Murder

by Sarah Pinborough

  … the bodies of three children having been found in the Thames, and as in each case they were tied up in a peculiar manner – string similarly knotted having been found in the possession of the prisoners – the Treasury will charge the accused with causing the death in each instance.

  In the case of the child Jones the police evidence is to the effect that it was for some time placed out to nurse, and well cared for. Then, in consequence of an advertisement the mother met Ada Williams and arranged for the child’s adoption. Ada Williams gave an address at Hammersmith, and there the child was delivered up and £3 of the premium paid. The balance was to be paid later and an arrangement was made for the mother to see the child during the following week. On her calling at the house she learned that the accused had only engaged the room for a few hours …

  … On September 27th the body of the child was found in the river. Death was due to suffocation, and the head bore marks of violence.

  … The woman, in a letter addressed to the police, admitted having carried on a system of baby-farming, and explained that the children which she had received she caused to be readopted at a less premium. The accused were remanded.

  53

  London. December, 1899

  Dr Bond

  ‘This man was James’ tutor?’ Henry Moore said, as he studied the newspaper articles I had spread over my desk. Despite my aversion for company, I had called on him. I felt I had to. In many ways, this felt like the old days, the two of us poring over information, but in truth, the old days were long gone. Moore had retired from the Metropolitan Police the previous month to move to the railways and I had retired from my position as surgeon at Westminster a week before. Nothing was like the old days, least of all me. But I needed to know the truth of it, and Moore was the only man who could find out more for me beyond the tittle-tattle of reporters.

  I had seen the first article only by accident, while I was in the cellar in a laudanum haze and using the paper to wrap a torso, just like the first one in Whitehall had been. I remembered how appalled I had been when it had been discovered, and I could not help but wonder now if my horror at the time was perhaps a subconscious knowledge that I would myself come to be such a monster; was it that which had given me that terrible dread? It was hard to tell. It was all such a long time ago. A lifetime ago.

  As my bloodied hands had folded the paper around the meaty flesh in the dim glow of lamplight, the name had snagged my attention. The two words – Chard Williams – hooked in my mind, even through the drug-induced haze, and I had frozen momentarily, then peeled the damp paper carefully away and read it with my heart knocking grotesquely in my chest.

  Since then I had devoured the papers for news of the case. It could not be true, I told myself; it must be a mistake. I should ignore it. But as always, my curious mind was ever my downfall, and despite the awfulness of my cellar, I sent a message to Moore, asking him to find out what he could for me.

  ‘Are they guilty?’ I asked. My mouth was dry, but I did not try to hide my fear: as far as Moore – or anyone else – knew, I was concerned only for Juliana and her poor dead son.

  ‘Definitely,’ Moore said. ‘The strange knots have given them away. They found the same knots in Ada Chard Williams’ house as on the bodies. They moved from Barnes in October, not long after the first two babies were pulled out of the river there. Baby-farming was her business, but rather than selling the babies on to wealthy couples as she promised, she often just took the money from their natural mothers and then killed them and put them in the river. Like that Reading devil did.’ He paused, then said quietly, ‘Damned if I know how many victims she really had.’

  The world spun beneath me. I needed laudanum. I need opium. I needed an escape from myself as the true horror sank in.

  ‘Will you write and tell Juliana?’ Moore asked, steady as ever.

  For a moment I loathed him for his normality.

  ‘I am not sure,’ I said after a moment. ‘She would want to know, but I fear it might not be good for her. She would blame herself for anything young James might have witnessed there, and for bringing them into her home – although I doubt very much he was exposed to anything.’

  Dead girls in the river. That was what James had said to me when the nightmares woke him night after night. Dead girls in the river. My hands trembled and I balled them into fists at my sides to hide the shaking.

  ‘I think she should know,’ Moore said. ‘Perhaps you could write to her husband?’

  ‘Perhaps I shall,’ I said, trying to sound normal. The world shimmered, its edges too hard and bright. I had dragged Moore over to my house but now I just wanted him gone.

  ‘Thank you for finding out for me,’ I said, walking over to the study door, ‘especially when you are so busy with your new line of work occupying you now.’

  He followed me out and we headed downstairs. As he gripped my shoulder and told me to enjoy my retirement, I thought of the bloody scene beneath our feet, not yet cleaned out and scoured. I remembered Andrews’ face when I turned to see him in that desolate street, and later, once my consciousness had returned after our fight, the lolling of his head and tongue as I staggered out into his garden to find him and fight him once more, instead finding him dead already and hearing the terrible slow creak of the rope tied around the branch …

  If Moore knew any of that he would probably strangle me with his bare hands himself, Upir or no Upir. I doubted the beast would hold any sway over a man like Henry Moore, always steadfast, always grounded in reality. For a moment I was tempted to tell him everything and have done with it once and for all, but my lips and tongue would not comply and instead I bade him a warm farewell and accepted his invitation to join him for dinner very soon.

  It was only when the door had closed behind him that I let the shudder that had been building run through me. I could barely move. My legs felt ready to collapse under me, overwhelmed as I was with the terrible weight of my guilt. What had I done? Oh dear Lord, what had I done?

  The pieces fell into place in my mind. James had not changed until he started going to Chard Williams’ house for his lessons. Until then, he had simply been a quiet, sickly child with whom I could not bond because of my aversion to his father – no, I must be honest, with myself at least; my guilt over his father.

  He had grown quieter after that, and he had started playing constantly with knots – I vividly recalled him showing me the fisherman’s knot that he must have learned there. And that Christmas day he had barely spoken a word, just played with the rope instead. What had his young mind been trying to make sense of? Babies who had been there and then vanished? Or worse yet: had he seen Ada Chard Williams at her ‘work’?

  I remembered their concern when James fell ill and then became sicker at my hand. They had wanted to speak to him – they had been so insistent. What had they wanted? To say something? To see what he knew? Or perhaps they had intended to hasten his end themselves, to prevent him from accusing them of anything should he recover. James had been a quiet, docile boy, the very sort of child who always saw something or heard something he should not. So what had happened in that house to disturb him so?

  My legs gave way and I sank to the ground, my back pressing into the door behind me as if I could somehow grind the Upir to extinction. I wanted to die where I sat, sobbing into my hands, a broken fool. I was a monster. A murderer.

  I had been blinded by my own madness. I had disliked poor little James from the moment he had struggled into this world – but how could this sickly child who had nearly killed his mother during his birth and who looked like his father have brought such insanity into my life? I had wished he had never existed for he was a reminder of a past I longed to forget and that had coloured everything in my relationship with him.

  The scales had fallen from my eyes and I could no longer hide from the horror of the truth. James had loved me in his quiet way, and I had pushed him away. Then when he was afraid, it was me he had turned to – he had been
trying to tell me about the Chard Williams. I saw something, he had said when I woke him from his nightmares, but I had shut him up, allowing my own guilt to distort the truth. How could I possibly think James could ever be a threat to me? How could I think he might have a part of my own monster inside him? Of course he did not; he was just a child. A terrified child, and the son of the woman I loved.

  And I had murdered him.

  I had given him a slow, painful death that had left him screaming for his mother. This little boy had only wanted my help, for his Uncle Thomas to listen: the uncle he loved, although I did not deserve it.

  For the first time since the Upir had claimed me, I saw myself for what I really was: a cold killer. Damned. For all my arrogance in casting judgement on those I had murdered, chopped up and fed to the river, none had deserved to die – and if they had, it should have been by the hangman’s noose, not by my hand.

  I hauled myself to my feet and stared into the mirror on the wall. I did not recognise the haggard man who looked back at me. I did not know who lived behind the familiar eyes; all I saw was a child-murderer. A madman. A monster. The priest had said the Upir would drive the host mad, but I had been too full of my own self-importance to pay attention. I should have thrown myself into the river as soon as I left Kosminski at Leavesden, while it was still weak.

  Now I was too late; it would allow me no such end. My shoulders ached with the weight of it, and always there was the small black space at the edge of my vision where I could almost see it but not quite.

  I needed brandy. I needed laudanum. I needed opium. I needed to forget. For all the women I had killed, it would be James who would haunt my waking hours for the rest of my life. I had murdered him, the child who had been the closest to a son that I would ever have. I had broken Juliana’s heart and I had destroyed myself.

  *

  The next morning, my clothes dishevelled after a night in the seediest den I could find, I took a train to Leavesden. My feverish opium dreams had been full of the child’s pale face and accusatory eyes, and in my head I could still hear his weak screams of agony. When I finally staggered out onto the street I saw him everywhere, on every busy corner, a small blond boy staring at me as I passed. He was not real. He was dead. I knew that in my heart, for it was I who had killed him, but still I shuddered and gasped at each sighting until I knew I could not go on this way. I had to give it back. I had to go to Leavesden and persuade Kosminski that this was the only way.

  They would not let me in.

  Even if I had appeared sane, rational and well-dressed rather than over-excited, filthy and stinking, it was obvious the polite refusal would have been the same. Aaron Kosminski was having no visitors at present, nor for the foreseeable future. Visitors were not good for his emotional state. I wondered as I stood and begged in vain what the attendants made of my emotional state; even through my haze of fear and guilt I could see their pity and concern.

  In the end, I had no choice but to return to the grime and stench of London. Worse, I could feel the fever coming upon me, as if the shock of the previous day’s revelations was making the Upir excitable and hungry.

  I would kill a woman that night, and this time I would not study her for her crimes. What did it matter any more? Behind my eyes, the blood was already endless.

  All the way back to London, James sat, silent and still, on the seat opposite me. I did not look at him.

  54

  The Morning Post

  Monday, February 19, 1900

  At the Central Criminal Court on Saturday sentence of death was passed on Ada Chard Williams, twenty-four, for the murder of a nurse child, whose body was found in the Thames off Battersea. William Chard Williams, the woman’s husband, was acquitted.

  The Times

  Wednesday, March 7, 1900

  EXECUTION AT NEWGATE – Ada Chard Williams, 24 years of age, who was convicted at the Central Criminal Court of the wilful murder of Selina Ellen Jones, a child which had been placed in her care, was executed at Newgate yesterday morning. There were present at the execution Lieutenant-Colonel Milman, Governor of Newgate and Holloway Prisons, Mr. Under-Sheriff Metcalfe, representing the High Sheriff of the county of London, Dr. Scott, medical officer of Newgate and Holloway, and other officials. Billington was the executioner. An inquest was subsequently held in the Sessions-house, Old Bailey, before Mr. Langham, Coroner for the City. Lieutenant-Colonel Milman gave evidence, stating that the execution was carried out satisfactorily. Death was instantaneous. The prisoner made no confession. The jury returned the usual verdict.

  55

  London. August, 1900

  Dr Bond

  I lived most of the year in the dark, succumbing to that I could no longer even pretend to fight. The night had become my world; I could no longer bear the daylight and those who carried on their normal lives within it too. It was too loud and noisy, and in my rare moments of sober clarity it was too painful a reminder of everything I had lost.

  I employed a woman – no Mrs Parks, but an earthy creature who needed the money – to fetch whatever shopping I required from that alien world outside. Visitors, mainly ex-colleagues from Westminster Hospital, still attempted to call on me, but I rarely answered the door, and when I did I pleaded back pain and illness to get rid of them quickly. Even with the hospital so close by the stream eventually became a trickle as the world moved on without me. Only Henry Moore remained persistent in his attempts to secure my company, and on the rare occasions I agreed to meet him I could see that he was concerned for me. No matter how hard I tried to achieve the veneer of the honest and respectable man I had once been, it was always just out of my reach. I was a poor imitation of myself, and Henry Moore was too clever a man not to notice it. Our dinners were short and I escaped them gladly. In some way I loathed Moore now, not for what he had done but for who he was: he was everything I so desperately wished to be: sane, clear of conscience and invigorated by life.

  I took too much opium and laudanum, and drank anything else that might drown the last tiny shred of decency inside me that screamed and railed at the horror of my existence and haunted me with visions of James. I was no longer afraid of the dark spot in the corner of my eye. I had accepted that the Upir and I had become one being, but every sighting of the dead boy filled me with awful dread. I would find him in the most unusual places, on the landing as I turned the stairs, or his shoes and legs visible in my closet as if he was hiding behind my clothes, and a thousand other places, and always when I least expected it. I did not grow used to the sight, even though I knew the boy could not be real.

  I rarely slept, not even when I was exhausted and the drugs had taken their toll on my body. Perhaps by accepting the Upir I had relinquished that small mercy and hell had come for me early? There were times when I wondered if I was indeed dead, for my craven existence, so flooded with blood, was hell indeed; I could scarcely imagine a worse one. The days and weeks blurred into one and the only true gauge I had of time was the changing weather and the longer days as I waited for night to fall, when I could hide in the darkness.

  I had become depraved. There was no other word for it. I could no longer deny that the Upir’s lusts had become my own. Where once my deeds had reviled me, now I was beginning to revel in the moment of the kill and the sweet delights that came after it. I did not limit myself to Whitechapel in my search for my prey; I would not risk the notoriety Hebbert had drawn, working only in those unhallowed streets. The Upir most enjoyed the homeless and the wandering immigrants from the east of Europe, relishing in the taste of their soft organs as I squeezed them into my mouth.

  Not all my victims went into the river. The woman Hebbert had killed was no longer lonely in her grave at the bottom of my garden. I knew George was becoming suspicious of my activities, having witnessed the feral energy I exuded after such a kill, and with each trip he demanded more money from me. I was beginning to think I would have to deal with George himself before long. Whatever fear I might have had of
him was long gone; now it was he who looked at me warily, his survival instincts honed from a life in the alleys of the East End.

  Sometimes I wondered if I now killed as much for myself as for the devil on my back. It was so very hard to tell when my hands were tight around a throat and I could feel the surge of excitement running through me. The beast’s transferred energy was a drug in itself.

  It was perhaps good that I no longer slept, for the cellar always needed scrubbing these days. My fingers were raw from the bleach and carbolic soap.

  If only I could clean my soul so easily.

  56

  London. November, 1900

  Henry Moore

  In many ways, he blamed himself. He had thrown himself into his new job with such vigour that there had been little time for checking up on his old friend, even though he knew Thomas Bond had not been himself for some time.

  Tonight the doctor’s appearance and behaviour had shocked him. His words were slurred and his clothing and hair unkempt, to the point that even in the more basic restaurants that Moore preferred, the waiter’s displeasure had been obvious. Bond had barely touched his food, but he drank too much wine and brandy before complaining of illness and stumbling outside.

  Moore had followed and helped him into a hansom, then watched as it disappeared towards Westminster before lighting a cigarette and strolling, still sober, towards his own part of the city. He was not a man predisposed to fanciful thoughts, but there was an air of death around Bond, almost seeping from his very pores. Moore thought he might even go so far as to say there was a sense of both mania and resignation to his coming end – for his end was coming, he had no doubt about that. Thomas had grown almost skeletally thin and he stooped badly, perhaps to relieve the incessant back pain which had plagued him this last year or so. He had a permanent phlegmy cough that he appeared not even to notice. He was a far cry from the man who had written his report on Jack the Ripper a decade before, the man he had chosen as his police surgeon whenever possible. That man had been serious, sober and sharp of mind. This ‘new’ Thomas Bond was anything but.