The Devil's Ribbon (29 page)
‘Leave my girls out of this and put your damn gun down. We’ve sent a message to The Yard, and these meadows will be swarming with
Specials any minute … there’s no way out … whichever way you go, they’ll find you. How on earth did you ever think you could get away with it?’
Patrice laughed, standing under a huge oak tree, his finger twitching on a trigger. ‘Get away with it? You helped me. Showed me every trick in the book, Albert.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Learning and erudition, monsieur. I couldn’t resist that. One in the eye, for the ignorant apprentice,
n’est ce pas
?’
‘But why? If you survived
The Liberty
and saw all those terrible deaths, why more deaths? What did it achieve, Patrice?’
Patrice put his eye to the viewing finder, readied himself, as the sky got darker, the rain fell down, the lightning setting the earth on fire.
Crack
. Fork lightning, as he smiled. ‘Achieve? I’d say that was obvious, wouldn’t you, monsieur, or should I say, and this be Paddy speakin’ to yer now …’ His voice switched suddenly into a rasping Donegal accent. ‘Sure, I knew no better, me be’n a poor Irish lad, one up from an animal, no better than a savage, yer honour … killing and death is all I know …’
Crack
. A wave of thunder across the shimmering grasses.
‘Killing me won’t bring your sister back.’
‘Let me go, then …’
‘You know I can’t do that, Patrice …’
‘Very well. It’s a pity because I raised myself, fed myself, clothed myself, shooting game in Canada, lived like a wild man in the woods, and I’m an excellent shot, and even through this finder, I can see your grey hair, Albert. Your failing eyes, your trembling hands, but are you ready …’
‘Ready.’
Roumande counted for both of them – as a matter of honour –
Une.
Deux.
Crack.
Patrice went up like a firecracker. A burning effigy. A hot explosion of sparks, his body on fire, the tree on fire, the grass on fire, the earth on fire. Roumande wrenched his coat off, ran, threw it on him, rolled him in the dirt. But struck by lightning, Patrice was dying, just one word on singed lips. ‘
Sssss
…’ or was it ‘
Ffff
…’?
Roumande bent down, said something like a prayer and listened. ‘What are you saying, lad?’
‘Ssss …’
Hatton raced down the hill, to see her twisting and turning around ancient gravestones, her thin body pummelled by the rain but not enough rain to stop the blood trail that was leading to a stream, a canopy of trees. Hatton was long-limbed, fast, determined, and she was stumbling, limping, slipping across some moss-covered stepping stones. But what was he doing? Catching or saving her? He didn’t know, he wasn’t sure, but as she scrambled up the other side of the bank, he was after her. Her heels sending little pebbles flying into the water, scaring the fish away, and above them, ribbons of evening light, and in the leaves, a peep, peep, peep of a bird and the snap of a branch.
‘Sorcha?’ he cried. A flash of black hair, she suddenly found her strength, knowing she might die, and ran like the wind up the grassy bank, but he was a damn good hunter when he put his mind to it. ‘Got you!’ he said, as the girl – and she was a girl despite her strange appearance, with her ripped face, her curling locks caked in blood – fell
to her knees and turned around to face him saying, ‘
Saoirse
…’ Her breathing came in sharp little rasps as he held her to the ground. He grabbed her wrists tighter.
‘How could you?’
‘
Saoirse
, please, Adolphus … if you love me …’
‘Love you?’
‘
Saoirse
, please. I beg you …’ He held her there for a few more seconds, pinned beneath him, his legs straddling her body. She pulled him forward, kissed him. ‘Please, please … have pity … Addy …’ There was a storm above them, electric in the air, a crack of thunder, clouds rolling in. His breath running faster than hers.
‘I’ll never see her again, will I?’
Roumande shook his head as Hatton crossed the bloody floor of the mortuary towards a large cadaver on the slab. It had come their way yesterday, for general dissection work. ‘So who’s that?’ Hatton asked, not really caring at all.
Roumande was preparing the corpse, washing it down with chloride of lime as he said, ‘The journalist, John O’Rourke. He was hung from a gibbet in the Old Bailey, along with that poor little boy, despite our protestations to The Yard. It’s a disgrace. He was one year older than my son.’
Yes, I know,
thought Hatton.
And I’m bitterly ashamed.
He’d heard the prison bell ring, announcing the hanging, but couldn’t go, he couldn’t face it, but soon learnt from the hospital gossips that it was a
terrible sight because the rope was too long and the boy was too light. That the hood filled with blood and the boy twitched on the gibbet for a good fifteen minutes before the end came.
Hatton had moved like a ghost, laying his scalpel down and making his way slowly to the chapel, to do what?
Revenge is a wild kind of justice
, he’d thought as he genuflected in front of the altar, in a show of what? Contempt? Mockery?
But today Hatton thought,
I did nothing, nothing for that child. Another death on my hands
– as his mind drifted back to Sorcha. ‘She really has gone, hasn’t she?’
Roumande knew it was best, under the circumstances, to say nothing more about the girl. False comfort helped no one. And it was times like this when it was best to give the Professor space, a little time for the contemplation of love and what it meant when it ended.
Hatton sat on his chair by the grate where a huge, comforting fire was lit, because even though it was still summer, he felt cold all the time. Roumande said, ‘It will take time, Adolphus. But you have to accept that she’s gone from your life.’
Yes, but Inspector Grey hadn’t.
‘What do you mean, she’s gone?’ Inspector Grey had said when he arrived at the plague meadow, two hours too late. ‘She can’t have just gone? She must be somewhere? If you’re lying to me, Adolphus, there’ll be hell to pay. You let her go, didn’t you?’
But Inspector Grey had other matters to deal with, far more pressing. A singed killer at his feet and two more ready to hang. The successful conclusion to the Ribbon Murders Case, ensuring that Grey was no longer just ‘inspector’ any more.
‘Chief Inspector,’ he preened, a few days later. ‘Free meals all over town. Champagne all round. Chief Inspector Jeremiah Grey? How the devil does that sound, Hatton? Mr Tescalini is a very proud man.’
‘It’s very fitting, Chief Inspector. Like one of your suits.’
‘Yes, isn’t it,’ said Grey as he leant forward, sneering. ‘We all suffer from affairs of the heart, Adolphus, and I know what you did. But I shan’t breathe a word. It will remain our little secret, eh, Professor Hatton?’
Yes, the threat weighed heavily and Hatton knew that as long as he kept Sorcha’s letter, there was always a chance for the threat to weigh heavier still. So reluctantly, he stood up and threw the letter in the fire, watching it burn, a funeral pyre. And when it was nothing but ash, he said, ‘I’m not feeling so well, Albert. I’m going home.’
‘You did your best, Adolphus. It’s all we can do in the end. Dr Buchanan is up and about, by the way. He has been sent to Clacton for sea air, and just before he left, he made special mention of you and our department, Professor.’
Did he care? But fighting his despondency, Hatton still said, ‘In what capacity?’
‘A fivefold increase in our budget, Adolphus, which means we can hire a toxicologist, a part-time phrenologist, and start making real progress on this fingerprinting thing.’
‘Of course,’ Hatton said, pushing his derby down on his head, and lighting a penny smoke, a habit he’d now adopted. He puffed the bitter weed out, grimaced. ‘You’re right. I’ll see you tomorrow, Albert.’
Because this day was over, but another would surely begin – without her.
Hatton left the morgue, and walked with his head down, crushing
the weeds which struggled up through the pavers. Bright orange hawkweed and the blue specks of speedwell trying to catch the last drop of a soon-to-be-ending summer.
14 Gower Street.
He opened the door to the lodging house and, once inside his room, lay on his bed, looking at the cracks in the ceiling, utterly spent but hearing a voice in his head – ‘
Death stalks us. Death stalks all of us, Professor
.’
A WORD ABOUT INSPECTOR GREY AND SCOTLAND YARD
In the nineteenth century, Scotland Yard was based at Number 4 Whitehall Place, the number of detectives increasing to around twelve men by the mid 1850s. The population of Great Britain was expanding rapidly, and by 1858, London was the largest city on the earth, fuelled by Industrialisation and the great wealth generated by The British Empire. With these dramatic economic changes came a burgeoning middle class, intent on protecting its property, and the flip side of that – desperate poverty, particularly in the rookeries (the slums). With increased city dwelling came an inevitable increase in crime – armed robbery, garrotting, vice, pickpocketing, and, of course, murder.
Inspector Grey is a figment of the imagination and it wasn’t normal for a detective – even a senior one, like Jeremiah Grey – to have an assistant. His yearly salary would have been in the region of three to five hundred pounds a year, tops. Not nearly enough to keep him in Savile Row suits,
opium bonbons, a morphine habit, presumably lodgings somewhere (tastefully decorated, of course), never mind a servant. However, for the purpose of the story, I felt Inspector Grey really ought to have one.
DRUG CITY
Drug-taking was widespread in nineteenth-century London. The Victorians enjoyed not just large amounts of alcohol (the water wasn’t safe to drink, anyway) and spoonfuls of laudanum (opium mixed in a syrup), but also cannabis, coca from South America, mescaline, and with the invention of the hypodermic needle in the 1840s, morphine and heroin. Hot off the narcotic-filled creative brilliance of the Romantic poets, Victorian writers such as De Quincey, Dickens, and later Conan Doyle were all influenced in their work, to a greater or lesser extent, by drug-taking. For many Londoners, drugs undoubtedly lessened the pain of existing and the harsh realities of urban life in the 1800s. Added to which, all sorts of drugs were widely available dressed up as lotions, potions, eye drops, pills, and pick-me-up ‘tonics’ to treat a whole range of illnesses and maladies – headaches, coughs, feminine ‘hysteria’ (PMT), you name it. And on the whole, simply bought over the druggist counter, perfectly legally. This inevitably led to an increasing number of addicts. Opium-spiked bonbons – a favourite of Inspector Grey’s – were a regular treat for many.
SICK CITY
The opening theme of this novel is cholera. London suffered from a number of outbreaks from this horrible disease during the 1840s and
’50s. Most Victorians believed the disease was carried in the air – the so-called miasma – but it was the work of Dr John Snow (dead from overwork by June 1858) and his colleagues, Mr William Farr (the government’s chief statistician), who together isolated the true roots of cholera though their groundbreaking medical research, during an outbreak in 1854 at The Broad Street Pump in Soho. They discovered through painstaking detective work that the disease travelled via the mouth from faeces in contaminated water. However, the miasma theory continued to hold sway long after their work was completed.
A WORD ABOUT THE PAINTING IN MR HECKER’S MILL BY MILLAIS
Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Amongst other things, he painted landscapes and was much beloved by Victorian gentlemen.
As with all historical novels, I did a great deal of research to get the detail right. I hope I’ve succeeded but, of course, I’m not infallible and will stand to be corrected – although not in a Newgate dock. Here are some of the places and books that helped me: The Wellcome Trust Museum;
The Medical Detective
by Sandra Hempel;
London in the Nineteenth Century
by Jerry White;
London, A Biography
by Peter Ackroyd; and
The Great Hunger
by Cecil Woodham Smith. For more on the Victorians and my work, please visit my website at www.demeredith.com.
As ever, Charlie Meredith for everything; my two fantastic boys, Joseph and Rory; wise owl and friend, Natasha Fairweather. Plus: Anne Wilk, Mary Meredith, Kathleen and Alec Laver, Helen Calcraft, Freya Newbery, Gaby Chiappe, Julie Major and the Bike Club, Tim Sibley, Amy Fletcher, Caroline Stack, Jennifer Joyce, Sarah Gordon (and all those suppers), Neil and Sarah Laver, Susie Lipsey, and Christine Langan. A huge ‘
Grazie
’ to Francesca Polini, ‘
Go raibh maith agat
’ to Eoin O’Neill and my cousin, Lorna McPhearson, and ‘
Merci beaucoup
’ to Melanie Lanoe; thank you also to Elizabeth Piedot, Naomi Klein, and Phil Michel.
Thanks to my mentors and uber agents Sophie Lambert and Kevin Conroy Scott and everyone else at Tibor Jones. Also Marika Lysandrou for her timely input. Many thanks to my editors in the US at St Martin’s, Peter Wolverton and Anne Bensson who helped make this book what it is. Special thanks to Susie Dunlop for buying this series and publishing
me in the UK with such aplomb. The energy, creativity and commitment Susie and all of her team at Allison & Busby have given to the Hatton and Roumande Mysteries series has been more than any writer could possibly wish for. And more.
I am also very grateful for the meticulous work done on the UK edit by Sara Magness. For her amazing designs which have impressed so many, Christina Griffiths, and also Chiara Priorelli for her fantastic work behind the scenes.
And finally, I would like to make a special mention of my lovely friend Claire Wilson who listened to me banging on about my books for hours with such patience and good humour. Claire, you are sorely missed and the world is a lesser place without you.