The Vice Society

by James McCreet

  No answer.

  He listened intently for any sound of Mr Cullen’s cries at the rear, but there was only the maddening silence of accumulating flakes and the thud of blood in his ears. He wondered whether he should run around to the rear of the property. Frustration burned in his eyes. Something had to be done.

  The window with the chair lodged in it was too far from the doorway to peer through, and railings barred his way. He grabbed a broom that had been left propped in the doorway and used the handle to smash a pane so that he might push the curtain aside and look in.

  He saw the legs of a man lying immobile on the floor. There was blood on the carpet around the body.

  ‘Noah? Noah – is it you? Can you hear me! Move your legs if you can hear me!’

  Nothing. No movement or reply.

  Mr Williamson went back into the street and looked frantically towards each end of Bedford-row for signs of activity. There ... at the south end: two figures were ascending from below the street and running madly towards Brownlow-street, that narrow aperture connecting with Holborn. They were escaping.

  He raced back to the carriage and wrenched open the door. ‘Inspector – two of them have escaped on foot. The houses must be connected below the street. We must pursue before they have a chance to disappear.’

  ‘I think not. As you have said, we know who they are and where to find them. Why chase across the city in this weather? Let us wait to see whether the street door opens. We have constables ready.’

  ‘We do not know who those two escaping gentlemen are. They may be entirely different but connected criminals!’

  ‘Or two gentlemen late for a show. I will wait, George, and so will my carriage.’

  Mr Williamson looked back at the house. Was that Noah dying inside? Was he already dead? Were those running gentlemen the same who had murdered his wife?

  ‘D—— you, Albert Newsome! I follow justice alone!’ shouted Mr Williamson, and he was off running hazardously over the snow towards Brownlow-street.

  He emerged into Holborn, where a cab was parked just a few yards away.

  ‘Did you see two gentlemen emerge from here a minute or so ago?’ he shouted to the cab driver. ‘They were running.’

  ‘Aye. Got a cab. They won’t be goin’ nowhere fast in this weather though, and no mistake. Though the way he’s lashin’ the ’orse, they’re in a right ’urry.’

  Mr Williamson climbed into the cab. ‘Pursue that carriage with all haste! Catch it and there is a sovereign for you.’

  They set off with a lurch.

  The streets were virtually clear of traffic due to the weather, but it seemed both of the cabs were possessed by some demonic force. Whips cracked, equine nostrils snorted and hooves skittered over the stones, each vehicle risking a fall in the worsening conditions but neither making the least attempt at caution.

  Holborn passed in a blur, its occasional human forms hunched and cowering into malformed shapes. Holborn-hill was becoming a pale sepulchre, made ghostly in its valiant illumination. On they raced, the distance between them unchanging and the flakes flashing about them in icy vortices.

  And then, even above the rattle of wheels and the muffled clop of hooves, they all began to hear it:

  Something like a colossal moan expressed from innumerable throats; something like the plaintive cries of thousands; something, indeed, one might expect to hear from the very fields of the damned: a cacophonous chorus of anguished and bestial cries punctuated by individual wails and yelps.

  ‘Smithfield,’ muttered Mr Williamson.

  As if in response, the carriage pulled to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Can’t go no further,’ yelled the driver over the noise. ‘The other carriage has stopped and the gents has bailed out!’

  Mr Williamson stepped down to behold the scene on upper Farringdon-street. A drover with dogs was leading a flock of sheep around the stopped cab across the thoroughfare and up towards the market. The animals bleated en masse, raising clouds of steam and pungent manure as they trotted blindly through the night towards their waiting pens at the market.

  ‘Which way did they go?’ shouted Mr Williamson to the driver.

  ‘Up yonder – up the hill with the animals!’

  ‘Here is your sovereign.’

  ‘Are you goin’ up there amidst the sheep?’

  ‘I am.’

  And Mr Williamson pushed off through the beasts’ snowy fleeces towards the market, his coat collar pulled up and his shoes sliding in the reeking slush of ordure and ice. The close thoroughfare reverberated with animal cries and flowed inexorably towards Smithfield.

  Into Cow-lane he progressed, pressing close against the wool of the sheep and being driven relentlessly along. Pigs joined the procession from another direction, grunting and snuffling their bristly hides against his legs . . . and up ahead . . . was that two top-hatted figures also caught in the ovine-porcine cataract, turning around now and then to look behind them?

  ‘Stop! Stop those men!’ shouted Mr Williamson, but his voice was dumb, dissipated in the whirling flakes and deafening babel. There was nothing to do but proceed at the pace dictated by the herd.

  Minute by agonizing minute, the animals moved: cloven-footed and emanating the thick stench of manure. His hands grasped at rough, greasy wool for balance and they moved ever closer towards the end of that narrow artery. Slowly, mercifully, the buildings began to open and Smithfield market presented itself in a scene that, even in the heat of his pursuit, made him momentarily stop and wonder at its horror.

  The vastness of that city-walled plain was a veritable inferno of torches blazing above endless ranks of pens in which 40,000 beasts writhed and shifted like waves in a swollen sea of flesh. Swine, sheep, calves, bulls and the ever-present yelping dogs sent forth billowing clouds of steam from their expirations, evaporations, evacuations and execrations against a bloody fate. It was scene from before civilization, from before history and the settling of cities. It was a scene of madness seen through the ceaseless swirls of snow now lashing and enveloping the marketplace. The phantasmal light of the gas flares at surrounding establishments cast a sickly glare over all. The noise was a palpable vibration.

  He could not see the two top-hatted men.

  Where to begin amid such chaos?

  Two constables in oilskin capes were sheltering in a doorway close by and he ran to them.

  ‘Constables – two gentlemen came this way,’ he shouted. ‘They were wearing top hats and were not dressed for the market. Did you see them? They were most likely in a hurry.’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’ returned one of the men, a surly sort with his hand on his truncheon.

  ‘They are murderers!’

  They looked at each other, sceptical.

  ‘Listen! I was once a policeman. I was Sergeant George Williamson of the Detective Force. Which way did they go?’

  The name stirred something in the constables. They looked anew at the agitated gentleman before them, his legs soiled with manure and his reddened and pox-scarred face wet with snow. Could this man really be the great Williamson?

  ‘You will answer to Sir Richard Mayne himself if those men escape me!’

  ‘I think they went that way,’ replied the surly one, gesturing towards the corner of the market leading off towards West-street.

  Mr Williamson took off at a trot, urgently scanning the crowds for the fugitives. Grotesque tableaux assaulted his senses: here a blue-aproned buyer with his spittle-sticky fingers in a calf’s mouth; here the flash of a switch and the moan as it pierced a bovine hide; here the flashing heat of the brand and the stench of burned hair; here a flaming torch illuminating the lumpen impassivity of a drover; here the bared teeth and darting legs of the sheepdog . . . and there, two figures rounding the corner of West-street . . . one of them with his hat knocked off and a bare cranium exposed to the elements.

  He arrived at that corner just as a drover was leading a number of calves to the slaughterhouse di
strict. Even there, at the market’s edge, the metallic tang of blood and fresh death was thick in the air. The animals sensed it; they smelled the hideous effusions of the bone-boilers and tripe-dressers . . . and they sent up moans of distress. Their eyes rolled back and their hooves hammered nervously through the filth.

  Onwards he hurried, slipping ahead of the herd now, and driven by a goad more piercing than that wielded by any drover. The two men – around twenty yards in front – looked back phrenziedly and he saw their faces: one with a moustache, the other seemingly disfigured. Then they were gone.

  It was futile to shout over the din of the animals. All he could do was chase towards them through the freezing mud before they could lose themselves in the labyrinthine yards and alleys.

  At the place where they had vanished, he turned and looked down a narrow, twisting passage whose very walls seemed to glisten and steam with freshly butchered flesh. Perhaps three hundred carcases hung on hooks all along that hideous nook, leading towards a place where the poleaxe was wielded and knives parted muscle from bone. He gulped a breath and started to run.

  It was a charnel parade of horror. All about him, bones glared white; yellow fat hung from flesh so recently alive; glutinous things dangled from cavities once vital with organs. There was a sweet, steaming smell of death that clogged his throat and forced him to breathe lest he vomit. This was the very throat of the city: moist, ravenous and corrupted beyond redemption.

  He stopped, panting, and rested his hands on his knees. There was no sign of them – only a choice of two alleys. He looked for footprints, but the ground was so churned with slush and soil and two-toed treads that there was barely a trace to read. With no lamp to hand, he was venturing into an area of darkness to rival any subterranean chamber. His breath billowed about him in the falling flakes.

  There . . . was that a footprint? A slipshod sliding arc where a man had almost fallen? It pointed towards an alley into which an onrushing herd was now being steered by lashes of the switch and the unintelligible oaths of the drovers. They would block the thoroughfare and leave no escape for the villains. He ran ahead of the cattle.

  The alley narrowed and began gradually to descend, channelling the beasts into a smaller and smaller area so that they would eventually pass in single file through an aperture from which they would emerge only as joints and cuts:

  The slaughterman’s killing pit.

  Mr Williamson felt the herd at his back as he searched for his fugitives. Cows began to surround him. Hides pressed closer and closer in upon him. He dug his elbows into the bodies in an attempt to lift his feet clear of the crushing hooves. The reek of blood was thick in the air; the bovine chorus of despair was horripilating. Where were the two men?

  There was a strangulated cry. Cattle ahead seemed to stumble. Mr Williamson strained higher to see above the steaming masses. All moved ceaselessly forward.

  Then, a body . . .

  It was one of the men: dead or dying, his mortal form mangled and soiled almost beyond recognition by the innumerable limbs passing over him and crushing the life from his frail frame. There was a moustache . . . there was the dull glint of a medal . . . there was a mouth splashed with filth and open in a soundless scream of outrage at a life extinguished in the scatological mire.

  The other man must be close.

  But closer still was the tunnel.

  Single file now. He struggled to maintain balance and stay clear of their legs. They descended deeper into the earth.

  And there was the slaughterman himself: his bare, thickly muscled arms raised above his head . . . his eyes staring lifelessly at the spot on the hairy scull before him . . . his entire form bespattered with steaming gore. He brought down the poleaxe with a tremendous swing upon the animal’s head and, even before it could fall, his accomplices had pushed it from the side so that it toppled still further down into a cellar to be divided by the waiting knives.

  And there . . . another man’s arm reaching up between bodies! The fugitive risking his life to stay low among the hooves.

  ‘Stop! Stop there! There is a man among the cattle,’ yelled Mr Williamson, his voice utterly lost.

  There was no stopping the flow.

  The poleaxe fell. The bodies rolled. The herd moved on.

  ‘Stop! You there – slaughterman! There is a man hiding there!’

  The poleaxe went up. The eyes stared at the spot on the hairy scull. The poleaxe came down . . .

  A human head of pale, mottled skin was where the cow’s forehead should have been. Weak brown eyes stared madly. A mouth opened too late to make a sound.

  The axe drove into the delicate scull with as little hindrance as if it had been striking a hen’s egg. And the slaughterman’s eyes widened in amazement.

  Unspeakable matter splashed across the heaving, protesting bodies of that hellish space.

  A human form rolled into the blood-puddled pit.

  And for an instant – for the merest few beats of the heart – it seemed to Mr Williamson that everything stopped: that there was no miasma of blood and urine, no ceaseless bestial clamour, no blizzard lashing the soot-blackened city. For that instant, there appeared to be a silence that suggested even the ignorant beasts had recognized the outrage of the scene and had paused, startled, at its horror.

  The moment passed. Gore-bewrayed reality returned. Mr Williamson looked down to see that he was ankle-deep in blood.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  For twelve hours the snow fell: a relentless, soundless assault through the night. It coated roofs and clogged gutters; it carpeted roads and blocked bridges; it drifted over steps, masking their form; it insinuated itself into alcoves and arches; it disguised the familiar with immaculate accumulations; and it transformed the charred metropolis into a pristine field of featureless white.

  By morning, household curtains twitched and extra coal was put on fires. Shops stayed boarded against the still invading flakes. The chimneys of Southwark gaped emptily at the sky. All trace of human life was absent from the tabula rasa of the city.

  By midday, the snow had stopped. Tentative patches of blue appeared in the sky. The temperature dropped again. Three feet of coverage muffled the sounds of the people emerging into that alien landscape to find themselves in a London that had momentarily become a wilderness as remote and inaccessible as any highland glen. But human industry persevered as it will. Within hours, boys were out with shovels and brooms cleaning the major thoroughfares. Inundated carriages were reclaimed from their frigid cocoons, and, by dusk, a number of shops were open, casting their eerie gaslight over the pallid streets.

  And at one particular residence, Mr Williamson sat sombrely in front of the fire, staring into the flames and warming his stockinged feet. He was wearing the same clothes of the previous night’s activity, the ordure of Smithfield now crusted and congealed upon his legs and his saturated shoes curling slowly in the heat of the hearth. Snoring on the floor beside him was the hefty form of John Cullen, his trouser bottoms steaming where they came closer to the fire.

  After the slaughter pit, and the necessary extrication of the corpses from the filth, Mr Williamson had trudged back to Snow-hill in the hope that his cab had remained. It had not, but another late-running (and particularly irascible) cabman had been persuaded to take him back to Bedford-row and the scene of the rendezvous. Mr Cullen had been waiting at the street door of the property.

  ‘My G—, sir! What has happened to you? Are you hurt?’ said the doughty ex-constable on seeing the reeking and bloody figure in the snow before him.

  ‘I am uninjured. Have you been inside? What has happened here? Has the inspector been inside?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I gained entry shortly after the gentlemen fled. Inspector Newsome has recently left. He went into the house, looked around and left in a black humour with his men. He said he would send the surgeon.’

  ‘The surgeon? Let us go inside.’

  They entered the room that Mr Williamson had glimpsed through the
broken window. The body was still on the floor and had evidently been turned over to discern his identity. Neither of the investigators recognized the body as Peter, the young man who had been sitting alongside Harold Jute.

  ‘A gunshot to the chest. And there is another, sir – here behind the sofa.’

  They stepped round the furniture to look upon the other form.

  ‘Harold Jute,’ said Mr Williamson without emotion. ‘Where is Noah?’

  ‘He has gone, sir.’

  ‘Gone where? What happened here? Tell me everything.’

  ‘I told Inspector Newsome and he—’

  ‘I am not Mr Newsome.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was waiting at the rear as arranged. I admit I was bored and so I strolled along to where the pump is: opposite Brownlow-street. It was there I saw two gentlemen running. I did not know what to do, so I waited . . . then I saw you, sir, running after them and I discerned that an escape was in progress.’

  ‘Very astute.’

  ‘Well, I called the other constable and we went around to Bedford-row. There was a kitchen door open and a scream coming from within, so we charged down the stairs and . . . a girl had had her throat cut. That was when we encountered the other gentleman.’

  ‘Which other gentleman?’

  ‘I did not know him. He hit the constable with something that sounded like a metal rod and the wounded fellow took me to the ground as he fell. I . . . fear I allowed the murderer to escape as I struggled to right myself.’

  ‘Never mind that. What of Noah?’

  ‘Once I righted myself, I saw that the kitchen of that building was curiously connected by a doorway to the next house, and that to the next. Evidently the men had passed under three buildings to escape at the end of the street. I walked through to where I knew the villains’ house to be and discovered these two bodies here. The two constables from the front appeared shortly thereafter with Inspector Newsome. It seems Noah had exited from the street door and called them in to apprehend the villains. Of course, there were none alive to apprehend and Noah ran off before they could discover this.’