Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  The artist passed a constable—he’d lost count of the number of policemen guarding the streets tonight—and made a gesture that all was well. As he reached his destination, he nodded to a frantic man hurrying by. The man carried a basket of something that must have been important, perhaps his family’s evening meal. Did the fool believe that the evening meal was worth his life?

  The artist saw yet another constable, this one standing beneath a nearby gas lamp. Again, an all-is-well signal was exchanged.

  When the artist stepped into the tavern, the occupants jerked their heads up, startled. At the sight of him, however, all except one man relaxed and returned to their conversations or their beer mugs or their pipes.

  There were eight occupants in the smoke-filled room. The tavernkeeper, wearing a white apron looped around his neck, stood behind a counter on the right. Two men sat on stools at the counter. In back, a barmaid—also wearing a white apron—brought a plate of bread and cheese to three men sitting at a table near the fireplace. At a table in front, a weary-looking constable jumped to his feet, the only man who wasn’t assured by the artist’s arrival.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” he blurted. “I’ve been outside so long and it’s so cold out there, I couldn’t—”

  “Not to worry, Constable. I understand. The truth is my feet are frozen, and I came in here for the same reason you did. What are you having? Tea? Perhaps I’ll join you.”

  The tavernkeeper grinned. “Better yet, Sergeant, I’ll pour you a pint. No charge.”

  “No, thanks,” the artist replied. “Breaking one rule is bad enough. But drinking alcohol on duty—I don’t think so.”

  “You’re on duty sure enough. Keeping us safe. We thank you for it. Hot tea on the house.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  The constable’s helmet was on the table. It contained a metal liner that strengthened it sufficiently for the constable to be able to stand on it and peer over fences. It was also strong enough to withstand a heavy blow to the head from someone sneaking up behind him. But not when it was on the table.

  As the artist walked past the constable, he dropped the ripping chisel from inside his sleeve and swung it, using the blunt part of the hook to crush the constable’s skull. Without stopping, he pivoted and swung three more times, right, left, right, shattering the heads of the three men about to eat their sandwiches. The barmaid gaped. The curve of the hook whacked across the side of her head and drove her unconscious onto the floor.

  “Hey!” the tavernkeeper managed to say.

  By then, the two men at the counter had blood erupting from their skulls as the iron bar found its targets. The tavernkeeper never had a chance to say another word before the artist swung powerfully.

  In a rush, the artist turned the iron bar so that the sharp end of the hook was now available. He toppled the constable off the bench, placed a foot on the constable’s chest, and brought the hook to his throat.

  The artist did the same to the men who’d been about to eat their sandwiches. To the barmaid. To the men lying near the counter. To the tavernkeeper.

  But the masterwork was not yet complete. After leaving the ripping chisel on the counter, the artist propped the victims over tables or the counter so that, except for the blood, they gave the appearance of having drunk too much and fallen asleep.

  His uniform was spattered with blood, but he needed more. He scooped two handfuls from a pool on the floor and smeared it over his face and his neck, obscuring his features.

  He opened the back door.

  Then he hurried to the front door, took several deep breaths to make it appear he was winded after a struggle, and staggered outside, moaning to the constable under the gas lamp, “Murder!”

  “Sergeant!” The constable rushed toward him.

  “Help!”

  The artist fell to the cobblestones.

  Overwhelmed, the constable pulled his clacker from his equipment belt and frantically swung its handle. Its racket couldn’t fail to be heard for a considerable distance, attracting every patrolman in the area.

  “Inside,” the artist moaned. “They’re all dead.”

  The narrow, fogbound street erupted into chaos, neighbors racing toward the tavern and the clacker’s din, their voices rising in fear.

  “What’s happened?”

  “My God, look through the door!”

  “Butchered!”

  “It can’t be! I saw Peter only an hour ago!”

  “Martha’s dead also? No!”

  Constables charged along the street, their murky forms like ghosts in the fog.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Murdered? Who?”

  “Everybody, keep away from the door! You can’t go in there!”

  “Do what he says! Keep away!”

  “Sergeant.” The constable who’d sounded the alarm knelt beside the artist, who lay on the cobblestones, moaning, his face and uniform covered with blood. “I sent for a wagon. We’ll get you to a surgeon.”

  “Too late.”

  “We’ll do everything we can. The man who did this—did you see him?”

  “Dressed like a sailor.”

  “Did he have a yellowish beard?”

  “No beard. He looked like any other sailor.”

  “Did you see where he went?”

  “Out the back door. Your face is a blur.”

  “Here’s the wagon. We’ll get you to a surgeon. You two! Help me put the sergeant into the wagon! The rest of you, the killer escaped out the back! Look for a sailor!”

  With his eyes closed, the artist felt arms lift him and settle him into the wagon. Amid the shouting in the street, the wagon bumped forward.

  “Easy!” the constable warned.

  “You can get him to the surgeon quick, or you can take your time and get him there dead!” the driver shouted back.

  The constable made sounds as if climbing aboard. “Well, we don’t want him dead from the damned ride either!”

  Two other constables climbed aboard.

  “Look out for sailors!” someone in the crowd yelled. “A blasted sailor did this!”

  Sailors won’t be difficult to find, the artist thought. The docks are only a quarter mile away.

  The wagon bumped over more cobblestones.

  “He stopped moaning,” the constable said. “I think we’re losing him! Hurry!”

  The clatter of hooves increased, as did the violent motion of the wagon. The angry roar of the crowd receded into the fog.

  “The surgeon’s house should be just up ahead,” the driver insisted. “In the fog, I can’t quite… There!”

  Someone pounded on the surgeon’s door while hands lifted the artist from the wagon and carried him toward lamplight that he saw through squinted eyes.

  “Inside!” a man ordered.

  Hands carried him through a doorway, then another doorway, setting him on a table.

  “There’s so much blood,” the surgeon exclaimed, “I don’t know where he’s been wounded.”

  Through squinted eyes, the artist saw that the surgeon wore nightclothes.

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, I feel him breathing. I need room to work. You two go outside. You, help my wife bring hot water.”

  Footsteps hurried in various directions.

  Hands unbuttoned the artist’s coat.

  “Can you hear me, Sergeant?”

  The artist moaned.

  “I’ll do everything possible to save you.”

  The artist allowed his eyelids to flicker open. A spectacled, gray-haired man in his fifties leaned over him.

  The artist glanced around the room. It was empty.

  Resolve and skill meant everything. The artist slipped a dagger between the surgeon’s ribs, piercing the man’s heart. He slid from under the collapsing surgeon and positioned the corpse on the table. At once he heard footsteps in the hallway and stepped to the side of the door.

  A constable rushed past him, carrying a bowl of steamin
g water. A gray-haired, middle-aged woman hurried after him. Since her hands were free and a possible, though unlikely threat, she died first, with a dagger to her right kidney.

  Hearing her moan and fall, the constable turned, holding the steaming bowl of water. The artist slashed his throat, incapacitating his voice box so that he couldn’t cry out. As the constable slumped, the artist grabbed the bowl so that it wouldn’t fall and shatter, attracting the two policemen who’d been sent outside.

  Unfortunately, blood had gushed into the water, making it useless. But presumably there would be more in the kitchen. After setting the bowl on the floor, the artist hurried toward the back of the house. No one was in the kitchen. More water was in a pot that dangled over the hearth.

  He washed blood from his hands and face. He took off the crimson-streaked sergeant’s uniform. Under it, he wore the ragged clothes of a beggar. The double layers had not been conspicuous because the cold forced many people to wear extra garments. From filthy pants, he removed a filthy hat and tugged it over his head, concealing his features.

  At the front of the house, a door opened, one of the policemen calling in, “How is he? Will he live?”

  The artist opened the back door and stepped outside, disappearing into the fog. From nearby streets, the shouts of hunters and the screams of quarry reverberated through the night. The artist’s masterpiece was already in progress, sounding as if it would be even more splendid than he hoped.

  THE GERMAN SAILOR had a workable knowledge of English. That morning, he’d arrived after a six-month voyage from the Orient, the British East India Company’s vessel laden with tea, spices, and opium. After he’d found a rooming house, he paid for a servant to carry a tub and pails of hot water to his room. Sitting with his knees drawn to his chest in the small container, he’d luxuriated in the cleansing heat of the water. Decent food came next, anything that didn’t have fish in it. Tomorrow, he would use his voyage money to buy fresh clothes, but for now, he had greater needs. A woman serviced him at the end of an alley, no language necessary—all he needed to do was extend two shillings.

  Then a tavern. By all means, a tavern. The German sailor hated English beer, but he hated gin even worse, and English beer was better than nothing. His pent-up need for alcohol couldn’t be satisfied, no matter how many mugs he drank and how many times he visited the privy behind the tavern. A woman at the bar gave him a look that suggested she also might be in the market for two shillings, but then a man perhaps offered her three shillings because she went upstairs with him. Finally the sailor felt bloated and tired enough to return to the rooming house, provided he could remember which direction to take.

  The cold, yellow fog surrounded him as he stumbled along narrow streets. In the tavern, his limited English had made him understand parts of conversations, most of them about killings that had occurred two nights earlier, but he didn’t understand the details, and he was too tired to care, although it did strike him as odd that the mood in the tavern had not been as energetic as he had expected.

  Putting a hand to a soot-covered wall to steady himself, he heard a terrible noise in the distance and was slow to identify it as a London policeman’s clacker. Immediately he heard other clackers as well as shouting, a panicked commotion at the end of the street. The din was enormous.

  “Murder!” someone yelled.

  Someone else shouted something about “Sailors!”

  The shouts merged with boots rushing along the street, some of them coming in the sailor’s direction. Dim streetlamps showed the fog swirling as figures charged through it.

  The sailor ducked into an alley. The crowd roared into view. Hiding in shadows, he watched the murky shapes run past. They continued to shout something about sailors.

  Trembling, he again felt pressure in his swelling bladder. He held it, waiting for the mob to pass. Some had knives. Others had swords. One carried a rifle.

  The pain in his bladder intensified. Shifting deeper into the alley, he waited until he couldn’t see the lamp or the street. Urgently he unbuttoned his pants and released a trickle against a wall. Despite the night’s chill, sweat beaded his face as his bladder insisted on being emptied more swiftly.

  “What do I hear?” someone asked from the street.

  The German sailor’s English was good enough for him to understand. Instantly he stopped.

  “I don’t hear anything,” someone said from the darkness at the end of the alley.

  “Down there. Sounded like somebody taking a piss.”

  “I still don’t hear anything. Without a light and a lot more people, I ain’t going in there anyhow. Even if you’re right, it could be anybody. Could be one of us.”

  “I probably imagined it. We’d better catch up to the others. You’re right—it ain’t safe being out here alone.”

  Footsteps hurried down the street toward the sound of the mob.

  In the darkness, the German sailor trembled and listened and waited and finally the pressure in his bladder was again too great to be denied. Once more, he released a stream against the wall.

  At last, he buttoned his pants. Fear purged the effects of alcohol from his mind. He now remembered the location of his rooming house, but he needed to reach it without being seen. Perhaps if he removed his sailor’s coat, that would stop him from attracting attention. The night was bone-chilling, but since the rooming house was only a quarter mile away, he could probably reach there in just his shirtsleeves without becoming numb.

  He eased toward the alley’s exit. As the fog-haloed lamp came into view, he dropped his sailor’s coat and stepped into the street.

  “See, I told you somebody was in there,” a man said.

  Threatening figures emerged from the fog. The sailor gasped.

  “What’s that he dropped?”

  “A sailor’s coat!”

  “He wouldn’t have thrown it away if he was innocent!”

  The sailor blurted to them in German that they were making a mistake.

  “A foreigner!”

  “He’s the murderer!”

  The German ran.

  The pain that entered his back felt like a punch. He looked down stupidly at a sword protruding from his stomach. As blood streamed down his pants, he tried to stagger forward and instead toppled.

  “That’s what you get for killing Peter and Martha, you bastard!”

  10

  In the Realm of Shadows

  IN 1854 LONDON, a journalist who spent several years compiling a four-volume study, London Labour and the London Poor, estimated that “there are upwards of fifty thousand individuals, or about a fortieth part of the population of the metropolis getting their living on the streets.” Some pulled bones from rotting animal carcasses they came across and sold them to fertilizer makers. Others picked up dog shit, known as “pure,” and sold it to tanners, who used it in the chemical process of removing hair from leather. Crossing sweepers swept horseshit from street intersections so that well-to-do pedestrians could move from sidewalk to sidewalk without soiling their shoes. Street musicians, ragmen, umbrella menders, match sellers, organ grinders, patterers who delivered the dying speeches of famous men, these and hundreds of other vagrants and wanderers (“a separate race,” the journalist called them) filled the two thousand miles of London’s streets.

  Another term for them would be beggars, and under the calmest of conditions, beggars attracted little attention. After all, to notice them might lead to a compulsion to give them money, but one couldn’t alleviate the condition of fifty thousand of them, not without becoming a beggar oneself, so it was wiser to pretend that they didn’t exist. Especially on this hellish night, when mobs roamed the streets searching for strangers and foreigners to punish for the terror that threatened the city, beggars received little attention. How could nonpersons be seen as a threat when they weren’t truly seen at all?

  One such ragged nonperson limped unchallenged through London’s squalid East End. With the fog so thick, his shabby figure was ev
en more invisible than usual as he navigated a labyrinth of dismal lanes. Hearing the gratifying roar of mobs in the distance, he reached a sagging building with a faded sign above its double doors: LIVERY STABLE. Barns for horses and vehicles were commonplace in London, where fifty thousand horses (their number matched that of beggars) were necessary for the carriages, cabs, coaches, carts, and omnibuses that crammed the city. Those vehicles would definitely cram the panicked streets tomorrow as even more people used any means they could find to escape from London.

  The beggar knocked twice, once, and three times on a rickety side door, then stood close to a dusty window, allowing himself to be seen. Inside, a curtain was pulled away. A lantern was raised, illuminating the beggar’s features. The curtain was repositioned.

  Someone freed a bolt and opened the door, providing only enough room for the beggar to slip through without revealing anything that was in the stable. Even if someone had managed to glimpse the interior, only the side of a stall would have been visible, certainly not the two vehicles that stood in a row before the locked double doors of the main entrance. A dark cloth concealed each vehicle.

  After securing the door, the beggar (no longer limping) followed the man holding the lantern and joined two other men, who were seated on barrels.

  “No need for me to ask if your mission was successful,” the man with the lantern told the beggar. “The frenzy out there is proof. After what’ll happen at the prison tonight, the panic will worsen.”

  “Yes, the prison. Anthony always enjoys a challenge,” the beggar agreed. “But I wish I were there to do it in his place.”

  “You had your own mission tonight,” the second man emphasized. “A more important one.”

  “That depends on your viewpoint about what’s important.” The beggar walked toward the cloaked vehicles. “You made arrangements for the horses?”

  “Yes. They’ll be ready whenever we need them.”