We went upstairs to his study and I could feel the temperature drop as we climbed. Hebbert paused to turn up the lamps, though they spluttered and did little to shift the atmosphere of gloomy unease. The fire was set and I lit it while he poured us both drinks and we took our usual seats on either side of the fireplace. Of all the rooms in the house this felt the most lived-in. Books and papers were scattered across the desk, and a further pile sat on the table next to the cabinet of medical equipment.
‘No need to drink it all at once,’ I said, with a smile, as Hebbert nigh on drained his glass. ‘I cannot keep up.’
He sighed and stared down into his glass. ‘It is this or the laudanum. Sometimes both.’ With his humour gone I could see how the years had settled into his face. The skin around his eyes hung in dark circles and beneath his beard his cheeks were veined, and no longer as plump as they had been.
‘What plagues you?’ I asked. ‘Is it Juliana? Are you worried about her? She seems very well to me.’
He shook his head and something darted in the corner of my eye and the weight on my back almost pushed me forward in my chair. I fought the urge to twist round suddenly in the hope of grasping it and tearing it from me; I knew that would not work. Instead I gritted my teeth and reminded myself it was simply an infection, nothing more – certainly nothing that would drive me mad with its presence. But sitting here in the gloom with Charles Hebbert, that was somehow harder to believe, and it was my turn to take a long drink of my brandy.
‘No, it is not Juliana,’ he said, wearily. ‘She is blooming after her loss at last. I think we can thank Mr Kane for that.’
His words were not meant as darts, but they stung all the same, for it was I who had looked after and loved Juliana for all these years, not the handsome American.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, the reflected light of the fire dancing in the dullness of his eyes, ‘when I suffered those terrible dreams?’ His voice was low, the natural energy normally present vanished. ‘So unlike me. So vivid.’
I nodded; we had sat in this very room when he had spoken of them before. I had been gripped by my insomnia and sense of dread and he had appeared to me everything stable in the world. I had tried to reassure him they were nothing then; now, I had begun to suspect differently. Now, the cause of those dreadful dreams sat opposite him, just out of sight, clinging to my back.
‘I have not felt right since your illness,’ he said. ‘The dreams have returned.’ He stared into the fire. ‘There is such wickedness in them, Thomas, such terrible deeds. I do not understand – they are so strong, so powerful, that the fear they cause in me lingers throughout the days. It is like it was back then again. Sometimes I feel as if I exist in a cloud of claustrophobic darkness. I am not even sure of my own mind some of the time – I find myself thinking things that cannot possibly be. Only the laudanum calms me.’
‘I have taken that path to ease my own anxiety at times,’ I admitted. ‘There is nothing wrong in it—’
‘I just wish I were not afraid,’ he said. ‘Or that I knew what it was that terrifies me so.’
A wave of sympathy for my friend rushed through me and once again I wished that Harrington had died in Poland, for then we would all have been freed of this terrible curse. I did not blame myself for Charles’ predicament – I did not even blame Harrington, he too was a victim, after all – but I still felt some strange guilt at Charles’ suffering. For an overwhelming moment I wanted to tell him everything, to pour out the secret life I had lived in that dark year that followed the summer of Jack, to tell him my tales of river demons and possession, of death and darkness …
I did not of course. How could I? He would not have believed me. I had not believed the priest, after all, even though I had been suffering in the wake of the beast. I could never tell my story, not without appearing mad or admitting to what others would see as murder.
‘Would you like another brandy?’ I asked instead, the concerned friend, the steady influence. I was as I always appeared to the world.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Yes please.’ I left him staring at the fire as I took his glass and went to his desk to re-fill it. The room was gloomy and in an effort to raise my friend’s spirits slightly – and in all honesty, my own – I turned the gas lamp above the glass cabinet up – and it was then that my eyes fell on the contents of the cabinet. On the top shelf, tucked behind various bottles, was an old mortar, a large, heavy vessel. After glancing at Hebbert to check he was still pre-occupied, I ducked slightly to peer behind it. A rack of old pestles rested against the wooden back, with numbers painted on them to denote their size. I looked at the middle. The number six was missing.
The weight on my back was suddenly forgotten as my head started swimming. Elizabeth Camp had been brutally beaten to death with a pestle marked with a six or a nine. It had been thrown onto the track after the terrible deed had been committed.
As I fought to keep my breath steady I took a sip of my brandy. I recalled my own joke to the police at the time, that I used that line to visit Hebbert’s daughter but that the pestle was not mine. It had not even occurred to me, not for one moment, that Charles Hebbert also had frequent cause to travel that way.
‘I dread sleeping,’ Charles said softly, and with my heart racing in my chest, I turned to look his way, every nerve in my face straining to hold back any expression of horror and feign calm normality. He was still staring into the fire, his face utter desolation. ‘I wish Mary were still alive.’
‘It will pass,’ I said, and my tone was steady. I had become so adept in disguising my own terrors that now it came almost naturally. ‘It did before, did it not?’
‘That is true.’ He looked up at me. ‘You are a good friend, Thomas. I know I sound like a madman, that this is so out of my usual nature. I pride myself on my affability.’
It was a strange phrase, I thought afterwards, when I had cajoled him into going to bed and finally left the house. To pride oneself on something made it sound forced. Had he dark fantasies in his mind that he controlled in his daily life? Surely all men had secrets, lustful or otherwise, that they hid from the rest of the world. But what were Charles Hebbert’s? And what could have driven him to beat poor Miss Camp to death on that train all those months before?
Trails of damp mist wrapped themselves around my ankles, deadening the sound of my boots on the pavement as I walked. In the chill air, my face burned. The sympathy I had felt for my friend still lingered, but the realisation that my suspicions might be correct were making me nauseous. If Charles had killed Elizabeth Camp then he was surely capable of other horrors. I moved from pool to pool of streetlight but I barely noticed, for my thoughts were darker than the night around me and no yellow gas glow could lighten them.
Whether he realised it or not, I now truly believed that Charles Hebbert had been Jack the Ripper. I wanted to believe that it was the presence of the Upir – the infection – that had brought the wickedness out in him, that he had not been entirely responsible for his actions. After all, the Ripper killings had stopped when Harrington had died, and it was only since I had become infected myself that Charles was reporting the return of his bad dreams. But the murder of Elizabeth Camp did not fit: she had been killed while the creature was locked up with Kosminski, miles away in Leavesden – so the question was, why? And why had it been such a vicious attack?
I would watch Charles Hebbert carefully – although what I would do if I discovered he was a murderer, I did not yet know. But I had a moral responsibility to follow my suspicions. I was no monster, and I would not condone such action in others, even in the wake of the mayhem created by the thing on my back.
It would also, I thought as I finally let myself into my own dark and empty home, provide a distraction from my own predicament.
*
Over the next two weeks I forced myself into Charles’ company wherever possible, arranging days out with Juliana and little James and turning up unannounced at his house. Under the guise
of returning the concern he had shown me while I was ill I asked about his melancholy and dreams; in truth, I was trying to force his hand. If the priest’s theory was right and the Upir drew out the wickedness in the city, then increased proximity to me should have the same effect on Hebbert that Harrington’s presence had had. Now that I was well again, I had been called into the police mortuaries on several occasions to undertake post mortems on men and women killed in apparently irrational fights, and I was now certain that these incidences were in part caused by the mayhem that spread out from the thing on my back. I distanced myself from responsibility, however: I could not bear any blame for I too was a victim, much the same as those who were unwitting carriers of typhus but did not themselves suffer: they could not be blamed for an outbreak should the disease be brought onto a battlefield.
My pursuit of Charles gave me emotional balance. I could do nothing about the effect the Upir might have on the city unless I left London, and that would have meant leaving Juliana, which I could not have borne – but if I could uncover Hebbert as a killer and prevent more deaths then I would be at least doing some good from this Purgatory in which I found myself.
I started following him whenever my own schedule allowed, and just as Kane had thought, he had been going to his club often and leaving late at night and much the worse for drink. Then one night I watched him come out of his club and take a hansom to Whitechapel. With me not far behind him, he weaved his way drunkenly through the louder streets, though with no apparent purpose. This happened again, and again, and although I made sure to keep my distance as I trailed behind him through those vice-ridden streets, I began to realise that I could probably have come face to face with him and he would not have seen me. Aside from his drunkenness there was something confused in his manner on these increasingly frequent late-night walks. He would stop at a street corner and look around him as if puzzled to find himself there, then pick a new direction and set off again until eventually some subconscious decision was made to find a hansom to take him home.
The nights grew bitter over those few weeks as winter gripped London. The stench of burning coal filled the air and smoke once again covered London in a gloomy smog where buildings loomed out of nowhere as you walked and footsteps were all you knew of the ghostly passers-by who flitted quickly in and out of sight around you. It became a city of isolation, and when the last streaks of daylight had faded, the East End alleyways, far away from the light and noise of the Commercial Road, exemplified London at her darkest, and it seemed to me that the Thames flowed like the Styx, dark and deadly, through the heart of hell.
With every visit to Whitechapel, Charles Hebbert stayed a little longer, and his feet strayed towards the run-down taverns and the crowded doorways where gin-soaked women, most far from the bloom of their youth, leered at the passing men, cat-calling the offer of their delights; they might have fondly hoped their manner was flirtatious, but to me it sounded like nothing so much as weary desperation. Each time Hebbert paused and glanced their way my heart would race and I would forget the bite of cold in my lungs, but he would eventually turn and leave, and in those moments, despite the death of Elizabeth Camp, I felt overwhelming sympathy for my friend and colleague. Was he fighting an urge as I did each time I cut into another poor dead dog? Did his mouth water slightly? He had no cellar in which to contain the horrors which consumed him; I did not know if he was even aware of them. At least I had knowledge to fight my demon, to fight to retain my humanity.
By now I was beginning once again to doubt my suspicions of Hebbert, even with the evidence of Elizabeth Camp’s murder – surely many medical men used the same set of pestles and mortars, after all? – and in truth, I was wearying of my nightly vigils. This night, when Hebbert had neither attended his club nor left his house, I was ready to leave the freezing shadows from where I had been watching and go home. I was not quite myself, having abstained from killing any more dogs for the last few days in the hope that the more I starved the parasite, the more Hebbert would feel its effects and be drawn out by them; then I would be able to capture him – before he committed a terrible deed, but after I had seen enough to convince myself once and for all of his guilt.
My skin burned slightly with the start of a fever, my lungs felt full of liquid and I had developed a racking cough. I needed my own warm bed. I was about to turn away when the front door opened and Hebbert emerged, wrapped in a dark coat. Even though his face was mostly hidden by his top hat, as he passed under the streetlamp I caught a glimpse of his expression and I could clearly see something had changed. On his previous outings he had looked almost confused; now he was focused. His eyes glared darkly ahead and he moved with dread purpose. As my heart raced, my tiredness vanished and after letting him get a little way ahead I fell into step and followed him as he strode to the main road to flag down a hansom.
He did not go to his club but got the driver to drop him on the Whitechapel Road, then he strolled along the street, turning this way and that until he had made his way into the maze of narrow backstreets. The light and noise that spilled from the pubs on most corners only emphasised the threatening darkness that surrounded them. I stayed behind Hebbert, doing my best to keep my tread soft, for I had to stay close to keep him in sight through the rank fog that sank between the buildings and consumed even the cobbles beneath my feet.
After ten minutes or so he went into a public house from which music and raucous laughter spilled out onto the pavement, together with several of its clientele. I hung back for a few moments, watching through the window until I had seen him order a drink and take a place towards the far side of the room and then I went in myself. It was hot inside, a damp heat caused as much by the bodies that crowded the place as by the roaring fire, but I kept my cheap coat collar up and the battered bowler hat I had invested in tugged down almost over my eyebrows. I hunched my shoulders and changed my gait and made my way to the other side of the worn bar from where Hebbert stood. The publican brought me a small glass of beer and after I had paid him I settled back against the wall and watched.
I needn’t have worried about Charles spotting me. All his attention was focused on the drunken men and women who filled the room. Several of the women, sweaty and much the worse for wear, were attempting to ply their trade, trying to lure men into the alley outside in exchange for a few pennies; some were doing better than others. One woman, however, was rejected at every table with such disdain that I wondered if she was at the point in her career where she would have to give away her services to find a customer who would take her.
She was not young – even if time had been less cruel to her I would have placed her at thirty-five or more – but with the jaundiced yellow of her sagging skin and several teeth missing, she could as well have been fifty or more. Her attempts to make up her face were now smears down her cheeks, rendering her eerily clown-like as she weaved unsteadily between the men who so cruelly brushed her off.
‘Go ’ome, Annie,’ the barman called out. ‘You’re putting the customers off their beer!’
There was a round of laughter and though the woman shouted something back, it was lost in the noise. She pulled her shawl around her, covering up her drooping breasts that had been threatening to escape the loose ties of her bodice, and stumbled towards the door. Hebbert watched her like a hawk. After a moment or two he put down his glass and slipped through the side door.
Not wishing to draw too much attention to myself, I exited the way I had come in and moved quickly round the corner, where I hoped to see Hebbert not far ahead. My heart sank as I was presented with a crossroads. I ran forward and peered both left and right, but with the noise of the pub so close by their footsteps were lost to my straining ears. My heart raced. I had to find them. I was now sure that Hebbert meant the woman harm and I had to catch him in the act, but in time to still save her. What I would do after that I did not know, but at least this wretched Annie was so drunk no one would listen to her story; I doubted she would remember any
details clearly enough, even if someone did.
I took a deep breath and turned to the right on instinct, my feet carrying me quickly into the darkness. The road narrowed, the slum houses on either side almost leaning in to touch each other, and here and there a black mouth of an alleyway loomed up out of the fog. Where had she gone? And where was Hebbert? I paused and looked around me, feeling lost in an awful maze, and then I heard something: a drunken giggle, a few slurred words, coming from somewhere down a tiny road on my left.
I followed the noise, barely able to see a foot in front of me. The fog deadened the darkness and made it a solid entity. I could hear them ahead now, the shuffle of shoes and the rustle of clothing, and a gruff voice that sounded so unlike the urbane Charles Hebbert I had spent so many convivial evenings with. As I moved more quickly, certain I should have been upon them by now, I could not help but wonder if it was the parasite that was aiding my hearing, if I was somehow attuned to its supernatural powers now that I was so close to a potential murder.
She laughed again, and then I saw, only a few feet ahead of me, a glint of steel in the night and the cream of exposed flesh.
‘Charles!’ I called out, grabbing at the shroud of his coat. ‘Charles, no!’
But I was too late. Her laugh caught in a gasp and then there was a short shriek that was over before it started. As Charles Hebbert stared at me, bewildered, she slid down the wall behind him, her eyes open wide in shock, one hand flailing towards the cut on her neck.
‘Thomas?’ Hebbert said. ‘What are you doing here?’ He dropped the knife as if he had forgotten he was holding it and the intensity of his expression faded away, leaving only the face I knew – I thought I knew – so well: open, friendly, generous Charles Hebbert.
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