The Candle Man (16 page)

Souls like that needed removing from this eternal cycle, like filtering muck and spoilage from drinking water. Souls like that needed snuffing out permanently. And Babbitt had been blessed with
that skill, that
responsibility
; to not only snuff out a worthless life, but to look into the eyes of the dying, to look through their dilated pupils and see that coiling dark shapeless
thing – the soul. And snuff that out too just as easily as one would quickly grasp between thumb and forefinger the glowing wick of a candle.

Babbitt smiled. George had wondered why he’d allowed himself to be dubbed ‘Candle Man’. It most probably had something to do with the one lit candle he left behind after every
job. Left behind to burn down until its wick drowned in a pool of its own liquid wax and went out.

H
e watched the ebb and flow of patrons into the public house.

He watched the flow of smudged faces and florid cheeks, crimson noses, gap-toothed grins, snarled greetings and exchanged curses, through pale blue wafts of pipe smoke, which hung above the
churning mass of customers like a marsh mist. He watched and thought of the flow of patrons like a flow of shit into a cesspool; main channels of flowing shit, and side pools where things became
stiller, quieter. That’s what this place, this busy inn, resembled to Babbitt: a stagnant pool where the turds of humanity coalesced and bobbed together.

Babbitt had a stool at one end of the bar and nursed in his hands a tankard of warm and flat ale. He made it look like he was swilling thirstily from it, but was in fact barely deigning to wet
his lips with the awful brew. He fitted right in with the noisy crowd; a few stolen clothes from the washing lines that dangled across the narrow streets of Whitechapel, several days’ growth
of bristles on his cheeks and he looked just as unpleasant, dishevelled and grubby as the rest of these mole-like creatures.

Why? Why would any soul want to exist like this?

He’d been watching an old prostitute for a while. An unappetising sight made worse by the clumsy, clown-like splotches of rouge on her cheeks and the complete lack of teeth in her mouth.
But once upon a time, that caved-in witch’s face might just have been attractive, or even beautiful. Her pay was ale, not money. A pint of ale. In the last hour, he had seen her propositioned
by four different men even more unpleasant to behold than her. Men who took her by the arm to the gent’s lavvy and returned on their own only minutes later. This poor wretch emerging shortly
after, straightening her clothes and wiping her chin dry, eager to sip her flat and warm wages to wash away the foul taste in her gummy mouth.

Babbitt’s keen ears caught the wafting shirt tails of conversations, his ears well-tuned now to make sense of the mongrel version of English these underworld creatures spoke.

‘. . . an’ the dirty bitch ’ad it cummin’, didn’t she? Fuckin’ went an’ spen’ it all when I says I needed it . . .’

‘. . . s’how it goes, right? You gonna take the piss, then yer gonna feel a fuckin’ fist . . .’

‘. . . don’t care, mate. Ain’t right. Just ain’t right. ’E bleedin’ well deserved wha’ ’e got . . .’

‘. . . all dirty bastards, love. You take ’em for what you can, ’specially them stupid drunk ones . . .’

Everyone of them preying on the other. Not a single cupful of kindness in this entire inn. Not even a thimbleful of it.

His ears had been hard at work all through the evening; the rest of him was slumped on his stool, looking almost asleep over his drink. Often his eyes closed so he could just listen to the
rising, falling voices, the shrill slices of sneering laughter, the rough voices of hard men loudly stating their place in the inn’s masculine hierarchy. Like monkeys in a cage: the ones
squealing the loudest getting to sit on the highest perches in their little world.

Babbitt had left his timepiece back at his hotel room, quite deliberately. His mind was used to metering time. Just over three hours he had patiently sat like a man fit to topple onto the floor
before his ears picked out one solitary word amidst the noise of strangled, slurred, mutilated language being spoken.

Tolly.

Intently, he focused his attention on the growling voice that had uttered the word, doing his best to pull it to the foreground and filtering out the rest of the hubbub, pushing it back into the
shadows.

‘. . . so ’ow much is it yer owe ’im?’

‘Enough that fucker’s gonna break summin’ on me even before he finks to ask for it.’

A laugh. Not exactly a friendly or even a sympathetic one. ‘Then yer a complete idiot, intcha, ol’ son? I mean, losing yer tin to ’im, of all people. The bastard’s a
complete fuckin’ nuttah!’

‘Tha’s why I’m lyin’ low for a bit.’

‘Well, yer bein’ a fool comin’ in ’ere. S’one of ’is regulars, this is.’

‘I ’eard ’e’s down the Cock tonight.’

‘Bill don’t always stick to ’is routine, mate. Yer a silly fucker chancin’ it comin’ in here.’

Babbitt’s eyes cracked slowly open; the impression of a drunkard stirring to sip again from his tankard of old beer. His ears suggested an approximate direction for him to glance and he
did, quickly identifying the two old men propping up the corner of the bar, ten feet along from him. The worried and regular glances over his shoulder by the one on the right clearly indicated
which one of the two of them was the fool in debt to Tolly.

‘. . . tell yer what, yer stickin’ out like a sore thumb, keep lookin’ over at the door like that.’

‘Well, I ain’t gonna let ’im sneak up on me!’

‘Tell yer what, seein’ as I’m facin’ the door, I’ll jus’ nod to yer if he enters, right?’

A pause. ‘Well, dontcha fuckin’ miss ’im, or I’ll make sure you get a smackin’, too.’

Babbitt smiled.
Charming. Not even a thank you.

He closed his eyes, once again the bar stool drunkard returning to his sleep, and let his ears continue to do their work. It was nearly another hour of exchanges between them, most utterly
banal, before finally the one on the left said something quickly.

‘Oi, fuck! Tolly’s ’ere!’

Babbitt sat up and craned his neck to look over the milling crowd. In between jostling billycock hats and flat caps and plumes of drifting blue pipe smoke, he caught a glimpse of a tall,
bull-necked man entering through the public house’s stained glass double doors.

He saw one of the two old men quickly finish the last of his ale, slide off his stool and lose himself amidst the busy press of patrons. Babbitt’s eyes returned to Tolly. He watched the
man ease his way towards the bar, a respectful path clearing in front of him.

He’s a ‘name’ in here.

Babbitt had suspected that. A neighbourhood thug. Every tenement block, every crowded street in the Five Points of New York, had at least one. A ‘name’. Most people steered a wide
path around them.

He knew Tolly’s type: brutish, stupid. The type to act impulsively and think with his fists. If he ever threw his lot in with one of the organised gangs, he’d only ever be a foot
soldier. A sergeant at best. The slightest smile stole out and spread across Babbitt’s lips. This oaf was going to be all too easy to deal with.

T
olly had had enough of those two silly bitches. He’d just spent the last hour down the Rose and Crown, their favourite haunt. It was quiet
enough there to be able to talk without shouting, but noisy enough that a conversation across a table was unlikely to be overheard.

Both Annie and Polly were getting very itchy about it. They were in on the blackmail now. He’d decided to cut them both in, not out of a sense of fraternal charity but because he was being
a right clever bastard. The gentleman client he’d done the job for was bound to hire some petty knapper to find out where Tolly’s place was, break in and simply snatch the locket back.
So, Annie and Polly could mind it between them. He trusted them not to fuck with him, not to pawn it, hock it, or lose it. Because if they did . . . well, they knew exactly what they’d get
from him. Still, both of them, despite being keen to have a slice of the blackmail money, were getting decidedly hot-footed about the whole matter.

‘He’s
proper
rich, that man in the picture,’ said Annie. ‘You can tell it. An’ proper rich ’as
means
, Bill, you know what I’m
sayin’?’

Polly nodded.

‘’Course ’e ’as
means
, love; ’e’s got money.’

‘No, I’m talkin’ about the secret stuff. Them proper rich buggers, most of them’s in secret groups that ’elp each other out. So could ’e be.’

‘Them secret groups?’ Tolly laughed. ‘Them secret groups is all story. Don’t tell me you been tryin’ to read the dailies again?’

‘Fuck off, you can’t read no better than me, Bill.’

Tolly grabbed her hair in one of his big fists. ‘Tell me to fuck off again an’ I’ll cut yer nose in half.’

‘Ow! Let go! That’s ’urtin’ me!’

‘’Course it is.’ He let her go. ‘Just mind yer fuckin’ language in future. It ain’t nice out of a woman, not even a slapper like you.’

Annie rubbed her head where he’d yanked at her hair. ‘Just sayin’, Bill. Just sayin’ I ain’t ’appy ’angin’ onto that thing. It’s been too
long now. We should just get rid of it.’

‘The gentleman’s payin’ up. It’s just ’e needs to get the money in a way that’s discreet. That’s what ’e said. That’s why the wait.’
He smiled. ‘You just sit easy. Goin’ to be the easiest fuckin’ money you two will
ever
make.’

‘I ain’t ’appy bein’ the one ’oldin’ it, though.’

Bill shrugged. ‘So give it to Poll to ’ave for a while.’

Annie looked at her friend. ‘Yeah?’

Polly looked unhappy at the suggestion but, with her two co-conspirators staring at her, she realised that unless she offered to do something useful, they were going to start questioning why the
hell she was getting a share at all.

‘All right.’ She nodded. ‘All right, I s’pose I got a good place to ’ide it.’

That was earlier. Bill excused himself from their company and decided to come down the Turpin for a couple of scoops. There was a stupid old soak who usually drank in here who owed him some
money. If he found him, he could twist some of his dues out of the old fart. Just tap him for a few shillings and call it interest on the loan. Tolly knew that’s how the banks on the big high
streets made their lolly: not getting their money back, but getting the rent on that money. That was the clever bit. Money making money. He fancied, once they got their swag off the gentleman, he
might set up his own little bank. Set it up right inside the busiest pub he could find in Whitechapel where his customers were going to be too drunk to realise how much ‘rent’ he was
going to charge them for their loans.

As he entered the Turpin, he looked around the sea of faces for the gnarly old sod and, failing to spot him, decided the very next most important thing he needed to attend to was to have a big
piss.

The gentlemen’s lavvy was like any other public house’s: a back room lined with cracked tiles and a stained porcelain gutter along the bottom of one wall in which all manner of
unpleasant things sedately floated like tug boats down a piss-yellow canal.

Bill snorted and spat, adding his own glutinous vessel to the convoy as he unbuttoned his trousers and began to release a long, overdue torrent into the porcelain channel.

‘Desperate for it, eh?’

He looked to his left to see a man as tall as him, all mutton chop whiskers and a cap.

‘Yeah, straight in, straight out. Got a bladder smaller ’an a Jew’s purse.’

The man chuckled at that as he released a torrent beside his. ‘Makes you wonder why we pay for it. I’m sure I’m shootin’ out nothing different to what I just been
sippin’.’

Tolly sniggered. ‘True.’

The man had the ghost of an accent in there. It sounded vaguely Irish, but he knew it wasn’t. ‘Where you from?’

‘Me?’ replied the man. ‘New York, as it happens.’

‘Yeah?’ Bill was instantly interested in the man. ‘New York, you say?’