From Whitechapel

by Clegg, Melanie

  Emily’s face fell. ‘They wanted to ask about Poll and if any of us saw her last night,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Then they took some of us down to the workhouse mortuary to have a look at her.’ She gave a shudder. ‘It were horrible, Em. She looked all pale and her eyes were open a little bit so it was like she was looking at us and even though they’d tried to hide it, you could see the cuts on her neck…’

  I felt sick and looked away from her as she gestured with her hands to show where Poll had been cut. ‘Did you see her last night?’ I asked eventually.

  She nodded enthusiastically. ‘At about half two in the morning, going by the church bells. There was a huge fire down at the docks so a group of us went to have a look, you know, as you do.’ That would explain the stink of smoke and dark smuts on her face then. ‘I bumped into Poll outside the grocer on the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel High Street on the way back. She was completely off her head with gin, could hardly walk in fact.’ She smiled at the memory, as I did too, remembering Poll and how funny she could be when she was helpless with drink. ‘Anyway, we had a bit of a natter about this and that and I tried to get her to come back here with me but she was having none of it. I said I could get her in for the night if we promised to pay double tomorrow but she said she weren’t taking no charity not even from me and wanted to earn her own doss money.’ She laughed a little sadly. ‘She had this stupid bloody new hat, you see. Said no man could resist her in it. Silly bitch.’

  I sighed at the mention of Poll’s bonnet. ‘She’d have been better off hawking it and getting her money that way,’ I said unhappily.

  ‘Too late now though, isn’t it,’ said Emily, her mouth downturned.

  I stood up, suddenly desperate to get out of that stinking kitchen, to breathe proper outside air even if it was thick with smoke and dirt from the factories and stables that jostled for space with the houses in this part of Whitechapel. ‘You sure that it’s definitely her?’ I asked.

  Emily nodded, her wan little face miserable. ‘I seen her with my own eyes,’ she said. ‘It couldn’t have been anyone else.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I heard two of the coppers outside talking about what was done to her. They said that her throat was cut so deep that her head almost came off and that she was all cut open so that her guts was hanging out but that no one even noticed until they’d got her off the street and into the mortuary.’ She frowned, considering this. ‘How did they not notice something like that? I know the coppers round here are as thick as mince and mostly on the take too but they’ve got eyes ain’t they?’

  I shrugged, looking away from her as she mimed cuts to the front of her torso. ‘Maybe it was dark?’ I suggested, wanting more than ever to be away as the long suppressed memory of that awful night in Calais and Bea’s fair hair spread out over the bloody cobbles came back to me.

  She thought about this for a moment. ‘Maybe,’ she concluded eventually. ‘They said to me that it was very early when she was found, just an hour or so after I seen her on Osborn Street at half two. She was just lying there on Buck’s Row with her skirts up and throat cut for all the world to see.’ She paused to roughly wipe away a tear with the back of her hand. ‘Poll never meant anyone no harm. Soft as shite she was. What sort of man does something like that?’

  I shook my head. ‘I dunno, Emily. I dunno.’

  It didn’t take me long to reach Buck’s Row as I followed in the footsteps that Poll had taken the previous night, turning right out of Thrawl Street onto Brick Lane with the Frying Pan on the corner, where she had got royally and, I thought, fatally drunk then walking down to where Brick Lane merged into Osborn Street. Emily had bumped into her by the grocer’s shop on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and I paused there for a moment, leaning my hand against the wall just as she had described Poll doing and feeling horribly, immeasurably sad in a way that I had not felt for Martha or any of the other women who had vanished off the streets in my time there.

  I turned left down Whitechapel Road, a wide busy road that had a more prosperous feel than nearby Commercial Street but was similarly rammed solid with carriages, carts and omnibuses while the pavements overflowed with all manner of people from Orthodox Jewish men rushing along with their skullcaps and black curls hanging about their ears to Chinese sailors smoking tobacco in long white plaster pipes to smiling red cheeked housewives popping in and out of the shops while gossiping with their friends. It was decidedly down at heel compared with, say, the likes of Regent Street but definitely lacked the ominous and ever present threat of imminent violence that hung in the air like a black pall over Commercial Street and the dark festering warren of streets and courts that ran off it.

  About half way down, it widened even more and became even smarter, bordered on both sides by several flashy pubs, proper gin palaces with shiny coloured glass in the windows and the gleam of mirrors everywhere inside and shops, all covered from floor to roof with gaudy advertising billboards for everything from tooth powder to rat poison to pipe tobacco. Across the road I saw the East London Theatre, which was usually too pricey for the likes of me but where you could see all the latest music hall acts perform as well as the usual plays and such. A bit further along there was also the London Hospital, a vast pale stone building set a little back from the road and surrounded by a small park where it was whispered that they sneaked out in the dead of night to bury the chopped up remains of human carcasses that had been experimented upon. Maybe that accounted for some of the suspicion and dread with which the hospital was regarded in Whitechapel, to most of us it was where you went to die and none of us would have gone there willingly. Certainly I wouldn’t set foot in the place unless I was in the direst need of treatment and in full expectation of death anyway.

  I gave it one last wary look over my shoulder as I turned off Whitechapel Road on to Thomas Street and then took the first right on to Buck’s Row, a narrow cheerless road with looming dark brick warehouses running down one side and a tall ominous looking school building, a length of brick wall and a row of squat little two storey cottages on the other. There was no need to ask anyone where Poll’s body had been found as there was still a crowd gathered around a spot on the narrow pavement in front of a pair of tall wooden gates next to the cottages and directly across the way from a solitary street lamp. She really had been left out in the street for all to see.

  I slipped closer, gently elbowing my way through the crowd until I was near the front and could see what they were looking at. If anyone had come here expecting gore, then they were no doubt sorely disappointed when they realised that all there was to see was a damp, slightly pink and obviously recently scrubbed patch of pavement and a handful of nervous looking young policemen struggling to maintain calm as they were harangued by the crowd for not keeping better order of the streets.

  This then was where Poll had died. I looked at the cottages right next to the gates, home no doubt to respectable workmen and their families and wondered what they had heard in the depths of the night. Heard and ignored. A struggle perhaps? Maybe a scream? I then looked back over my shoulder at the huge hulking building behind us, a deeply unlovely three storey warehouse with ESSEX WHARF painted in huge white letters on the side. Was this the last thing that Poll saw as the killer struck at her with his knife? Or was it the distant clock of the London Hospital, just visible between the roofs of the houses that lay between Buck’s Row and Whitechapel Road.

  The ground shuddered beneath our feet as a train passed underneath us, creaking and rumbling along a railway line that was hidden from view by the brick wall next to the gates and its fellow on the opposite side of the road. I felt a bit foolish now as I’d assumed the wall was concealing the board school playground when in fact it was hiding the sheer drop down from the bridge that we were unknowingly standing on.

  ‘The playground is up on the school roof,’ I heard someone mutter behind me to their friend who had made the assumption as me and I looked up again at the board school, a f
our storey red brick monolith with, I now saw, tall metal railings lining the roof to prevent the children falling over the edge. ‘They could have had one on the ground if it wasn’t for the bleeding trains.’

  The crowd started to melt away then, finally satisfied that there really wasn’t anything much to see and that they wouldn’t feel any closer to what had happened or have any better understanding of it by being there. I lingered for a moment longer though, straining my ears to hear the distant racket of Whitechapel Road in one direction and the rumble of trains from the other and gazing up at the warehouses that presided menacingly over the squalid little road. Even by Whitechapel standards, this was a miserable place to die.

  I turned to leave, feeling in desperate need of a drink and somewhat regretting the odd impulse that had brought me there to look at the spot where my friend had died, feeling that even though I had known her, I was still no better than the random strangers who had turned up there for no better reason than to gawp in slack mouthed curiosity at where some poor woman had met her end.

  And it was at that moment, as I stomped past the board school feeling deeply ashamed, trying my best to ignore the growl of hunger deep in my belly and wishing that I was somewhere, anywhere, else, that I saw her, a pale and familiar face amongst the crowd, staring fixedly and with wide eyed horror at the pink stain on the pavement. I couldn’t place her at first, but then it all came back to me: that dreary day when I’d gone to the mortuary to try and steal my stuff back from a dead woman. She’d been there before me, the girl with red hair and sad eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  She looked up at me and I saw an expression of confusion followed by dawning recognition that must have mirrored my own, spread across her pretty face. There was a moment of indecision, during which I half expected her to turn tail and do a runner but instead she surprised me by smiling and shyly raising her hand in greeting. I hesitated for just a moment before shrugging my shoulders, fixing a smile to my own face and strolling over to her.

  ‘Nasty business, isn’t it?’ I said by way of a greeting and she gave a slight nod, her eyes nervously fixed again on the wet stain on the pavement where Poll had bled her life out.

  ‘Did you know her?’ she asked in a thin, small voice, pulling her red wool shawl closer around her shoulders as a shadow fell across the sun overhead and a light breeze rose in the sky, scattering some rubbish that lay in thick clumps around the edge of the pavement. ‘The dead woman. You knew the other one as well, didn’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘We all know each other in our bit of Whitechapel,’ I said. ‘Poll, the woman who died here, shared a room with me, which I suppose made us friends of sorts.’

  The girl gave a half smile and turned away from the pavement. ‘I suppose you all have to look out for one another,’ she said quietly. ‘I have my sister for that but you have to make do.’

  ‘Pretty much.’ We started walking back up towards Spitalfields together, glad to leave those towering warehouses and the rattle of trains behind. ‘You need friends in a place like Whitechapel. It’s not the sort of place where it’s advisable to keep yourself apart because you never know when you’re going to need someone,’ I said, echoing almost word for word the advice that Poll herself had given me when I’d first appeared on the streets of Whitechapel a year earlier, on the run from France and terrified for my life.

  I gave the girl walking beside me a sidelong look, taking in her neatly plaited and pinned up red hair, her faded but clean blue dress and her well looked after boots. She was carrying a brown paper bag in her hand, a slight sheen of grease and waft of soft dough suggesting food inside. My stomach growled again and I idly considered robbing her if I got the chance but then, more than a little appalled at myself, resolutely shoved the idea away. ‘It’s lonely too though.’ Lonely, exhausting and frightening.

  She nodded as if she understood then changed the subject. ‘My Pa says that in the olden days they used to call this Ducking Pond Row because there used to be a ducking stool for bad tempered wives out this way. Eventually the name got changed to Duck’s Row and then finally Buck’s Row as it is now.’ She looked back at the stretch of pavement where Poll had been found and where another small crowd was beginning to gather. ‘Hard to imagine a pond here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is your Pa a teacher then?’ I asked with a laugh although I felt a little sad inside because my Pa used to talk the same way to me when we went on our walks together around town. He knew about all sorts of things like the Roman soldiers who used to live there and the warrior Queen with a blue painted face who came and burnt the whole town down because they mistreated her and her daughters. He loved history, my Pa.

  The girl shook her head and went a little red about the ears. ‘No, he’s a policeman,’ she said in a low voice, shooting me a quick look to see my reaction.

  ‘Oh.’ An awkward silence fell broken only by the growling of my stomach, the rumblings and shouts from Whitechapel Road and the distant barking of a thousand dogs.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said at last with a smile. ‘He’s not one of the bad ones though,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘I know there’s some who aren’t so nice. He’s not like that.’

  ‘I don’t think any coppers, and especially not the ones on the take, think they’re bad,’ I said with a shrug. Her face fell and I felt guilty enough to rush to make amends. ‘I’m sure your Pa isn’t one of them though.’ What was it Emily had said in the kitchen earlier on? ‘Thick as mince and mostly on the take as well’? I hid a smile.

  We turned on to Hanbury Street, a long grotty road that would take us straight back to Commercial Street. ‘So what’s your name then, copper’s girl?’ I asked cheerfully, seeing as we were clearly walking back together.

  She smiled. ‘Cora. What’s yours?’

  I briefly considered giving her one of the false names that I occasionally used but then gave a small shrug and decided to tell the truth. ‘I’m Emma but everyone calls me Em.’ I grinned. ‘Emma always reminds me of my Ma when she was in a temper and shouting out of the door for me to come home and get a beating.’

  The sun had come up now and people were thronging the streets, plenty of them sitting on their doorsteps or on the pavements sharing mugs of beer and tea with neighbours and keeping a cursory eye on the scruffy little ragamuffin children playing in the middle of the road. People always liked to say back then that the people of the East End didn’t care for their children, were little better than animals in fact, but that wasn’t true at all. Oh, it’s true that hardly anyone could afford proper schooling and decent clothes and food for their offspring but they loved them fiercely nonetheless. If someone had done for a child the way that Poll was killed then there would have been riots on the streets that day and the murderer dragged out from whatever hole he was hiding in to be torn from limb to limb by a mob of angry women.

  Cora and I strolled along Hanbury Street in companionable silence, enjoying the feeling of sunshine on our faces and the light breeze in the air. It still stank of course: of dirty bodies, smoke, old dinners and the refuse from the stables and tanners yards that nestled among the houses, but that breeze was just enough to lighten the mood a little and chase away the worst of the stench.

  ‘You remember the last time I saw you?’ I said after a while, as carelessly as I could. ‘At the mortuary?’ I carefully watched her face and saw her go pale and then look for a moment as if she was going to deny all knowledge of that day before finally giving a small nod.

  ‘I remember,’ she said in a low voice as if she wished that she didn’t. ‘We met on the doorstep, didn’t we?’

  ‘That’s right.’ We were walking past a pub, one of the ones that didn’t encourage women to drink inside so that a small cluster of blowsy old tarts hung about outside, glowering sourly at the world from over the rouge stained rims of their gin glasses. ‘Martha, the woman who got stabbed, had something of mine, you see,’ I said, treading carefully. ‘An envelope with something inside it. I thought it
might still be on her when she was killed but when I went to have a look…’ I let my voice trail away and looked at her hopefully, hoping that would be enough to nudge her into telling me if she had the pendant.

  Cora stared at me for a moment, her eyes wide with panic, then resolutely shook her head. ‘I didn’t see it,’ she said, looking flustered and a bit pink about the ears.

  I sighed, now knowing full well that she was lying. ‘It’s just that it was very precious to me,’ I persisted, thinking that precious was an understatement right now when I didn’t have a pot to piss in and needed the money it could have made me to survive a few more weeks on the streets. ‘It was a keepsake of another friend who got murdered and I’d dearly like to have it back again. It didn’t fall on the floor or something did it?’ I was quite proud of that touch, which gave her an easy excuse for owning up to taking it.

  She stopped walking then and looked right at me. ‘I didn’t take anything,’ she said, her voice rising a little so that people turned to stare at us. ‘I never saw no envelope nor nothing else either and I certainly didn’t take it.’ She was bright red now, her cheeks almost clashing with her hair and I hastened to calm her before she started to cry and involved anyone else, not that I need have a care about that as no one on Hanbury Street would be interested in gawping at two girls having a fight. They’d seen it all before a hundred times over.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said gently, putting my hand on her arm and making myself smile. ‘I was just wondering if you’d seen it, that’s all.’ I started walking again and after a moment she hurried to catch up with me. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ I said, half tempted to drag her into an alleyway and beat her up a bit until she told me the truth.

  She blinked away some tears then gave a tentative nod. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know that you had to ask.’ She couldn’t quite meet my eyes, knowing as well as I did that she was lying and probably fully aware that I knew it too. I sighed again. So this was how it was going to be, was it?