"It’s no secret how people of your sort are regarded by the church, Miss Hawes. Especially in these last months. But I assure you, I have never in my life shared the sentiments of those of my former acquaintance. It is one of the reasons why I was never given a congregation to lead, and also why I find myself standing here, asking for your help."
"So, I take it you’ve not come here to save my soul?"
There it is. That elusive smile, tight-lipped, bringing out a fine web of lines from the corners of his eyes.
"Mister Chissick?"
"Yes?" Still smiling, the poor man.
"What do you want?"
And now he is walking towards me, pushing his limp hair from his forehead as though to see me more clearly. He beats his hat against his leg, and I push down the urge to rescue it from his abusive possession before the wool is battered beyond repair.
"You will take no offense if I am blunt?"
"None whatsoever."
"It is a... delicate matter."
"I am afraid you’ll find most things are delicate matters, but still we survive."
He clears his throat, nods twice, and returns to the portmanteau. For a moment, he sits forward, but this posture doesn’t suit him, so he slides back, shoulders falling slightly as a long breath slides out of his lungs.
"There is a body." He hesitates there. But, no. It’s not a brief intermission between statements, but rather a full stop, and it becomes my responsibility to carry the thread along.
"I assume you mean the body of one who is recently deceased?"
Another sigh. "Yes."
"Murdered?"
"That’s how it appears."
"And you’re here to request my help." Spoken without a hint of question in my voice.
An abrupt motion forward, and his elbows move to where the armrests would be, dipping a few inches when he realises none exist on this particular seat. "As much as you would be willing to give," he says, hiding his awkward movement with a straightening of his shoulders. "And, of course, there would be some remuneration."
Ah, so he has been speaking to Marta.
"Reverend." I shut my eyes, biting my lip at my mistake. "Mister Chissick, I am sure you’re not unaware that our fair city has a veritable army of police at its service, detectives and whatnot, each and every one of them more than up to the task of pursuing the murder of yet another young woman. Mere sleight of hand is not enough to recommend me for this, or any task. I’ve no doubt a brief foray to Scotland Yard—"
"Miss Hawes?"
My hand fidgets with the edge of my cuff, tugging it down until I’ve worked at least a thread or two free from the weave. "Yes, what?"
He looks at me. It’s a different expression on his face than before, and I sense he’s studying me, his body quite still, his gaze fixed on mine. Finally, after a minute, or two minutes, or one hundred minutes, he opens his mouth to speak.
"I never said the body in question belonged to a young woman."
And this is when I’m undone. It was the ghost of a vision that leaked into my head while he spoke, the voices ringing to life and then dying as I pushed them out again. But because I was lax, because I failed to attend to all the details of our conversation, I lost track of which images were put into my head by his words, and which came of their own volition.
"I am… I am sorry." The stammering unnerves me, but I press on regardless. "It’s this heat, I think. I can’t…" The wave of a hand. A fluttering of eyelids. Nothing else, but it’s enough to show that Mister Chissick is all concern.
"Shall I fetch you something? A glass of water, perhaps?"
"No, I am fine."
"Fresh air, then? I could open the window for you."
"Thank you, but, no." I neglect to mention that the window is well sealed with countless layers of paint and grime, aside from the amount of moisture in the air that has swollen the wood and distorted its shape so it may never be moved from its sill. But no matter, really, since I’m certain that should I ask him to reverse the flow of the Thames for me, he would not rest before finding a way to achieve it.
A moment of silence follows, as I strive for some level of composure. I tell myself not to raise my gaze from the level of my lap, but it’s as if my sight has taken on a will of its own, and I’m soon studying the line of his jaw, the fine growth of stubble on his chin. "What you’re asking me to do, I am not sure… I’d rather not…" At the look on his face, I close my mouth, rearrange my thoughts. "I’ve spent most of my career on stage. I am a performer, an actress. And not a very skilled one, at that. I don’t think I am capable of providing you with the help you seek. In fact, I am quite certain I could not."
He is leaning forward again, always forward, until I think he’ll abandon his seat entirely and drop to his knees in front of me.
"Please," he says. The only thing he says.
My eyes drop to the unfinished sewing in my lap, the neat stitches I’d been taught to do so well.
"You can walk away at any time. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you into a situation that would cause you any sort of discomfort. But…" And now it’s his turn to stammer, to hesitate, to flounder in the open sea of awkward pauses. And when he regains his voice, the words are softened, the edges buffed smooth during the time it took for him to line them up on his tongue. "One look, Miss Hawes. That’s all I ask."
One look, he says. As if he has any idea what I might see.
Chapter Four
* * *
* * *
The street is shrouded in darkness, pushing out the glow from the various shop fronts until all that’s left is a faint lightening to the gloom. Small half-circles and distorted rectangles of white and yellow edge the pavement, but the shadows rule this silent byway, hiding away all manner of humanity and leaving them to live and breathe the sharp tang of the city’s underbelly—like toadstools taking up residence in the shadow of a rotted log.
A brief touch on my elbow, enough to make me flinch, and Chissick lowers his mouth until it is a few inches from my ear.
"Best stay close, Miss Hawes. Until we’re in better company."
I look down at his hand, still hovering near the vicinity of my arm. After a moment, he takes it away, but the tension remains in his fingers, in the way he holds his wrist and elbow. And when I stumble over a large crack in the pavement, his reaction is instantaneous, one hand returning to my arm, the other on the small of my back, prepared to catch me should I fall.
"Thank you," I say, and he accepts my gratitude with a quick nod. His attention, however, has already returned to the darker shadows of the alley, his eyes narrowing as if to better identify an unsavoury figure that might be lurking in the dusk.
Though "unsavoury” might not be the best word to use here. "Suspicious” might be more precise, or perhaps I’m doing the inhabitants of this neighbourhood a disservice. There’s nothing to distinguish these men and women from the people I pass every day—on broader avenues, streets well-lit by sun and flame and even a spark of electricity. It’s the darkness that establishes their characters here, before they’re given a chance to prove themselves as harmless individuals. I glance at a few of them now, sheltered in a doorway, their heads wreathed in a foul-smelling smoke that refuses to dissipate. Their shoulders are rounded forward, as if bending beneath the weight of this abominable darkness. All faces are turned away from the light, leaving me with nothing to examine but smudges and shadows, broken only by a blaze of flame when one of them strikes a match and cups the flickering fire between his hands.
And because my imagination is so prolific today, I look away from the man’s features, exaggerated to those of a ghoul’s by the sputtering light of his match. But curiosity emboldens me to take a second look, and this time, all the familiar traits of humanity are erased. Or perhaps the human face was a mask, and now that it’s stripped away, I’m permitted a glimpse of the beast that resides beneath. But another blink, followed by a few puffs of smoke, and he’s lost to the fog that hove
rs and dips below the eaves of the house.
"Through here, now," says Chissick, leading me towards an open doorway, indistinguishable from the dozen or so others in my line of sight.
"Stay close." His hand seeks out my wrist, but worse than that, I feel his thumb brush over the damaged strip of skin between my sleeve and the frayed edge of my glove. I move my arm, and momentarily thwarted, he settles for closing his hand around my fingertips. It’s a gentle pressure, I notice, not pulling me along, but holding onto me, as if he fears I’ll be snatched from his grasp the moment he lowers his guard.
A quick stumble as I put my foot down on the front step, and I glance down at the impediment, a man sprawled across the stoop, groaning at the unwelcome contact between my shoe and his rib cage. Any apology I could make is forgotten as Chissick steers me inside, through another door, and there’s a brilliant light, so bright I’m forced to squint and shield my eyes with my hand. The noise is there, too. A regular cacophony of every tone and accent, squalling and laughing, every swear and curse imaginable, until I’m convinced there won’t be this much sound until Judgement Day, when the trumpets sound and every soul congregates outside the gates of Heaven.
But I have every hope that Heaven will smell nothing like this.
It’s a long, low room he’s led me into, lit by a fire and streaming gas lamps that put out enough heat to fool me into believing I’ve stepped into a furnace. And there are the people, dozens of them, lounging along the walls, tapping out their pipes on the tops of narrow tables, tripping over benches as their balance deserts them. They talk, and they laugh, and they spit—yes, even spit—onto the floor, onto the walls, great gobs of dark brown tobacco juice shooting from their mouths with all the regularity of breathing. And so the walls are decorated with the effluvium of the room’s inhabitants, spit and sweat and blood and piss and shit, a portrait of life in this part of the city, one I’ve only ever suffered the misfortune of visiting in my mind.
My guide takes great pains to shield most of this from my sight, his shoulders twisting around until his stride becomes something of a side-step, his narrow body acting as a screen that directs me towards yet another door, set into the wall at such an angle one would think it was added to the building’s architecture as an afterthought. And maybe it was, judging from everything else I’ve seen up until now.
A glance over his shoulder, and he pulls the door open, not wide, but leaving enough space for a slender person to slip through into the darkness on the other side.
"I’ll go first," he says, and I notice he still has a hold of my arm. He releases me for a second, his pale fingers beckoning.
I take a breath—for courage, I think—and immediately wish I hadn’t. Another smell drifts in from this new opening, of mould and dust, but more than that. Mould and dust is the aromatic specialty at Mrs. Selwyn’s, nothing new to shock my senses. But there’s something else drifting upwards from the subterranean depths, something my senses revolt against. And then a sound reaches my ears. Footsteps, descending slowly, broken by a pause when Chissick must notice I’m not close behind him. Another breath drawn into my lungs, held for a moment, and it takes all of my resolve not to turn on my heel and run.
The first step whines in acceptance of my weight, accompanied by a small shudder that makes me thankful I’m unable to see how tentative a grasp the staircase might have on the wall. The next step is easier to take, now I know the depth of them, and by the third my hand has found the wall, my gloved fingertips soaking up all manner of effusion from the damp, cool stone.
"Careful on the last step," Chissick warns me, his voice devoid of echo or reverberation. Only dead noise falling out of his mouth.
On solid ground again, but already I’m losing my bearings. I feel a flutter of panic when the thought crosses my mind that I could turn around now and not be able to find my way back to the stairs. Closing my eyes, I breathe slowly, ignoring the musty smells that tickle my nostrils. In the distance, or maybe quite close, I hear a dripping noise. Not steady, but irritatingly erratic, and I imagine the pace of the falling water must match the irregular beatings inside my chest.
"How much farther?" I despise myself for asking it, but I need a destination on which to focus. The fear of treading through a dark maze of dank hallways while being assaulted by the odours of death and dying is simply too strong to bear in silence.
"Just along here," he says, and latching onto the sound of his voice, I follow.
Some part of myself must know what it is I’m about to see. I’m prepared for the soft glow of lamplight beyond the next doorway, for the pervasive odour that seems to adhere itself even to the fibres of my dress. The light has a warmth to it, incongruous in this chilly cellar, the damp rising up from beneath the soles of my shoes. It’s the best place to store a dead body during this time of year, I think. And then Chissick steps aside, and I’m left to stare at the naked woman laid out on top of the rough, wooden table.
The scene is all so impersonal, isn’t it? A corpse—and loath as I am to use a word with such gruesome connotations, there isn’t a more fitting one in my mind—stretched out in front of us, naked as the day it came into the world. And fittingly so. The end like the beginning, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all the rest. But it could very well be a rag doll, or a lump of coal for all the attention we give it as a fellow member of the human race. The spirit is gone, and along with it, our ability to treat it with more reverence than our imaginings of this woman’s former life can give to it.
Desperate to remove my gaze from the columns of white skin, stained underneath with the slow coagulation of blood, my eyes begin a careful search of the room, the arc widening with each pass, until I notice the open case of tools set out on a stool, an assortment of post-mortem weaponry displayed upon the case’s red velvet lining. And my sight presses farther, and I can see the man standing on the other side of the table, sleeves rolled up to reveal thickset arms, just the meat and muscle of a forearm topped off with a blunt-fingered hand, and no significant narrowing of the wrist in between. These same chapped hands flex and run together as the man walks around the end of the table. And now the full width of his figure is on display, pushing and puffing through the room like the prow of a steamer. By the time he arrives in front of Chissick, he’s puffed himself out, his broad chest rattling with the effort of this short exertion.
"Julian," the stranger says, punctuating the name by pressing his fingers to the right side of his nose and sending a blast of more than air whistling out of his nostrils. "Wondered where you’d gone off to. Began to think we wouldn’t be seeing you again." Before he’s finished speaking, his deep-set eyes, nearly black in this poor light, flick towards me. "A friend of yours?"
"U-um, Miss Hawes?" There’s reluctance in Chissick’s voice, as if he’d prefer to continue his role as a screen and keep me hidden from any other set of living eyes. "This is Trevor."
And there lies the end of the introductions. No clue as to whether "Trevor” is the man’s Christian name or surname, but Trevor doesn’t waste time with the delicacies of politeness, and leans towards Chissick, thick shoulder to thin.
"She’s a better breed than I normally see you cavorting about with, but who can account for sudden changes in taste and temper, eh?"
A quick look of apology from Chissick, and he clears his throat, his single vocal protest to this discussion of my appearance. "How are you getting on?"
"Oh, it’s slow business, Jules. Very slow when you’re not given much to work with. Lookee here." The tilt of his perspiring head is meant for his friend, but I fall into step behind the two of them, bearing the large man’s wary gaze with as much equanimity as I can muster.
"Here." He leans towards Chissick once more, but his eyes are very much pinned on me. "You don’t think she’d be better off waiting outside?"
"She’ll be fine," he replies, without a glance in my direction. His attention is now held by the girl laid out on the table, his gaze switching away from h
er before returning to the vicious wound at her throat.
No wonder he can’t bring himself to look away for more than a few seconds, with the dark line of severed flesh at once as hideous and attractive as a monster’s grin. And, in point of fact, it does resemble a grin. Follow the shallow curve of it, widening slightly at the center in its path from ear to ear. No other injury is visible, the girl’s skin a papery white, contrasted by the dark auburn of her tangled hair, the bluish cast to her lips. And—oh—those lips carry a smile of their own, don’t they? Very subtle it is, too. A smile of contentedness, of peaceful dreams, and… well, there’s something else, but I can’t quite identify it. Could it be pleasure? No, no, no. It’s less intense than that. It’s more like relief. There’s relief in the faint upturn of those lips, and I feel a shudder at what could’ve put it there.
"It all looks fairly standard, don’t it?" Trevor chatters away, pausing to sniff deeply before shaking loose the contents of his lungs with a harsh, wet cough. "One quick slash across the throat and she’s done. But you see here? I thought something was iffy when there wasn’t any blood on her. Not a single drop, you see? And here…" The rattle of metal against metal, and he produces a pair of tongs from the wooden case beside him. Giving his right sleeve another push to prevent it from sliding down past his elbow, he uses the tongs to pinch one side of the injured flesh at the girl’s throat, rolling back the loose flap of skin until the wound is over an inch wide.
"See that?" he says. "It’s like it’s all been cooked, the flesh seared to nothing, right from one end to the other."
"Cauterized," I say, my voice cracking at the end of the word.
Trevor looks down at me from the other side of the body. "That’s another word for it."
What might be in the man’s gaze at this moment, I can’t say. If hard pressed, I’d wager that he regards me as an intruder upon this conference between himself and his old friend Chissick. And so I leave them to talk. Or more accurately, for Trevor to babble about bruising and asphyxiation while I move to the opposite end of the table, so that the girl’s legs are stretched out towards me. Her slender ankles are relaxed, allowing her small feet to fall into the delicate curve of a dancer’s arch.
The Half Killed Page 4
