The Vice Society

by James McCreet

  Sitting apart from the others on a wooden bench was Mr Aubrey Alsthom, a prematurely balding young man with the intense expression of the intellectual. In his long, slender fingers was a miniature wooden figure of indistinct features that he held up to the light and twirled for closer inspection. The approach of the strangers drew his attention and he looked at them coolly.

  ‘What have you made there, Aubrey?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘It is a figure of Plato, Doctor Norwood.’ The voice was but a cadence.

  ‘I think you need to give him another chin,’ offered Noah with a smile.

  ‘Do you think so? I did wonder about that. I may have to start again.’

  ‘Aubrey – these gentlemen have come from the city especially to see you. They would like to ask you about the Times.’

  ‘Is . . . is that not forbidden? I mean . . . I should not . . .’

  ‘Becalm yourself, Aubrey. Let us consider it a brief clinical experiment, then we will let you return to Plato.’

  A wooden bench was carried over by Benjamin and Mr Cullen, then all sat around Aubrey, whose eyes had begun to glisten either through trepidation or glee. There was a sense of commingled anticipation and fear among the four investigators. Mr Williamson had his notebook at the ready. At a nod from Doctor Norwood, Noah began:

  ‘Aubrey, I would like you to search for . . . “Freepass” – as a single word if you please.’

  Aubrey’s eyes lost focus and rolled upwards, becoming mere flickering whites. His left eyelid twitched briefly. His mouth sagged open slightly . . . then he returned with a strange, unearthly monotone:

  ‘“. . . a collision between a collier and a cutter just off Freepass-stairs in the Thames Pool . . . Mr Arbuthnot’s Murder’d Moor alehouse in Freepass-alley . . . the horse fell at the corner of Cock-lane and Freepass-alley . . .”’

  There was no need to shout ‘stop’. Aubrey had finished. There had been only three mentions of that place in the last ten years or so.

  ‘Excellent work, Aubrey,’ said Doctor Norwood, patting the young man’s knee.

  Aubrey smiled uneasily as if unsure whether he should be enjoying himself quite so much.

  ‘Search for . . . “coal tar”,’ said Noah.

  Again, the eyes took that ghastly turn and there was the twitch.

  ‘“. . . Johnson’s patent coal tar is the finest such product for preserving wood . . . a manufactory refining coal tar and other such products . . . Dr Parkinson’s Coal Tar Remedy for vomiting of blood . . . the timbers had been treated by numerous applications of coal tar . . .”’

  ‘Stop! I think we have discerned the pattern there,’ said Noah. ‘I fear the term was too generic.’

  Mr Williamson made a note and seemed to be deep in thought, no doubt cogitating upon how best to use this preternatural mental resource. ‘Aubrey – please search for . . . “lavender”.’

  ‘“. . . Mr Nelson of Lavender-hill . . . Viners’ new Motto scents, including lavender, myrrh and cedar . . . a necklace lost in the environs of Lavender-terrace . . . Thomas Lavender Esq. presented himself to her Majesty . . . Hendrie’s Perfumed Spirit of Lavender . . . Drury’s lavender water for handkerchiefs . . . Mr William Lavender said that . . .”’

  ‘Stop! Hmm. I do not think that is a helpful avenue of investigation. I am beginning to understand the need for greater specificity. Perhaps we should try a name. Search for . . . “James Tattershall”.’

  ‘“. . . the attendees were James Smith, John Tattershall and George Plothers . . . Tattershall’s Throat Lozenges against coughs . . . shooting at Glenfiddich were Charles Booth, Henry Athers, James Brookes, James Tattershall and Sir John Smythe . . .”’

  Aubrey stopped. ‘That is all. I apologize for the initial match – the proximity of the two names tricked me.’

  ‘You have no need to apologize, Aubrey,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘We greatly value your prodigious talent. Perhaps you could search for . . . “Major Archibald Tunnock”.’

  ‘“. . . the court martial of Major Archibald Tunnock on grounds of gross indecency and conduct unbecoming an officer . . . the unsuccessful Tory candidate Major A. Tunnock had to be escorted from the room . . . My India by Major Archibald Tunnock, an unvarnished soldier’s tale . . . a meeting to be held at Friar’s Hall by Major A. Tunnock on the question: ‘Vice and its Ends’ . . .”’

  ‘Stop! That is as concise a biography as we could wish for on that person,’ said Noah.

  ‘Hmm. Let us attempt something more detailed,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘Aubrey – could you search for “suicide” and “prussic acid” in juxtaposition?’

  Noah nodded his approval.

  The young man was paler now than when the questioning had begun. Perhaps it was the cold, but there was a slight shivering in his form. Nevertheless, he raced through the volumes of his mind and returned:

  ‘“. . . the lady was found lying in the street having taken a phial of prussic acid . . . the girl Juliet, a mere seventeen, took the poison because she was enceinte . . . in addition to taking prussic acid Mrs Cotton had strangled herself with a cord . . . the woman was seen drinking from a phial of what was believed to be prussic acid before she jumped and was dashed against the buttress of the bridge . . .”’

  ‘Stop!’ said Noah. ‘I am afraid, George, that this avenue will yield hundreds of such matches. By all means return to it and elicit some dates from Aubrey for further research, or refine the search, but I fear we will exhaust him thus.’

  ‘Hmm. Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘I believe Aubrey is becoming fatigued,’ said Doctor Norwood. ‘Perhaps we should stop and recommence another time if need be.’

  The young man did indeed now look quite deflated and pale.

  ‘Just one more, if we may,’ said Noah, glancing at Mr Williamson. ‘Aubrey – search for . . . “Persephone”.’

  A pause. The eyes flickered. The mouth opened and the lips moved as if he were speaking silently. Then . . .

  ‘Nothing. I am sorry,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘What do you mean, “nothing”?’ said Mr Williamson as politely as he could.

  ‘It means there is no occurrence of that word in the last ten years’ editions, sir. Not in headlines, advertisements or features.’

  ‘Hmm. Should we spell it differently?’

  ‘I have searched for the possible phonetic variations, hence the slight delay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘There is, I am afraid, only one way to be sure: one must read all of the last ten years’ editions.’

  ‘Hmm. Hmm.’

  ‘I think we should now leave Aubrey to his whittling,’ said the doctor, standing.

  The others followed suit, albeit reluctantly, and thanked the young man in turn before making their way back to the house.

  ‘Did you manage to elicit the information you wanted?’ asked Doctor Norwood as they strolled.

  ‘I fear that we would need much more time with Aubrey to fully exploit his knowledge,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘I was only just beginning to fathom how the questioning could work.’

  ‘Alas, we are playing with the delicate sanity of a young man. We may already have asked more of him than he can bear. Perhaps you can return again later, in a week or so.’

  ‘We do not have a week—’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor Norwood, for the generosity you have shown,’ interjected Noah. ‘In truth, we had so little information before that this has helped to some degree.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘I apologize for my tone, doctor. We are frustratingly close to justice. Thanks to Aubrey, I will now be able to locate this Freepass-alley and venture there.’

  ‘I, too, have had further thoughts on the case as a result of this meeting,’ said Noah. ‘I think my next port of call will be the British Museum reading room.’

  TWENTY

  Is there any other place in London that has such resonance to the writer as the reading room of the British Museum? Not in a dozen lifetime
s could one read its half-a-million volumes, and yet those endless shelves are a multitudinous reminder of one’s own failure to achieve posterity in a leathern spine.

  If we lean on the balustrade of the gallery and look down upon the hushed readers below, what do we see? It is a veritable human encyclopaedia of hacks, scribes, copyists, journalists, novelists, diarists, biographers, historians, cataloguers and plagiarists – monomaniacs all, surviving on a meagre diet of thin hope and sugared dreams.

  There is a musty scent of books and damp clothing, for most are here to escape the bitter cold of their lodgings. If they are currently reading their way through the newspapers on offer, it is merely a preliminary to the colossal opus they will begin later that day, or tomorrow, or next year. See the copyist, almost as blind as a mole, squinting at the tome he is reproducing for a publisher; see the student of University College debating whether he should copy that page of Greek or simply tear it out; see the aged author glancing around to see if anyone has recognized him as the progenitor of that shoddy novel that sank in a mire of indifference last year.

  And, of course, I. I have had a productive morning researching a new list of likely benefactors for the begging letters I am to start writing once more. I will try the Literary Fund again, I suppose, and target the Royal Society – those old gentlemen of science have not the wit to see through a piece of masterful prose unless it has an erroneous equation in it.

  But let us not lose track of the story. It is the day after that strange episode at Doctor Norwood’s place, and immediately below us is Mr Noah Dyson, his desk stacked with an interesting array of books. There is one on medicine and another on herbal remedies; there is an edition of the Times from seven years past; there are a number in indecipherable Greek, and a directory of London charities. He has already written a number of letters that are safely in envelopes inside his jacket: one to Major Tunnock accepting the invitation to converse further, and three others ... of which we will hear more in good time.

  Is he not a curious fellow, this Noah Dyson? One day we see him in the east of the city at his opium manufactory; another day we see him at the library desk as comfortable among books as if he had always been a university man. There must be few who can inhabit such different worlds with equal ease, but then he is a man who has seen the world as few have.

  Those hands that turn the page so delicately have hoisted rope in the uncharted frozen wastes of Lancaster Sound, have clung to the splintered wreckage of a whaler sunk by behemoths, have been tanned almost black on Antipodean decks, and wielded weapons against pirates off Cape Matapan and Jamaica. Those eyes that scan the page with such application have seen vistas and horizons we could never conceive: the Morea, Pernambuco, Honduras, Buenos Ayres, Exuma, Tortola, Demerara, Bahaia, Madras . . .

  Now, however, he is looking again at that tract given to him by Major Tunnock – a particularly nasty and radical piece of writing:

  THE GENTLEMAN’S POETICS OF TRANSGRESSION

  Being a study of the advanced erotic appetite

  Man is an inexhaustible seeker of pleasure unlike any other beast. His curiosity, as demonstrated in his very Fall, is his driving impulse towards satiation whatever artifices of so-called morality stand in the way of his primordial desire.

  And thus it is that every carnal pleasure is a serpent-lured transgression against the diaphanous veil of decorum that we drape over these animal bodies. Is not the depucelative act itself the first such rending of that sanitary membrane? Is it not true that we each – Christian and heathen alike – owe our existence to an act of destruction – of transgression?

  Look at the children of the common classes: these people to whom Faith and education are as unknown as a foreign tongue. In their simplicity, in the low lodging houses of our rookeries, they rut and breed without shame or guilt BECAUSE IT IS AN INSEPARABLE PART OF THEIR BESTIAL NATURE!

  In short, Man’s inexorable urge is towards the carnal, towards transgression, towards the abyss, as the immortal Bard has put it:

  . . . there’s no bottom, none,

  In my voluptuousness. Your wives, your daughters,

  Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up

  The cistern of my lust: and my desire

  All continent impediments would o’erbear

  Once one has begun on that path, once one has torn away that veil of mystery and passed to the other side without divine censure, without guilt or shame, there can be no pause or hindrance. One transgression leads to the next as satiation requires another and another step towards the abyss.

  Sailors of the southern oceans have brought us a word, ‘tabu’, used by those primitive peoples untouched by our parody of civilization. Even they, in their ignorant nakedness, recognize that some things are forbidden because they are ‘holy’ and ‘unclean’ – holy AND unclean! Is that not a lesson to our pious clerics from the black-skinned savage?

  Only by breaking the tabu of the forbidden does one see the truth of our religion – that it is a hollow charade, itself saturated in the transgressive urge towards the abyss?

  Consider the martyr: does not his body, torn and broken by his tormentors, seek the consummatory ecstasy of oblivion? Is not his pain a threshold he must cross to achieve the perfection of satiation? Is not the very Christ figure – humiliated, whipped, penetrated by nails and stripped almost naked – a representation of sensual attainment? Towards death lies the path of the seeker after fulfilment.

  In death we find the horror and the ecstasy – the final transgression. And in the sexual act do we come closest to it physically and metaphysically, Man’s spending of his seed being consequent with the fleeting transport from this world to the next. Through the carnal act do we approach that End by degrees of transgression – until we arrive at the unspeakable horror and stare it in the eye, triumphant in our attainment of the ultimate. In Thanatos do we find the purest embodiment of Eros . . .

  Noah folded the tract away and pursed his lips. It was the kind of thing written by earnest graduates, a barely logical mix of literature, religion and mythology in a show of seeming profundity. But as an insight into the thinking of the group from the Continental Club, it was useful enough, and suggested a number of ideas in relation to the case at hand.

  He was about to return to his studies when one of the silent-moving attendants of that venerable place approached carrying a volume and spoke with a well-practised whisper.

  ‘Your book, sir.’

  Noah looked up. ‘What book? I did not request another book.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir. I will return it to—’

  ‘Wait.’

  Noah looked at the people seated at his table, all of whom were engaged in their own thoughts. He looked around the reading room, but if he had expected to catch someone looking at him, he was disappointed. There did not seem to be anyone present he had not seen before.

  ‘Sir . . . ?’

  ‘I will take the book. Thank you.’

  It was a relatively new volume: volume five of Mr Charles Knight’s magisterial encyclopaedia London. The hard cover was finished in an attractive marbled design, its brown leather spine still aromatic and its gilt glinting dully. There was a slip of paper tucked between the pages towards the end and Noah opened the book at that place.

  ‘The Reading Room of the British Museum’ proclaimed the title on that page – and there was an etching showing the very space where Noah was sitting to read about it. He might well have been one of the fellows sitting in the picture – being observed.

  He looked around again. Nobody seemed to be watching. Was this an innocent mistake, or some message being delivered to him so subtly that he could not fathom its meaning? He looked once more at the book and began to turn the pages of the chapter hoping to find some further clue . . . and there on page 390, circled in dark pencil, was the suggestion of one.

  Amid a list of illustrious names, that of Ptolemy was the one that had been picked out. An absent reminder scribbled by a hurried geogr
apher? Another coincidence? Or a signpost to another clue?

  Noah left his seat and ventured to request a Ptolemy from the attendants. A ladder was procured and soon the heavy volume was on the table before him. He turned the large, thick pages looking for something, for anything that might tell him what was happening.

  And there, beside an archaic map, was a folded sheet of notepaper addressed: ‘For your interest’. Again he cast a furtive glance at the people around him on the table: a couple of dishevelled characters reading the newspapers, and an elderly gentleman engrossed in his Latin. He looked up at the gallery and saw nobody observing him from there. He turned to look at the doorway into the vestibule between the two reading rooms . . . and glimpsed a body rapidly disappearing.

  Immediately, he was up and running down the space between tables, his shoes hammering across the wooden floor. Faces looked up in alarm and a murmur of excitement rushed through that space so accustomed to bated breath.

  Down the stairs and out towards Montague-place Noah ran, but there was no sign of that quickly vanishing figure. He looked up and down the street and saw no one hurrying.

  ‘He was out of here like a rabbit,’ said the young man sitting in the sentry box at the entrance to the library. ‘Like his coat-tails were on fire and no mistake.’

  ‘Did you see his face?’ said Noah.

  ‘A blur – that’s all I saw, sir.’

  ‘Was there a carriage waiting? Where did he go?’

  ‘A carriage? That is possible – I did hear horses, but I was reading the latest on the financials, see?’ The sentry helpfully held up his copy of the Times.

  Noah scowled. In his mind, he went over that briefest of glances he’d caught and tried to recall something that might identify the fleeing figure. Had there been the merest hint of scarlet in their attire? An epaulette, or a scarf perhaps? He felt in his pocket to reassure himself that the note was still there, and returned to the reading room to collect his things.