Downriver (34 page)

My path was blocked by Millom's upraised cane. ‘He doesn't kill the King's brother, does he? No need for that.
He employs a blindfolded surgeon to bleed the woman to death
. Very astute. The King gives him a commendation and furnishes him with a bran'-new wife, a
virgin
.'

We plunged, unguided, into a spinney of plaster arms – raised in surrender like an abandoned winter army: bladed wings, crucified midgets. We were soon lost among negative forests of exiled Poles (
Bors, Tomczak, Balawender, Pitera, Pelc, Sieczko
); colonies of replanted Italians with sad sepia photographs, albums of grief; cellars of Irish, dismissed Republican taskforces.

‘A blindfolded surgeon bleeds her to death, wonderful!' Millom was furiously revolving the tip of his swordstick among
the crust of leaves. I expected a wisp of smoke to rise from the frozen ground. ‘Drop by drop, razor cut by razor cut; he describes her – leeches her from life. Takes the heat out of her. Irritates her skin with expectations of pleasure. Am I wrong? An adultery of slow wounds, a salty painless sleep. Imagine the succeeding chain of ecstasies that rolled through her dreams. That's what the Whitechapel butcher was after. He wanted to bleed their fallen natures, let time drain the corruptions. But he was always interrupted; they harried him. He became frantic, botched the job. You understand? These things can only unfold in an ordered society. You can't force the pace of a culture. It took thousands of years for Rome to evolve. Yes?'

This narrative was, I felt, beginning to take a dangerous turn. Millom's agitation was increasingly seismic. He was being cannibalized by his own metaphors. His breath came in rasping seizures, gusts of recycled aniseed. His starched white cuffs were flashing mirror-gauntlets; as he jerked and jabbed and twisted. The rusting dog-fox hairpiece slithered on his moist scalp, ready to make a run for it. Suddenly, and without warning, he drew the blade from its narrow sheath and drove it into the earth, a couple of inches from my boot: an uneasy moment.

‘You're standing on her,' Millom whispered, relishing the theatrical effect, ‘the final victim! A girl of twenty-five, a beauty;
Prima Donna
, the whores called her. She was left without a cup of blood in her entire body. It has been revealed to me that the man who did this thing drank it, believing it would make him invisible. And
I know
who that man was. Or “is”, because I'll tell you something else for nothing –
he's still alive
! He punished himself with immortality. You understand? The last ritual
was
successfully completed.'

By reflex, I looked straight down – ready to meet the dead girl's accusing stare. The grave was freshly dug, blanketed in red and white carnations, on which an inverted crucifix had been carelessly tossed. There was a splendid new headstone, listing
badly to port – as if someone (in escaping from the earth?) had tried to pull it over:
The Prima Donna of Spitalfields. And Last Known Victim of Jack the Ripper. Do Not Stop to Stand and Stare Unless to Utter Fervent Prayer. (Mary Magdalene Intercede.) Dedicated by John Millom, 3 December 1988
.

‘I had her moved. Dug out from a paupers' pit and placed here; beside the ground I have already reserved for my own interment – when the time comes. Am I wrong?'

The man was obviously moved by the enormity of the implications he had floated. Pulling a vast scarlet handkerchief from his breast pocket, he trumpeted ostentatiously. I averted my eyes in shame. Frosty silver trains were rattling and shuddering beyond the graves; defining the perimeters of the dead in a shower of sparks, hobbling the ghosts with thin fire.

John Millom was kneeling. Thinking himself unobserved, he dug his hands into the turned soil – and filled his pockets with damp clay.

V

The cheesy net curtains did nothing to filter out the inhuman entropy of High Road, Leyton; an embolic flutter of muddied Transits, partially resprayed Cortinas, and an angry boil of citizens scouting for the first rumours of the bus pack. The street had no evident purpose, beyond proving the Third Law of Thermodynamics (‘Every substance has a limited availability of energy…').

Millom's apartment smelt sour, unused: he had rented a ledger of unfranked slights, and half-digested resentments. The furniture was impregnated with ancestral flatulence (bad meat, verruca'd potatoes, cabbage boiled to a nappy-like consistency): it asserted a strident eagerness to be elsewhere. Grossly fragrant vapours, rising through the Axminster from the Pharmacy beneath, did nothing to sweeten the atmosphere. They suggested experiments
with feline essences and mouth-violets intended to disguise the more active stinks of chicken vindaloo and illegal chemistry. Everything Millom owned was accounted for and in its place: unloved. A lighter touch was provided by the cloth-texture reproductions in their ornate frames (obviously ordered ‘sight unseen', or left behind by some previous tenant).

The room described a reversed
L
, or mason's square (the Egyptian ‘foot' hieroglyph); taking in views of Calderon Road to the north, and the High Road to the west. The proportions were unsettling, tending to slip and drift: a lozenge with a single shrine-invoking focus. I perched on the rim of a leatherette chair, struggling to repel its alarmingly adhesive embrace. At any moment the points of the golden compasses would close like chopsticks, and I would vanish into the only ‘window' open to me: John Millom's emblematic map.

This scroll, or chart, dominated the east wall and had taken, so he said, three years to assemble. It was a socio-alchemical portrait of Whitechapel; featuring, of course, events from the autumn and early winter of 1888. They spiralled in ropes of demented imagery from a sulphurous heliocentric furnace: a Sun-Father. The words were engraved with marker pen on a marly field. Victim faces, hacked from magazines, were imposed on the courts and furtive alleys: heads bigger than houses, black eyes like dew-ponds. A rash of sticky heat raised these transfers of redundant obsession: names became stars, became pentacles; trees were swords. The circumference was cut by a scarlet thread drawn from the fixed point of the steeple of Christ Church, Spitalfields. The craftsman's own interpretations and comments were too intemperate to await some anecdotal occasion: they blazed free. ‘
I SAY TO SCOTLAND YARD: WHY PRETEND TO FORGET YOUR OWN LIES? Knight picked the WRONG GODFREY. WHO has the KEY???
'

‘Like it?' Millom smiled, proudly. ‘Now you can see I know what I'm talking about. It's all clear. Right? I learnt how to lay out information effectively when I ran a crack sales team. My
time, your money. Am I wrong? We ate it up: Loughton, Chingford, Billericay, Stanford-le-Hope; west as far as Enfield, even Potters Bar. Heating equipment, bathroom suites, brass-ware, sanitary ware, boilers, tanks, polypipes, plastic plumbing systems: we handled the lot. Just get your basics right, I used to drive the message home.
GOTH
: Gather, Order, Transform, Harmonize. Then, when they'd proved they could cope with responsibility, I'd slip them a big one –
JAH
: Jettison, Assert, Hazard. Take risks. No pain, no gain. Am I wrong?'

He stood back, mesmerized by the enormity of his achievement, ogling the chart with dubious paternal pride. It was, like all the other ‘treated' rooms I had encountered, a map of nothing but its maker's brain. For these people, there was no ‘outside'. Their rooms were works of fiction that fought to quell, through partial confession, the vessels of wrath. My very own job description.

‘I always told them at group meetings,' Millom blathered on, ‘remember
JAH
. Number One: Jettison. Cut out inessentials; fall-guys, stoolpigeons, false accusations. Number Two: Assert. Put down the
facts
in the clearest possible way. Dates, times, locations. Number Three: Hazard. Don't be timid, don't be bamboozled by so-called “experts”, with their mouths full of language. The man we want couldn't have been more down-to-earth: he had a practical solution to a practical problem. Am I right? He was a pragmatist. I'm telling you. My solicitor is one hundred per cent behind me on this one. Won't stand still for any loose talk about “Royals” or “Secret Societies”. All anarcho-socialist long-hair propaganda.' He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that trembled with import.

‘Reach under the red carpet and you'll soon get your fingers around our circumcised friend, the ringleted Israelite, unpicking the woof of an ordered society: exclude him at your peril. Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg; Charlie Chaplin, he was half-Jewish, a Comintern agent. They kicked him out of America. Am I wrong? My solicitor doesn't think so. He holds duplicates, in his
safe, of all the Protocols. Anything happens to me – he has his instructions.'

I wanted to pursue the matter of the key (???), for some reason it haunted me. (I suppose I was still thinking of Davy Locke's sunstreak epiphany.) But it was not easy to put Millom, in his cuff-twitching, finger-jabbing flow, on hold.

‘Key? Key?'he pursed his lips in a vinegar pout of denial; trying to cover up the guilty words on his chart with a damp and boneless hand. ‘The Jews didn't find out about that, did they? Your media czars – Bernstein, Weidenfeld, Lew Grade, Victor Gollancz – they're all in it. You won't see the key on the television with Michael Caine, will you? Am I wrong?'He slid open a drawer and took out a cigarette packet from which he extracted something wrapped in tissue paper.

‘This was the pass key, made from a corset-spring, with which the man I am not yet at liberty to name picked the lock of the private madhouse and escaped into the streets. I acquired it, through mutual associates, from an official, no longer employed by the hospital: a favour for a favour, so to speak.'

I looked at the meagre object, which seemed hopelessly inadequate for the task of carrying its burden of iconic signification. It was more of a fish-hook than an implement of power. It lay, unactivated, on the occasional table: a symbol with nothing to symbolize. I tried to bury myself in the unyielding chair, to escape Millom's presence: the engorged veins, the carmine flush coursing through the unripe pallor like an over-administered hit of embalming fluid. He was holding his breath, sucking in the flaps of his cheeks, preparatory to some momentous announcement.

‘You've shown you know when to keep silent,' said Millom, with a choreic twitch of approval (as if I'd had any choice in the matter!), ‘now I will return the compliment and let you have first sight of the document you will publish on my behalf. But I must make one thing absolutely clear before you read it: though every word is transcribed in my holograph,
I did not write it
. It
was dictated to me – by the one person who could have known, without dispute, the full secret of the Whitechapel Murders. I have used my own methods to “go over”, cross the line, make contact. I have been granted access to the voice of that lovely young girl, the victim of the locked room, the madonna of that oven of meat. She will speak to you through my hand.'

The lights had come on in the High Road: Millom stood before me, continuing to demonstrate the progressive degeneration of his basal ganglia. He jerked like a pantomime demon: black-browed, corvine, streaked by the lurid beams of rush-hour traffic. The seediness of the situation was intolerable, but my criminal curiosity stifled all repulsion: I accepted his bundle of blue lined paper, unknotted the pink rose ribbon, and began to read.

VI

The Prima Donna's Tale (As transcribed by John Millom, Calderon Road, 1/1/89)

I had not, I think, been dead beyond two or three months when I dreamed of the perfect murder. Perfect? No, hardly that – inevitable; pure in design and execution. My murder would be an exercise of memory: I would recover something that had, perhaps, never taken place, and I would
make
it happen. Now the past could be whatever I wanted it to be. I had surely earned that right. My power was absolute.

I saw the outline of a girl's body, frosted with unstable light. I saw my own double, kneeling sadly over that body, then moving into the shadows.

A cracked window pane. Muslin belling over a chair-back. The guttered stub of a candle in a broken wine glass. Something shapeless and made from felt smouldering in the open grate.

The room was an oven. But the smell was of incense, not of meat.

I couldn't hold any impression of the girl's face; dark hair was drawn across her throat like a wound. She would certainly have been called ‘handsome', ‘strong-bodied', ‘gay'. But she had turned awkwardly, her legs raised as if for the stirrups. I do not know her, nor do I understand why she condones such abject and degrading poses.

An east wind blusters the powdered snow through a congregation of deformed angels: their names are gone, their faces are without features. They press heavily on the frozen cloth of earth, inhibiting the drowsing dead: those who lack the courage to dream.

A shower of sparks from an engineless train, breaking before the icy station: a platform of chilled and stamping travellers. They have forgotten us. Our desires cannot trouble the banality of their thoughts. Snow faintly falling, like the descent of their last end; unnoticed, unrecorded. Oak and elm, a chaplet of heartsease. Memory anticipates event. A clear, young voice, beyond the courtyard: ‘Only a violet.' It is too late. There is nothing to revenge. A dream to be shaped. Dreamt again, perfected. I move in that dream, I float on its surface. Once more I am sitting at the window, awaiting his step on the cobblestones. I have no power to change the order of the ritual.

This was the best time, the preparation. Self-absorbed, my actions mirrored my intentions: an uninstructed immediacy. There was no anticipation of pleasure, nor dread of failing to provoke an interest. Brushing and rebrushing my hair, halfremembered words of some song. In the elbow-chair, a heavy rug over my knees. From the window, the world at an angle: across the court, a bare wall. Or running my cold fingers over the shape of my own face, making it into a mask of glass. Letting the act collapse into the memory of the act. Bare-legged. A green linsey wrap. Tapping my nail on the sill. Warmed, lit from behind by the glow of a coal fire.