The Night Calls

by David Pirie

  After that I spoke to him in no very coherent fashion about my concern for the women and the disturbance that had interrupted Macfarlane’s lecture. He looked at me for a moment as if shifting his mental focus. ‘Yes, I heard something of it,’ he said at last. ‘My belief is it is the first time Macfarlane has been successfully interrupted since 1863. On that occasion there was a fire.’

  I was annoyed by this flippancy and did not hesitate to show it, pointing out that the women were being seriously harassed. But he stopped me with a raised hand and a piercing look. ‘No, I am not jesting. On the contrary it is a measure of the seriousness of what occurred that Macfarlane was interrupted. Whatever his style as a teacher, he is nothing if not indefatigable. The situation is becoming deeply distasteful to all of us. But, as you are aware, there are many differences of opinion in the university. I will take note of what you say. I only wish, Doyle, that they would try some of their antics in my lecture hall.’

  ‘But they never would,’ I protested. ‘They pick their victims with care. Not least the women themselves.’

  The cab had come to a stop outside a narrow, nondescript, three-storey building. Bell had agreed with me, yet I felt a deep dissatisfaction that he would not promise more action. At the time I was indignant that he was not doing more to back up his beliefs.

  The cab waited as we entered the building which was at the end of a row of similar houses on a road close to the docks. There was nobody about, and at first I could not understand what we were doing in what appeared to be an ordinary domestic house. I suppose I could have asked the Doctor, but I had already distracted him enough, so I waited.

  Closing the door, we turned into a room which was quite large, with two new sofas, an armchair and a large cabinet. In an attempt to make it more cheerful, someone had applied a coat of red paint to the walls, but the effect was overdone. The Doctor glanced at all this without much interest.

  Rather to my surprise, the only other rooms on that floor were a small scullery with a basin and an even smaller bedroom. We moved up the stairs, which were clean if not well lit, until we came to a carpeted corridor and three more rooms. Again, all of them contained rather basic beds and most were decorated with dull etchings, showing country scenes, of a kind that can be purchased by the dozen in any cheap saleroom. Though free of dust and dirt, the bedrooms were dauntingly similar: all of them had side tables with basins and jugs, all had fireplaces, all were rather overpainted. The largest had a tatty sofa as well as a bed, but that was the only difference.

  Apart from these sticks of furniture there was absolutely no sign that I could see of any personal possessions in the whole place. I reflected on this oddity as the Doctor went back to the larger room near the top of the stairs. Outside it was starting to get dark, so he lit some candles, before bending down to examine a stain he had found on the rug beside the bed. It was not large, but from the colour I assumed it was blood. And then we heard the noise.

  It was like a kind of humming, though it was hard to make out a tune. The notes were strange, high-pitched. Bell was out on the landing in an instant. I had assumed we were on the last occupied floor but now I saw there was a ladder to a skylight and the noise came from a small door one side of it.

  The Doctor went first, climbing quickly ahead of me till he reached the opening. Then, holding his candle high, he flung the hatch-like door open.

  It was a boxroom. I could see some empty cases, but there was also a makeshift bed, this time with sheets and blankets. And there, sitting in it, sucking a stick of sugar, was a small boy.

  The creature had bright eyes and dark curls and looked up at us with mild curiosity but without the slightest flicker of fear. He was reading something by the light of his own small candle and took another lick of his long stick of barley sugar. Although small, I decided he must have been almost twelve years old, and he certainly had a marvellous confidence for his years. Bell stared at him, and his features softened, but it was the boy who spoke first.

  ‘And who might you be?’ he said, putting down his book which was one of the most lurid of the old Penny Dreadfuls called Varney the Vampire.

  Bell moved forward, smiling. ‘Oh, I am a doctor who is looking around, perhaps with a view to buying this place for my practice. And this is my helper, Doyle. How is it you are here?’

  ‘My mam left me here last night,’ said the boy, and though he spoke well in the English manner I began to wonder if he did not have a slight foreign accent. French perhaps. ‘She said my grandmam would come.’

  ‘You must have hidden, then,’ said the Doctor. And both the boy and he eyed the trunks where he had evidently concealed himself. A small bag was packed beside it.

  ‘You will not say I am here, then?’ The boy looked at us

  This evidently presented Bell with a problem. ‘We will warn you if we do,’ he said. ‘But of course you would not want to stay here for ever.’

  This seemed to satisfy the boy as, to my amazement, he took another lick and went back to his reading.

  A few minutes later Bell and I were conversing in the room below. ‘Well?’ he said with a slight twinkle in his eyes revealing not the slightest surprise at this development. ‘Are you apprised of all the details of the case?’

  I considered a moment. He was playing with me, of course, but I was determined to show my powers of observation as well as I could. ‘From the arrangement of rooms it is obvious,’ I said, ‘that this is a boarding house, one that by its very emptiness has fallen on evil times. Since the whole place has been cleared, I can only conclude a very serious crime has been committed. I believe you were examining a bloodstain by the bed in the larger room and I assume that is where the body was found. A stabbing I take it.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And the boy?’

  ‘His mother is evidently foreign, but to be living here must have entered a period of poverty which has, I presume, led to problems of an even more serious nature. She has told him to hide and hoped to summon his grandmother. Therefore I conclude the mother is either dead or accused of the crime.’

  There was a cry from below us, someone calling for ‘Davey’ and footsteps on the stairs. ‘Excellent, Doyle,’ said Bell. ‘And if I am not mistaken that is the grandmother now.’

  Sure enough a woman entered the room, but she was not as I had expected. The boy had about him an air of foreign manners. There was nothing foreign or refined about this good woman who wore a filthy apron and looked terribly worried. ‘Oh, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I am so feart. Have you seen him? Have you seen my wee Davey?’ The stench of fish from her apron suggested she must work in one of the fish shops by the docks.

  ‘You need have no concern, madame,’ said Bell, smiling at her. ‘All is well, he is here.’

  At this the woman gave a great cry of thanks, coming forward to shake his hand, evidently so relieved that she could not stop talking. ‘Oh, that is a kindness, sir. Her mother said I would find him here but she didna tell me till she got out this afternoon and she is worried to come back here. She loves Davey and the boy is all I have of my son, but still it is terrible what she seems to think the poor lad can endure.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bell, ‘he seems to have endured no harm. He was left with a supply of barley sugar and enough reading to last him a week. You will find him in the room above.’

  At this her face brightened even more – she fairly leapt up the ladder and we heard her cry of joy as she found the boy. Soon they were both coming down with Davey still clutching his sweetmeats and the little bag so neatly packed. His mother was evidently not as negligent as had first appeared, or as his grandmother thought.

  The woman offered profuse thanks, and the boy seemed pleased enough to see her, before the two of them disappeared down the stairs and into the darkness.

  By now, I was starting to feel rather pleased with myself, for the grandmother had appeared as living proof of my deductions and no doubt Bell saw my satisfaction. ‘Well done, Doyle!’
he said, putting down his candle. ‘I am grateful for your analysis, and the grandmother arrived to prove you right.’

  ‘So my deductions were not too wide of the mark?’

  ‘Well, I would myself hesitate to call the grandmother a deduction when the boy had already told us in plain English he was waiting for her,’ he replied.

  ‘And the rest?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, it was a fine piece of work,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Even though every single observation you made was wrong, and every conclusion you drew false.’

  Not for the first time with the Doctor it was as if I felt the ground giving way under me. But at least Bell never gloated, and already he had returned to his inspection of the bloodstain and the bed beside it.

  ‘The boy’s mother, who I am glad to say seems to love her son, is neither victim nor accused.’ He bent down reflectively. ‘She is merely a witness, but not of anything the police are taking seriously, for no serious crime has been committed. If it had been, do you really believe even Inspector Beecher would have left the place unattended only hours after the deed?’

  Beecher was a senior detective of the city’s constabulary, a pompous man who the Doctor had crossed more than once. ‘And I can assure you,’ Bell continued, ‘that if someone had been stabbed to death you would expect to see far more blood than this; why, it might have come from a bleeding nose.’

  He stopped looking at it and straightened up. ‘As to this building, it is, you must agree, Doyle, on any showing a very odd boarding house. Where is the dining room in which the landlady can offer food to her guests, and the kitchen in which she cooks it? How on earth can it be cleared so quickly and efficiently of any personal things, including even those of the landlady herself? You put this down to a crime but it is hardly common for the police to clear a house after a crime. An infection might have been a better theory though it is not the answer. And you hazard the place has fallen on hard times but, if so, why is it kept so clean?’

  I knew there was logic in what he said. And I began to see where he was leading.

  Bell looked at me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘It was used as a place of assignation. There are far more elegant establishments in the old town, you may have heard of Madame Rose’s. This one is more basic. It was run efficiently but nobody ever lived here.’

  ‘So why is it empty?’

  ‘In fact it is empty for much of the day. But it is true something curious happened here last night.’

  ‘And the women ran off?’

  ‘It was not so dramatic as that. After much deliberation, the women called the police but Beecher, as is his way, refused to give them any credence as witnesses and took them all down to the cells for a night. The mother of the boy is a wise woman and made him hide before they came. In doing so, she spared him a good deal.’

  ‘But why did Beecher summon you?’

  ‘Oh, he did not,’ said Bell. ‘As you know, he has not consulted me for months and he will not do so again unless he is desperate. No, I was told about the matter by a police constable to whom I once offered some medical assistance. He was here last night and heard their story and felt I might be interested. I have come here today to follow up what he told me. And not only am I interested, I will tell you I am extremely concerned.’

  ‘Were they attacked?’

  ‘There have been attacks. Mainly in the street. On this occasion they were not exactly attacked, but a client who they will only describe as being a good-looking gentleman demanded certain things. He made it out to be a game of will. For example, he made one of them eat some grapes.’

  ‘Not so onerous unless they were poisoned?’

  ‘And they were not. But he stood before the mother of that boy and held them out and insisted she ate them. That was the beginning. There were three women here. At first they took it as a game, though they were frightened. He asked another to drink some brandy which she did not want. Another was cut. You saw the stain.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Only a tiny cut. She bled a little, but it was little more than a scratch. The man tired of the game and left, apparently without doing anything more, not even claiming any sexual favours though he had paid amply for them.’

  ‘Yet they told the police.’

  The Doctor turned to me, looking very animated. ‘Perhaps I have been unfair with you, Doyle. There is no reason why you should have been able to deduce what in itself may be regarded as an odd trifle. All the more since I can hardly claim to have used my own method when I was told most of the details by my constable. But I am delighted to see that now you have put your mind to it and reached the heart of the matter.’

  I was pleased, if surprised. But the Doctor was quite serious. ‘Oh, yes! The heart of it! They told the police. Consider, Doyle, the implication of that for one instant. Women of this kind will do anything to avoid them. They will run through streets when they see them coming. Hide in ditches if necessary. They can expect nothing but trouble. Yet they called them to this house. They were taking a great risk and were treated to a night in custody as a result. But there must have been a reason, and there was. Namely that they were absolutely terrified. Not, of course, at the beginning. They were all a little drunk. They assumed at first that he was being playful. And then, suddenly, when he used the knife, they became convinced they were all going to die. I believe that they nearly did.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘It seemed to be all he required. He put the knife away. Told the woman there was nothing to fear from such a tiny incision, which was quite true. And then he left.’

  ‘Perhaps he was drunk?’

  ‘Perhaps. I can prove nothing. But their fear greatly concerns me. Especially when I am sure, from their description, it is the same man who has committed attacks elsewhere. But we will learn nothing more here. And Beecher has decided the place will not reopen, so our man has no cause to return.’

  We made our way out of that house. By now the thought of this pointless exercise in cruelty had begin to haunt me, and I was very glad to be away from it.

  At the door, Bell stopped and looked back.

  ‘Well at least nobody was badly hurt,’ I said.

  ‘That is part of what occupies me,’ said Bell, and I could sense the feeling in him. ‘In one way it was almost childish. Like a child testing his own power. I hope it is not his idea of a rehearsal.’

  HAIR AND KNIFE

  I lay in bed that night, thinking of the house we had seen. That word the Doctor had used, ‘rehearsal’, appeared curiously apt, for there was something about that shell of a building which almost seemed like a theatre without the performers. It was the first time I had ever ventured into such a place, and I was both repelled and intrigued.

  I thought too of the student, Miss Scott, who I had met under such strange circumstances. Of all the strange things that had happened to me that day, our meeting had made the strongest impression. I could still visualise the sudden flash of her impish smile before Crawford interrupted us. I tried to recall exactly what had passed between us, all that she had said. And now, for the first time, I remembered that she had mentioned Latimer.

  Professor Neil Latimer was a fierce-faced anatomy teacher who had made it a pledge of honour never to admit a single woman to his class. Indeed the lack of anatomy tuition was becoming one of the women’s greatest handicaps. The man would argue his case constantly in front of us, and I recalled one occasion in particular when he was brutally dissecting a frog. ‘Besides, gentlemen,’ he said, looking up at us from his dissection with an expression on his face that was positively obscene, ‘there are traps even you may not have thought of. What after all is to stop a Magdalene from the streets coming here to study?’

  He smacked his lips as he said the word Magdalene, and we all knew what he meant, indeed some of the men guffawed at the thought of a prostitute in our midst. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘there is a place for everything.’

  It was, I suppose as I look back now, am
ong the stupider observations I heard from any teacher in the whole of my career at university. Not only was it utterly fatuous to imagine a woman of the streets without any education entering the university to study medicine. But supposing even that impossibility happened, what exactly could she do to corrupt us? Beyond the open soliciting that we endured every day on the streets, the answer was nothing at all except in Latimer’s own fevered imagination. His words were nothing more than a lustful fantasy masquerading as an argument. My blood boiled to think of that now, and to recall that Crawford had been one of those who guffawed the loudest. And what did it say about our sex that on the one hand we could try to hound women out of learning the practice of healing and on the other use their services in houses like the one I had just seen?

  That night such thoughts went round and round in my head but it would be entirely dishonest to pretend that, during this confused time, I always occupied the moral high ground. On the contrary, I was as torn as any eighteen-year-old about my true emotions with regard to these subjects, and no doubt my encounter with Miss Scott added to my confusion. For the honest truth was that, outside of my immediate family, I barely knew what I should expect of a woman when the examples around me were all so manifestly different.

  On the one hand there was the Edinburgh landlady, who in this era was a notorious breed, grasping and viciously prudish almost to a point of madness. On the other, in the streets, we students were constantly being importuned by girls who seemed tender-hearted and were no older than ourselves. There was one woman in particular I had encountered regularly, on the corner where Samuel played his violin, who had a merry twinkle in her eye and a kindly mischievous manner.

  I never really dared to talk to her, yet once this woman had come upon me unawares, and offered a sweet kiss, and the memory of that kiss lingered uneasily with me. I knew well enough it was only an attempt to part me from my money, but in her way she still seemed far less hard and grasping than the landladies I had encountered at my friends’ lodgings. Indeed, when Latimer had first spoken, I certainly felt a guilty fascination at the thought of a ‘Magdalene’ appearing in our class to tempt us to unspeakable acts of lust.