The Fiend in Human

by John MacLachlan Gray

  The cabman produces a greasy copy of Dodd’s. ‘I likes to keep up with the news. Shockin’ business on the hangman what starved his mother. Well done, Guv. Right fly.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ He accepts the compliment, although the piece was written by Fraser, a rival he holds in contempt. He recalls that the hangman was in fact a bootseller whose mother died of worms, that Fraser’s account contained more fiction than fact by a generous measure; yet such was the response, Dodd’s was required to print extra editions. He wonders, not for the first time, if there is any point in reporting actual events at all.

  The grinder’s spindle-legged, moth-eaten horse, hairs on end like porcupine quills, whisks its tail into his face as Whitty mounts the runner; the cabman flicks his whip with a practised movement of the wrist so that the abrupt forward motion flings the passenger rudely into his seat, even while closing the door. Bracing himself for the bone-rattling trip down Hampstead Road to shabby Tottenham Court Road to precious Oxford Street, the correspondent settles into a deepening apprehension and gloom.

  Clearly the cab has been out all night. One of its silk window-curtains has been torn from its fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. The velvet cushions, worn shiny by a thousand trousers and the pomaded hair of a thousand heads, are powdered with cigar-ashes. He notes a theatrical pass-check under his feet, and the dirty fingers of a white kid glove stuffed down the back of the seat.

  He leans back, closes his eyes and falls into a half-sleep, in defiance of the vehicle’s unpredictable lurching. In his half-dream he is speaking, or rather orating, to a restless throng at some sort of political rally. The phrases issuing from his mouth are in a foreign language and he is unable to discern his own text. Now it comes to him that he is standing not on a platform but on a gallows, in the courtyard of Newgate Prison. The air is swirling with pigeons. One of the birds flies straight at him from the slate roof opposite, striking him hard on the cheek …

  A particularly deep pot-hole jars the vehicle so that Whitty is nearly thrown from his seat, and now the sounds of wheels surround him like waves of the sea: the clatter of hansom wheels, the rattle of the brougham, the groan of broad cartwheels, the latter leaving behind the fragrance of green peas and country earth. He hears a babble of voices, excited, angry, pleading, a not-quite musical roar like the sound of a large marriage party, or a political gathering, or a livestock auction.

  He rubs his eyes and peers through the window as the grinder makes a right turn onto Regent Street and south to the city. Beyond the rattling omnibuses, saddle horses and drays are fine ladies in flounced skirts, sleek gentlemen in twice-about neck-cloths and black top hats, gliding up and down the walkway like moving columns, pausing at the superior shops and furniture galleries whose square-paned windows glint like spectacles in the morning sun.

  A mustard-coloured chariot with a trail of liveried servants stops in front of a chemist’s. The delighted shopkeeper dashes across the pavement to open the door with the sweaty enthusiasm of a man who has recently stepped back from the brink of financial ruin, his fall checked by the arrest of William Ryan, otherwise known as Chokee Bill, the Fiend in Human Form.

  It is impossible to overestimate how truly unbalanced London became during the Chokee Bill panic. Yet the cognizance that a murderer walked the streets, and the lurid nature of the murders themselves, would never have produced such an extremity were it not for their artful treatment in the sensational press, notably by Edmund Whitty of The Falcon – who, through a vivid, not to say lurid, reconstruction of the murders, the murdered and the murderer, stirred the London reader’s torpid imagination into imagining the violent death of a fallen woman as something notable, or even abnormal.

  In fact it was not until three women had been murdered while plying the trade, murdered with the same scarf and the same mutilations, that the Telegraph stooped even to a mention that the murders had anything in common. (And there have been two in as many months since: God only knows how many anonymous wretches died previously by those same hands.)

  Even at that, with the wilful myopia only editors achieve, only two of the four commonalities were deemed relevant: the fact that all three were women, and the fact that all three were whores. Hence, the Telegraph chose to present the murders, not as the work of a single fiend, but as though violent death and mutilation were a fate of all who choose that style of life, and that these three women together sound a dreadful message to women who would follow the path to ruin. As far as the Telegraph was concerned (as well as the Metropolitan Police), the identity of the murderer, whether one or several, was largely irrelevant.

  It became clear to the correspondent that, if these wretched women were to cause any notice whatsoever through the fog of reflex moralism, it would be necessary to shift public attention from the victim to the murderer. Further, until such time as the identity of the Fiend in Human Form was known, it would be necessary to invent one.

  Thus it came to pass.

  Lying in his bed with a serious case of morning sickness, and with a deadline looming over him like some dreadful bat, Whitty partook a medicament from his chemist, fell into a slumber … and through the opium haze, before his mind’s eye, slouched the inspiration, the man of the hour, the figure who would lift the murder of whores into the realm of the newsworthy: Chokee Bill, the Fiend in Human Form.

  In supplying a name for the murderer, Whitty had no sure estimation of the potential of a symbolic character to rivet the public imagination and focus it on a narrative; none the less, this soon became apparent. Within a matter of days, so entrenched and so vivid had the Fiend become in the public mind that, had any man claimed to have created Chokee Bill, he would have been made a laughing-stock.

  It was as though a resounding chord had been struck by the sound of the name itself, which Whitty borrowed from a half-remembered childhood rhyme:

  Up the river, over the hill

  Into the village is Chokee Bill

  With (something, something) and graves to fill …

  Perhaps the name served to reawaken some ancient, common memory, some long-forgotten, Gothic bogeyman. In any case, Chokee Bill permeated the city like a miasma, causing business to contract as though the plague were upon London.

  For the economic slump to follow, Whitty feels not a shred of remorse and more than a little of its opposite. The wave of public alarm – and the attention of the constabulary – would not have required the name Chokee Bill to effect, had the victims been shopkeepers, and not whores …

  Whitty peers through the curtains at the passing parade of expensive fabric, the magenta satins, the bottle-green velvets. By unfocusing somewhat and thereby altering his field of vision, he can discern the thin shapes of sneak thieves, beggars and sweepers, darting out of the crannies between buildings, scuttling sideways like crabs then retreating into the shadows.

  He observes a girl no older than six, in rags, crying in distress over what appears to have been a beating, a performance which she enacts on a daily basis. As always, he marks with heartfelt admiration her portrayal of hopeless despair, the theatrical sweep with which she gesticulates, clasping her little hands together and pressing them to her breast.

  A magenta dress with its side-whiskered escort swishes by the child without pause. Lacking the Fiend in Human Form to disconcert them, they have no reason to notice.

  2

  Fleet Street, west of Ludgate

  The cabman tosses Whitty’s coin into the air and catches it with an impudent wink, then, sensing the possibility of a fare in the middle distance, whips his foaming wreck of a horse and tools off, leaving the correspondent warily scanning the streetscape off Chancery Lane for suspicious parties, while identifying the beggars and performers who occupy customary tracts under the arches and porticoes, as though by inheritance.

  A solemn, sharp-featured young prostitute watches traffic from a second-floor window while tearing a newspaper into strips for curling-papers; behind her a
young man yawns and buttons his shirt. On the walkway beneath her a Hindoo, in a voluminous turban, orange caftan, worsted stockings and hobnailed boots, sings a foreign ditty while beating a tom-tom with stoic monotony.

  At the corner beside the tobacconist’s, an Italian organ-grinder, hirsute and sunburnt, churns out airs from I masnadieri, ‘The Old Hundredth’ and ‘Postman’s Knock’, cycled throughout the day like the chimes of a clock. Nearby, a coarse-featured woman, in a Scotch cap adorned by a thatch of rusty black feathers, dances the highland fling, while her partner, a shabby operator with one eye, produces a shrill howl from a set of etiolated bagpipes.

  Each of these parties is familiar to the correspondent, having from time to time served as paid eyes and ears supplying fragments of information, to be connected like scattered dots into a coherent picture, from hearsay to rumour to fact.

  Other spaces and terraces along Fleet Street are occupied, as always, by costermongers.

  The Irish fruit-seller with his cart, for which the loan (at two hundred per cent interest) has been nearly paid. On the street, such a thing approaches the acquisition of a building. Next to him the clothes-man, tall and skeletal beside racks of men’s and ladies’ apparel, freshly stolen from the clothes-lines of the better districts.

  In less-favoured locations stand less-favoured retailers, all wearing the same quiet expression of melancholy struggle – slowly starving to death, keeping out of the workhouse one more week in the last gasp of their independence. Their cries, none the less, are a confederacy of hearty optimism.

  Paaaaper! Any of the morning paaaapers!

  Strange news from Sussex!

  Fine pictures, show stunning!

  Will you buy!

  What d’you lack?

  The choice is yours!

  As though to provide a visual counterpart to the vocal din, the walls around these melodious hawkers are themselves a clutter of messages:

  Malt whisky from John Howse!

  Can you help me out?

  Rose Swingle is a drunken cunt!

  Suspended above the heads of the prospective buyers and sellers rushing in all directions are the signs of shops, scarcely nine feet above the ground, large enough to nearly touch one another in the middle of the street, each sign proclaiming a rare and precious commodity or service. Beneath one’s feet even the drain covers carry a message of some kind.

  Whitty confines his attention to the specific object he seeks, or dreads: specifically, any person who might conceivably deal in rats, or associate with people who deal in rats, or search for clubmen who have failed spectacularly in their efforts to profit in rats.

  Thus far, the coast is clear – thanks, perhaps, to the frock-coated Peeler standing patiently at the opposite corner. (Whitty reminds himself to write in favour of an increased police presence at the earliest opportunity.)

  Hallo. The correspondent’s survey pauses at the patch of street formerly occupied by Stump Conners, the armless musician and informant, able to play the violincello with his feet. In his stead (dead probably, Stumpy has not been looking well) now stands a man Whitty has never seen before: robust yet melancholy, fresh-coloured yet weary, with full whiskers and a broad sandy brow, wearing shiny corduroy trousers, a jacket whose seams have been strengthened with brass studs, a pair of stout hobnailed boots, and what was at one time a fine stovepipe hat but is now the colour and consistency of soot, careening at an odd angle to the left as though having suffered a chimney fire. In the hatband are inserted several sheets of paper; other papers fill the crook of his arm. Around his neck is the red handkerchief typically worn by costermongers.

  A standing patterer by trade, announced by the sandwich-board he carries (divided into compartments illustrating the merchandise on offer), and by the roar emanating from his mouth (among standing patterers it is a rule that the greater the bellow the better the chance of a sale). Not that it is possible to ascertain what the man is announcing, it being the way that only isolated words (Barbarous, Wicious and Full Particulars) can be discerned.

  A typical specimen, excepting that this particular individual appears to be directing his attentions solely in Whitty’s direction. As the correspondent steps off the kerb (slipping a ha’penny to the Indian crossing-sweeper to preserve his boots), even with his back turned he can sense those watery blue eyes watching him, while a stentorian voice breaks off from its barrage of syllables to recite, with perfect diction, an excerpt from a ballad:

  Hark! the solemn bell does summons

  The wretched murderer to his fate,

  Let us hope he does repent,

  His sins, before it is too late.

  See the hangman is approaching,

  No one present can him save,

  While his victims are in Heaven,

  Whitty fills a murderer’s grave.

  Hallo. The correspondent pauses; no doubt his mind is in a dreamlike state, as frequently happens when suffering from morning sickness; yet he thought he descried a familiar name.

  He shakes off this mild hallucination as he turns up the narrow court to Ingester Square, a nondescript patch of grass containing a forlorn plane tree, with a decrepit bench beneath for minimal shelter from the weather.

  Below the square, the byways wind down the embankment to a series of steps containing a warning – ‘Clothing Must Remain Decent’ – and thence to a number of open sewage drains, where boy mudlarks forage for objects to sell; where, to the left, through a mist like hothouse steam, one can see the half-destroyed hulk of Blackfriars Bridge, once the route for children on their way to visit their parents in Marshalsea, the debtors’ prison.

  His father’s investments did not lead him quite so far down as that institution – or perhaps one should say that they took him far beyond it. A solicitor by profession, Richard Whitty had attained a measure of craft sufficient to entangle his holdings in a devaluation dispute at the Chancery, a web of such intricacy that the matter is unlikely to be sorted out this century; which stratagem afforded ample time for a relocation in the New World – where, Whitty has no doubt, a substantial nest-egg awaited. When last Whitty heard from Mother (Father having ceased communication over another matter), they had settled in California, having joined a railroad syndicate. Next came a curt announcement from Father that his mother had died ‘of natural causes’.

  And, as mad Hamlet put it so well, the rest is silence.

  At the far side of Ingester Square sits a queer, dumpy, blank old building, like a warehouse that has been sat upon; which inconspicuousness confers an immense advantage, for the challenge of finding it allows irate readers plenty of time to cool down. The Falcon’s headquarters is further diminuated by the two churches adjacent, as well as by the proclaimed headquarters of two fine-sounding companies which have never been heard of except by their directors.

  He stops at a nondescript door in the corner of the squat building, marked with a single word: FALCON. Before entering he turns once more to scan the square, for he has an uneasy impression of being watched.

  In the churchyard, the man in the crooked hat deftly slips out of sight behind a monument, and remains motionless until Whitty has disappeared inside the building.

  3

  Sewell’s rooms, off Bruton Street

  Nestled in a suite of mahogany-panelled, second-floor rooms opposite Berkeley Square, following an English breakfast of kipper, kidney, toast and jam (it is well past noon), two young gentlemen settle into their coffee, cigarets and a bit of a read.

  Reginald Harewood, in ill humour, groans at something in the latest Dodd’s: ‘Oh dear. There’s another fellow gone.’

  Immersed in a volume of Browning, Walter Sewell absently stirs an unwholesome amount of sugar into his cup.

  Harewood lowers his newspaper with an expression of reproach. ‘You might at least muster sufficient interest to ask the poor chap’s name.’

  ‘Sorry. Who was it?’

  ‘It was Swan-Thackeray.’

  ‘Charlie? Oh dea
r. How did he die?’

  ‘Not dead, married.’

  ‘Married? Oh.’ Sewell shrugs. ‘Well, as St Paul put it, Better married than burn.’

  ‘No scripture, please, old boy. As I have said on numerous occasions, we received a lifetime’s worth at Chapel.’

  ‘Quite.’

  The two young men – one handsome, one not, one tall, one not, one whiskered, one not – have taken their meal courtesy of the less attractive but better financed of the two, born Walter Sewell, patronized by fellow Oxonians as ‘Roo’.

  Reginald Harewood – ‘Reggie’, as he is known by friends, teammates, competitors and a succession of willing young women – spoons a dollop of gooseberry jam onto an end of buttered toast. ‘Deuce of a thing, marriage. Don’t disagree with it in a general way, of course …’

  ‘Such arrangements seem to be the rule,’ comments Sewell, who decides to risk another biblical reference. ’Adam’s rib and all that. Even Noah’s animals went two by two.’

  ‘Poor examples. You’re leaving out of account the thrill of the chase. What would become of fox-hunting if it were always the same fox?’

  Sewell puts one hand to his cheek, where there should be whiskers were he able to grow them. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get you.’

  ‘The pursuit of the opposite gender. The unmentionable act. The fur of the fox. I say, old trout, how many euphemisms do you require?’

  ‘Oh. That. Oh, I see.’

  ‘Love is a drab business once it has lost its mystique.’

  ‘True.’ Sewell turns his teacup pensively in its saucer, as though the saucer is the dial of a clock and time is running out.

  Harewood lights a fresh cigaret and smiles at his unlovely, inexperienced friend: ‘There, there, my good fellow. We’ll make a clubman of you yet.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘No doubt about it. I vote we begin with a spot of brandy – though it’s rather early, I admit.’