But here at the northern end the dock has changed things. For one thing, there is nothing behind the houses which line the street, only flat wasteland now owned by the London Dock Company. Within living memory, this open land had been meadow. The company has no doubt reserved this land for some great commercial undertaking of the future, perhaps an extension to the dock (a project already being discussed in the London Tavern, where the reimagining of the lower Thames as an international entrepàt is a vivid dream of rich and ambitious men). At a time of intense and growing overcrowding, when the available living space has already been brutally squeezed by the grand new dock, this huge plot of empty land feels like a criminal self-indulgence on the part of the mercantile rich. A few of the most militant local souls have tried to extend their properties into this wasteland, normally at night, and within days they have found their untidy little lean-tos and huts smashed to pieces by person or persons unknown.
Anderson’s own little house backs onto this wasteland, but for some days he has been carefully not looking out across that empty space. It used to be a source of endless interest, that view westward toward the dock and the city, but in that direction also lies the Marr house, way over there behind the hulking darkness of the dock warehouses. The wasteland is now a dark vacancy between here and there, and at night Anderson’s overactive imagination (often spiked with a good quantity of cheap ale from the King’s Arms, just a few doors down the road) is prone to imagining the comings and the goings of all sorts of creatures with malign purpose out there on the deserted mud. A thick curtain, the only one in the house, has gone up on the upstairs rear window just in the last week.
A man living on his own does not freely admit to night terrors, least of all to himself, but the truth is that, like many of the constables of St. Paul’s and St. George in the East, Anderson now lives his days and nights in a grim state of shallow panic. At times this suffocating anxiety could even be characterized as terror. It is perfectly clear to him that the magistrates of the Shadwell office, despite their grandiloquent airs and ostentatious public hearings, are stumbling about in a procedural gloom. Constables like Anderson have little if any understanding of “procedure,” if such a thing can be said to exist within London’s fumbling attempts at institutional law and order. But they can smell incompetence and prevarication as keenly as the salt on the riverside wind.
Everyone in Shadwell and Wapping knows this one thing: that somewhere out there, in the wasteland or in the street or nestled in the enclosing warrens of the lodging houses, there dwells a monster (or even monsters) with sufficiently depraved appetites to eviscerate an entire family, including a baby. The central fact of the baby’s death has taken on a flavor of doctrinal law in the past week. The saloon bar magistrates and justices are convinced that none of the drunks and fools and thieves who have been arrested since the murders (most of them, it is often noted, Irish) bear the supernatural countenance of a baby-killer, so ipso facto the monster is still at large, just waiting for more chances to carry away the souls of more sleeping infants.
Several constables attended the coroner’s inquest, and brought back lurid tales of exposed bones and lumpy brain matter clinging to freshly plastered walls. The coroner’s dispassionate anatomical descriptions have been embellished by the street’s own demotic imagination, and these macabre pictures have soaked their way into the minds of many of the residents, including Anderson. This is a community which has already grown spiritually fat on strange stories from faraway lands. For Anderson, as for the other constables, the murders of the Marrs have become a new local mythology, all the more powerful for being vividly real.
Many of the constables, already well soaked in gin and beer, have been drinking more and more in the face of this spreading malaise. The watchmen, one step down on the official ladder from the constables, have their own stocks of cheap liquor in their little roadside sheds, from which they creep every half-hour during the night to yell the all’s-well. Anderson is by no means the worst drinker among the constables and watchmen, because he is by no means the least educated, and he at least has his own house, the result of a fortunate marriage which is now a dim distant memory. But even for Anderson there is an edge which needs wearing down, and liquor provides the best sandpaper of all.
So, it is time for a drink, and there is nothing in the house which will serve. Anderson steps out into the street and walks the two doors down to the King’s Arms, nodding at John Lee, the landlord of the tavern opposite, the Black Horse. Lee nods back and then resumes his anxious pacing, his eyes constantly returning to the north end of the street, waiting for someone to appear. Anderson pauses to consider asking him what the matter is, but the call of ale is too strong. He carries on down the street and turns to go through the door of the King’s Arms.
It’s eleven o’clock at night. The Arms is one of the area’s most popular taverns, and normally at this time the place would be almost full, but it is empty, the quiet atmosphere in keeping with the watchful peace of the street outside. Mrs. Williamson, the publican’s wife, is standing behind the tavern’s recently installed wooden bar, on which gleams a single new pump, evidence of the investment the Williamsons have made in the place. Beneath the bar, Anderson knows (because Williamson has talked of little else for months now), lie the workings of a new beer engine, allowing the pumping of ale up from barrels in the cellar direct to the taproom. No other tavern or alehouse in Shadwell or Wapping can boast this new technology, although many are stretching what resources they have to follow the King’s Arms’ lead.
Mrs. Williamson greets Anderson with an open smile, unaffected by the somber air outside.
“Evenin’ to yer, Tom Anderson. I’m takin’ it it’s still pretty quiet out there?”
“It is, Liz, it is. Your trade will ’ave been slow today, I’d be thinkin’.”
“Slower than the Regent gettin’ into last year’s breeches, Tom.” She laughs at her little joke, and Tom chuckles willingly. Always willing to smile at a bon mot from the attractive landlord’s wife, is Tom Anderson. “John’s in the kitchen, if ye’d like to go through.”
“Much obliged if you’d pour me a pint, Liz. I’m blessed parched.”
“Think you mean pull a pint, Tom. Don’t forget John’s new toy.”
They laugh, and she pulls out a rough glass tankard from beneath the bar.
“Go on through, Tom. He’s been wantin’ to talk to you. I’ll give a shout when your beer’s ready.”
She starts pulling the pump handle toward her and after three or four pulls beer starts sloshing into the glass. Her arms are bare beneath the simple cotton dress she is wearing, and the broad muscles tense as she pulls on the handle. Fine-looking woman, is Liz Williamson. And a good wife. It’s been a dozen years since Anderson touched a woman, and for a wistful moment he ponders on what it would be like to lean toward her, stroke that magnificent upper arm, feel it solid yet soft beneath his lonely, peeling fingertips.
He steps into the kitchen, which doubles as the tavern’s parlor, and here’s John Williamson, rising from his old brown armchair to grab Anderson’s arm and hand and speak at him in the confident, bruising way of a London publican. He’s a bear of a man, all bristles and bluster, twice the size of Tom Anderson.
“Tom! Just the man!”
“Liz said yer wanted to speak to me.”
“She pullin’ you a pint?”
“She’s at it right now.”
“Well, listen. You’re an officer, and there’s something I think you should know. There’s been a bloke ’angin’ round, big tall fella, wearin’ a brown coat.”
Anderson doesn’t react to this. For the last week he’s had a dozen of these conversations each and every day. People are watchful, but more than that people want to be part of the drama that has unfolded since the killings of the Marrs. If he’d followed up even a tenth of the things people had told him about, he’d never have slept or eaten. Or had a drink, come to that.
“Brown coat
, you say?”
“Yes, like a sailor’s jacket. You know, peacoat, bit like yours. He was listenin’ at our door.”
Williamson speaks with some urgency, watching Anderson closely as he does so.
“Listenin’ at your door? When was this?”
“This mornin’. About nine.” Williamson pauses, still looking intently at his friend. “Yes, about nine, I’d say. We weren’t open yet. I came out the side door and found him ’angin’ about, as if he’d just ’ad ’is ear up against the door. Loiterin’, if you take my meanin’. I said somethin’ or other, and he just stood and glared at me. Then ’e walked off.”
“He didn’t speak to you?”
Williamson looks down at this, breaking his gaze. He shuffles back around his chair, keeping his eyes away from Anderson. His manner strikes the constable as suddenly, unfathomably, odd. There is something creeping and guilty about it. This big bristling man is taciturn most of the time, but is gregarious when his position demands. Tonight, he seems edgy and nervous.
“P’raps it was one of Bridget’s friends?” Anderson asks. Bridget is the servant in the tavern, a fearsome battle-ax from the West Country who has been known to flatten drunken miscreants on a Saturday night with a swipe of a swinging pewter jug. Even as he says it, Anderson thinks the idea preposterous. Could old Bridget even have any friends?
Williamson looks up from his musing, as if the idea strikes him in the same way. He still seems distracted.
“No, no, Tom. I know all Bridget’s friends. This was a stranger, no question about it.” The emphasis is very marked, and Williamson slashes the air with his hands to underline the single word: stranger. “Tall fella, young man, bad limp. Almost lame, I reckon. Black hair. Didn’t say anything, just made off down toward Wapping. I’d have made after him, but Bridget called me back to the kitchen about something or other. When I came out again he’d gone.”
The words tumble out onto one another, deliberately yet messily, as if they’ve been half-rehearsed. Tall fella, young man, bad limp, almost lame, black hair.
Liz shouts from the bar that Anderson’s pint is ready.
“Right, that’s me. Now don’t fret, John, I’ll ’ave a look into your lame peacoat bloke.”
“Right you are, Tom. ’Ave a quiet night.” Williamson shakes his hand, still looking tense.
“You too, John.”
Williamson sits back down in his old leather armchair, picking up a pipe and staring at the rear door to the house, as if on watch. Tom watches him for a moment, wondering why this big, gruff man is apparently so nervous, but the call of the ale (and the woman who has been pouring it for him) is too strong, and he leaves the kitchen.
He goes back to the bar to pick up his beer, and is disappointed to find that Liz isn’t there anymore. He shouts his thanks, and hears her cheery reply from somewhere inside the building. He sips the beer to make it easier to carry and leaves with his tankard, thinking about her strong attractive arms and the way her simple dress exposed the tops of her breasts.
Outside in the street John Lee is greeting his wife and daughter. Anderson nods again at him, and notes the man’s relief. The two women are dressed for a night out. Lee’s earlier nervousness is explained: they’d been perhaps a few minutes late, and he’d scurried into the street to watch for them, imagining any number of horrors that might have happened to them on their way home.
The girl, Alice, waves excitedly at Anderson and starts singing a song, which he vaguely recognizes as being from the new show at the Royalty Theatre on Wellclose Square. The mother joins in, and Anderson smiles with honest pleasure as he carefully carries his pint jug into his house. The voices of the two women have added a lightness to the street which has been missing for a long time.
He has a small fire going in the front room of his house, and he sits in the only chair in the room to enjoy his drink. He sips at the ale, which is as cold as the night air, or rather as cold as John Williamson’s unheated cellar, which is almost the same thing. He lights a taper in the fire, and uses it to light the pipe which he’d made ready before walking to the King’s Arms, and puffs away contentedly.
He’s been working all day, and will be back working as a shipwright in one of the yards on the south bank of the river tomorrow. His unpaid post of constable is something he is proud of, unlike most of those men who are offered it (many of them willingly pay the customary ten pounds to get themselves out of the obligation). He takes his duties seriously, from setting the nightly watch (which means handing pocket money to old men like Olney up on the Highway, who simply drink the pocket change away, even while on duty) to arresting prisoners and presenting them before magistrates. Anderson is unusual, though: a property-owner with no wife and a steady, skilled job. He can afford some time to be a diligent constable.
On his floor lie several handbills, the detritus of a headless investigation: the initial handbill produced by the parishioners of St. George in the East (Fifty Pounds Reward. Horrid Murder!!); the handbill published by John Harriott, the great river magistrate himself, offering twenty pounds for information about men seen outside Marr’s shop (for a moment, something resonates inside Anderson’s mind, something about men loitering outside); and finally the Home Secretary’s own, unprecedented handbill, which took almost a week to appear and offers the unbelievable sum of £100 for information leading to an arrest. One hundred and seventy pounds’ worth of reward in total. Someone is going to get rich on this sickening business, that is clear. He has heard tell that the Home Secretary’s reward has been raised even further.
He considers the handbills as he puffs his pipe. For him, only Harriott’s is worth the candle, entirely because of the man who offers it. All the constables and watchmen of Wapping, St. George’s, and St. Paul’s know of Harriott: the one-man whirlwind behind the River Police, the man who had stood down the lightermen rioters in 1798, the man who had reclaimed an island from an Essex river only to see it overcome years later by the rising waters. There were rumors of shamans in North America, of concubines in the Indies, even of buried treasure and an abandoned woman in Canada. But these picaresque tales hide a deeper truth: the magistrates of Shadwell, Anderson’s official district, are pale shadows of the imperial Harriott, the quintessence of English drive and energy. If anyone will solve this case, it will be Harriott. Anderson has no truck with those who talk of jurisdiction, who point out that Harriott’s remit does not extend inland to events on the Highway. Such matters are for bureaucrats and pettifoggers.
He finishes his ale, and then his pipe. The fire is still burning strongly. He looks at the clock, and decides there is probably still time for another beer. He is wide awake, and will not sleep for some time. And perhaps another glimpse of Liz Williamson and her magnificent décolletage will put pictures in his head to take into his dreams. He puts down his pipe, stands and heads for the door.
As he opens the door, the pint pot is knocked from his hand by someone rushing past. A sudden crowd of people is streaming past, collectively screeching and squawking as it approaches the sound of a man shouting, down the street to Anderson’s left. Anderson catches a glimpse of one of his watchmen, Shadrick Newhall, who has been pushed by the surging crowd down toward the King’s Arms. Newhall is gaping at something high up, on the building, and Anderson looks in the same direction.
A near naked man is swinging there, right next to the sign for the King’s Arms, frantically scrabbling down a rope made of knotted sheets, his bare feet seeking purchase on the walls, his arse hanging out of the back of his tattered nightshirt. He is shouting as he spins in the air:
“Help! Help! Help! Murder! Help! Fucking hell, murder! Fucking help me!”
He is beginning to lose his grip on the sheets, and his voice is hoarse but clear over the shrieks of the crowd.
“Catch me! Fucking catch me! Fucking catch me!”
His hands lose their grip, and he falls, landing on top of Shadrick Newhall, his arse almost in the watchman’s face. The two
tumble to the ground, the knotted sheet landing on top of their heads. Newhall groans slightly as Anderson shoves his way through the crowd toward him, and the man in the nightshirt gets up. It is John Turner, lodger at the King’s Arms, a man Anderson has supped with half a dozen times. Turner grabs Anderson’s arm, recognizing him as what passes for authority in this shouting mob. He is breathless, his eyes wide, his skin white in the winter night.
“They’re killing them . . . inside. They’re killing them all!”
Some people are already beginning to batter on the street door of Williamson’s inn, which looks ominously dark and locked. Anderson, clearheaded, gestures to three men to help him force open the cellar hatch in the pavement in front of the tavern. John Lee, the landlord from the Black Horse, is one of them. Another is a local butcher, Edward Crestle. The third man Anderson doesn’t recognize, but he notices the man has a poker, as if he’s rushed out into the street with the first weapon he could lay his hands on at the sound of Turner’s screams.
They heave at the cellar door, and with a cracking sound it opens up. Anderson steps down into the gloom, but by the light from the street he can already make out the shape of a body lying on the floor of the cellar. It is Williamson. Anderson hurries to his side and kneels down to his friend, bending in closely to try to see him in the gloom, and then someone at the top of the cellar ladder lights a gaslight and he sees that the man’s throat has been severed through to the bone, that his head has been smashed in, that one thumb is hanging off a hand by a piece of skin. An iron bar, coated in hair and matter, lies next to the body. Twenty minutes ago, he was talking to this inanimate bundle of dead flesh. Twenty minutes.
The English Monster Page 14
