The Thing About Thugs (16 page)

Mr Stanton and Mr Drew quickly discovered that the man was dead, and that he had obviously been murdered recently, as his body was still warm in the chill of the winter night. However, their horror was increased by the discovery that the man was lacking a head: yes, gentle reader, the man had been beheaded by the monster who had deprived him of life. Despite a search of the alley, the missing appendage was not recovered — which reminded at least this correspondent of the unsolved murder of an old woman in an opium den some weeks ago. In both cases, the bodies were, it appears, ceremonially decapitated.

That crimes take place in a teeming city is a matter of regret. But that such crimes should take place in Mother London is more than a matter of regret: it is a matter of alarm and condemnation. If the authorities have not yet woken up to the nature of these two crimes, then perhaps it is time they did so. We have a monster loose in this fair city: a cannibal who consumes the heads of his hapless victims.

Jaanam,

Time is such a cheat. The more importance you give it, the less you have of it. I could see it in the people around Captain Meadows: they were always looking at their pocket watches, tugging at their fobs, running from appointment to assignment, and they were always the people who had less time than anyone else. On the other hand, there are people in the villages, like my uncle Mustapha, or even people here, like your fate aunt, who order their calendars more by the seasons than by the clock, and it is these people who have hours to spend. Time, jaanam, is not like money: it seems as though one needs to waste time in order to have more to spend.

In these weeks on my own, I have been both niggardly and a spendthrift with time. I hoard the hours that I spend with you with the intensity of a miser, and these are the hours that fly past most swiftly. The rest of the time, the hours and minutes go by slowly, as I walk the cobbled streets or sip chai with Qui Hy and Gunga, or try and find a profession for myself, or an enterprise into which I might put my savings with good chances of success.

Return has never struck me as an option. Would it have been an option if I had not met you? I doubt it. I fear that some people have no desire to return, for to return is to disturb a past which, whether good or bad, is better left well alone. So the only return I have in mind is the moments when you return to me.

Days pass, sometimes news comes and goes — news from nearby which concerns me (as that of the singing gypsy who was beheaded just a month ago, or the fire at Lloyd’s Coffee House and at the Royal Exchange) and news from afar (gossip about a rebellion in Canada or the proposal for Jewish emancipation in Sweden, places and events that mean nothing to me) which keeps the city agog. Time passes, and I measure it by the frequency of your coming and going.

Qui Hy had her basket of garments and pockets next to her, and was stitching away diligently, earning some extra money even in her spare time, while listening to Karim ramble on, in the gossipy girly way he had, about the latest beheading. It was someone Karim knew vaguely, having once shared a street corner with him during a night of drunken stupor. Gunga nudged Amir at this, for the murder victim was a young boy — Greek or Italian — who lived off the streets of London by exhibiting a cage of performing white mice, and Karim was known to his friends for his penchant for young boys, whom he befriended with the utmost generosity.

Karim caught the gesture and cursed Gunga in mock seriousness, switching from Urdu to the lascar patois which Amir understood only vaguely. Then he returned to his flowery Urdu, which he spoke far more fluently than any of his jahaajbhais, and continued the narrative.

Evidently, the Italian boy had been discovered only late in the morning, his body discarded on one of the middens behind the slaughterhouses of Newgate market. The body must have lain there at least a couple of nights, for it was decomposing — its stink mingling with the smell of decomposing meat and bones discarded by the butchers of the market.

Amir had never been to the market, but he had heard about it from Jenny, who always spoke of it in terms of extreme revulsion. Some years ago, she had worked there as a porter: carrying everything from hides and Colchester baize to entire sheep, from shop to shop, side-stepping rivulets of bloody water on which floated large blobs of fat. Porterage was women’s work in all such markets and Jenny had made good money, being young and strong enough to carry entire carcasses, running from shop to workhouse on the slippery, blood-and-water smeared paths of the market. But she had found the smell and work repulsive. It was this experience, she had told Amir, that had made her determined to work in polite houses, even if it meant longer hours and less pay. Of course, most of the houses she worked in, Amir knew, were hardly polite: they were the houses of tradesmen and poor gentry, who could not afford more than one full-time servant and had to depend on the services of part-timers like her. Captain Meadows’ household was perhaps the only exception. And Jenny had lasted there simply because the Captain, with absent-minded generosity, had told Nelly to keep her on; Nelly had been far less willing to try out a young girl without any respectable recommendation and with the easy ways and accents, no matter how desperately camouflaged, ‘of the streets.’

Karim continued his story. ‘So, hazraan’, he said, ‘the poor boy had been killed at least a night earlier and left on the midden, where he might have been foraging for some food for his mice. He must have been murdered some nights back, for bodies do not decompose in just twenty-four hours in this cold. The mice were discovered, all except one, dead and half-eaten in their cage, next to him. Evidently, some animal, a cat or a rat or a dog, had managed to get at them through the bars.’

‘And your punch line, Karim?’ said Qui Hy, stitching carefully in her chair.

‘My punch line?’

‘Your punch line, Karim, for you would not have given us such an intricate description if you did not have something shocking to say at the end of it’, Qui Hy added.

‘Mai knows you well, bastard’, said Gunga in their patois.

‘No head’, replied Karim.

‘What?’ Qui Hy paused in her stitching. Again?’

‘No head. Clean cut. Swish.’ Karim drew a finger across his own neck to illustrate.

Qui Hy looked at Amir, who sat in a huddle, unnaturally still. She knew about Jenny’s aunt. She shook her head, as if in warning or regret.

Karim continued, in his usual determinedly heartless manner, ‘Though who would want the poor boy’s head is anyone’s guess. It was the most ugly skull I ever saw, the top of it that is. He used to keep it hidden under a cap. Such a fine-looking boy, gentle, with beautiful eyes and lips, but he had the skull of an ogre, as though a giant hand had twisted it out of shape.’

Jane Austen. My grandfather’s library had its inevitable quota of Jane Austen. He could not have been what he was without those gilded, hardbound books.

Looking back, I feel vaguely disappointed with myself for taking to Austen like a gecko takes to the backs of cobwebbed paintings and portraits. Couldn’t I see the distance between Austen’s world of the gentry and mine, sense the loud silence of her servants and those gaps that were trips to plantations and colonies? Perhaps I could; perhaps I couldn’t. But what I could see and hear were the muffled footsteps of her female characters, their satin voices that often covered an iron will. I had heard those sounds and voices. My grandmother’s house was full of them. I knew them intimately, though in another language. It was in that ghostly resonance that I recognized the sound of Austen’s world, which was, after all, not too different from how I came to imagine the Batterstones in their ancestral seat. How else would I have been able to enter that world? For even though my grandfather’s house was not a fraction as grand as the Batterstone country seat and the twain were divided by gaping differences, I have no doubt there was also a similarity of prosperity, politeness, patience, persistence, patterns, paths.

Lady Batterstone walked down the path to the ancient landing place, carefully restored and maintained, by the muddy river. It was difficult to imagine that this narrow river, swaddled in dark rushes in the middle of the quiet countryside, wound all the way to noisy London, which her lawfully wedded husband must now be quitting to make his annual three-hour journey to the family-seat. He was supposed to join them for dinner tonight. Not that the family was around any more — both the boys were married and settled on their own estates. And not that she had been family to Lord Batterstone for at least twenty years now, no, not in anything other than words. Yet, this was a ritual they maintained: Lord Batterstone coming ‘home’ to his country mansion from his London residence for a fortnight every year, usually, but not always, in early summer. In the past, Lady Batterstone had reciprocated by visiting London for a week or two during the season. But it was four years since she had last been there and she did not miss either crowded London or her husband’s large, spooky residence, filling slowly with skulls.

Appearances had to be maintained though. She had to play the charming hostess for a few days every year. She had to invite interesting or distinguished guests and throw an annual ball. Lord Batterstone would be there throughout, polite and cold. She would be there too, the perfect hostess despite the various minor ailments that plagued her, her rheumatism, her migraine, her aches. And, almost without realizing it, she would manage to include in the twenty or thirty guests who visited during the period, at least one person whom Lord Batterstone abhorred.

There was the sound of waves breaking as a small barge sailed past. The men on it raised their hats to Lady Batterstone, ceasing to row
for a moment, and their barge floated like a light shadow on the dark waters of the river. Then a fish jumped, and there was the sound of a party — some of her guests — following her down the path.

She knew it was futile to hope for solitary moments during her weeks of fashionable hospitality. But she was relieved when the guests who stepped out from under the trees overshadowing the path turned out to be only that pale, serious young man, Captain Meadows, and Mary Grayper, the girl he was obviously wooing. Mrs Grayper followed at a discreet distance, complaining that the young people were walking too fast for an old woman like her, but Lady Batterstone had seen enough of mothers like Mrs Grayper to know that they always allowed their protected broods ample elbow room with a suitable bachelor. In any case, everyone knew that Mrs Grayper and Mary were angling for the Captain who, Lady Batterstone had heard, was eminently suitable, now that he had come into an unexpected legacy from a distant uncle, which enabled him to live a life of ease in the London house he had inherited from his parents.

Lady Batterstone had heard of Meadows’ ‘scientific’ differences with her husband. In fact, the Graypers, whom the Batterstones knew very slightly, had been invited in order to enable and induce the Captain to come: neither the Graypers nor the Captain were in the Batterstones’ league. Not that it bothered Lady Batterstone. She ignored such matters when she wanted to, just as she had forgotten, now that Captain Meadows was here, about the rumours of acrimonious debates between him and her husband. There was very little of note that Lady Batterstone did not eventually get to hear. London was far away, no doubt, but then, who would believe this narrow, muddy river flowed all the way to it?

She nodded to the men in the passing barge and moved to join her guests. The rest of the party would soon follow; unless, of course, the gods being merciful, they had decided to head for the new Chinese pavilion in the park.

Major Grayper had remained in the library of the huge Batterstone mansion. It was an impressive library. The Major had been to great houses in the past, but never to one of this stature. He was, though unwilling to show it, a bit overawed. He needed moments, now and then, to recover from the majesty of the place. And the library was the only place where he was assured of privacy: most of the other guests hardly ever used it, and neither did Lady Batterstone. Captain Meadows, he knew, might have been here, but that was the likelihood Mrs Grayper was resolutely guarding against. Men never propose in libraries, she had sagely pronounced on her way to the Batterstone mansion. Ever since she had received the unexpected invitation to spend a week at the Batterstone mansion and learned that the Captain had also been invited, Mrs Grayper had not only strained to induce the reticent Meadows to accept but was now plotting insidiously to throw her daughter and the Captain together in romantic, Arcadian surroundings, certainly not bleak, bookish ones.

So it was with a degree of surprise and mild irritation that the Major looked up when the door was flung open and a large man walked into the library. Eyes not used to the gloom of the library, it took the newcomer a few seconds before he noticed the Major at a desk. By then the Major had recognized the man as Lord Batterstone and hastened to greet him.

‘Oh, I am sorry to have interrupted you. I just arrived and was told that everyone was out for a walk in the park’, said Lord Batterstone, shaking hands. He did not recognize the Major, for they had met only once or twice in the past, but he pretended he did. He was used to being greeted by complete strangers ensconced in his mansion as his guests, and often, by people he would never have invited himself. It would not surprise him, he laughed inwardly, to find that upstart Captain Meadows reclining in the armchair one summer!

But what was this man, Major whatsisname, babbling about? A garden walk, yes, yes, he knew that; a trip through their park to see the new pavilion that his lawfully wedded spouse had spent a minor fortune on just last year, yes, yes, he knew that too — though of course his smile and nods did not betray the irritation of his thoughts — his daughter, so, the Major had a daughter, called Mary, yes, what else, also out, with his wife, the Major’s that is, of course, poor woman to have to put up with a man of military bearing and the wobbly talk of a dithering poet, his wife gone out too, with Mary, yes, who else, and what, what, Captain Meadows... Captain Meadows!