Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  An elderly man raised an upper window and leaned out sleepily. “What’s all the noise?”

  “Do you work here?” Ryan yelled up.

  “Yes. Go away.” The old man started to close the window.

  “Police. We need to talk to you.”

  “Police?” Although the old man seemed impressed, it took a while before he managed to come downstairs and open the door. He wore nightclothes, including a cap. His white beard curved into his sunken cheeks.

  “Those bells are loud enough without you hammering,” he complained. Fumbling to put on his spectacles, he clearly wondered what a uniformed policeman was doing with a ruffian whose red hair wasn’t quite concealed by a newspaperboy’s cap.

  “The Opium-Eater,” Ryan said.

  “Thomas De Quincey?” Ignoring Ryan and his shabby clothes, the clerk spoke to Constable Becker. “Yes, what about him? You won’t find him here. Saturday was the time to talk to him.”

  “We’re looking for books that he wrote,” Ryan said.

  The clerk kept directing his attention toward Becker and his uniform. “They’ve been selling briskly. I have only a few left.”

  “We need to read them,” Ryan said.

  The clerk continued to ignore him, telling Becker, “We’re not open on Sunday. But come back after church. I’ll make an exception for a constable.”

  “We need to read them now.”

  Ryan passed him, entering the shop.

  THE LEATHER-BOUND VOLUME had pages that needed to be cut. Becker hid his surprise when Ryan raised a trouser cuff, pulled a knife from a scabbard strapped to his leg, and slit the book’s pages.

  “Be careful how you do that,” the clerk objected. “Customers are particular about how their book pages are cut. Constable, since when do you let prisoners carry knives?”

  “He’s not a prisoner. He’s Detective Inspector Ryan.”

  “Irish.” The old man nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed.

  “Tell us about ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ ” Ryan said.

  “Seems like you’d know more about that subject than I would.”

  Ryan stared at him so directly that the old man raised his hands in surrender.

  “If you mean De Quincey’s essays…”

  “Plural? De Quincey wrote more than one essay about murder?” Ryan asked.

  “Three. All in that book you’re trying to destroy. De Quincey does enjoy his murders.”

  “Murders?”

  “After he wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he promised his next book would be called Confessions of a Murderer.”

  The two police officers gaped.

  “But instead of a book about killing, he wrote three essays about it,” the clerk said, opening the book to show them.

  Astonished, Ryan and Becker read about a men’s club where lectures were delivered about the great murders of history. The lectures were called the Williams Lectures, after John Williams, the man accused of the Ratcliffe Highway multiple killings.

  “My God, look at how De Quincey praises the murders,” Ryan said. “ ‘The sublimest that ever were committed. The blaze of his genius absolutely dazzled.’ ”

  “And here.” Becker quoted in amazement: “ ‘The most superb of the century. Neither ever was, or will be surpassed. Genius. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his.’ ”

  “De Quincey sounds insane.”

  Ryan and Becker discovered that De Quincey’s latest essay about murder had been published only a month previously. In it, the Opium-Eater described Williams’s two killing sprees for fifty astoundingly blood-filled pages—murders that by 1854 had occurred forty-three years earlier and yet were presented with a vividness that gave the impression the killings had happened the previous night.

  Williams forced his way through the crowded streets, bound on business. To say was to do. And this night he had said to himself that he would execute a design which he had already sketched and which, when finished, was destined on the following day to strike consternation into the mighty heart of London. He quitted his lodgings on this dark errand about eleven o’clock P.M., not that he meant to begin so soon, but he needed to reconnoiter. He carried his tools closely buttoned up under his loose roomy coat.

  Ryan pointed at the next page. “Marr kept his shop open until midnight. Williams hid in the shadows across the street. The female servant left on an errand. The watchman came by and helped Marr put up the window shutters. Then…”

  Williams waited for the sound of the watchman’s retreating steps; waited perhaps for thirty seconds; but when that danger was past, the next danger was that Marr would lock the door. One turn of the key, and he would have been locked out. In therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of his left hand turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this fatal stratagem.

  “His left hand. How does De Quincey know Williams used his left hand?” Becker wondered.

  Having reached the counter, he asked Marr for a pair of unbleached cotton socks.

  “Unbleached socks? How does he know that? Only the victim and the killer were in the room.”

  The arrangement had become familiar to the murderer. In order to reach down the particular parcel, Marr would find it requisite to face round to the rear and at the same moment to raise his eyes and his hands to a level eighteen inches above his head.

  “Eighteen inches? How can De Quincey be that precise?” Ryan exclaimed.

  This movement placed him in the most disadvantageous possible position with regard to the murderer who now, at the instant that the back of Marr’s head was exposed, suddenly from below his large coat, unslung the heavy ship-carpenter’s mallet and with one solitary blow so thoroughly stunned his victim as to leave him incapable of resistance.

  “It’s the same as what happened last night, complete with the unbleached socks we found on the floor. The shopkeeper must have been reaching for them,” Becker said. “Look at this about the baby.”

  He found himself doubly frustrated—first, by the arched hood at the head of the cradle, which he beat into a ruin with his mallet; and secondly, by the gathering of the blankets and the pillows about the baby’s head. The free play of his blows had thus been baffled, and he therefore finished the scene by applying his razor to the throat of the little innocent, after which, as though he had become confused by the spectacle of his own atrocities, he busied himself by piling the clothes elaborately over the child’s corpse.

  “It’s the same as what we found.”

  “Two,” Ryan suddenly said.

  “What?”

  “Williams committed two sets of killings.” Ryan turned a page to find more horrors: the slaughter of the tavernkeeper, his wife, and the servant twelve days later.

  “The tavernkeeper’s name,” Becker said.

  “What about it?”

  Becker pointed at a line in the book. “John Williamson.”

  “So?” Ryan asked.

  “The killer’s name was John Williams. In the second set of murders, the victim’s name was John Williamson.”

  Ryan looked at him in confusion.

  “John Williams. John Williamson. As if they were in the same family,” Becker said, “like a father killing his son.”

  “That has to be a coincidence,” Ryan told him. “The commissioner would have mentioned if the killer was related to the victim. Besides, the parallel doesn’t work. Williams was young enough to be the tavernkeeper’s son, not his father. Thinking that way doesn’t make sense. The point is, look at the detail with which the Opium-Eater describes the murders.”

  The housemaid was caught on her knees before the fire-grate, which she had been polishing. That part of her task was finished, and she passed on to filling the grate with wood and coals at the very moment when the murderer entered. Mrs. Williamson had not seen him, from the accident of standing with her back to the door. Before he was observed, he had stunned and prostrated her with a shattering blow on th
e back of her head. This blow, inflicted by a crow-bar, smashed in the hinder part of her skull. She fell, and by the noise of her fall, roused the attention of the servant, who uttered a cry, but before she could repeat it, the murderer descended on her with his uplifted instrument upon her head, crushing the skull inwards upon the brain. Both women were irrecoverably destroyed, so that further outrages were needless, and yet the murderer proceeded instantly to cut the throats of each. The servant, from her kneeling posture, had presented her head passively to blows, after which the miscreant had but to bend her head backward so as to expose her throat.

  “It’s as if I’m in the room,” Becker murmured. “Forty-three years after the murders, and the Opium-Eater writes about them as if they happened yesterday.”

  “He describes the blood with glee.” Ryan grabbed the book and quickly stood. “We need to talk with him.”

  A voice asked, “Who? De Quincey?” Footsteps rumbled down the stairs, preceding the elderly clerk, who held a hymnbook and was dressed to go to church.

  “He was here on Saturday, you told us?” Becker asked.

  “In that chair over there. Wasn’t comfortable. His forehead gleamed with sweat. Even sitting, he kept moving his feet up and down. Probably needed laudanum. But his daughter brought him cups of tea, and he answered questions from customers, and I must say I sold plenty of books. Are you planning to buy the one you mutilated, by the way?”

  “A discount for police business.”

  “Who said anything about a discount?”

  Ryan put half the price on the desk. “Do you know where he went?”

  “Well, I know he lives in Edinburgh.”

  “All the way to Scotland? No!”

  “But I got the impression that for the next week he and his daughter were remaining here in London.”

  “Where?” Ryan demanded.

  “I have no idea. Unlike the police”—the old man gave Ryan’s shabby appearance a disparaging look—“I don’t ask people their personal business. Perhaps his publisher would know.”

  “Where do we find his publisher?”

  “The address is in the book for which you demanded a discount. But if you need to talk to the Opium-Eater anytime soon, I don’t think the address will help you.”

  “Why?”

  “The publisher’s in Edinburgh, also.”

  RYAN AND BECKER hurried from the bookstore and climbed onto the police wagon.

  “Waterloo Bridge train station,” Ryan told the driver.

  As they sped away, people walking toward St. Paul’s Cathedral looked with disapproval toward Ryan’s rough clothes, seeming convinced that he’d been arrested.

  “De Quincey wrote about two sets of murders,” Becker said.

  Ryan reacted as if Becker had stated the obvious. “Yes, there were two sets of Ratcliffe Highway killings. What’s your point?”

  “Do you suppose there’ll be another set of murders?”

  As the wagon came to Waterloo Bridge, buildings gave way to the open expanse of the river with its steamboats, barges, and skiffs adding wakes to the surging waves.

  Becker noticed that Ryan looked down at the wagon’s floor rather than at the wide, powerful water. The detective’s grip was tight on the side of the wagon. Only when the wagon arrived on the other side and the river was behind them did Ryan relax his grip and look up from the floor of the wagon.

  “Are you all right?” Becker asked.

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “Crossing the river seemed to bother you.”

  “Murders are what bother me.”

  They reached the arches that supported the Waterloo Bridge train station and ran into its massive structure.

  Ryan could remember when railroads hadn’t existed. The first one—from Liverpool to Manchester—had been built in 1830, when he was sixteen. Before then, most transportation had been via horse-driven coach, which—as Commissioner Mayne had noted—could proceed as fast as ten miles per hour, although only the mail coaches, with their system of horse relays, could maintain that pace. Now, with railroads crisscrossing the nation, it was possible to travel at a once-inconceivable sixty miles per hour.

  For the system to function, however, arriving and departing trains needed to maintain a strict schedule. The result was a profound change in the way communities thought of time and distance. Prior to the railroad, a village in northwestern England might have had its clocks set at ten minutes after seven while a village a hundred miles away might have had its clocks set for twenty minutes later. The discrepancy couldn’t be noticed when someone traveling via a horse-driven coach required more than ten hours to go from one village to the other.

  But now, with trains speeding across that hundred miles in one hour and forty minutes, the difference between the clocks in those two villages was significant. If similar differences existed in every community, a coordinated schedule would have been impossible. Using the measurement of time as determined by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, every railroad clock (and soon every other timepiece throughout England) was set for the same hour and minute, in what became known as Railroad Time.

  Amazingly, information could travel even faster than passengers on a train, crossing hundreds of miles not only in a few hours but in an astounding few seconds, because as the railroads spread, telegraph lines were erected next to them. The click-click-click of operators’ keys relayed messages with what had once been impossible speed.

  In the train station’s telegraph office, Ryan told the operator to send a message to James Hogg Publisher at 4 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, the address inside the book.

  People at risk. Send London address for Thomas De Quincey at once.

  “You make it sound as if De Quincey’s in danger,” Becker said.

  “It might get us a quicker response.”

  As they spoke, the message would arrive at the Edinburgh telegraph station. In minutes, a messenger would set out to deliver a sealed envelope to Hogg’s business address, where if the publisher wasn’t available (as he wasn’t likely to be on a Sunday morning), the messenger would ask every neighbor he could find until Hogg’s home address was located.

  Ryan sent a separate telegram to the Edinburgh police department.

  Murder investigation. Urgent you find James Hogg at this address. Need London location of Thomas De Quincey.

  “Now you make it seem as if De Quincey’s a suspect,” Becker noted.

  “Well, isn’t he? Edinburgh’s small compared to London. One of these messages ought to get results this afternoon. Twenty years ago, when I was a constable like you, there wasn’t even a train to Edinburgh, let alone a telegraph line. This could have taken weeks.”

  “What if Hogg traveled somewhere?” Becker asked. “He might even be in London.”

  “Then I’ll order patrolmen to ask at all the hotels in London. One way or another, I intend to find out where the blazes De Quincey is.”

  THE MURDER SCENE remained a welter of activity.

  As Ryan and Becker jumped down from the police wagon, a constable reported, “The neighbors I spoke to didn’t notice anything, Inspector.”

  “Same here,” another said. “The fog and the cold kept everybody inside.”

  “I found a dollymop who claims she saw a stranger,” a third added.

  “Working the streets last night, she must have been desperate,” Ryan told the policeman.

  “That’s one reason she noticed him. Nobody else was in sight.”

  “One reason?” Ryan asked.

  “She says when she started to approach the stranger, he gave her a look that warned it would go nasty for her if she came any closer. Hardest eyes she ever saw, she tells me.”

  “Did she describe him?”

  “Tall. Big shoulders. A sailor’s coat and cap. A yellow beard.”

  “Yellow? There aren’t many men with that color of beard. We’ll go through the catalogue system and look for a match.” If the man had been ar
rested in the past ten years, Ryan knew, his aliases, age, height, weight, tattoos, birthmarks, scars, and other identifying characteristics would have been recorded as part of the arrest procedure. “Did she notice where he went?”

  “She says she was smart enough to go one way when he went the other.”

  “Keep questioning the neighbors. Extend your search even wider.”

  Ryan and Becker entered the tavern and went to the back room, where two patrolmen watched the handcuffed prisoner.

  Still claiming to have been drunk, the prisoner didn’t remember where he’d been the previous night or who could vouch for his presence at the time of the murders.

  “His boots have hobnails,” Becker pointed out to Ryan. “The prints we found didn’t.”

  “ ’Course my boots’ve hobnails. Can’t afford to keep resoling ’em,” the prisoner muttered.

  “There’s always a chance he changed his boots,” Ryan said. “But he can’t change their size.”

  “Let’s find out.” Becker tugged a boot from the complaining prisoner and went outside to compare it to the prints, the casts of which were now dry.

  “Too small,” he reported when he came back.

  Ryan rubbed the back of his neck. “Almost out of possibilities.”

  “Detective Inspector Ryan?”

  Ryan turned toward a constable in the doorway.

  “There’s a boy here looking for you. He has a telegram.”

  When Ryan opened it, he smiled. “De Quincey’s London address.”

  Continuing the Journal of Emily De Quincey

  In all my adventures with Father, I can now add one more: being arrested. Constable Becker and the ruffian who said his name was Detective Inspector Ryan insisted that was not the case, but the somberness of their expressions and the haste with which they wanted to place us in a police wagon belied their assurances.