The Jekyll Revelation Page 20

  Fanny, I thought, might keel over with delight, while Henley, I feared, might bring up some delicate political issue. ‘Behave,’ I muttered to him.

  He grunted his acquiescence, and the introductions were made peaceably all around.

  ‘I’m a bit of a writer myself,’ the prime minister mentioned—is there anyone in London who is not?—‘and so I can appreciate the artistry of a tale well told. I have read “Treasure Island” to my children three times, and still they haven’t tired of it. That peg-legged pirate, Long John Silver, is their favourite.’

  Then, perhaps taking sudden notice of Henley’s wooden leg, he said, ‘And many other characters, too, of course.’

  Henley, not one to let an occasion for embarrassment pass, said, ‘Still, it’s the one-legged ones that make the strongest impression. Why, my friend Louis tells me I was the very model for the man. Didn’t you, Louis?’

  ‘And how did you enjoy the play tonight?’ Fanny burst in, all but knocking Henley off his crutch.

  ‘Very much, I enjoyed it very much.’ But before he could expatiate on that, a thin man in a drab brown suit and derby squirmed to Salisbury’s side and whispered something in his ear. Salisbury bent his head, asked the man to repeat it, and all I could detect were the words ‘fire’ and ‘frigates’. Now that it had been mentioned, there was indeed an acrid smell in the air.

  ‘Yes, yes, quite right,’ Salisbury said, then making his apologies, hurried back to his coach, with the Union Jack emblazoned on its door, cabriolet lamps shining, and a pair of perfectly matched chestnut mares in harness.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Fanny asked.

  ‘Judging from the direction of the wind,’ Henley said, ‘I’d bet there’s a fire over at the Holloway docks. I must be off—a newsman’s work is never done.’

  On the journey home, the sulphurous smell in the air only grew stronger, making the horse skittish and aggravating my lungs even further. And yet there was something else in the air, too, a sense of impending doom. Was it the residual effect of the play? The spectre of a fire at the docks? Possibly. But I could not attribute it solely to those causes. As we passed away from the white glare of the West End, down the narrower streets, lit only by the intermittent glow of gas lamps, and sometimes by nothing but starlight, I felt the approach of something dire.

  The next afternoon, the penny press carried the first tidings of a crime so savage that even the sordid slums of the East End, long accustomed to violence, had seen nothing like it before.

  ‘Brutal Slaying in Whitechapel!’ the “Times” proclaimed. ‘Atrocity Committed Under Cover of Dark!’

  It was an act so heinous, so wanton in its cruelty, it might well have been perpetrated by a genuine Mr Hyde.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Roy kept his goggles on and his head down, tending to his lab work, but all the while his head was spinning. Sure, sure, he knew he was supposed to be packing up, but he was right in the middle of mixing up a big batch, and there was no way he was going to let all that work amount to nothing while Axel found a new place to set up shop. But now that those two park rangers had found their secret lair, how long would it be before the whole gang got busted? The marijuana laws were changing all the time, but meth? Meth was still a major felony and carried hard time. He’d been to the Chino state penitentiary already—three years for auto theft—and he was not about to wind up there again.

  Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw that Axel had stretched out again on the sofa, sleep mask over his eyes and earbuds firmly implanted. Nothing ever seemed to get to the guy. But what the hell? Was Axel just going to let them walk away, knowing what they knew? Was he planning to count on their instinct for self-preservation and simply trust them to keep their mouths shut?

  That was not a plan in Roy’s book.

  The sun had set, and Axel was still asleep (Roy had seen him swallow a couple of something—maybe Xanax—when he lay down) when he dared to stop working, gather up the stuff he needed—a flashlight, compass, hunting knife, and of course, the shotgun—and creep out of the building. At the top of the stairs, he waited, wondering if he’d hear any noise from within, but apart from Axel’s contented snoring, there was nothing.

  The sky was clear, and the moon was bright enough to let him see where he was going, most of the time. The ground around the lab was sere and parched by all the waste chemicals Roy and his occasional lab assistants had dumped there, but even when he’d put the building far behind him, the undergrowth was sparse and dry. He swept the flashlight back and forth, looking for footprints, but there wasn’t much to see. Maybe a scuff mark here and there, stuff Hiawatha could have picked out, but Roy was going on his gut. When that girl had taken off, she’d headed off toward the Potheads’ place, so that was where he headed now.

  What he would do once he got there was still unclear to him. Sometimes he wondered if working around so many chemicals and fumes had kind of altered his cognitive functionality. That was a phrase he’d heard a few times from the Chino psych therapist—cognitive functionality. He’d really kind of liked it; it sounded like he had something important going on in his head. And he certainly preferred it to all the talk about irrational anger and impulse control. Once, he’d gotten so mad at hearing about how out of control he was, he’d managed to pick up three plastic chairs in a row and smash them to smithereens on the floor of the mess hall. That had taught them all a lesson; he never heard about his anger issues again—at least not to his face.

  The air was cooler now, and he enjoyed being able to swing his arms without the constrictions of the lab gown. It was nice, too, to be free of the sweaty goggles and the gloves. But when he got within sight of the Potheads’ shack, he slowed down and tried again to formulate some kind of plan.

  Was he just going to bust in and shoot everybody on the spot?

  Appealing as it was, it was pretty drastic. That many dead would definitely draw attention, and could in the end get him arrested again.

  And besides, Axel would be pissed. He hadn’t ordered the hit, and he liked to operate under the radar as much as possible.

  A lantern was shining through what you could call the side window of their shack—there just wasn’t any glass in it—and as quietly as he could, Roy crept up to it and took a peek inside.

  Christ, why didn’t that old bag ever cover her jugs? She was leaning over a rickety table, pouring tea into clay cups in front of the rangers and her idiot husband. Ducking down again, he heard snatches of the conversation. Bees. They were talking about bees, for some reason. “The hives are disappearing,” that guy Salazar was saying, “and without them, a lot of other plants and animals are going to suffer.”

  Mr. Pothead said something about Washington and a conspiracy, and Salazar let him run his mouth. The girl tried to get in a word or two edgewise, but Roy had already lost interest. At least they weren’t talking about the meth lab, or cops.

  But shooting them all seemed like a bad idea.

  He had to do something smarter. But what?

  When he heard the word jeep, it gave him a thought. “It’s dark enough now for us to head back to the jeep,” Salazar said. “But thanks again for your hospitality.”

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “Wait,” Mrs. Pothead said, “I just want to wrap up some of my muffins for you.”

  Muffins? Man, those had to taste like shit, Roy thought. But if they’d driven the jeep up to this area, he had a damn good idea of where they’d left it.

  And with any luck he could beat them there.

  Slinking away from the window, he loped off across the field, over the next crest and into the patchy woods and brambles of the canyon. His brain was teeming with cognitive functionality. It was almost like he could even see and hear and smell better, too. His feet were dancing on the ground, feeling a trail, and when he picked up the dull glint of moonlight on metal—the hood of the car—it was all he could do not to let out a war whoop l
ike some Indian.

  The jeep was still pointing up and into the canyon, as far in as it could go, which meant Salazar would have to back up and then turn it around before heading home. Roy knew he would have to take that into account. A huge puddle of brake fluid on the ground might be spotted in the headlights, which, by the time Salazar got there, would definitely have to be turned on. Besides, Roy needed the brakes to work a little still, enough to get the jeep under way and to make it as far as the steep slope that ran down the crest toward the main Topanga road. That’s when they would really need the brakes, and without them, run the biggest chance of accelerating out of control and hitting something. A tree, a rock, maybe even a truck if the jeep made it far enough to go rocketing onto the asphalt highway. In his dreams, Roy saw the car smashing headlong into something and erupting in a ball of flame that took both of the rangers out of the picture for good, with no questions asked and no evidence left to sift through.

  But if his dreams were to come true, he needed to work fast. A practiced car thief from his many years on the streets of Bakersfield, he had popped the hood and taken his hunting knife to the brake lines in a matter of minutes. This, he thought, as he clamped the flashlight between his teeth and sawed away just enough to get the job done, was cognitive functionality at its best.

  3 September, 1888

  Seemingly overnight, the dining room at Cavendish Square had come to resemble the reading room at the British Museum. Fanny must have subscribed to every newspaper and penny press in London, and those that weren’t spilling off the edge of the table were spread out between the cups and the bread basket, leaving barely enough room for the spoons.

  ‘Oh, it’s horrible,’ she said, as soon as I shambled through the door in my dressing gown, not even fully awake. ‘Absolutely unspeakable.’

  That, I knew, would not keep her from speaking of it.

  ‘I assume you refer to the fire at the Holloway docks? Two of Her Majesty’s frigates, and a ship of the line, to boot.’ Unable to sleep after the debut of the play, I had hailed a cab on the street, and in the dead of night gone to observe the mounting conflagration, whose acrid odour hovered over the city still.

  ‘Very funny, Louis. You know perfectly well what I’m referring to.’

  Mrs Chandler came in from the kitchen and filled my cup with thick, black coffee, a habit Fanny has inculcated in me; Americans much prefer it to tea. ‘Will you be wanting eggs and bacon this morning, or just porridge, sir?’

  ‘Just some buttered toast, I think.’

  ‘Oh, but sir, you need more than that to make a start of the day.’ She glanced at Fanny for her true orders, and with a nod, Fanny effectively countermanded me.

  ‘They’ve determined it for sure now,’ Fanny said, holding up the “Times.” ‘The woman’s name is—was—Mary Ann Nichols, though it seems her friends all called her Polly. Poor thing.’

  I poured a touch of cream into the coffee and watched it swirl about, then dissipate; doing so always puts me in mind of the dreams my little Brownies so assiduously assemble each night, only to have them subsumed by the demands, both petty and pressing, of the daylight hours.

  ‘The man who first found her body—a carter on his way to work at four in the morning—mistook her for a tarpaulin, thrown up against a fencing, and went to fetch it for his own use. When he saw it was a woman, with her arms flung wide and her dress much dishevelled, he put it down to drink—a drunken prostitute. Not something uncommon on Buck’s Row.’

  Much of the story was already known, but each day the papers retold everything already established and added such salacious details as they had been able to muster in the interim. No recent story had received quite so much attention as this. Lord knows murder and assault were far from unusual in the East End, but the sheer malevolence and barbarity of this one had shocked everyone, from the officers of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard to the ordinary citizens of the city, whether they lived in squalid Whitechapel or lofty Mayfair.

  Putting down the “Times,” Fanny riffled through her library, pulling out the “Star,” the paper that could be depended upon to dig deeper, and dirtier, than the rest of its competition. ‘The killer apparently held her by the throat with one hand—his right—and slashed with his left,’ she said, summarizing the account. ‘He must have sent her bonnet flying; it was a few yards away. And once he’d severed her jugular, and the woman could no longer fight or cry out, he’d used his knife on her, over and over again.’

  Mrs Chandler put a plate of rashers and runny eggs on the table before me, and scurried from the room with her hands all but covering her ears.

  ‘I think you are frightening the servants,’ I said.

  ‘There was a long gash down her left side,’ Fanny went on, unperturbed, ‘and a number of deep lateral incisions across her abdomen. The doctor who did the post-mortem, Dr Ralph Lees Llewellyn, says that all of these mutilations were done after she was dead, and must have taken him at least five or ten minutes to finish.’

  ‘I think you are frightening me.’

  ‘The way they were done’, Fanny said, finally lowering the “Star,” ‘indicates that the murderer had some basic anatomical knowledge.’

  ‘So now we should look sideways at our physicians?’

  ‘We should do that, anyway,’ Fanny said, ‘starting with that Dr Rüedi.’

  ‘Surely, you don’t suspect him of the murder,’ I joshed.

  ‘No, not of that.’

  ‘And as for me, I’m still alive, aren’t I? Years later?’

  ‘Yes, there’s that,’ she said, as if it were somehow beside the point. ‘I just never liked his manner—very condescending, and particularly towards me.’

  How could I tell her that it was Rüedi’s elixir that was keeping me alive—much less that it was rendering me, on certain desperate occasions, a stranger even to myself?

  Outside, we heard the clip-clopping of a horse’s hoofs coming to rest, and when Fanny went to the window, she said, ‘Oh my, it’s Lloyd.’

  ‘In a carriage, of course. Has he got any money to pay the driver?’

  ‘Now, Louis, don’t harangue him about his writing again.’

  ‘There’s nothing to harangue him about. Has he written two words?’

  The hall door opened, and I could hear Lloyd rustling through the envelopes and bills, many of them his own, that tended to congregate on the foyer table. I left them there in the vain hope that he might notice how much he was spending and consider doing something one day to pay them.

  ‘We’re in here,’ his mother called, and he slouched around the corner, looking much the worse for wear. ‘Morning, Louis,’ he said, as he went to kiss his mother’s cheek.

  ‘Where have you been all night?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Desmond and I went to his club to play cards, and as it was so late when we quit, I stayed over at his house in Belgravia.’

  In no time, Lloyd had cultivated a taste for the finer neighbourhoods and frivolous activities of London. In Randolph Desmond, he had found the perfect tutor.

  ‘What’s that under your arm?’ she asked, and he said, ‘The latest edition of the “Illustrated Police News.” I knew you would want it.’

  And on that score he was quite right. She snatched it eagerly from his hand.

  Mrs Chandler put her head in to ask if he would like anything to eat or drink, but Lloyd shook his head. ‘I ate already, at the club.’

  From the way he spoke, it might have been his own club he was referring to.

  ‘I’m just going to go up to bed,’ he said. ‘Wake me for tea.’

  Fanny watched him go with the loving, but concerned, look of a mother hen, and I attended to the last of my eggs and bacon. What I did not need this morning was another debate about what to do with Lloyd. I had done all that I could to help him in his literary aims, even going so far as to assist him in plotting and composing various dramatic ideas, but the lures of London life were too enticing,
and his fundamental nature was, like his father’s, too diffuse and undetermined.

  ‘I do think it’s a great help to have such useful pictures,’ Fanny said, her face buried in the “Illustrated News.” The engraving on the cover, which I could hardly avoid seeing, showed a toothless, middle-aged woman, in a dark bonnet, with a basket slung over one arm.

  ‘Fanny, does it say anything in there about her selling flowers?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Let me see,’ she said, scanning the interior pages. ‘Yes, here. It says her bonnet, blue crêpe, was a few yards off—they knew that already—and a basket of dead blossoms was strewn on the pavement near the corner. He might have knocked them from her hand before the attack.’

  Leaning across the table, I lifted the paper from her hands—‘I’m still reading that, Louis!’—and studied the cover, and then the additional pictures of the victim inside. My heart grew cold.

  ‘Don’t you recognize her?’ I said.

  ‘What? Polly Nichols? Why would I?’

  ‘At the theatre. As we got out of the carriage. She tried to pin a carnation on my lapel.’

  Fanny studied the pictures again, and then said, solemnly, ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

  I knew I was. And what occurred to me, a moment later, was that I might have been able to alter this woman’s fate—that had I simply bought a carnation or two, she might have had enough to pay the fare for a bed that night. Instead of plying the streets as a prostitute, she might have been asleep in some shabby, but safe, doss-house, and awakened the next day in no worse way than she had gone to sleep.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that awful,’ Fanny said. ‘But I don’t suppose that information would be of any use at all to the police.’

  ‘No, I don’t see how it would be,’ I replied, as we had barely noticed her at all, ‘though it is surely a grim coincidence.’ More than that, even, it was a reminder—one I hardly needed any more—that the workings of fate were as inexplicable as they were implacable.