last night’s attack: the youngster who tried to profit from Meda’s disappearance with a bogus ransom demand.

  The man who points the hose is unmistakably Karol.

  The message contains no words but its meaning is clear.

  Molly realizes she is breathing hard. Realizes she has played the video four times before forcing herself to look up and acknowledge the others. She feels heat upon her skin. Cold within her bones. Feels a great swell of something raw and primal flood through her. A protective instinct wrapped inside something she cannot explain. It is a desire to see more. To watch and understand. To stand beside Karol and watch the dispassionate way he tortures the man who dislocated his elbow. This is a bad man holding the hose.

  She looks at her daughter. Makes up her mind. Replies to the message with a simple communication of her own.

  I’M GOING TO THE POLICE. IF YOU WANT TO STOP ME, MEET ME WHERE THE TRAMP’S THROAT WAS CUT. I KNOW YOU KNOW.

  ‘I’m going out,’ says Molly, announcing it to nobody in particular. ‘Lottie …’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Mum, what are you doing?’ asks Hilda, and there is a true fear in her voice.

  ‘I’m going to sort it out,’ says Molly, and she reaches to the shelf behind the bar for the knife she uses to slice lemons. She slips it into the pocket of her coat as she wraps herself in its great black folds. She feels none of her earlier disquiet. She feels anger. A sort of mania. Feels an urge to hurt or be hurt. ‘Fuck them,’ she adds, and her face is stone. ‘Fuck the lot of them.’

  A slug of gin from the optic on the wall.

  Out the door and into the rain.

  Into a night as bleak and pitiless as the figure who watches her leave.

  HILDA

  We could have done without the Ripperettes that night. The Bonnet was a magnet for anybody who liked their music to be written on the black keys. If you were ever called a weirdo at school or had owned a pencil case with a picture of a wolf or a unicorn on it, chances are you would have downed a cocktail and troughed through a pickled egg in our pub. Mum had no problem catering for the kind of clientele who spent their money on quills and potion bottles and replica Stoker goggles. They were our bread and butter, though Mum did once say that it would be more apt to refer to the Ripperettes as our bread and lard. Their love of all things Victorian didn’t extend to their diets. There were four of them and none of them were wasting away on a diet of porridge and stale bread. Their appetite for big dinners was on a par with their hunger for any experience or artefact with even a nodding acquaintanceship with the Ripper, his victims, or the streets in which they bled. They were regulars on the Whitechapel Walks and could debate long into the night about which of the latest Ripper theories had the most holes. They also seemed dedicated to disproving the assumption that ‘fat’ always came with a side order of ‘jolly’. They could complain to an Olympic standard and anybody with the misfortune to sit within earshot would soon find themselves uncomfortably familiar with their litany of medical concerns, career obstacles and the failings of the men who had let them down with their ceaseless disobedience. They dressed in a lot of black, though their boots had been ordered from specialists in wide-fittings and the raven necklaces that should have hung in their cleavages were dangerously close to becoming chokers. They were in their thirties and didn’t appear to like each other more than they liked anybody else. They each read Edgar Allan Poe verses when we had a Halloween night and you could tell that they got off on the gruesome bits. Mum suspected that each saw themselves as exact replicas of the women who plied their trade in our neighbourhood a century and a half before. She said that this implied the only mirror that any of them owned was the back of a spoon. Then she felt bad for saying it and said there was nothing wrong with being a little on the chubby side – provided you didn’t become a bitch or a total cow-bag at the same time. Personally, I think that deep down, they really wanted to kill somebody. I should know. I’ve looked into such eyes.

  ‘They’re in,’ said Katriona, rolling her eyes. She was bar manager in Mum’s absence and had been enjoying a quiet night until the murder squad bustled in out of the rain and plonked themselves down at the table in the window. Lottie and I were still in the back. She was reading some textbook and I was playing a game on her laptop. We hadn’t spoken much since Mum left. We were both trying not to let our thoughts run away with us. We just wanted her home. Wanted everything to be better than it was.

  ‘Who is?’ I asked, looking at Katriona. She was Scottish and had blonde hair and pale skin and in her pure white shift dress and dark eye make-up, she sometimes looked a lot like a ghost. She swore more than Mum and always called me ‘chicken’.

  ‘Fucking ghouls. The Sisters of Perpetual Premenstrual Tension. Sixty stone of twat.’

  ‘The Ripperettes?’

  ‘Aye. Moody bitches.’ She looked at Lottie, relishing the pained look on her face. ‘They’ll be creaming their granny-panties when they see you. No doubt they’ll have a theory needs your attention. You should run, chicken. Save yourself.’

  ‘Don’t tell them I’m here,’ said Lottie, urgently. ‘I’ll hide up the chimney or something.’

  ‘They’ll find you. There’s a rumour that the Ripper carved his name on the fifteenth brick up the flue. They’ll be in here staring up your skirt in no time.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘No. But I might start the rumour, chicken …’

  ‘Oh my goodness, you’re the lady from the Dead Pretty podcasts! We saw you walk off. I must say it was very disappointing. We’d ordered pizza and planned to watch it right through. Rather shoddy to leave people in the lurch. And oh, you’re the glamorous assistant. Rather a sexist thing to say, wasn’t it? Still, I won’t make a fuss. I hadn’t put two and two together. Of course, you’re the boss’s daughter, aren’t you? Do you drink here, Lottie? Do you mind if I call you Lottie? Of course you don’t – it’s people like me who give people like you an audience. I’ve got lost looking for the toilet. I don’t know why there can’t be signs. And no doubt they will be in a terrible state when I find them. Not much better than animals, some people. You have to come and meet my friends. They might want your professional opinion on something. I’m sure you don’t mind …’

  Half an hour later we were still in the front bar. The only other clients were old Connie, busy flashing angry daggers at the newcomers and saying ‘Gordon Facking Bennett’ under her breath, and Brendan, who had just wandered in from the street and who had clearly been drinking since breakfast.

  I looked at Lottie, who had a pained expression on her face. She kept glancing at her phone.

  ‘Anything from Mum?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And where might the good lady of unceasing virtue be upon this detestable eve? Her hostelry is impoverished by her absence.’

  In Mum’s absence, it fell to me. ‘Would you give it a rest please, Brendan? Just for tonight.’

  He placed a hand upon his chest and mimed offence. He changed his accent and became a Southern belle. ‘Well, I do declare …’

  ‘Please, Brendan, my brain is going a bit. Mum says you don’t mean any harm and I’m sure she’s right, but sometimes you’re a walking migraine.’

  I don’t know how Connie’s geriatric ears picked up our conversation but she let out a peal of laughter at that. ‘You tell him, girl. By Christ I only come in this pub because it’s near enough the flat but there are times I wonder if I’m in the nuthouse. Time was you could go and have a half of stout without feeling like you’d gone to a freak show.’

  ‘I hope you’re not talking about me,’ said the plumpest of the Ripperettes. She was wearing a red cape and looked how Red Riding Hood might have appeared if she had killed the wolf and had him deep fried.

  ‘Not you, lovey,’ said Connie, breezily. ‘You’re proper down to earth, I can see that.’

  ‘I should hope so.’<
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  Lottie was scratching at the back of her hand. She seemed agitated. I could tell she was worrying about her earlier argument with Mum. They’d never had a set-to before and it seemed to make Lottie feel a perfect schoolgirl who had just been summoned to the Headmaster’s office for a caning. She wasn’t herself. Normally when we were left alone I would use the situation to my advantage, but on that night I was feeling too peculiar to do much other than kick my feet against the bar stool and try not to get too agitated. It was taking all my effort not to think about the only thing my brain wanted me to think about. I was forcing myself not to let Meda pop up in my imagination. I knew that if she did, I would quickly grab hold of the picture as if it were a horse on a carousel and I would ride it around and around until I was sick and dizzy and Meda was dead or dying.

  ‘Does your mother really say that?’ asked Brendan, and his voice had lost the flamboyance. I gave him a smile, the way Mum always did whenever one of her hopeless drunks said something endearing.

  ‘She’d sell you that thingy if she could,’ I said, nodding at the scarificator in its case above the bar. ‘She doesn’t mind you.’

  Brendan beamed. It may have been the best compliment of his life.

  ‘It’s me that you have to worry about,’ said Lottie, looking up from her phone to pull a face. ‘I know how to get rid of your body.’

  ‘Food for the pigs, is it?’ asked Brendan, and he sipped his wine. The bottle was on the bar in front of him. He chose his own tipples from the supplier each week and paid for his drinks by the measure instead of by the bottle. It cost him much more than it should have done but he never asked Mum to change the system.

  ‘More unreliable than you would think, pigs,’ said Lottie, and she put her phone away with a groan. ‘Sea creatures would be my bet. Wrap you in wire, weigh you down, drop you in the ocean and let the tides and the crabs and all the microscopic organisms munch you into nothing.’

  ‘Would I be nude?’ asked Brendan, grinning at the prospect. ‘I would take it all for a fulsome undraping at your exquisite hands.’

  ‘You’d be dead.’

  ‘That wouldn’t stop me. I’ve been pronounced dead twice before and woke up both times after some careful chest pummelling. Decided not to head towards the light just yet. Too many things to do.’

  ‘Like what, Brendan?’

  ‘Complete my collection, of course. I have heard a whisper about a statua humana – a working human statue built in the seventeenth century. A working reproduction of the inside of a human being, created entirely from funnels and tubes and bellows. The male member is recreated by pushing on a balloon-like bladder and is said to still be able to become tumescent when pressed …’

  ‘Can nobody have a proper facking conversation any more?’

  ‘Sorry, Connie.’

  We sat still for a while. The rain pattered against the glass like thousands of tiny hooves.

  ‘How will the collection be complete?’ asked Lottie, walking behind the bar to top up her gin and tonic. ‘You want everything. You’d write me a cheque for every sample I possess if I let you.’

  Brendan tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat. ‘I will always seek to possess that which fascinates me. I will stop when that impulse is no more.’

  ‘How did you get into it, Brendan?’

  ‘Oh facking hell, girl …’

  Brendan seemed to light up with pride at being asked. Beside me I felt Lottie stiffen. Brendan could spend a whole evening giving an answer to a solitary question so enquiries about his life story were unlikely to be brief.

  ‘Just the potted version,’ Lottie jumped in. ‘You know, the top line on the Wikipedia entry …’

  ‘That dreadful thing is terribly inaccurate,’ said Brendan, icily. ‘I’ve requested it changed many times but without success.’

  I paused. ‘Have you really got an entry?’

  ‘A reference or two. I’m habitually known as a “private collector”, though it doesn’t seem terribly private sometimes. The auction house in Durham made the most terrible fuss when I bought the Mary Ann letters, even though I was decent enough to make copies for public viewing. And yet they still won’t furnish me with the name of my nemesis.’

  Lottie gave a laugh. ‘The Mary Ann letters? Mary Ann Cotton?’

  ‘Yes, fascinating lady. Killed eight at least. Could be as many as twenty. The Black Widow, they called her, though from her words it seems she was no more evil than any of us. Concerned with money worries and bickering solicitors. The handwriting is so intriguing.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with scarificators and human statues?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘My dear child, I am a collector of the intriguing. The unusual. The fascinating. In all of its forms.’

  ‘I’d love to see your house,’ muttered Connie, coughing foully, and sounding as if she would like to spit out whatever her lungs had just given birth to.

  ‘I will confess it is a little cramped, as are the storage units. But a fellow must have that which inspires him.’

  ‘Inspires him to do what?’ I asked.

  Brendan looked at me as if I were simple. ‘To collect more, of course. And I shall.’

  ‘What have you got your eye on?’ asked Lottie, drumming her fingers on the bar in an obvious attempt not to look at her phone. ‘Found one of Jeremy Bentham’s original toenails, have you? Honestly, you should put this stuff in a proper museum, properly curated and looked after.’

  ‘You shall not have my artefacts,’ said Brendan, and if he were a cat his back would have arched.

  ‘I meant I could help you, though I don’t know why I’m offering.’

  ‘You could help me by finding out the name of that gazumping ragamuffin!’

  At that, one of the Ripperettes pointedly cleared her throat. She had clearly not expected to hear the phrase ‘gazumping ragamuffin’ this evening.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know those people. Why would they tell me?’

  ‘Because you are the great Dr Lottie! The blue-haired maiden of all that is corporeal.’

  Lottie gave a low growl. She looked at me as if asking for suggestions and I gave a shrug. It didn’t really matter. She wasn’t busy and Brendan was a good customer and if she helped him he might shut up. ‘Fine. Bloody fine.’

  When Lottie’s phone vibrated fifteen minutes later we both thought it might be Mum. It wasn’t. Her contact at the auction house was replying in person to her email. Lottie put on her vlog voice when she answered and sat with her back straight and her lips pouted in the way that made Mum accuse her of setting feminism back by two centuries. I didn’t pay much attention to the call. I was staring through the condensation on the window at the blackness and the rain behind Connie. I could see the familiar lights of passing cars and the gaudy neon of the shop across the street and suddenly everything felt cold and sad, as if I were looking at a dead duckling at the edge of a pond. I had a sudden vision of Banky, huddled up in his sleeping bag in his doorway and his dog all trembling and bony against his chest. And I thought of Meda, putting a smile on his face with a simple gift of a tin of tuna for them to share. I imagined what it would be like to shelter in a doorway, pulling the darkness about yourself like it was a blanket. I imagined that sense of utter vulnerability and exposure; the knowledge that you were laid out on cold stones and the only thing between yourself and death was the reluctance of people to waste their time by killing you. It made me feel all lonely inside, as if I was suddenly in a world where nobody cared about anybody and it was all for nothing.

  I wasn’t really focusing on what I was looking at, if that makes any sense. It was all just shapes and vague patterns. But I became aware that I had been looking at the shape across the road for some time. I don’t know why it had caused some part of my brain to take notice but as soon as I realized I was staring, I blinked and turned away. An instant later I questioned myself, as if I had blithely accepted a truth. I looked again and saw the figure. Tall, long-
limbed and wrapped in black. They were standing perfectly still and as I watched I thought of the ravens at the tower; blacker than midnight and somehow wrapped in a kind of eeriness that always gave me goose bumps. They always seemed to look through you. That’s how the figure seemed to be looking at me. But could they see me through the condensation and the rain? I almost felt as if I were having a staring match with a statue.

  ‘Still bloody there,’ muttered Connie. ‘Bloody freak.’

  ‘I looked at her, in her red coat and her gold jewellery and her white hair. She softened her face a little as I cocked my head and asked her what she meant.

  ‘Another freak, working up the courage to join the show. Don’t know what it is about the Ripper but he gets under your skin if you’re an outsider. If you’re from here you just think it’s all a bit of drama over nothing. He did horrible things to those poor ladies, but do you think that was a one-off? Their lives were bloody awful. People chopping each other up were almost a blessing, you ask me. My grandmother didn’t speak of it often but you got a hot toddy in her on a cold night and she’d give you chapter and verse. Tore through those women like they were made of paper, so he did. Real thirst for blood. All these theories about who did it and who was where and who wrote the letters. None of it matters. What does it say about us that all these years later we’re still trying to work him out? We’re still trying to understand what made him tick. Whatever was running in the veins of the women back then – it still runs in ours. We’re no different. No better. Horrible people doing horrible things. You ask me, the Ripper was a woman. Taking it out on herself by chopping up people like her. But that all sounds like psychobabble and I’m supposed to hate all that.’