The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “There’s something else—” begins Charles tentatively. He’s been wondering whether to mention this—in fact, ever since he saw the butchery done to Lizzie’s ravaged body he’s wanted to talk to Maddox, get advice from Maddox, elicit from Maddox some part of the unparalleled insight he has into man’s inhumanity to man. But in the two days since the murder, the Maddox he needs has been all but gone. Now, at last, the great Regency thief taker has returned, and the flailing madman who took his place is stilled.

  “What is it, my boy?”

  “Do you remember the police coming here yesterday?”

  Maddox frowns. “No—or at least—”

  He stops, and the old terror creeps back into his face—the terror of knowing how much he no longer knows—of how black the blank spaces are becoming, and Charles realises his mistake.

  “No matter, Uncle,” he says quickly. “It was just—”

  “—but I should know—if there are officers of the law in this house—my house—then I should be the one to—”

  Maddox’s voice is catching that slightly hectic edge that Charles knows he must at all costs avoid. Not just for his uncle’s sake, but his own.

  “Really—it is no matter, Uncle, I doubt they even crossed the threshold. They were merely enquiring as to my whereabouts the previous evening.”

  Maddox looks sceptical. “And why should they wish to know that?”

  “Because I discovered a body yesterday. A girl I know—a whore—was murdered.”

  “There is nothing so very extraordinary about that, I fear.”

  “The point is not that she was killed, but when she was killed, and how.”

  “Go on.” Maddox’s voice is clear again and his gaze steady; his mind has teetered but swung back from the shadow.

  “I saw her a few days before. The only reason I found the body at all was because I’d arranged to meet her there. She was going to tell me something—something about Sir Julius Cremorne. I don’t know what, but I’m guessing it had something to do with what I found out at the Argyll Rooms. Because despite Cremorne’s public reputation for high principles and a happy family life, he’s been regularly debauching a whole host of young women.”

  “That, I am afraid to say, is not so very unusual either. At least among those of Sir Julius’s class. But I admit it is hardly something a man in his position would want bruited abroad.”

  “But this girl wasn’t just killed. She was slaughtered. With the same skill, and no doubt the same knife, that opened William Boscawen’s throat, and was subsequently used on me.”

  The details are soon given: first Boscawen, then Lizzie. The scene in Agnes Court plays again, reel by reel, through Charles’s head. For some reason he finds himself recalling more than he remembers seeing at the time, but it’s not so much the horror of it now, as the utter banality. The clothes folded neatly on the chair. The boots placed by the fireside. Maddox is all silent calculating attention as he talks, his eyes half closed, nodding now and then. When Charles has finished, Maddox does not respond straightaway. Instead, he takes a deep breath and stares into the fire. After a few moments—just when Charles fears he may have lost him once again—he starts to speak.

  “Did you find your finger?”

  The question is so ludicrous—so darkly black-comical—that Charles doesn’t know how to react. Is this his uncle’s infamous wit? Or is it just another example of his inability, so frequent now, to tell the acceptable from the offensive?

  “Well, I—” he stammers.

  “It is a perfectly serious question, Charles. Did you find your finger?”

  Charles gapes at him. “I can hardly say I looked for it!”

  “But it was nowhere obvious—nowhere about you when you came to your senses?”

  “No—but the rats may well have had it by then. You know what it’s like on the City Road.”

  “All the same,” says Maddox. “And you are sure that some of this unfortunate girl’s internal organs were missing?”

  “Most of them were lying in pieces about the room, but I was told later at the police-station that the heart was definitely absent.”

  “And the breasts were also removed?”

  “Both of them. One was lying by her feet, along with what appeared to be her liver. Though there was so much disembowelled flesh I cannot really be sure.”

  Maddox nods. “You perceive the pattern?”

  A pause, then, “No, Uncle, I cannot say that I do.”

  Maddox sits back. “Men such as this—men attracted to the point of compulsion by violence so extreme it violates every natural instinct or moral constraint—they are very rare, but they do, in my limited experience, exhibit very similar characteristics, both as a sub-species and as individuals. By the latter I mean that each murderer will have his own habits, and his own preferences, whether it be weapon, setting, victim, or some other little ritual or attribute which may elude the eye of even the most experienced of detectives. As to the former, I have encountered more than one instance—like the present one, indeed—where the perpetrator has felt himself compelled to take something from the victim, not so much a memento mori as a memento delectare—a way of reviving the illicit excitement generated by the crime long after the actual deed has passed. You will recall, I am sure, our conversation about the Ratcliffe Highway killings, and the watch that was taken from the body of the landlord of the King’s Arms—an obvious instance of an otherwise meaningless piece of pilfering that can only be explained by the murderer’s need to retain a material keepsake. But I am sure that you, as a scientist, are at least as well-qualified as I could be to venture an opinion on this subject.”

  Charles, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in no state to offer an opinion on anything of the kind—if Maddox is correct, even the pieces of the puzzle he thought resolved will need to be put back together in a new configuration. He’s been assuming all along that Tulkinghorn hired some Cockney bludger to do his dirty work, but is it possible that Cremorne committed these crimes himself? He could have found out from Tulkinghorn where Boscawen was lodging, and he could just as easily have followed Lizzie home and slipped into the courtyard unseen in the small hours. And he could—equally easily—have followed Charles to the Graham Arms. But was that really the voice he’d heard when he was lying face-down in the dirt? It didn’t sound like a man of Cremorne’s age—or one of his rank, for that matter—and Charles is certain there was no stammer. But his recollection is fragmentary at best, and the voice never much more than a whisper.

  Maddox, meanwhile, has settled more comfortably in his chair. “Perhaps I might join you in a brandy, Charles?”

  “Of course, Uncle,” says Charles, getting quickly to his feet. He pours the brandies and when he hands Maddox the glass his grasp is firm.

  “I agree,” Maddox resumes, “that it is a reasonable hypothesis to presume, until contradictory facts intervene, that these killings were each the work of the same perpetrator. Our next task, therefore, is to ascertain what these crimes tell us about the man who committed them. There is one fact, of course, that obtrudes immediately on our notice.”

  He looks at Charles, who takes a sip of brandy in an endeavour to buy time. Maddox smiles, and continues, placing his fingertips carefully together.

  “Perhaps fact was too strong, since the available evidence is not extensive enough for a robust deduction, but I posit that the individual with whom we are dealing is a swift, skilled, and ruthless killer. Of men. He is, by contrast, a slow, cruel, and utterly depraved murderer of women. A man who takes his time to inflict the utmost pain and degradation on his female victims, and who clearly derives an intense and degenerate gratification from so doing. That, to me, suggests a man who has—to say the least—an unhealthy relationship with the fairer sex. A relationship founded on the desire to dominate, and humiliate. Further investigation of Sir Julius’s habits and history might, therefore, be instructive, especially as—”

  He stops, and frowns, then waves a hand qu
ickly back and forth in front of his face, as if swatting a fly. But it is winter, and there are no flies. Charles sits forward and puts a hand on his arm. “Uncle? Is everything all right?”

  “I was about to say something, but it is eluding me.” He raises his hand again and covers his face, as if the light is dazzling him. “What was that? Who’s there—I know there’s someone—show yourself—damn you—show yourself—”

  He reaches blindly for his cane and makes to seize it, but Charles forestalls him, then moves quickly to the bell and rings for Stornaway. By the time he arrives, Charles can barely keep Maddox in his chair. The old man is kicking and biting and bawling profanities so disgusting Charles can hardly believe he ever knew such words, far less used them. He’s almost embarrassed to have Stornaway hear all this, but apparently with no reason: He’s either heard it all before, or can dissociate it entirely from the man he has served and revered for over half a century. It’s a lesson, of a kind, and despite being in no fit state to fend off the vehemence of his uncle’s blows, Charles does what he can to help, and they finally manage to bring Maddox back to some sort of calm. Stornaway silently motions Charles away and kneels down in front of his old master.

  “There now—is that better for ye? Would ye like me to bring ye anythin’? Some water perhaps?”

  Maddox eyes him with a leering look, then nods and slips his gaze away. Stornaway looks up at Charles. “I’ve noticed he’s allus worse as the day draws on. But I think we’ll be a’right now, Mr Charles, if ye have other things to do.”

  It’s the gentlest, most courteous dismissal you could ever devise, but it’s a dismissal all the same. Charles nods and is turning to go when Stornaway calls to him.

  “Mr Charles, ye’ve dropped some’at here.”

  “I don’t think so, Abel.”

  Stornaway bends down behind Maddox’s chair and hands Charles a slip of twisted paper. It’s in his uncle’s handwriting. Not, alas, the confident flowing hand of his maturity, but the weak looping scrawl that’s a sad gauge of Maddox’s deteriorating grasp—both of his pen and of his mind. This scrap certainly seems to have been written from a clouded place: As far as Charles can see it’s nothing more than a string of random numbers and letters.

  “Do you know what this means, Abel, if it means anything?”

  Stornaway takes the paper and looks at it, then nods. “Aye, it does. It’s a reference to one of the newspapers in those boxes downstairs. He devised a system a his own for organisin’ ’em. He’d have me file anythin’ as might prove to be useful. And many’s a time it was.” He sighs. “There’s a pile down there I never got round to doin’. Don’t suppose I ever shall now.”

  “Can you find it for me—this newspaper?”

  “I’ll do me best, Mr Charles, but it looks to me that there’s some’at missin’ here. There should be seven figures, not six. But I’ll go see if Billy’s back and can sit with the boss, and then I can get to it right-away.”

  Narrowing the reference down to one of the boxes in the office proves to be fairly straightforward; working out what, in all the solid stack of newsprint it contains, Maddox wanted Charles to see, is quite another. Stornaway can give him no further guidance, beyond saying that the papers have not been logged in chronological order, but according to the nature of the crime as Maddox defined it. Charles is left with the prospect of a dreary evening that may, in the end, lead him nowhere. Nonetheless he has the fire lit in the room, and asks Billy to bring up a decanter of wine and his dinner, when it’s ready. Then he brings down a more comfortable chair from the drawing-room and settles himself by the oil-lamp to read.

  As he makes his way through the box, page by page, he finds he is confronting the painful reality of his uncle’s slow and harrowing descent into the dark. The sheets are covered with annotations in black ink, but as with his uncle’s handwriting, so with his subject matter: There is a terrible distance between the confident magisterial comments that mark the older newspapers, and the impenetrable scratchings on the more recent ones. In consequence it takes longer than it should to decipher exactly what crimes this box records, but when he does, Charles’s heart starts to beat a little faster and he grips the page he’s holding until the elderly paper crackles in his hands.

  The crime referred to hereunder is archetypical of that committed by the ‘sequential killer’, by which I mean it exhibits a gratuitous brutality, allied with an extreme, not to say excessive, ceremoniousness in the way the corpse has been performed upon, plundered, and positioned.

  NB: This man will kill again, and has very likely killed before: Investigate the possibility of earlier instances.

  The date at the head of the page is August 1817—far too early to have any bearing to the Cremorne case, but it’s the theory, the thinking, that has Charles turning up the lamp and emptying the box onto the floor. He’s sure now that this is what his uncle was trying to tell him—that a crime so elaborate as the murder of Lizzie Miller cannot possibly be a single unique act. That it must, in fact, have been preceded by other similar outrages—killings that display some of the same characteristics, if not the same degree of premeditated cruelty. Now he knows what he’s looking for, everything suddenly accelerates. Within minutes he has the pile of print in two groups—those too old to be relevant, and those recent enough to be plausible. He rearranges the latter heap chronologically and works backwards in time—six months first, then ten, a year. And then he finds it. No more than a paragraph, at the bottom of a column titled ‘Accidents, Inquests, &c’. The story in question clearly sits under the third of the three categories, though a mere ‘&c’ hardly seems strong enough to contain it:

  Frightful Murder near St Giles

  A dreadful murder took place last Monday week, in the vicinity of Church Street, St Giles. The mutilated body of Mrs Abigail Cass was discovered shortly after midnight by a Police-constable of the St Giles sub-division. We are assured that the unfortunate lady was of unblemished character, and appears to have been the victim of a spontaneous and frenzied attack by an assailant armed with a knife. It is not known what led to this awful crime, and every effort is being made to bring the killer to justice.

  Were it not for Maddox’s notes Charles might never have noticed it—there’s nothing, after all, so very unusual about this report, which resembles a dozen others appearing in the London press every day. Though there is perhaps a coded message here you would not habitually find—the writer is clearly signalling that this was no common streetwalker, and words like mutilated are rare, even for the more sensational papers. It’s irritating not to have the name of the officer who found the body, but that’s an omission that can soon be remedied. But what was a respectable woman doing in that part of town in the first place, and what link can there possibly be between her and a whore like Lizzie? And what can either of them have to do with the strange persecution practised by William Boscawen, and the violent death meted out to him by way of retribution?

  SEVENTEEN

  The Track

  CHARLES FIGHTS UP to consciousness, beating the dream back, forcing himself awake. It was the same dream, the same nightmare he’d had ever since he was a child. It was never monsters or ghouls that terrorised him—he’d never had that sort of imagination—this dream’s terror lies entirely in its mundanity. Just his small self, his five-year-old self, following his mother through the garden of the house where he was born. He could tell he was just a little boy because the plants and flowers were taller than he was. There were huge furry bumblebees and bright butterflies as big as his small fat hands. It was always the same, always identical. The sky as blue as cornflowers, the huge white clouds billowing like yeast, and up ahead of him, his mother, walking gaily, and holding his baby sister nestled in her arms. He could see her pretty print dress and the red hair coiling in ringlets down her back and lifting lightly in the warm breeze. And he wanted desperately to walk with her—to have her turn and see him—take him by the hand—but however hard he tried to catch h
er up, she was always just too far away—however loudly he cried out, she never acknowledged he was there, never took her eyes from her tiny sleeping daughter. He knew she could hear him, but she wouldn’t turn round, he called to her again and again but she never looked back, never turned her head—

  He sits up, sweating despite the cold. It’s still dark outside and the fire died hours ago. At his side Molly stirs, and whimpers, then falls silent once more. Charles slips from the bed softly, so as not to wake her, and goes to the window. The sky is clear and the moon full and bright, ringed with a thin greenish edge like the peel on a fruit. Ice is already starting to cloud the glass. He breathes on it and rubs it with the sleeve of his night-shirt. Anything—anything—to dispel the image of his mother’s face. Not the face he’d longed to see in his dream, the beautiful face of the mother of his infancy, but the face he last saw more than six years ago. The face he has tried ever since to forget.

  His wound is throbbing and he loosens the dressing, concerned still about infection. He goes to the wash-stand and slowly unwinds the lengths of cloth, clumsy and left-handed, before sinking his arm into the basin. The shock of the cold water against his skin is raw, but then soothing, and the pain ebbs gradually down. He’s still sitting there at five, when Molly wakes and helps him change the bandage before going downstairs to stoke the kitchen fire and clear the hearths. Charles is just about to leave an hour later when a note is delivered from Mr Chadwick. It’s in reply to Charles’s own letter of a few days before, enquiring whether his client can think of anyone who might have taken his daughter from the workhouse. The response is concise, and characteristically curt.

  As I have explained to you on at least three previous occasions, I have no information whatsoever as to the identity of the father of my daughter’s child. I can only surmise that this was the gentleman responsible for her removal, though he has forgone any right he might once have had to such an appellation through his own corrupt and vicious conduct.