The Fiend in Human Read online

  He watches her read, growing warm as though standing next to a fire. She is very lovely, very dark. Her hair, jet black, spread in a thousand curls about her head and neck, seen against the red velvet of the divan. Her cheeks and lips are full, her white neck giving way to the softness below. She can be soft, but she can also be severe. He must stand very still, for that is what she told him to do.

  She closes her book, lays it aside and surveys him again from head to toe. ‘You are not precisely a treat to the eye. Yet I suppose we shall find some way to make use of you.’

  Her bust is full and beautifully shaped, yet she dresses as though oblivious to it, always in black – not a sad widow’s garment, but well-fitting and, especially, simple. A majestic woman, a pleasure to serve.

  She rises and walks around him, looking him over like a mediocre piece of furniture. ‘How dare you look at me like that! How dare you! I can see what you are thinking – Do you know how a well-bred women responds to such looks?’

  Suddenly and with impressive strength she slaps his face. He lurches backward and falls onto the carpet as though having received an electric shock.

  ‘Get up on your knees, Sir, your thoughts offend and disgust me. Do not look at me unless I tell you to, or I shall deal with you as you need to be dealt with.’

  Kneeling on the Turkey carpet like a Muslim, he stares down at the pattern, or series of patterns, which reminds him of the entrance to an Oriental temple. His cheek burns as though scalded. In the heat of his burning cheek he can breathe the lotion she rubs into her hands to make them smooth.

  ‘I wish to make myself comfortable before we proceed. Come here and take off my shoes. Do it immediately. And remain on your knees, Sir.’

  A light, elegant, buttoned shoe with a riding heel appears beneath the folds of her clothing and points in his direction.

  Eagerly he approaches the waiting foot as though having not yet learned to walk. Taking his place before her, his hands tremble as he removes the shoe, slips the soft leather away from her shapely, warm foot, then places it before her. Her smooth toes, toenails sharp, move as though to stretch themselves, then disappear beneath the folds of her crinoline. Now her other foot appears and demands its turn. He slips the shoe off the foot – even warmer than the first! – as slowly as he dares, using his left hand, while holding her delicate, naked ankle with the right. The second foot disappears. Now he carefully arranges the shoes – still warm! – side by side in front of the divan. Now he remains still, staring at the carpet, awaiting her pleasure, studying the warm leather shoes before him.

  ‘I shall return directly. If you remain absolutely, completely still, and if you behave as you know you should, then we may not have to administer punishment – indeed, we may be pleased to administer a reward …’

  She disappears through the door to what he knows to be her dressing-room, for this entire procession of events has occurred previously, many times, in the same sequence and form, with occasional improvements and variations to elicit surprise.

  Her shoes. Black leather against the red of the Turkey carpet. He reaches out his hand – he can feel their warmth on his fingers even without touching them. But he must touch them. Now is his chance. He picks up one open shoe, still warm, holds it to his face and smells. Now the other. He lifts the two to his face and breathes their perfume, like water to a man dying of thirst, sounding an audible ohhh …

  ‘For shame, Sir!’

  She stands in the doorway to her dressing-room, framed in mirrored light, seemingly taller than before, clad in a long dressing-cape, deep red with a small hood, its folds unbroken from her shoulders to the floor, her white limbs bare to the shoulder from two openings in the sides.

  ‘What is it you think you are doing with my shoes?’ In her right hand she holds a whipping-cane made of the most flexible rattan, steamed and suppled with brine as are whipping-canes in the better public schools, and with the characteristic curve of the handle, but slightly longer to give it more spring.

  ‘This obscene behaviour must be corrected by means of the severest punishment. Take down your trousers, Sir – and do it quickly, do not enrage me further, I warn you! Look down at yourself, at the evidence of your debauchery! Do you think that I mean to indulge your disgusting lack of self-control?’

  ‘Now we will begin your correction. Kneel over the divan. I did not know that I should have occasion for the harness quite so soon.’

  He obeys without a sound, taking position, bent low over the end of the divan, which, unlike its domestic equivalent, has been bolted to the floor and has been laid with a white towel to receive his spendings.

  From behind her back she produces a harness of narrow, strong leather, fitted with brass buckles so that it can be precisely fastened around the neck and across the torso, around the genital apparatus (now in a painfully swollen state), thence to the ankles, there to be affixed not by a buckle but by a cinch. She performs this manoeuvre with swift, expert movements, then, standing behind his back, she pulls the cinch tight until he cries out, in a voice higher than its normal resonance.

  She laid him flat on a gorse down pillow,

  And scourged his arse with twigs of willow,

  His bottom grew white, then pink, then red,

  Then bloody, then raw, and his spirit fled.

  ‘Please, Miss – I cannot bear it!’

  Bracing her bare foot against his behind, she pulls the cinch even tighter. ‘Oh but you shall, Sir. You shall! How dare you disobey me! How dare you use my shoes for your filthy purpose!’ Having completed her task, she stands above and behind him, readying the cane as though about to strike. She pauses, knowing what a pause can do in certain circumstances.

  ‘Do not think for a moment that I enjoy having to do this.’

  She strikes. Again – each blow from her strong and cunning wrist bringing him closer to the ultimate humiliation, until at last the Earl of Claremont cries out in agony and rapture with the voice of a small boy …

  A knock on the window. Voyeurs are a common nuisance at the Grove of the Evangelist, men who like to watch but not to pay for it. It is a disadvantage to working on the ground floor.

  ‘Cease this crying and sobbing, I warn you. I shall give you a moment to consider your misconduct and vow to amend it.’

  Slipping on her shoes, she steps briskly across the Turkey carpet to the corner window, heavily draped with red velvet, both as insulation and as an assurance of privacy. She grasps the hem of each drape, throws aside the curtains, steps forward – and faces the gentleman on the other side, whom she has not seen face to face in fifteen years.

  Despite the blood on his face and the years and the grime accumulated during his escape through London, the recognition is instant. A sound escapes from her lips, a voice from long ago.

  20

  Camden Town

  Thinking is a chore requiring patience with the limitations of the mind; or to be more precise, patience of the spirit with the limitations of the brain.

  The spirit longs to throw off the blinkers of rational discourse, to see fully, to employ the entire mind and not simply that part of the brain which thinks it is thinking. Thus it is fitting that the spirit, upon occasion, deceive or manipulate the brain into surpassing itself. Hence, man has been endowed with alcohol and other ‘spirits’, with which to reconcile the disparity between the demands of the spirit and its chief instrument – albeit at some cost.

  With perseverance, the correspondent has laid before him several lines of enquiry, each with its own singular attraction:

  THE FIEND AND THE PAUPER

  Chokee Bill’s Strange Confessor

  by

  Edmund Whitty, Correspondent

  The Falcon

  THE LOWLIFE OF LONDON

  Inside Rat’s Alley – A Shocking Report

  by

  Edmund Whitty, Special Correspondent

  The Falcon

  A WALK THROUGH THE STEEL

  Science, Fiendishly Cle
ver

  Edmund Whitty Reports from inside Coldbath Fields

  RYAN TO WHITTY: ‘I TOO AM A VICTIM.’

  Cruel Upbringing Nurtures a Convicted Murderer

  WHITTY’S ASTOUNDING ASSOCIATION

  A Fallen Woman in the Shadow of the Fiend

  THE FIEND STATES HIS CASE

  Would Implicate Prominent Person

  RYAN CLAIMS INNOCENCE

  Never mind that last, thinks Whitty, it is too implausible. On the other hand, one does well to test the range of public credulity, to give the imagination a stretch.

  Notwithstanding, there lie buried in these obvious lines of enquiry more nuggets of productive employment than the correspondent has encountered in months. Whitty has not the faintest idea where any of it will lead, for he is not a clairvoyant; on the contrary, he is a man whose lot it is to stagger from one question to the next, from one fact to the next, sniffing for crisp copy, barely able to see his own feet.

  Tell that to the Editor. Tell it to the Captain. Tell it to the Master at Christ Church, Oxford.

  Whitty takes a sip of gin. For the greater good.

  The Fiend, the patterer, the rookery, The Steel, the madam, the murderess – not to mention a shocking girls’ school dalliance: such an embarrassment of riches …

  Someone is knocking. Someone is at the door. Four knocks, evenly spaced.

  Blast. That is Mrs Quigley’s knock. He recognizes her spongy knuckles, not to mention the implied rebuke in the rhythm, the calculated urgency of attack. And of course it would require the insensibility of a walking-stick not to recognize the nasal whine now invading the premises, which music has caused Whitty such joy throughout his sojourn at Buckingham Gardens. Call it ‘The Song of the Suburban Twit’, if you like, or perhaps ‘The I of the Wheedle’, lending superb expression to the suburban attitude of flatulent self-congratulation …

  Where am I? What was I thinking?

  ‘Mr Whitty! I can hear you talking to yourself, therefore you are within! Your attention if you please! There is a gentleman to see you, sniff, if I may deem the term to be appropriate in this case …’

  The wooden teeth of the proprietress go against the grain. Whitty hears himself emit an involuntary oath, which elicits a predictable gasp of shock from the other side of the door. Recovering his composure, he crosses the Turkey carpet (in his night-dress and bare feet, gin in hand, cigar in mouth), and flings open the door.

  Remain calm.

  Her crinolined form entirely fills the entry as she glares at him, wearing an expression calculated beforehand to inspire miscellaneous guilt.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Quigley, cheering as always, such a delight to behold. Please state your business.’

  ‘I hope, Sir, that I did not hear the words my ears tell me I most surely did.’

  Stepping into the room without an invitation, she sniffs the air conspicuously, brushing aside clouds of smoke with the palm of one hand as though the carpet were on fire; her glittering eyes observe in every detail the correspondent’s red-eyed state of disarray.

  ‘I smell an unusual brand of tobacco, Sir.’

  ‘An acute and penetrating observation, Madam, lending an air of innocence to the act of prying into other people’s business. What exceedingly brief service may I offer you, Mrs Quigley – engaged as I am in vitally important work?’

  The eyes travel upward and in silent enquiry as to what important work might be sensibly undertaken in Whitty’s condition.

  ‘The police are here to see you, Sir.’

  Whitty suppresses the urge to heave. ‘A most ominous pronouncement, Madam. Are you certain it is the police?’

  ‘Sir, I know a policeman when I see one, I can assure you of that. Mr Whitty, when we entered into our arrangement, I regret that I was not apprised of your line of work. I believe you intimated you were in banking.’

  ‘You mistook me, Madam. Drinking was what I said.’

  Mrs Quigley does not find this amusing, indeed there emerges a steely aspect to the woman, a quality Whitty has noted in others of her sex who undertake a commercial enterprise late in life – what one might call the battle-axe within.

  ‘I shall indeed provide for alternative accommodation, Madam, the moment I have completed my expose on suburban lodging. And now, so that I may prepare to greet my guest, allow me to draw your attention to that useful portal, the door.’

  Having thrown on a dressing-gown, cravat, slippers and a splash of toilet-water, Whitty descends the stairway into Mrs Quigley’s fussy, under-heated foyer.

  Wouldn’t you know: Under-Inspector Salmon, of that nest of snakes known as New Scotland Yard. Salmon, whose technically handsome features – patrician nose, strong jaw – have placed him in charge of entertaining the press, or harassing them, or breaking their arms, as necessary.

  In his straight hat, straight coat, straight chin-whiskers, and his straight and dangerous stick, Salmon aspires to resemble some Cromwellian Iron Duke. Yet to Whitty the under-inspector is a man like himself, a professional who walks a dark street, wringing a living out of misery and death; indeed, put together with the Editor and taken as a group, Salmon, Whitty and Sala somewhat resemble Burke, Hare and Knox, whose frightful commerce in cadavers chilled the public’s blood in the early part of Her Majesty’s reign.

  Up the close and down the stair

  Up the close and down the stair

  But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.

  Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

  Knox the boy what buys the beef.

  At Whitty’s appearance on the stairs the under-inspector smiles: not a reassuring expression in his case. ‘Mr Whitty, Sir. I thank God to have found you at home.’

  ‘Indeed, Policeman, I assume a godly reason for your visit.’

  ‘Ungodly I am afraid. The Fiend has escaped from Coldbath Fields.’

  ‘Shocking. And which fiend might that be?’

  ‘As though you don’t know.’

  ‘Indeed, Policeman, I do not.’

  Whitty has heard that even the crushers regard the under-inspector as unnatural and bloodless, with an incorruptible, cruel rigidity to his character.

  ‘Indeed, Sir, I have come to congratulate you.’

  ‘And what is my achievement, Sir?’

  ‘A bit late to plead ignorance, given that it was you who predicted it.’

  Thinks the correspondent, Did I? If so, then the game begins in earnest – whatever it is.

  ‘Mr Whitty, I’ll thank you to favour me with a reply.’

  Salmon gestures with his stick while speaking, stopping just short of the bric-à-brac, figurines and other bourgeois affectations that clutter every horizontal surface of the room, thereby signalling his willingness to do damage.

  ‘Please enlighten me further, Mr Salmon. I write many pieces in the public interest, and I make many predictions of varying discernment.’

  ‘A disappointing response, Sir. I assumed we could speak intelligently and with a measure of mutual respect.’ So saying, the under-inspector produces a neatly folded page of The Falcon, opens it, and proceeds to read aloud:

  However valid, such objections are soon to be eclipsed by a scandal of sheer incompetence, the which is destined to jolt London to its foundations … Due to rampant negligence and petty corruption from the highest official to the lowest crusher, the public remains at the mercy of the true fiends who stalk the streets …

  Salmon refolds the clipping carefully and slides it in his pocket as though it were evidence for the Crown. ‘When you saw fit to compose those words, Sir, to what were you referring, if not to the escape of Chokee Bill?’

  ‘Chokee Bill has escaped? The deuce, you say!’

  Salmon’s stick cracks Whitty behind the ear with sufficient force to put him on his knees. ‘Please do not play cute with me, Sir. Please do not.’

  Whitty rubs his throbbing temple while awaiting the ringing in his ear to subside. ‘I fear, Mr Salmon, that you give me more credit than I deserve.’ />
  The under-inspector speaks with exaggerated politeness – never a good sign in a thug. ‘Please allow me to assist you, Mr Whitty, I believe you slipped upon a wet spot on the floor.’

  ‘Sir, I swear to you as a journalist that the piece in question was social criticism of a general nature, noting inadequacies in the security of the British penal system, with the obvious conclusion that no good will come if it is permitted to continue.’

  Salmon seizes the back of Whitty’s dressing-gown, ripping the collar: the correspondent now stands or rather dangles before him, face to face, receiving the full benefit of the officer’s metallic breath. (Mercury? Arsenic? Ether? Ether: Of course.) As well, he has the benefit of the officer’s stick, inserted skilfully into an intimate place which would cause pain in any circumstance, let alone with the injuries previously inflicted by the ratters and their little friend Rodney.

  ‘Policeman, I swear to you on the grave of my mother that I know nothing! Nothing!’ Unencumbered by feelings of manly pride, Whitty can bleat for mercy with conviction, and is willing to swear to anything at all by his poor dead mother.

  Still sensing a lack of sincerity, the officer twists the stick forcefully upward.

  ‘I know nothing! Policeman! I beg you, stop!’ The bric-a-brac clatters around him — surely Mrs Quigley is within hearing. ‘Mrs Quigley! Please come at once!’

  The door to the rear of the building remains closed.