Being a Most Sensational & Authenticated Account of Diabolical Doings in the Parish of St. Giles
By A.G.
Chapter the First: In Which London Sleeps, and Something Does Not
It is a curious and melancholy truth – one which your correspondent has had occasion to observe these many years, in the company of police inspectors, magistrates, resurrection men, crossing-sweepers, and that great unwashed democracy which constitutes the beating, if somewhat begrimed, heart of this our magnificent metropolis – that the city of London never, in any proper sense of the word, sleeps.
She dozes. She nods. She pulls her fog about her like a counterpane drawn up by a drunkard’s hand, thick and uneven and smelling powerfully of the Thames. But sleep? No. In the small and godless hours, when the respectable have long retreated to their feather beds and their self-satisfied consciences, London yet murmurs and stirs and conducts, in the shadows of her innumerable crooked lanes, a commerce as old as commerce itself, and considerably less scrupulous.
It was in one such lane – Cutpurse Alley, a thoroughfare so narrow that two umbrellas could not pass one another without negotiation, located in that labyrinthine quarter of Seven Dials which the charitable describe as colourful and the honest describe as wretched – that Molly Gash was last seen alive.
Molly was, in the brutal taxonomy of the age, a fallen woman. She had fallen, as many do, by degrees so gradual that she had scarce noticed each successive step downward, until she found herself at the bottom of a staircase she could not have drawn a map of, and discovered that the floor was considerably harder than she had been led to expect. She had been, in some prior incarnation, a glover’s assistant in Cheapside. Before that, a farmer’s daughter in Hertfordshire. Before that, a child who chased geese and believed, with the absolute conviction available only to the very young, that the world was fundamentally well-disposed toward her.
She was wrong, of course, as the world takes considerable pains to demonstrate.
On the night in question – a night in October, which is to say a night of particular and deliberate nastiness, the wind off the river carrying with it suggestions of every disagreeable thing the river had lately passed – Molly was conducting her professional perambulations along the eastern extremity of Cutpurse Alley when she encountered a gentleman.
We deploy that word with the caution it deserves.
He was tall – preternaturally, architecturally tall, as though he had been designed by someone with an excess of height and a deficiency of other materials. His coat was of a black so absolute it seemed less a garment than an argument, and his face, beneath the brim of a hat of antique and funereal cut, was the precise colour and temperature of old church marble. He had about him the distinction of a man of quality and the stillness of something that has been quality for a very long time indeed – longer, the more observant passer-by might have felt, than quality is commonly permitted to last.
His eyes were red.
Not the red of drink, nor of weeping, nor of the sort of late night that begins with ambition and concludes with one’s hat in a gutter. Red as garnets. Red as old port held to a guttering flame. Red as – but we shall allow the reader’s imagination to supply its own comparison, as whatever that imagination produces will likely prove adequate to the occasion.
“Good evening,” said the gentleman.
His accent was of no country that Molly Gash could name, though she was a woman of wider acquaintance with the varieties of accent than most. It moved through consonants the way water moves through old stone – unhurried, inevitable, wearing.
“An’ good evening to yourself,” said Molly, with the professional cheerfulness of her station. “Bitter night for it.”
“For it,” agreed the gentleman, and smiled. “Yes.”
He had, it must be recorded, a great many teeth.
Chapter the Second: Containing an Introduction to Inspector Crudge, a Man of Considerable Jaw and Limited Imagination, and to Miss Catherine Sparrow, Who Has Plenty of Both
Inspector Harold Crudge of H Division, Metropolitan Police, was a man built along the general architectural principles of a river barge – wide, flat, purposeful, and not noticeably possessed of any poetry. He had a jaw of such prominence that it arrived in a room several seconds before the rest of him, serving as a kind of herald, and eyes of a pale and suspicious blue that had, over twenty-three years of service, looked upon the worst that London offered and reached the conclusion that it was worse than that.
He stood now in Cutpurse Alley in the grey and uncharitable light of early morning, looking down at what remained of Molly Gash, and he was not, to his considerable credit, a man given to expressions of horror. He was, however, given to expressions of professional affront, and this his face now displayed in abundance.
“Drained,” said the police surgeon, a small and enthusiastic man named Phibbs who applied to human misery the cheerful energy of a man who has found his precise calling. “Completely and comprehensively drained. Not a drop to be found. Exsanguinated, one might say, if one were of a Latinate disposition.”
“I am not,” said Inspector Crudge.
“Bloodless, then. Dry as a last year’s herring. It is, I confess to you freely, Inspector, quite the most extraordinary thing I have seen, and I have seen-“
“Where,” said Inspector Crudge, with the flat economy of a man who has learned that Phibbs, left to his own devices, will enumerate at length, “are the wounds?”
Phibbs indicated the neck with a proprietary air, as though he had installed them himself.
Crudge looked. Crudge’s jaw moved in the manner of a man doing difficult arithmetic. Then Crudge straightened, placed his hat back upon his head at the angle that signified deep professional thought, and said a word that the more delicate reader will be content to have omitted from this account.
It was the third such death in as many weeks.
It was in the public house known as the Compass and Garter – an establishment which offered neither navigational assistance nor anything resembling finery, but which was warm, which served gin at a price that respected the poverty of its clientele, and which asked no questions that were not strictly commercial – that Inspector Crudge, nursing a glass of something he preferred not to examine too closely, made the acquaintance of Miss Catherine Sparrow.
She was perhaps five-and-twenty. She was perhaps considerably less than that, or considerably more – the streets have a way of rewriting a woman’s face in a hand not always legible. She was small and dark-eyed and possessed of a nose that had clearly had an argument with something solid at some point in its history and emerged from the encounter with its character, if not its geometry, intact. She was sewing.
In a corner of a public house at half past eleven at night, with the establishment in full and fragrant roar around her, Miss Catherine Sparrow was sewing.
“Piecework,” she said, without looking up, being the kind of woman who is aware of being observed without requiring confirmation of the fact. “Collars. Fourpence the gross. Don’t stare, it’s rude.”
“I’m a police inspector,” said Crudge, as though this were a philosophical rebuttal.
“Then it’s officially rude.” She bit off her thread with an efficiency that suggested she was not a woman who harboured patience for ceremony. “You’ll be about the murders.”
“What do you know about the murders?”
“What everyone round here knows. Which is more than you lot, I’ll wager, or you wouldn’t be sitting in the Compass at this hour looking like a man who’s lost something and can’t remember what it was.” She threaded her needle with the casual precision of long practice, eyes still on Crudge. “Three girls. All working the same patch. All left like-” she made a gesture, economical and eloquent. “My friend Molly was the last.”
“I’m sorry,” said Crudge.
She looked at him then, and her dark eyes were perfectly steady. “Are you? Well. That’s something, anyway.” She returned to her sewing. “He’s tall. Dresses old-fashioned. Red eyes, according to Bet Sawyer who saw him Thursday past on Monmouth Street and had the sense to run.” A pause, a stitch. “Bet is not, I will tell you, a woman celebrated for her sense.”
Inspector Crudge set down his glass very carefully, the way a man sets down something when he is concentrating on other things. “How do you come to know all this?”
“Inspector,” said Miss Catherine Sparrow, with a patience that did not extend to warmth, “these are my streets. These were my friends. And I will tell you something else for nothing.” She stopped sewing and looked up again, and there was something in her face that was not precisely fear and not precisely fury but occupied the territory between them with considerable authority. “He’ll come again. He’s not done. And your lads in their tall hats blundering about with their bulls-eye lanterns will no more catch him than they could catch the wind.”
“And what,” said Crudge, slowly, “would you suggest?”
Miss Catherine Sparrow smiled. It was not, in the strictest sense, a comfortable smile to be on the receiving end of.
“I suggest,” she said, “that you buy me a gin, Inspector, and I’ll tell you exactly what I suggest.”
Chapter the Third: In Which a Trap is Set, and the Bait Declines to Be Entirely Passive About It
The plan, as Inspector Crudge laid it out the following morning in the cramped and coal-smelling offices of H Division, was the product of that particular species of official thinking which mistakes complexity for cleverness and volume for strategy. It involved fourteen constables, four designated observation posts, a system of whistle signals so elaborate it required a written key, and a decoy.
The decoy was Miss Catherine Sparrow.
She sat across from the Inspector’s desk on a chair that had been designed by someone with a philosophical objection to comfort, her hands folded in her lap with a composure that seemed, to Crudge, both admirable and faintly irritating in equal measure.
“You understand the risk,” said Crudge, for the third time, because he was a conscientious man and repeating things was his substitute for feeling them.
“I understand it perfectly,” said Catherine, “which is why I negotiated terms before agreeing to run it, and not after, as only an idiot or a politician negotiates from a position of prior commitment.”
Her terms had been: one pound sterling in advance, a written letter from the Commissioner acknowledging her material contribution to the investigation, and the release of one Thomas Sparrow – her brother, a young man of amiable temperament and catastrophic luck – from the Clerkenwell House of Correction, where he was serving three months for a picking-of-pockets that he swore he had not committed and that all available evidence confirmed he had absolutely committed.
Crudge had agreed to all three, with the pained expression of a man swallowing something that does not agree with him.
“There is one further thing,” said Catherine, rising from the objectionable chair with the ease of someone accustomed to less hospitable surfaces. “Your men and their whistles. Keep them back. Not skulking-in-doorways back. Back. If he smells the peelers-“
“How would he-“
“He’s been working these streets longer than I’ve been alive,” said Catherine, with a certainty she had no rational basis for and which was, nonetheless, correct. “Keep them back.”
She left. Sergeant Tibbs, a broad young man of Devon who had been standing at the far wall attempting to resemble furniture, exhaled.
“Formidable woman,” he said.
“Expensive woman,” said Crudge, but he said it to the empty chair.
It was arranged for a Friday.
Friday was chosen on the logic – Crudge’s logic, which had the virtue of consistency if not always of brilliance – that the previous three incidents had occurred in the middle of the week, and that therefore the fiend, if fiend it was, might not anticipate an approach on a night of different character. This reasoning was not without its critics, Sergeant Tibbs being too diplomatic to voice his, and Catherine Sparrow being insufficiently diplomatic not to.
“He doesn’t pick his nights by the calendar,” she said. “He picks them by the fog.”
And indeed the fog was Friday’s. It came off the river as it always came – with the air of something that had been planning this for quite some time – and settled on Seven Dials with a thoroughness that was almost geological, filling the alleys to the brim, smoothing all distinction between lamplight and darkness, between the near and the far, between the solid and the suggested.
Catherine stood at the mouth of Cutpurse Alley at a quarter past ten.
She was dressed in the manner of her professional neighbours – a shawl of indeterminate colour, boots that had seen more history than was comfortable to contemplate, her dark hair unpinned and falling about her shoulders in the way that the streets required and that she, in other circumstances, would not have permitted for reasons of its inconvenience. She carried no weapon that was visible, which is not to say she carried none.
Fourteen constables were positioned – she trusted – at a distance sufficient to be useful without being conspicuous. Sergeant Tibbs, who seemed to her the most competent of the available auxiliaries, was stationed at the Monmouth Street end of the alley with instructions that were, essentially, come when you hear screaming, and not before.
She had been offered a whistle.
She had given it back.
She waited.
The thing about waiting, Catherine had observed over the course of a life that had required a good deal of it, is that it requires you to be present in a way that more active pursuits do not. You cannot distract yourself from waiting. You can only wait, and be aware that you are waiting, and listen to the city breathing around you.
London breathed its customary breath. A dog, somewhere, conducted a disagreement with the night. A carriage rattled distantly along Oxford Street, its lanterns making twin smears of amber in the grey. From the Compass and Garter came the communal noise of consolation – voices, laughter of the specific pitch that is indistinguishable from its opposite – and then a burst of cold air as a door opened and closed.
Then silence.
Then: the footsteps.
They were wrong.
This was Catherine’s first apprehension of them – not that they were loud, or rapid, or in any way conventionally threatening. They were simply wrong, the way a clock is wrong when it gains a second each hour, nothing you could point to but something your body knows before your mind does, the hair on the arms rising with the animal intelligence that predates every sophistication the reasoning mind has managed to construct atop it.
The footsteps had no echo.
In Cutpurse Alley – a canyon of old brick that turned the sound of a mouse into a percussion instrument – the footsteps had no echo whatsoever. They fell, and they ceased, and they left behind them a silence that was not the silence of absence but of presence actively suppressing sound.
He emerged from the fog as though the fog had made him.
Red Varney.
He was, as Bet Sawyer had reported, tall. He was, as the evidence of three poor women had already established, a creature of singular and terrible purpose. Up close – and he was now very close indeed, having crossed the interval between them with a gliding unhurriedness that seemed to mock the concept of distance – he smelled of nothing. Not night air, not river, not the cologne that men of his apparent station invariably affected. Nothing. A void in the olfactory world, which was, in its way, more alarming than the eyes.
The eyes.
Catherine had been told about the eyes. She had listened to Bet Sawyer’s account with the attentiveness she gave everything and the personal discount she applied to Bet Sawyer specifically. She had prepared herself, in so far as preparation is possible, for the eyes.
She had not, it emerged, prepared herself sufficiently.
They were the colour of old blood held in cupped palms. They moved over her face with the methodical interest of a craftsman assessing work, and in them was an intelligence – old, patient, particular – that was in no respect the intelligence of appetite alone, but of something that has had centuries to develop its appetites into connoisseurship.
“Good evening,” said Red Varney.
His voice was what water sounds like under ice.
“Evening,” said Catherine. Her own voice emerged level and of reasonable timber, which she considered, privately, one of the finer achievements of her life to that point.
He tilted his head – a gesture so precisely avian, so utterly without the hydraulics of human curiosity, that it clenched something in Catherine’s chest. His mouth moved. It was arranging itself into a smile of such particular architecture – so many teeth, so uniformly and unnecessarily white in the fog-grey dark – that the word smile seemed frankly inadequate to the structure.
“You are not afraid,” he said. It was not quite a question. It was the tone of a naturalist noting an unexpected specimen.
“I’m absolutely terrified,” said Catherine, “if it’s all the same to you. I’m simply not letting it have the room.”
Something shifted in the red eyes – old amusement, genuine and, in its way, genuinely horrible, the amusement of something that has found, after a very long time, a thing that is new. He stepped forward. The air around him was cold in the specific and unnatural way of things that have no business being cold – a cold that had no weather behind it, no winter, no wind, but only the pure abstraction of the absence of warmth.
His hand rose toward her.
His fingers – too long, too white, possessed of the slightly excessive certainty of a hand that has never been refused – reached for her hair.
And Catherine Sparrow, seamstress, lure, daughter of the streets, sister of a catastrophically unlucky pickpocket, reached into the front of her shawl and produced a four-inch filleting knife of the sort sold cheaply in the Caledonian Market and kept, by women in her profession, for reasons that required no elaboration.
She put it against his wrist with the economical precision of a woman who has put knives against things before.
“Scream now,” she said, to no one in particular, “would be helpful.”
What followed was, by the accounting of Sergeant Tibbs’s subsequent report – a document that strained the conventions of official prose nearly to their breaking point – an engagement of considerable confusion and duration.
The whistles sounded. All of them. Simultaneously and from every direction, which produced an effect less of coordinated enforcement and more of a foggy, shrieking bedlam. Boots arrived. Lanterns arrived. Crudge arrived, his great jaw forward like the prow of a vessel that has committed to a course it cannot now alter.
Red Varney moved.
He moved the way the second hand of a clock moves – in that fraction between one position and the next that the eye refuses to see but the mind knows must exist – and for a moment that was not quite a moment, he was at the alley’s entrance, and the bulls-eye lanterns caught him there, and fourteen constables of H Division had in that frozen instant the experience of seeing something look back at them that had been looking back at things for a very great deal longer than they had been looking at anything.
Several of them were, in subsequent years, unable to sleep particularly well.
He was gone into the fog.
But Catherine Sparrow was standing, knife in hand, unbitten, quite extensively unenjoyed, and wearing the expression of a woman who has won a point on a narrow margin and intends to remember it.
Crudge arrived at her side breathing with the specific labour of a large man who has run farther than his build advises.
“You were supposed,” he said, between respirations, “to wait for the whistles.”
“The whistles,” said Catherine, examining the tip of her knife with professional attention, “were taking their time.”
Chapter the Fourth: In Which Ancient Evil is Cornered, Tommy Sparrow Arrives, and the Gaslight Proves Insufficient to the Occasion
The fog did not lift. It never lifted, in Seven Dials, so much as it redistributed itself – moving from one narrow throat of a lane to another with the leisurely proprietorship of something that considered the quarter its own, which, in every meaningful meteorological sense, it did.
Red Varney had gone to ground.
This was Crudge’s phrase, deployed the following morning over a desk now comprehensively buried beneath constables’ reports, each one a monument to the magnificent variety of things that fourteen men can fail to observe simultaneously. Gone to ground. He said it with the professional stolidity of a man who has decided that the English language contains adequate resources for the situation and that he need not go looking for new ones. His jaw moved. His pale eyes moved across the reports. His hand moved toward his tea and, finding it cold, moved away again with the resignation of a man for whom this is not the worst disappointment the morning has offered.
Gone to ground. Yes.
But ground, in London, is a relative concept.
It was Sergeant Tibbs who found the house.
Tibbs – Devon-born, methodical, the possessor of a mind that worked the way good agricultural machinery works, slowly and with great force and without any interest whatsoever in being diverted from its furrow – had spent the two days following the night of the alley conducting what he privately described as his thoroughing, by which he meant the process of walking every street within a half-mile radius of every incident, speaking to every shopkeeper, costermongering person, crossing-sweeper, boot-black, and doorstep denizen who would hold still long enough to be spoken to, and writing down everything they said in his notebook with a pencil he kept so sharp it could have been used for surgery.
He knocked on Crudge’s door on the third morning with a notebook and an expression that, on a less topographically stable face, might have been called excitement.
“Varian’s Court,” he said. “Off of Neal Street. The house at the end, behind the elm.”
Crudge looked up.
“It’s been empty since ‘forty-seven,” said Tibbs. “According to Mrs. Pudwick, who keeps the pie shop on the corner and who, I will tell you sir, has a memory like a magistrate’s ledger, a man of exactly our description took a short lease on it six weeks past. Paid in coin. Old coin, she says.” Tibbs consulted his notebook. “She says it smelled funny.”
“The coin.”
“Yes sir. She said it smelled like a church. I said, what sort of church, and she said, one where everyone in it has been dead some time.”
A silence occupied the room for a moment, the way silences do when no one is sure they want to disturb them.
“Right,” said Crudge.
Miss Catherine Sparrow was not invited on the subsequent reconnaissance.
This detail is recorded here not because it affected the outcome – it did not, or not directly – but because Catherine Sparrow’s response to it was characteristic and illuminating. She received the news that she was to have no further official involvement in the investigation with a nod so serene and so immediate that Crudge, who had been braced for argument, felt the structural sensation of a man who has leaned heavily on a door that opened in the wrong direction.
“Of course,” she said. “Good morning, Inspector.”
Crudge left.
Catherine waited approximately forty-five seconds, put on her shawl, and followed him at a distance she had spent a lifetime calibrating.
She was, the reader will have gathered, not a woman who responded well to the passive voice.
Varian’s Court.
There are places in London which the city appears to have misplaced – little courts and passages and irregular scraps of ground which the general forward advance of the metropolitan idea has somehow, through some bureaucratic oversight of the universe, failed to reach. They exist outside of time in the specific way of things that have been too miserable for improvement and too structural for demolition, and they smell, uniformly, of the eighteenth century, which is to say of privation conducted without the consolation of gaslight.
Varian’s Court smelled of that, and of the elm at its centre – immense, elderly, its bark furrowed with the specific gravity of trees that have been watching human concerns longer than human concerns have deserved to be watched – and of something else underneath. Something old and mineral and dry. The cold-without-weather cold. The nothing-scent of nothing.
The house at the end had been handsome once, in the reign of some previous and optimistic monarch, and still wore its original proportions like an old man wearing his young man’s coat – technically correct, fundamentally sad. Its windows were shuttered. Its step was swept, which was somehow worse than if it had not been swept, because the sweeping implied occupancy in a way that dust and neglect, which merely imply abandonment, do not.
Crudge stood before it at half past nine at night with Tibbs at his shoulder and four constables at his back, all of them looking at the door with the particular attention of men who are reassuring themselves, each in his own way, that the thing they are about to do is a thing that is done by sensible persons in the ordinary course of professional duties and is not in any material sense something else entirely.
Crudge knocked.
The door opened.
This was, in itself, the first irregularity – not that someone opened it, but that it opened as the knock landed, as though either the knock had been anticipated or the door had been waiting with a patience indistinguishable from purpose.
The entrance hall was dark in the way that dark is sometimes merely the absence of light and sometimes the presence of something else wearing dark’s clothing. A single candle burned at the end of it – not a gas jet, not an oil lamp, but a candle, tallow, old – and by its light the hall resolved itself into: a bare wooden floor, swept; walls papered in a pattern of black vine that had faded to the colour of old bruises; and at the far end, in the doorway that led deeper into the house, Red Varney.
He did not appear to have moved since the alley. He wore the same coat, the same hat – removed now, held in one long-fingered hand with a courtly propriety that was the most frightening thing about him, because it was the gesture of something that has never stopped performing civilization even after civilization had entirely ceased to apply. His red eyes moved across the assembled constables with the interest of a collector examining lots that fall below his customary threshold of acquisition.
They settled on Crudge.
“Inspector,” said Red Varney.
“Sir,” said Crudge, because twenty-three years of the Metropolitan Police will affix the honorific to almost anything regardless of what that thing may have done.
“You have found me,” said the creature, with an inflection that suggested this was a matter for equanimity on all sides. “I confess I thought it would take longer. Your predecessor-” a pause, a small tilt of the head, the avian articulation of it, “-in the year eighteen-eleven, I believe it was – was rather less expeditious.”
Crudge’s jaw moved.
“Eighteen-eleven,” he said.
“The Ratcliffe Highway,” said Red Varney, pleasantly. “You will recall the case. Or perhaps not – you would have been-” he assessed Crudge with an eye that had evidently spent a great deal of time assessing the chronology of human faces, “-not yet born. Inspector Williams caught a great deal of the credit, as I recall. And the blame, ultimately, which was tidier from my perspective.”
The candle flame moved in a draught from no evident source.
Crudge reached into his coat and produced, with the air of a man who had given this action some thought but not quite enough, a pair of regulation handcuffs.
Red Varney looked at the handcuffs.
He looked at Crudge.
“Inspector,” he said, and now there was in his voice the undertone of something very large and very old and very poorly amused, like the first geological movement that precedes an avalanche, “I have been walking these streets – these specific streets, these lanes, these rivers of fog and cobblestone – since before your Metropolitan Police was a gleam in Sir Robert Peel’s legislative eye. I have been here since before the buildings you shelter in were built and after the buildings before them were unmade. The city knows me. I am-” he paused, selecting, “-of the city, as the river is of it. I am not inconvenienced by steel.”
He moved.
He moved as he had moved in the alley – that between-moment translation that bypassed the intervening space – and he was now at the side of the hall, and the constables were stumbling into each other with the eloquent confusion of men whose bodies have registered something their minds are still attempting to contest, and Crudge-
A voice from the doorway said: “Oi.”
There are moments in the affairs of the universe when the instrument of Providence reveals itself to be not what one would have chosen, had one been consulted. Such a moment now arrived, wearing Tommy Sparrow.
Thomas Sparrow was twenty years old. He was slight, sandy-haired, possessed of his sister’s dark eyes in a face that otherwise resembled a friendly ferret, and he had been released from the Clerkenwell House of Correction that morning with one shilling, his confiscated suspenders, and the strong institutional suggestion that he reform. He was standing in the doorway of the house in Varian’s Court because he had gone looking for Catherine – with whom, as a matter of fraternal duty, he had been looking to share his good news – traced her to Seven Dials by the method of asking everyone he met, which was a method that relied heavily on Catherine being memorable and the residents of Seven Dials being willing to talk, both of which conditions obtained, and had arrived at Varian’s Court at the precise worst moment that an unarmed twenty-year-old of modest physical stature and chequered recent history could have arrived.
He was holding, for reasons known only to Tommy Sparrow and the previous occupant of whoever’s pocket he had just relieved, a small silver cross on a chain.
He held it up now, more, one suspected, in the instinctive manner of a man who has seen the theatrical performances that addressed this specific situation than from any considered theological position.
The effect on Red Varney was immediate, structural, and remarkable.
He recoiled.
Not the recoil of a man startled. Not the recoil of a creature experiencing a social complication. The recoil of something very old encountering the specific thing – the one particular and ancient thing – which has always been the exception to its general immunity from consequence. He pulled back from the light of Tommy’s inadvertent talisman the way the tide pulls back from the shore, precipitately and without dignity, and in pulling back he pulled back also from the composed and ancient authority with which he had filled the hall, so that for a moment he was simply – in some quality that had nothing to do with the visual – less.
“Ah,” said Catherine Sparrow, from behind her brother, where she had been standing for the last thirty seconds exercising the patience for which she was not celebrated. “Tommy. You absolute idiot. I could kiss you.”
“I just got out of gaol,” said Tommy, keeping the cross extended with the rigid arm of a man who intends to keep doing the thing that is working for as long as it continues to work.
“I am aware. Watch your right.”
Tommy watched his right. Crudge arrived on his left. The four constables, reorganising themselves with the speed of men who have been handed an actionable situation after a prolonged period of bewilderment, arrived in a general encircling motion, and Red Varney – ancient, cornered, pulling about himself the remnants of centuries of terrible dignity – found himself at bay at the end of the hall with his back to a wall that was, for all the philosophical vastness of his history, in the practical present a wall.
He drew himself up. He was very tall. The red eyes moved from face to face – from Crudge’s implacable jaw to Tibbs’s furious pencil to Tommy’s extended cross to Catherine’s knife, which had reappeared with the quiet inevitability of a thing that is frequently useful.
“A seamstress,” said Red Varney, at last, and his voice was still the under-ice water, but there was in it something that had not been there before, something that in a human man might have been described as a grudging acknowledgment. “A seamstress and a pickpocket.”
“Family business,” said Catherine.
Chapter the Fifth & Last: In Which London Disposes of What It Cannot Explain, and Miss Sparrow Negotiates Her Future
The question of what, precisely, to do with Red Varney was one for which the Metropolitan Police had no established procedure.
This is not, in itself, remarkable. The Metropolitan Police had, in eighteen fifty-three, no established procedure for a considerable variety of situations – the force being, at that point, still young enough to be surprised by London, which is a state that London exploits with the cheerful efficiency of a seasoned market trader spotting a provincial newcomer. But most of those situations fell, however awkwardly, within the broad tent of human experience, and could eventually be routed to a magistrate, a coroner, a prison chaplain, or some other official whose job description, interpreted generously enough, might be made to cover the eventuality in question.
Red Varney did not fall within the broad tent of human experience.
He fell outside it, in the dark, in the cold that was not weather, in the red-eyed patience of something that had been outside that tent since before the tent had been erected, and had watched from out there with the untroubled interest of a creature that expects, eventually, to be watching still when the tent comes down.
They had him restrained. This had required, in the aftermath of Tommy Sparrow’s inadvertent intervention, a further period of considerable operational creativity – including the winding of the silver chain about his wrists, an expedient which Crudge later described in his report as a non-standard application of witness-provided materials and which Tommy later described, at length and with embellishment, in every public house in Seven Dials. Varney had not resisted further. He had submitted to the chain with the expression of a man accepting an inconvenience he considers temporary, which is the expression of a man who may well be correct.
He was installed in a cell in the basement of H Division’s offices – the deepest cell, the one normally reserved for persons of such established violence that proximity to the rest of the prison population was considered a public health matter – and the door was locked, and then locked again with a second lock that Tibbs had found, on reflection, and then a further lock that Tibbs had found on further reflection, which last was the lock from the stationery cupboard and was not, technically speaking, a security instrument, but which seemed to Tibbs to represent the right spirit.
Crudge visited him in the morning.
Varney was seated in the single chair – he had arranged himself in it with a composed and vertical exactness that no human spine, over the course of a night on a wooden chair, would have managed – and he turned his red eyes on Crudge as the Inspector entered with the attention of a man picking up a conversation that has been briefly and inconsequentially interrupted.
“You intend,” said Varney, “to charge me.”
“Murder,” said Crudge. “Three counts.”
“On what evidence?” The voice was academic in its interest. Not anxious. Not anything that occupied the same latitude as anxious. “The women you cannot produce in any condition to give testimony. Your witnesses – the young woman and her brother – saw nothing that any competent solicitor would not reduce, in open court, to hysterical fabrication within a quarter of an hour.” He paused. “I have, Inspector, been tried before. It was in sixteen ninety-four. The court found in my favour. The judge – a man of considerable personal courage and, ultimately, considerable personal misfortune – was quite thorough in his examination of the evidence. I found his methods refreshing.”
Crudge’s jaw moved in the manner of a man who is receiving information he did not request and cannot usefully process.
“What happened to him?” he said, though he was not certain he wanted the answer, which is a condition Crudge was not accustomed to, being a man whose professional relationship with information was generally unencumbered by preference.
“He lived to a very advanced age,” said Varney, which was not the answer Crudge had anticipated and was, in its way, worse. “They generally do, the ones who make the accommodating choice. London is, Inspector, a city of accommodations. You know this better than anyone. You make them daily – with the rookeries, with the criminal interests that organise the rookeries, with the trades that service the criminal interests that organise the rookeries. The city is nothing but accommodation, all the way down.” He turned his head, the birdlike precision of it. “Make the accommodation. I have been here longer than the city’s memory of itself. I will be here when the last of these buildings has subsided into the clay. What is the loss of a few – the phrase I believe is customarily deployed – unfortunate women, against the span of centuries?”
Crudge was quiet for a long moment.
“You consider that a reasonable argument,” he said at last.
“I consider it an accurate one.”
“Right,” said Crudge.
He left the cell and locked all three locks, including the stationery cupboard one, and went upstairs and stood at the window of his office looking out at London doing what London does in the morning – the barrows and the cries and the small particular griefs of commerce – and his jaw moved and moved and produced nothing further because there was nothing in the English language, as he had access to it, that was adequate to what he was feeling, which was the rage of a man who has been told a true thing he will not accept.
He sent for Catherine Sparrow.
She arrived in the same shawl – it appeared to be the only shawl, or else the shawl was a permanent condition – and she sat in the uncomfortable chair without appearing to find it uncomfortable and listened while Crudge, with a flatness that was the only form his distress took, laid out the situation in its completeness.
She listened without interrupting. This was, in Crudge’s experience of her, unusual enough that it had the quality of a professional courtesy, extended deliberately and withdrawn when deliberateness was no longer warranted.
When he had finished she was quiet for a moment, looking at nothing in particular with dark eyes that were doing something behind them.
“You can’t try him,” she said.
“No.”
“You can’t hold him. Not permanently.”
“No.”
“And if you release him-“
“No,” said Crudge, who had not yet exhausted the word.
Catherine unfolded her hands and refolded them in the opposite configuration, which was, for her, the physical equivalent of pacing. She looked at the ceiling, where a water stain had established itself in the outline of something that, depending on the observer, resembled either Italy or a cow.
“The house in Varian’s Court,” she said. “Is it still leased in his name?”
“Until the end of the month.”
“And his – his arrangements. His-” she paused, because the English language was failing her too, on a slightly different corner, “-his accommodation. His resting place. Tibbs searched the house?”
Crudge looked at her.
Tibbs was sent for. Tibbs arrived with his notebook and the expression of a man who has been thinking since the previous evening and has arrived somewhere he finds uncomfortable.
“Cellar,” said Tibbs. “Varian’s Court. Below the main cellar – a further room, accessed through a floor panel. There is a-” he consulted his notebook, though it was evident he did not need to, “-a box. Of considerable age. Lined with what appears to be continental soil. The lid-” he stopped.
“What about the lid,” said Crudge.
“The lid has, sir, from the inside, claw marks.”
The room received this information in the manner of a room that has run out of responses.
“Right,” said Catherine. She stood. Her voice had arrived at the place voices arrive when thought has run ahead of scruple and found the destination and decided on it. “I need an hour. I need Tommy – my brother – and I need Sergeant Tibbs’s notebook. Specifically the page on which he has recorded the address of the church in Aldgate from which, as he noted last Tuesday in my presence, the silver chain originated.”
Both Crudge and Tibbs looked at her.
“Don’t,” said Tibbs, slowly, “don’t you need to know-“
“I need the page,” said Catherine, “and I need not to have had this conversation.”
The fire in Varian’s Court was attributed, in the official record, to a fault in the old chimneywork, which was documented as deteriorated in a structural survey that Sergeant Tibbs wrote, with his careful and relentless pencil, on the morning following. The house, being of an age where the materials were both dry and determined, went thoroughly, and the court’s one elm went with it, which was subsequently noted as a loss by no one, the elm having been a source of recurring municipal anxiety for years. The cellar went last, the stone and old brick of it resisting longer than the wood above – but going, finally, in the way that everything goes, which is to say completely, and without the courtesy of leaving anything identifiable behind.
Whether the occupant of the box in the sub-cellar was inside it at the time the cellar went is a question that the official record does not address.
What the official record does note – because Crudge, whatever else he was, was not a man who omitted – is that the three locks of the deepest cell in H Division were, on the morning following, found locked, from the outside, the chain still in place, the stationery cupboard lock still gamely in position, and the cell itself empty.
The investigation into how a secured prisoner had vacated a secured cell without disturbing any of its three locks from the outside was pursued with diligence and resolved with the official finding of misadventure, which is a term the law deploys when what it means is something happened here that we have collectively decided not to look at directly.
London accommodates.
This is what London does.
There is, in the parish record of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, an entry dated the fourteenth of November, eighteen fifty-three, recording the appointment of one C. Sparrow to the position of Consulting Inquiry Agent to H Division, at a retainer of twelve shillings per week, said appointment being the personal recommendation of Inspector H. Crudge. The nature of the role is described in the entry as miscellaneous matters of an irregular character requiring particular local knowledge, which is bureaucratic English for: things we cannot put in a form, situations we do not have a procedure for, the dark lanes and the fog and whatever walks in them.
Catherine negotiated fourteen shillings. She obtained thirteen and a half, which she considered a fair result from a position of, technically, one.
Tommy Sparrow, in the months following, kept the silver cross. He was not, in any conventional sense, a religious man – he had been, he considered, too close to the operations of the universe to extend it that degree of credit without further evidence – but he kept it on its chain about his neck, and he kept it always, and he never again put his hand into a pocket that he had not first, and for reasons he would not have been entirely able to explain, determined to his satisfaction was one belonging to a living person.
He also kept out of Clerkenwell.
Inspector Crudge returned to his desk the morning after the fire in Varian’s Court and found on it, in an envelope without a mark or an address upon it, a single playing card: the Jack of Spades, which is the blackest jack in the deck, and which someone had pierced through the heart with the point of a very sharp and very small knife, the kind sold cheaply in the Caledonian Market.
Crudge looked at it for a long time.
Then he put it in the drawer.
He locked the drawer.
He drank his tea, which was, for once, adequately hot.
Outside the window, London moved in its million-footed, fog-breathed, ancient and unextinguishable way, making its accommodations, spending its darkness, proceeding – as it always proceeds and as it always will proceed – in the perfect and terrible confidence of something that has been here longer than any account of it, and intends to be here when the last account closes.
Something, in Seven Dials, in the fog, moved.
The fog received it.
The fog kept its counsel.
FINIS
The publishers wish to note that all persons depicted in the foregoing account are the products of imagination, including those elements which the reader may find most difficult to dismiss as such. The Metropolitan Police H Division has no record of a Consulting Inquiry Agent by the name of Sparrow. The house in Varian’s Court has no record at all, the parish surveyors having noted, with some confusion, that no such court appears on any map of the district post-dating eighteen fifty-three, nor can any resident of the area be found who remembers the elm.
The card is in the drawer.
The drawer is locked.
