Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  I had already spoken to the librarian and been told to come straight over. He said he had the morning free and could spend a couple of hours going over the college’s collection of private papers with me.

  It was a beautiful day for a walk. People’s faces had changed. Sunshine lay on honey-coloured stone. Students skimmed past me on bicycles, with no more care than to be on time for the next lecture. I walked slowly, feeling a sense of freedom, almost of exhilaration, for the first time in months. The events of the night before seemed like a bad dream. I had overexerted myself. Away from the house, and the menace of Liddley’s presence, I felt almost human again.

  The librarian was a small man called Dr Burnett. A large head, watery eyes, pale cheeks. He wore an extraordinary green tweed suit that seemed to have been tailored for a much larger man. Perhaps he had shrunk to his present size within the lifetime of the suit. I remember that, all the time we talked, he pulled nervously on one end of a long, untrimmed moustache.

  We have never met since. He had been a Fellow in chemistry and had taken the post of librarian when it fell vacant as a means of indulging an inordinate passion for bibliophily. His own collection of early chemical treatises, including several incunabula, was reputedly worth a small fortune and unrivalled for quality outside any but the greatest libraries.

  He found Liddley quickly enough, a copperplate entry in the acquisitions book for 1865. The entry was dated 15 June, and lay between a copy of Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi, published in that same year, and a collection of disestablishmentarian sermons donated by a Dr Oliphaunt, Senior Fellow in Theology. As I had guessed, Liddley’s donation had been considerable, both in quantity and quality.

  Each volume had been recorded meticulously by title and author’s name, and given an acquisition number side by side with the class mark assigned to it. The class marks were out of date now, having been abandoned for Dewey classifications in the present century, but a separate list recorded them alongside their modern equivalents.

  For the most part, Liddley’s collection consisted of published materials, mainly medical, but with a respectable sprinkling of volumes on chemistry, biology, botany, and other sciences. I noticed, besides those, several books of theology, about eighty volumes of standard Greek and Latin texts, numerous collections of poetry, and enough history to satisfy any amateur. Dr Liddley had been a more cultivated and rounded man than the bare record given by Munk had led me to suspect.

  ‘It’s a fine collection,’ said Burnett, running a dry, ink-stained forefinger down the columns, for all the world like an accountant reckoning up a client’s credits and debits. ‘That copy of Vesalius is extremely rare.’ He pointed to the entry for a copy of De Humani Corporis. ‘So is that first Dresden edition of Hahnemann’s Organon der rationellen Heilkunde. The whole lot would fetch a packet nowadays at Magg’s or Quaritch’s.’

  ‘What about personal papers? Would they be listed here?’ I asked.

  ‘If there were any, yes. They’d be kept separately, of course, but the acquisition would be recorded in the usual way. It’s not too hard to trace them, they have their own class mark. It begins with the letters P.P. Stands for “Private Papers”. Or, as my predecessor used to say, “Perverts and Poofters”.’

  He caught sight of my puzzled look.

  ‘Oh, that was a standard joke of his. A lot of the private collections used to be kept under lock and key. God knows why they were donated in the first place. Vanity, I suppose. Some people can’t bear to throw things out, even guilty secrets. Not that there’s really much dirt in any of those papers: you’d be surprised by what some old dons used to think had to be locked away from the common gaze.

  ‘Anyway, the rules were relaxed a bit several years ago; just after I took over, in fact. There are still some unopenable boxes, where there’s a family around to kick up a fuss. Otherwise it’s more or less a free-for-all. Think your Dr Liddley had secrets, then?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Who knows?’ I said.

  Burnett had all this time been flicking through the pages, looking for the P.P. classmark.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘P.P. Quite a few entries, actually. Any idea what you want?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Better get them out, then, see what there is. I’ll leave you with them. You can have a key, let yourself in and out. If you were a Downing Fellow, I could let you take them with you. But Pembroke – well, that’s quite another thing.’

  After so much frugal fare, the files and boxes Burnett proceeded to lay before me were a feast. Case notes, a medical journal begun during Liddley’s student days, accounts, letters, jottings: I hardly knew where to begin.

  Burnett went off to attend to other duties, leaving me effectively in charge of the little library. A couple of undergraduates wandered in around noon, stayed for less than an hour, and went off again. A Fellow came in, read a newspaper for a while, and fell asleep. I hardly noticed them. Liddley was taking shape before my eyes. My Frankenstein monster, my golem, my Grendel.

  He had been a gentle man, that was the curiosity. It was a point I had observed before, on reading of his therapeutic preferences. Most doctors of his day ladled out suffering on a gargantuan scale. The routine administration of mercury alone caused endless agony and frequent, avoidable death. They called it ‘heroic therapy’, but the true heroes were those patients who had to suffer at their hands. Liddley stood out. He would have none of it. This much I already knew and have already said. But on reading his journals, between the clinical observations and prescription notes, I found something of the man himself.

  I still remember one passage, dated 23 January 1825:

  ‘What am I to make of all these bleedings and purgatives, these emetics and antimonials, these mercurial dosings that are taken for the foremost weapons in my armamentarium? This last case has much lowered my spirits, that of the boy Simpson. A lad of seventeen who was brought to us with typhoid fever these seven weeks since. Doctor Beauchamp administered mercury in the usual doses.

  ‘Two weeks later, the boy displayed purple spots on either side of his face, then mortification and sloughing of the parts. Before long his whole jawbone was exposed from loss of the flesh surrounding it. The upper and lower lips were entirely gone, and on the right side mortification extended to the eye, scalp, and ear. He would have lost those too, but the death intervened, and none too soon to relieve his most awful suffering. His mother was most pitiful when she came to retrieve the body, for I could not let her look on him.

  ‘Is this, then, to be the regular end of Physick? To harm where it cannot cure, to make Death a more terrible thing than it already is? I would have given the boy his quietus, but that is against all our custom and morality. When I complain of such practices, my teachers slight me for the weakness of my stomach. I find myself at my wits’ end . . .’

  To the end of making sense out of an existence that seemed to him increasingly fragile and absurd, Liddley embarked on an ambitious project of self-improvement, reading voraciously and almost without discrimination among both the Ancients and the Moderns. Slowly, imperceptibly, out of his vast reading, a serpent began to uncoil itself within his soul. Those are not my words but his, in a letter dated 24 April 1834, of which he kept a copy. It was addressed to one Martin Pinchbeck, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a former teacher of Liddley’s, and one apparently initiated into the Masonic mysteries.

  ‘You may think me a fool or worse for the restlessness of mind and the turbidity of spirit that has led me to the Scylla and Charybdis between which I presently find myself. But I have drunk deeply of the Spring to which you, in your erstwhile enthusiasm sent me, and having drunk cannot spew it back again. I have read Libavius and Paracelsus, Bruno and Andreae. There is nonsense in all of them, but wisdom too. And I have read further. But I have found no firm answers. Rather, I think that a serpent has crept forth into my soul, whose coils are looped about me as it were about the staff of Asclepius. B
ut though the snake was sacred to the god, I fear it may prove mortal to me.’

  He was not only widely read, but widely connected, with a far-flung correspondence reaching not only through Britain but to the Continent. His correspondents included not just physicians, but philosophers, poets, Freemasons, philologists, and other men of learning and science. In one letter, he quotes Bacon’s words on the desirability of a fraternity of learning: ‘Surely as nature createth brotherhood in families, and arts mechanical contract brotherhoods in communities, and the anointment of God superinduceth a brotherhood in kings and bishops, so in learning there cannot but be a fraternity in learning and illumination . . .’

  And yet . . . And yet the fraternity to which he belonged seemed unable to set his mind at rest, not only on matters medical, but on matters metaphysical. He began to brood on the purpose of existence. The serpent was gnawing his flesh and troubling his spirit. And there was something else, something the letters did not reveal, a great trouble that was weighing on his heart.

  I came away from the library that day less happy than I had gone in. I felt uneasy in my mind, sensing that I was somehow becoming an unwilling witness to the darkness that had so inexorably enveloped John Liddley’s mind. More plainly than ever, I could hear his voice, that soft, plausible voice, whispering excitedly into my reluctant ear.

  It was early evening by the time I returned to college. Dinner was still being served in Hall, but I had little appetite and made directly for my room. I sat for about two hours with a bottle of whisky I had picked up on my way home, sipping and thinking, then trying not to think, listening to the animated voices of undergraduates passing below my partly-opened window.

  Some time after nine o’clock, I went to the porter’s lodge to make a phone call. I had neglected my friend Lewis, left him to fend for himself on the first sunny day after the taking of his photograph.

  I dialled his number. It rang and rang, and the longer it went on the more uneasy I felt. He lived alone, I knew that, and I knew that he spent many evenings drinking in the Toad and Rat, his local. He would be there, I reasoned, fortifying himself against the long night to come, against the darkness that was gentle John Liddley’s habitat. Would the doctor follow him to London, as Lewis believed he had already followed him? He knew the way, that could not be doubted. What else did he know?

  I rang again at ten, at eleven, and at twelve. The porter asked if something was wrong. I smiled weakly and answered no, but yes, yes, something was wrong.

  I slept badly that night. In my dreams, John Liddley spoke with me. He had an honest, open face and quick, suffering eyes. A man of sorrows. But what sorrows, what suffering? He had come from the dead-room, he said, from a dissection that had gone on all day. Was there nothing deeper than the flesh? he asked me. Nothing below the bone? I could not answer him. I tried, but I could not, because I did not know the answers myself.

  In the morning, I skipped breakfast. There were papers on the porter’s desk. Dafydd Lewis’s face was staring out at me from the front page of the Daily Mirror.

  20

  Lewis had been . . . What is the best word? Gutted? Disembowelled? Dissected? His innards had been carefully removed and less carefully sprinkled down an alleyway in Spitalfields. Yes, Spitalfields, at a spot almost equidistant between the alley where Naomi had been found and the semi-deserted church in which Ruthven had met his end.

  No one made the connection, however. The modus operandi was not the same, there was no reason to link Dafydd Lewis, newspaper photographer, with a police superintendent, much less with Dr Charles Hillenbrand, bereaved father of the murdered child.

  The thing was that I could not myself believe Liddley had done it, that he had the power of physical action. I had felt Liddley’s anger, Liddley’s hate, Liddley’s despair, but never his hand. Both Lewis and I had felt murder in the atmosphere of the attic, we might have been pushed to kill, but neither of us had felt directly threatened.

  Was it possible that Lewis was right, that it was not Liddley who was insubstantial but we ourselves? That Liddley did not manifest within our realm, but we in his? If so, was it not possible that, on such occasions, the doctor might have power over the flesh, as he had had in life? It seemed plausible, as much as any of it was plausible, and yet I had never sensed an immediate physicality, a fleshly presence that might have betokened such nearness or such strength.

  I took the first available train to London, harried there by Lewis’s staring, helpless face. Throughout the journey, I remembered that other journey, when Naomi had been with me and there had been no shadows on my life, other than a few thin ones I had made for myself. I remembered Magoo the snowman watching our train go past, like a scarecrow in the white field. And I remembered Naomi’s face, her tense excitement and wonder at travelling to London for the day.

  Once, I thought I saw a dark figure standing in a field. Another scarecrow, I said to myself, put there to chase away the birds of spring. But it was surrounded by a flock of blackbirds, pecking the furrowed ground. The train rushed on and the figure was lost behind me.

  Spitalfields was crowded and squalid, row upon row of dilapidated houses strung out between Shoreditch and Whitechapel. Not even the sunlight could do much to raise my spirits here. For the first time, it occurred to me that this had been the area of cheap lodging houses where Jack the Ripper’s victims had lived: Dorset Street, White’s Row, Fashion Street, Flower and Dean Streets. One of the bodies, Annie Chapman’s, had been found in Spitalfields on the eighth of September 1888, the second killing. It seemed appropriate.

  I had brought my A–Z and marked on it in red ink the side-street behind which Lewis’s body had been discovered, Fashion Street. But I think I could have made my way there without assistance, blindfolded.

  The police were still milling about in large numbers. Up and down every street within smelling distance of the crime, constables were knocking on doors, asking routine questions, receiving routine answers. ‘Not again,’ I heard one old dear remark as she opened her door and saw them on her step, a policeman and a policewoman, towering over her like undertakers.

  I tried to get into the alleyway, to see it for myself, whatever there was to see. But the entrance was sealed off by yards of plastic tape and two burly policemen laughing at a private joke. Further along, a large white van had been parked near some police cars. It proclaimed itself to be the ‘Police Incident Unit’. People were coming and going through its little door like beetles. The sunlight scraped their carapaces. There was no blood in sight. Even the air smelled almost clean.

  I turned to leave, and, as I did so, a voice called out behind me.

  ‘Dr Hillenbrand? Is that you?’

  I turned. It was the policewoman who had been with Ruthven that first dreadful day, the one who had shown us Naomi’s clothes in their polythene bags. I do not remember her name, perhaps she never told me. To be truthful, I had scarcely noticed her.

  ‘Why, it is you, Doctor. What brings you here?’

  I remember stammering, flushing, trying to hide my embarrassment. I was embarrassed, not only to have been caught out in my morbid curiosity, my uninvited intrusion on the realm of violence; but because I found myself suddenly, inexplicably aroused by the woman. The strength of my attraction took me completely by surprise. For a moment, everything became confused – my thoughts of Lewis, my search for his blood on the alley stones, Naomi’s death, Naomi’s clothes in plastic bags, the policewoman, her breasts, her legs, her closeness, the sunlight on my cheeks.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Dr Hillenbrand?’

  ‘I . . . I . . . Yes, I’m all right. Just the heat. I . . . I’ve been travelling. Dafydd . . . Dafydd Lewis . . . I wanted to see where . . .’

  ‘You knew Dafydd Lewis?’ She was quick.

  ‘Lewis? Ye . . . yes, I knew him.’ I was flustered, torn between talk of death and a craving for sex. I felt sick.

  ‘I think you’d better come inside and sit down. You look flushed.’
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  She took me to the Incident Unit van, made room for me inside, found me a chair. The sexual feelings were passing, almost as quickly as they had come. It was then that it came to me, when this had last happened. I remembered the overpowering feelings I had experienced a few weeks earlier in bed with Laura.

  The policewoman brought one of her superiors, a man I had not met before. He had been watching me as I came in, eyeing me as a butcher eyes a calf. I watched him cross the floor, a careful man stepping with ease through circumstances he knew and thought he understood. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, his skin was loose and pale, he looked as though he had not slept for nights. Perhaps he had not. The policewoman told him who I was.

  He was sympathetic, said he knew all about my daughter’s case, that they were still doing all in their power to track down her killer or killers. I felt like telling him they were wasting their time, that Naomi’s killer was beyond their reach, had been beyond their reach for over one hundred years. And yet I still could not bring myself to believe that Liddley had been responsible for Naomi’s or any other recent death. He was a catalyst, that was all.

  ‘What brought you here today?’ the policeman asked. Gently, but firmly, as though suspicion might be heaped on my head for the simple act of being there.

  ‘I knew him,’ I said. ‘Lewis. I met him a couple of times when he came to my house taking photographs.’

  ‘Is that so? Didn’t you want to avoid them? The press, I mean.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But Lewis got past our barriers, made himself useful. I got to know him.’

  The policeman seemed to think about this. Then he said, ‘Your daughter was found near here, wasn’t she?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘I never want to.’

  ‘And yet you’re here today, snooping about the scene of Lewis’s murder.’

  ‘Not snooping,’ I said, a little heatedly. ‘I don’t snoop.’ My embarrassment had left me warm. No one had offered me a cup of tea. I felt like a suspect, a murderer caught revisiting the scene of his crime.