by Alex Scarrow
He nodded, then laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Us,’ he replied. ‘I’m so much older, but it’s as if I’m the little one, and you’re my older, wiser sister.’
She turned to look at him, her hand gently resting on one of his broad shoulders. ‘What a decidedly odd couple we make.’
CHAPTER 17
28th September 1888, Holland Park, London
‘There,’ she said. ‘Breakfast: eggs, toast and butter, and a nice strong coffee.’
Argyll looked up from the chair in the bay window. ‘Mary, thank you. Are you not having something with me this morning?’
‘I have some errands to run. Just a few things.’
He reached out and grabbed her hand. ‘You’re doing so much for me. Caring for me, cooking for me . . . I don’t know . . .’ He smiled sadly. ‘I can’t help but wonder why such a beautiful young woman would want to spend time fussing around—’
‘Because I love you. Because you’ve got manners and graces unlike the . . .’ She was going to say unlike all the young bumerees and mug-fisted tykes that worked down Spitalfields Market and fancied their chances with her out the back of the pub. ‘Unlike most of them young gentleman around town,’ she said instead.
Impulsively, she leant over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Because you’re a wonderful man, John. An’ I aim to have you back with me. Now,’ she straightened up and flourished a copy of the Illustrated London News, ‘you enjoy your breakfast an’ have a nice read. I’ll be back later on with some groceries an’ make us both a lovely broth for lunch.’
She kissed the top of his head, where his coarse brown hair was still unruly and sprouted like cactus plants from a night bedevilled by tossing and turning against a feather pillow. The bandage had gone now and the area of his scalp around the line of stitching, near his crown, was sprouting a fuzz of bristles as new hair had begun to grow in. She was going to have to take John back to Saint Bart’s to have the stitches removed a couple of weeks from now. Dr Hart would take that opportunity to see how John’s memory was healing.
‘See you later,’ she said, stepping out of the front room and into the hall, closing the door behind her.
In the hall, another door beside the pantry stood closed. Gently, she eased it open to reveal a short, steep flight of stone steps down to the basement. She knew the basement well enough. On more than one occasion, Mr Frampton-Parker had found reason to follow her down there while she was collecting a bucket of coals for her bedroom on the top floor.
Their first awkward fumble had been down here in this grubby place. It was at the bottom of these steep stone steps that he’d offered to help her with her bucket, a hand reaching out for the brass handle and finding something else instead, by accident – on purpose. A muttered apology from him, followed very quickly by a declaration of his infatuation with her. She’d been aware he’d been looking sideways at her for a few days. Furtive glances at his wife first, to be sure she was engaged in whatever she was doing, then at her.
Mary had been a little mystified by that at first. Then more than a bit flattered by the idea. Then quietly and secretly guiltily, rather thrilled at the hold she had over Mr Frampton-Parker. Mary reached the bottom of the stairs where their ‘affair’ – if one really could have called it that – had first germinated.
John knew this basement was through that door and down these tricky steep steps, but had never been curious enough, or confident enough with his ‘sleepy left leg’, to try coming down. Which was just as well.
Because it was down here.
She stepped lightly across the floor of the basement, cluttered with several boxes of household tools, travel chests that contained smaller travel chests like Russian dolls. The chests were used infrequently when the Frampton-Parkers occasionally travelled further afield. In the corner was a small mountain of coal held in a wooden collecting frame, poured down a chute through the street-level hatch above. The chute had a padlock on it on the outside, which Mary knew could be jiggled open easily with bent wire. That was how she would have gotten in if she’d not had the brass nerves to walk into the agent’s office and rent the place legitimately.
Pallid shafts of daylight shone through a small barred window, surrounded by thick cobwebs like candy floss. Checking that John wasn’t watching her from the top of the steps, she knelt down beside one of the travel chests and lifted the lid to reveal the leather satchel inside. She opened its flap and her fingers found one of the bundles of notes. There had been twelve bundles when she’d first discovered the money. Now there were only nine. She’d paid six months of rent on this house: a tidy sum of four hundred pounds. And of course the clothes she was wearing and a small wardrobe of other clothes to wear, and some suits and casual clothes she’d bought for John, guessing at all his measurements.
There had also been the purchase of a few decorative knick-knacks around the house: some very neutral hunting prints in frames, a carved Red Indian savage for the drawing room – as she knew he was American – a set of faux Egyptian statuettes for chess pieces; sphinxes and pharaohs. Enough personal effects around to maintain the illusion that they’d been living together here for just over a year.
She took just a couple of the large five pound notes from the bundle, put the satchel back in the chest and hurried back up the steps to the hall. She closed the door and grabbed a bonnet and lace shawl from the stand in the hallway.
‘I’m off out now, John!’ she called.
‘See you later!’ he replied cheerily. She heard the rustle of the newspaper in his hands and knew he was going to be fine there this morning, sitting in the sun of the morning room bay window and watching the comings and goings of the busy avenue outside.
Argyll watched her through the window as she took the steps down to the pavement and waggled his fingers at her as she glanced up and waved at him, before briskly crossing Holland Park Avenue. The basket swung from one hand as she set off to do her shopping and run her errands. He settled back in the armchair, feeling that same warm glow he’d felt in the park.
To be blessed to have someone like Mary. Beautiful, cheerful, caring. The light fizz of her laughter was pure joy. And beneath that happy-go-lucky demeanour, she seemed to have a dedicated, earnest affection for him. But, despite what she’d said, he really couldn’t understand what she saw in him. Looking at the wall opposite, in the walnut-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, he saw a complete stranger. A man with faintly tanned and leathered skin, with fine creases that perhaps told a story of a lifetime full of memories from far-flung places, but which were now all gone. Perhaps for good.
Now nothing more than a thirty-nine-year-old child.
He looked down at his hands holding the newspaper and for a moment it felt oddly like they were another person’s hands. As if they could somehow tell him about the person he used to be. The curious faint scar running across his knuckles, the small swirl of ridged skin along the palm of his left hand, suggesting a burn from long ago? He wondered what job these hands used to do. Were they used to holding some craftsman’s tool, a chisel? Or were these hands that used a pen? Perhaps even a typewriter?
Mary stubbornly refused to tell him these things. She seemed certain it would all come back to him in due course.
He let his gaze drift onto the paper. At least his mind had not forgotten how to read, or write, or a hundred other simple tasks. Perhaps he would only find out what other things he used to be able to do by trying them.
‘Perhaps I can speak French?’ he said aloud. He tried to think of how to say that same phrase, but nothing came. ‘Perhaps not,’ he muttered.
His eyes settled on the headlines in bold type:
Carriage Incident Maims Mother-to-Be
Holborn Viaduct Electrical Lights Fail – Again!
Chapman Murder Linked to Another
Chapman. The name sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps he knew someone called Chapman. His foggy mind assured him of that. He read the column
beneath:
Rumours have been heard issuing from officers serving in Scotland Yard that the prostitute brutally murdered last month, Annie Chapman, 47, may have been the second victim of the same murderer. Another prostitute by the name of Polly Nichols was also murdered in a strikingly similar manner in Bucks Row, only a few streets away from where Chapman’s body was found. Police have so far been unwilling to reveal the precise details of the Chapman murder, but what details are in public circulation bear a striking resemblance to the ghastly mutilations inflicted on Nichols. It is known that both women were initially killed by a deep and savage incision to the neck. Following this, it is common knowledge that both women were extensively mutilated, with specific attention to their personals. A source from within the police service investigative force has hinted that the mutilations were of a ‘ritualistic nature’ . . .
Argyll put the paper down and sipped from his coffee cup.
I know that name as well . . . Nichols. Polly Nichols.
He wondered from where. A friend? Surely not the same person. A prostitute? Certainly not the same person. He closed his eyes and settled back in the armchair, willing, bludgeoning, his useless mind to conjure something up, anything. He sighed.
Nothing.
‘I’m useless,’ he sighed.
No.
That quiet voice again.
Your memories are all here, tucked away in boxes. Be patient.
Really? So little had been forthcoming thus far despite Mary’s diligent coercion and encouragement, filling in a few of the smaller blank spaces in the hope that he might fill in the rest. All he seemed to have were the confused and fleeting images in his sleep. The tall buildings he could only presume were New York. That horrible vision of chalk-painted savages and their horrific butchery – was that even actually a memory? Or just some lucid nightmare? He could only hope it was the latter.
The morning sun streaming in through the bay window was warm on his face, warm through his closed eyelids. He breathed slowly and deeply, beginning to relax. Little by little, his grip loosened and the newspaper rustled, settling to rest, unread, in his lap.
. . . a knife buried into her neck up to the hilt. A woman. Polly, isn’t it? Polly Nichols? With a quick jerk, he wrenches it forward, opening her throat in a jagged gash from beneath her left ear, almost all the way round to the other. She squirms and shudders, eyes wide and rolling like a startled pig in an abattoir.
‘Shhhh,’ he whispers to her softly, holding her head back to open the wound and ease the flow. ‘Like this, just be very still . . . It’s better, much, much quicker this way.’
She tries to gurgle something. Her boots scraping and slapping against greasy cobblestones.
‘There’s a good girl,’ he whispers into her ear. He kisses her cheek tenderly. ‘You can sleep soon enough, my dear. Sleep soon enough.’
Her struggling begins to slacken. She’s still alive, barely. She can still hear him. ‘This really isn’t the real world. Don’t you see? This world around us . . . it’s just purgatory.’
Her legs flex beneath her and all of a sudden she is a dead weight in his arms. Gently, he lowers her to the ground. ‘And now you’re free to leave.’
CHAPTER 18
28th September 1888, Whitechapel, London
Mary’s journey across London from west to east took much less time than she thought it would. The morning traffic was light and brisk. Just over a couple of hours and she was in her old haunting ground, her own manor: Whitechapel. Her heart sank as she walked along these familiar narrow roads. She crossed the small thoroughfare at the top of Dorset Street. Surrounded on all four sides by tall, grey painted brick buildings with small, squint-eyed windows almost opaque with grime; windows that had the milky boiled-fish look of a blind man’s retinas. Even in the pallid daylight of mid-morning, the thoroughfare had a permanent twilight gloom to it; brickwork dark with soot, the grooves between cobbles in the street filled with a glutinous washed-aside collection of grime.
In the daytime, a forgotten rat-run like this was a place of only women and children. Wives already having to plan and prepare for their husband’s evening meal in the few moments they weren’t busy keeping a watchful eye over their scab-kneed young chavys playing toss and catch in the street. Prostitutes emerging bleary-eyed into the day, sitting on doorsteps and nursing heads sore from the cheap alcohol of the night before.
Mary’s rented room was halfway down Millers Court, off Dorset Street; the ground floor of a forward leaning three-storey house of single-room tenants managed by a woman on the same floor. Marge Newing. She was a slight, rodent-like woman with a taut face and purse-string lips. She rented to single women only. Very deliberately. Single women of a certain kind – those who looked like they were teetering on the perilous edge of a downward slope that ultimately led to whoring as their profession. Women whose downing of any old cheaply-brewed mecks and an addiction to a pinch of laudanum was their only distraction.
For the poor girls who could only just about afford the money to take a room there, Marge inevitably ended up being their landlady, their madam – and their supplier. And in that inevitable order.
Mary had lived in her room for just over nine months now. So far she’d managed to avoid succumbing to the addiction of the opiates and the numbing allure of gin or absinthe. The bits and pieces she made from the late night hoodwinking of drunken, randy clients into parting with their money, the occasional petty theft, the infrequent morsels of legitimate work, were barely enough to keep the rent going and a little scran for her permanently rumbling tummy.
But Marge Newing was keen to see her go the way of her other girls; become a customer for the drugs she peddled as well as being one of her tenants. Like many a lodging house mot, she bullied and cajoled her tenants to become whores. Perhaps because that’s what she used to be. It was her bitter medicine – to feel one step above her girls, one step out of the gutter. Which was why she had a particular dislike for Mary. Not until she was another lost soul, like the rest of the girls in her lodging house, would Marge be content; a lost soul on a slow, spiralling, drug-addled, pox-ridden descent to Hell.
Mary took the two steps up from the narrow cobbled street and pushed on the door, pondering a decision that had been slowly turning over and over in her mind like a hog on a spit. Whether she really wanted to – needed to – keep her room here. Rent was due, in fact overdue, and Marge was certainly not averse to tossing the possessions of someone in arrears out onto the street, keeping and pawning those personal effects that might yield a shilling or two. Mary stepped into the dark hallway. Luckily, it appeared that Marge had not got round to emptying her room out just yet. A key unlocked the door to her room, and quickly, hoping to avoid confronting her landlady, she stepped inside, then closed and locked the door behind her.
She looked around at the painfully dismal space. A bed, a small, scuffed writing table, a water faucet with a tin bowl beneath it, a small wood-burning stove and a row of hooks hammered along the picture rail from which her few changes of thread-bare clothing hung. Her version of a wardrobe.
Her old clothes. She looked at them: desperately sad attempts at feminine glamour. Second-hands and throw-aways. She’d managed to lay her hands on a fox-fur stole turning bald, a lace shawl shedding threads, and a soot-stained ruffle she had intended to stitch to the hem of her skirt when she could be bothered.
My old life.
To walk away from this, her old life, to let the room go; she’d thought of nothing else this morning as she’d taken several different trams across London. There was nothing about this old life she wanted, but if John’s memory suddenly came flooding back and he realised he was being looked after by a tart attempting to trick him, then surely he’d turf her out, if he didn’t call the police first. If she didn’t end up in prison, she’d end up back here. And if her room and possessions were all gone, she’d be on the street.
Mary realised she was taking an almighty gamble. She was hoping, de
sperately hoping, that some lasting bond would have developed between John and her; that even as his mind came back into sharp focus, there would still be an affection there for her.
That’s a terribly big gamble.
It was. But she knew, this wasn’t a life she wanted to come back to. These four tight walls through which, almost every night, she heard a scream of pain or a slap, the snarl of a drunk’s voice, pitiful moaning or, even more pitifully, the fake-cheer of drunken singing, and in the early hours, the soft sound of someone sobbing.
Not now. Not now she wore these clean, new clothes. Clean clothes without a rip or a tear or a stain. Not now she slept in a room that was restful at night, a room that didn’t stink of stale piss and damp, a room that led onto a hallway and washroom that wasn’t shared with a dozen others taking turns washing themselves down after a night of work.
And wasn’t there more to this simple equation now? It was about the money at first. The smell of all that money in his satchel, and the intoxicating thought that this poor tourist gentleman must have a great deal more of it elsewhere.
But now . . . ?
Now there was something else. She daren’t put a label on it. But it was a feeling that felt good, that was honest, even if she wasn’t prepared to admit the word. A feeling that wasn’t rotten to the core, that didn’t smell like this whole house did, of desperation and selfishness. Of doing anything for enough coins to buy another bottle or spoon of cheer.
It felt wholesome and naïve. Hopeful and, quite probably, doomed.
‘Love’ was perhaps too strong a word at the moment.
Mary realised she felt affection for this stranger. This poor man who now swore blind his name was John Argyll; this man whom she’d named in a moment of panic. She felt something for him; actually wanted to care for him, to nurse him back to being a complete man.
