by Alex Scarrow
And perhaps, just perhaps, when he finally discovered he’d been lied to by her, that she’d been exploiting his lost and broken mind, he might still forgive her. Even love her back and take her with him, home to America. She saw flashes of a fairytale ending. A brightly painted stone house with a grand portico and front lawns surrounded by white picket fences overlooking a fashionable and busy thoroughfare. And her on John’s arm as he introduced her to New York’s polite society as ‘the English rose he fell for on his last business trip to London’. A spotless, clean household full of lovely things and chambermaids calling her ‘ma’am’. And John: polite, charming, handsome in a distinguished, silvered way, and oh-so worldly. Her lover, her protector, her provider and her mentor.
No matter how things went, she knew she couldn’t ever come back to this. If she did come back here, she knew the last of her resolve to do better for herself would evaporate. She’d end up like all the others: drunks, addicts and eventually, one day, end up as a carcass down a backstreet, a floater in the Thames, a small article in a parish newsletter, a nameless entry on a policeman’s notebook.
Actually, this room could go fuck itself. The money in her bag she’d brought to pay up her rent was going to stay right where it was; let that bitch Marge Newing toss out her things into the street. There was nothing here of any value anyway, except a few personal things to remind her of better days, a childhood that promised to be so much more than this.
She began to gather them up. A hand basket, half a dozen penny-packets of tea and sugar, a hairbrush – once her mother’s, a small, cracked porcelain-handled mirror – her grandmother’s.
One last look at the grimy cell, the dark, peeling walls, the threadbare evening wear on wall-nail hooks, stained by the few drunks she’d stooped to selling sex to at her most desperate and hungry. She was burning a bridge she planned never to use again.
Outside, in the gloomy hallway, she heard the clop of shoes on bare floorboards.
‘Mary?’
She turned to see one of the women who kept a room on the floor above. Cath Eddowes. One of the regular crowd of girls down the Firkin.
‘Mary? That you, love?’
‘Uh . . . hullo, Cath.’
‘Look at yer! My god! All posh clothes an’ all!’ she exclaimed, reaching for the sleeve of Mary’s blouse and rubbing the cotton between her fingers. ‘New clothes! What, you done a bit a hoistin’ up Chelsea way?’
Mary shrugged. ‘Come good on a bit a swag. That’s all.’
‘A bit? You look like a right toffer in that get up!’
Cath’s hands were all over her clothes, feeling her lace shawl. Her eyes wide and enquiring, a grin spread across her lips, revealing a piano keyboard of yellow ivories and black gaps. ‘Gawd, look at yer, love. So how’s all this brass come yer way all of a sudden?’
Mary felt a shade of shame steal onto her cheeks. Cath, a friend, along with Long Liz, Sally, Bad Bess, all the other girls who regularly gathered down the Firkin to seek solace in each other’s company – they were friends she needed to walk away from. They were as much a part of the squalid prison she’d been living in as the walls of this room were. Drunks, most of them, and addicts at least half of them. Bit by bit, they were pulling her down, trying to make her one of them. Doing Marge’s work for her.
‘Come on! Don’t be all coy! What’s yer fiddle?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, shrugging off Cath’s hands and pressing past her for the front door.
‘Piss off! Yer got yer ’ands on a load a brass, didn’t yer? Whatcha been up to?’
‘Actually, I just got a bit lucky.’
Cath’s eyes widened. She laughed. ‘Ac-tu-ally!’ she mimicked grotesquely. ‘Listen to yer! Yer even blimmin’ talkin’ all la-di-dah!’
Mary reached for the handle on the front door. ‘I’m not coming back anymore. I’m all finished here. Tell Marge she can have her piss-’ole room back.’ Mary realised she was subtly shifting back to her adopted version of an East End accent.
Cath put her hands on her hips. ‘Oh, it’s a man, innit? He got some brass?’
‘I got lucky is all,’ replied Mary. ‘Found me some money.’
‘Well, ain’t yer gonna share it with the girls? One in, all in?’ The motto they shared – that is, the motto they shared towards the end of an evening drinking. With the sound of closing time bells ringing and men shouting their orders over each other. One in, all in. The sisterhood of street girls. The code.
It was all just talk, though. They’d happily screw each other over if it meant getting their hands on a free bottle of liquid cheer.
Mary tugged the door open. ‘Goodbye, Cath.’ She said that in her new, very deliberate, accent.
But it angered Cath. ‘Hoy! You! Mary! What’s yer fuckin’ game? Yer think yer better than us, dontcha? Think yer can jus’ walk out on us like that!’
Mary looked around the grim walls of the hallway, the faded wallpaper and curls of peeling paint, the floorboards stained with spilled booze and, in one or two places, dark spots of what she suspected were probably blood. ‘I can’t live like this anymore, Cath. I never wanted this to be my life.’
‘None of us does, lovey! But yer takes whatcha gets.’
Mary smiled; a small, wan, apologetic smile. She turned to go. ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye.’
Cath’s face darkened. ‘Well, go fuck yerself then, yer stuck up bitch. Go on! Piss off an’ leave us!’
Mary hovered, feeling a tendril of guilt. Her hand stole into her bag and pulled several coins out. She offered them to Cath. ‘You and the others . . . this is for you. Have a few rounds on me.’
‘Fuck me!’ gasped Cath, wide-eyed once again. ‘Fuck me! That’s a . . . that’s a shilling?’
Her grubby fingers snatched it suspiciously from Mary’s hand, eyeing her warily like a pigeon feeding on breadcrumbs. Despite what she’d been saying about ‘one in, all in’, Mary very much doubted whether Cath was going to share that coin around. But it didn’t matter; that was up to her. Mary took Cath’s moment of bug-eyed amazement as she stared at the money in her hand to excuse herself and step outside into the heavy grey day, down the steps onto the cobbles, greasy now with the first spit of rain.
CHAPTER 19
8th August 1888, The Grantham Hotel, The Strand, London
‘There you are, Mr Babbitt,’ said the porter, bringing into the room a silver tray with a pot of tea, two smoked mackerel and a piece of toast.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and passed the young man a coin.
The porter grinned, thanked him and bowed out of the room, leaving him alone.
He settled down at the small breakfast table in his room. Positioned by the bay window, he had a pleasing view out onto Oxford Street below. A very nice hotel suite. As good as the best in New York.
His eyes, cold and grey – a demon’s eyes, an Indian had once told him – watched the to-ing and fro-ing of carriages and milk carts, top hats and the fluttering plumes of ostrich feathers. The sounds coming up from the street below reminded him of Manhattan; the cry of street vendors, the clatter of metal cartwheel rims on stone, the hubbub of voices, the endless coconut-shell applause of horse hooves on stone.
I am Mr Babbitt.
Every job came with a different name. A name usually chosen quite randomly; perhaps one overheard in a conversation, a sign above a business, a name in a newspaper. On the steamship from New York to Liverpool, he’d come across the name on someone’s travel trunk being hoisted into a cabin.
A G Babbitt. And just like that, he had a name to adopt.
The man he’d met a few days ago in the station, the nervous gentleman with a voice rich with privilege – ‘George’ – had explained in a low, faltering mumble the job they required him to do. A local shiv man from the East End by the name of Bill Tolly. A relatively easy man to locate, Babbitt imagined. The New York underworld was noisy with men like Tolly: blowhard thugs who boasted far too loudly about their handiwork after
a few drinks. The trick was simply knowing which bars – he smiled, corrected himself – which public houses to frequent. To sit quietly in a corner and listen to the traffic of conversation. George had given him the name of one of the places this man regularly frequented. That was enough to get started.
Quietly taking a knife to Tolly was, frankly, a job any hired killer could do. But there was more to the task than just that. The man apparently had several accomplices, one of whom presumably had an item on him or her that his clients very much wanted returned. Tolly, therefore, was required to do some talking before he died and that’s where some degree of professional experience was required. Again, any thug with a pair of pliers and a few basic instruments for inducing extreme discomfort and pain could extract a screamed confession of one sort or another. The trick of it was ensuring that the extracted information could be verified, cross-examined, confirmed. Very necessary before the final business of finishing off the fellow was carried out.
And he was extremely good at that sort of thing.
The other matter was making sure that Tolly, and whoever else was involved, were disposed of in a way that could be attributed to whatever background violence appeared to be going on in the locale. Babbitt had been in London several days now. Enough time to pick up the local papers and read about all manner of grisly, gang-related violence, crimes of passion, crimes of a sexual nature. It appeared the East End of London was every bit as debased as New York: full of shallow-minded fools stabbing and hacking at each other for the price of a pint of ale, for looking at them or their girl in the wrong way. Like New York’s dark underbelly, a place populated by animals with no grace, or ethics; insects with no communal purpose.
Recycled life, returned souls. That’s what they were. That’s why the world they all lived in seemed a far less moral place than it once was. Too many souls now were made of bad stuff. No place in God’s afterlife for the rotten, and the only place to send them was back here.
No surprise then that this world was becoming a thickening soup of rotten minds and souls. Effluence. Nothing more.
The faster they killed each other for their petty, selfish gain, the faster they made new bastard babies that would inevitably grow up and one day throttle a whore, or open someone’s belly with a knife just for the glistening silver timepiece in their waistcoat pocket.
Souls like that needed removing from this eternal cycle, like filtering muck and spoilage from drinking water. Souls like that needed snuffing out permanently. And Babbitt had been blessed with that skill, that responsibility; to not only snuff out a worthless life, but to look into the eyes of the dying, to look through their dilated pupils and see that coiling dark shapeless thing – the soul. And snuff that out too just as easily as one would quickly grasp between thumb and forefinger the glowing wick of a candle.
Babbitt smiled. George had wondered why he’d allowed himself to be dubbed ‘Candle Man’. It most probably had something to do with the one lit candle he left behind after every job. Left behind to burn down until its wick drowned in a pool of its own liquid wax and went out.
CHAPTER 20
14th August 1888, Whitechapel, London
He watched the ebb and flow of patrons into the public house.
He watched the flow of smudged faces and florid cheeks, crimson noses, gap-toothed grins, snarled greetings and exchanged curses, through pale blue wafts of pipe smoke, which hung above the churning mass of customers like a marsh mist. He watched and thought of the flow of patrons like a flow of shit into a cesspool; main channels of flowing shit, and side pools where things became stiller, quieter. That’s what this place, this busy inn, resembled to Babbitt: a stagnant pool where the turds of humanity coalesced and bobbed together.
Babbitt had a stool at one end of the bar and nursed in his hands a tankard of warm and flat ale. He made it look like he was swilling thirstily from it, but was in fact barely deigning to wet his lips with the awful brew. He fitted right in with the noisy crowd; a few stolen clothes from the washing lines that dangled across the narrow streets of Whitechapel, several days’ growth of bristles on his cheeks and he looked just as unpleasant, dishevelled and grubby as the rest of these mole-like creatures.
Why? Why would any soul want to exist like this?
He’d been watching an old prostitute for a while. An unappetising sight made worse by the clumsy, clown-like splotches of rouge on her cheeks and the complete lack of teeth in her mouth. But once upon a time, that caved-in witch’s face might just have been attractive, or even beautiful. Her pay was ale, not money. A pint of ale. In the last hour, he had seen her propositioned by four different men even more unpleasant to behold than her. Men who took her by the arm to the gent’s lavvy and returned on their own only minutes later. This poor wretch emerging shortly after, straightening her clothes and wiping her chin dry, eager to sip her flat and warm wages to wash away the foul taste in her gummy mouth.
Babbitt’s keen ears caught the wafting shirt tails of conversations, his ears well-tuned now to make sense of the mongrel version of English these underworld creatures spoke.
‘. . . an’ the dirty bitch ’ad it cummin’, didn’t she? Fuckin’ went an’ spen’ it all when I says I needed it . . .’
‘. . . s’how it goes, right? You gonna take the piss, then yer gonna feel a fuckin’ fist . . .’
‘. . . don’t care, mate. Ain’t right. Just ain’t right. ’E bleedin’ well deserved wha’ ’e got . . .’
‘. . . all dirty bastards, love. You take ’em for what you can, ’specially them stupid drunk ones . . .’
Everyone of them preying on the other. Not a single cupful of kindness in this entire inn. Not even a thimbleful of it.
His ears had been hard at work all through the evening; the rest of him was slumped on his stool, looking almost asleep over his drink. Often his eyes closed so he could just listen to the rising, falling voices, the shrill slices of sneering laughter, the rough voices of hard men loudly stating their place in the inn’s masculine hierarchy. Like monkeys in a cage: the ones squealing the loudest getting to sit on the highest perches in their little world.
Babbitt had left his timepiece back at his hotel room, quite deliberately. His mind was used to metering time. Just over three hours he had patiently sat like a man fit to topple onto the floor before his ears picked out one solitary word amidst the noise of strangled, slurred, mutilated language being spoken.
Tolly.
Intently, he focused his attention on the growling voice that had uttered the word, doing his best to pull it to the foreground and filtering out the rest of the hubbub, pushing it back into the shadows.
‘. . . so ’ow much is it yer owe ’im?’
‘Enough that fucker’s gonna break summin’ on me even before he finks to ask for it.’
A laugh. Not exactly a friendly or even a sympathetic one. ‘Then yer a complete idiot, intcha, ol’ son? I mean, losing yer tin to ’im, of all people. The bastard’s a complete fuckin’ nuttah!’
‘Tha’s why I’m lyin’ low for a bit.’
‘Well, yer bein’ a fool comin’ in ’ere. S’one of ’is regulars, this is.’
‘I ’eard ’e’s down the Cock tonight.’
‘Bill don’t always stick to ’is routine, mate. Yer a silly fucker chancin’ it comin’ in here.’
Babbitt’s eyes cracked slowly open; the impression of a drunkard stirring to sip again from his tankard of old beer. His ears suggested an approximate direction for him to glance and he did, quickly identifying the two old men propping up the corner of the bar, ten feet along from him. The worried and regular glances over his shoulder by the one on the right clearly indicated which one of the two of them was the fool in debt to Tolly.
‘. . . tell yer what, yer stickin’ out like a sore thumb, keep lookin’ over at the door like that.’
‘Well, I ain’t gonna let ’im sneak up on me!’
‘Tell yer what, seein’ as I’m facin’ the door, I’ll jus’ nod t
o yer if he enters, right?’
A pause. ‘Well, dontcha fuckin’ miss ’im, or I’ll make sure you get a smackin’, too.’
Babbitt smiled. Charming. Not even a thank you.
He closed his eyes, once again the bar stool drunkard returning to his sleep, and let his ears continue to do their work. It was nearly another hour of exchanges between them, most utterly banal, before finally the one on the left said something quickly.
‘Oi, fuck! Tolly’s ’ere!’
Babbitt sat up and craned his neck to look over the milling crowd. In between jostling billycock hats and flat caps and plumes of drifting blue pipe smoke, he caught a glimpse of a tall, bull-necked man entering through the public house’s stained glass double doors.
He saw one of the two old men quickly finish the last of his ale, slide off his stool and lose himself amidst the busy press of patrons. Babbitt’s eyes returned to Tolly. He watched the man ease his way towards the bar, a respectful path clearing in front of him.
He’s a ‘name’ in here.
Babbitt had suspected that. A neighbourhood thug. Every tenement block, every crowded street in the Five Points of New York, had at least one. A ‘name’. Most people steered a wide path around them.
He knew Tolly’s type: brutish, stupid. The type to act impulsively and think with his fists. If he ever threw his lot in with one of the organised gangs, he’d only ever be a foot soldier. A sergeant at best. The slightest smile stole out and spread across Babbitt’s lips. This oaf was going to be all too easy to deal with.
CHAPTER 21
14th August 1888, Whitechapel, London
Tolly had had enough of those two silly bitches. He’d just spent the last hour down the Rose and Crown, their favourite haunt. It was quiet enough there to be able to talk without shouting, but noisy enough that a conversation across a table was unlikely to be overheard.
