The Candle Man (26 page)

Remember what?

The devil makes work only for idle hands to do.

He stared at the creature’s small squinty eyes in the ceiling, hating its squat ugliness, its snout, its stubby horns. And hairline cracks that looked like a little pair of legs belonging
to a terrier dog. He stared at it and hated that such an ugly thing was here in Mary’s room, looking down at them, watching her sleep.

Please, go away! Please, I want you to leave me alone!

You need me.

NO! His balled fist knuckled his temple – as if trying to dig the malignant creature from his mind. NO. I don’t need you. I need Mary. I love her. I LOVE her!

Even if this home was an illusion, even if there was some part of what Mary had been telling him that didn’t quite add up, make sense, some small half-truth or petty lie – he
didn’t care. This . . .
this
. . . one man, one woman, curled in a bed together and a slant of morning light resting across them, the stillness of this moment; he wished it could last
for eternity. If it was an illusion, if it was a lie, little more than a museum diorama made specifically for him, then he could happily live in it forever, in this glass cage, just as long as he
had Mary to share it with him.

A museum exhibit of two.

There was no answer from the pig. He waited. Listened to the receding clop of a horse’s hooves, Mary’s gentle breathing, the twitter of sparrows in a tree outside.

Nothing else.

Argyll smiled. It was silenced. He could hope that perhaps it was gone, even.

I
t hung suspended in an empty jam jar full of cloudy water; one of Annie Chapman’s kidneys. The other left on the ground in that small yard
on Hanbury Street. Babbitt left it on the ground beside her head with the rest of the contents of her lower abdominal cavity; strings of offal draping back over her left shoulder to the gaping
wound from her pelvis, all the way up to her sternum.

The newspapers had given her murder a lot more attention than the other two. If the accounts being reported were to be believed, her body had been discovered less than half an hour after Babbitt
had finished his work there. The column writers and editors in Fleet Street were making as much as possible out of every grisly little detail they’d gotten their hands on. But Scotland Yard,
despite their ineptitude and the eagerness of their officers to sell titbits to probing Fleet Street hacks waving their fat wallets, had managed to hold back one or two important details.

Babbitt smiled. All of a sudden, with this particular murder, the police were being
very
careful with the information they were parcelling out to the public. Which could only mean one
thing: they – his clients – were receiving his ‘message’ loud and clear. That he could frame them, that he could pull them right out into the open with this, if he so
chose.

Annie, poor Annie, had been left as his clear warning to them, her remains staged to frame their three symbolic penalties.

. . . And if the oath of silence I make before my brothers I break, let it be that my throat be cut across, that my left breast be torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and
thrown over my left shoulder . . .

It had been anathema to him, counter-intuitive to be so horribly theatrical, to attract attention like this to his work. So very unprofessional. But they needed to hear his warning message
immediately. He needed them to be fully aware that he had an inkling what their intentions might be. If they had no qualms about disposing of that cheap shiv man Tolly, then despite the fact that
Babbitt had offered them assurances of his confidentiality, despite the fact that he was certain his clients in New York had vouched for him, these silly gentlemen may decide that once the contract
was done, they might deal with him the same way.

Poor Annie’s ritualistic mutilations – her tongue cut out and placed on her chest, his candle very deliberately left behind – was a clear message to his employers that he
could, and quite happily would, break his personal credo of confidentiality if they were entertaining notions of double-crossing him.

The paper he was reading this morning in his room,
The Examiner
, was making the murder a front page feature for the third day in a row now. Still there was no mention of the candle left
behind at the scene, nor a detailed account of the mutilations. But in various editorials, the Masons were now being euphemistically hinted at. Enough details of the ritualistic
modus
operandi
must have leaked out from the policemen working the murders for them to dare suggest a Masonic connection.

He smiled.
There’s your warning, gentlemen.

Back to work.

He finished writing his account of this particular contract on the hotel’s letter-headed stationery and tucked it into a manila envelope. It was all in there, every detail he’d
learned from Tolly and those two tarts. In his two sides of meticulously neat handwriting, there was mention of the foolish man in the photograph. The cause of all this crimson.

The very heart of the matter.

Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward; ‘Eddy’ to his friends, ‘Bertie’ to his mother, Queen Victoria.

There was enough on those two pieces of foolscap to ignite a powder keg. Babbitt chuckled at the thought of it, like a naughty schoolboy preparing a classroom prank. The future King of England,
Eddy, guilty not only of falling in love with and screwing a common girl – a French one at that, quite possibly even a Catholic – but far, far worse than that. As a result of the
ill-conceived affair, he’d produced an illegitimate child. And the silent establishment – the Masons, or perhaps some even more secret sub-set within the Masons – had carefully
set about tidying up the mess left behind by the stupid prince. Their complicity was stamped all over the murders.

What mischief this note could cause.

Every day the papers were filled with stories written for the working man. Stories phrased in clever ways to anger tired men at lunchtime with the dirt of labour on their hands. Stories of the
rich and privileged, stories of unspeakable extravagances, selfishness, foolishness. And Eddy, future King of England, an all too regular character in this enraging pantomime. Babbitt could only
imagine what sort of revolutionary fire he could ignite by applying a single candle’s flame to that kind of a tinderbox.

He dropped the small photograph into the envelope, rough and bent around the edges with flecks of the photographic emulsion peeling from too much handling, but still very clearly that stupid
young prince clutching adoringly at a common-born woman. He tucked the envelope under the jam jar and, for a moment, watched the half of Annie’s kidney bob in its cloudy solution.

All the evidence was there, right there on the room’s writing table.

Now, there were other matters to attend to.

He already had passage booked aboard a cargo ship leaving Liverpool in approximately two months’ time. Not knowing the precise details of this contract before he’d set sail from New
York, he had allowed himself three months for the job to be done before returning home. His business had been wrapped up far quicker than he thought it would be, and now caution dictated he would
be better finding himself a ship home soon.

But the matter was not finished yet, was it? His clients still owed him the second half of his fee and without that, the income earned from this job wasn’t going to do a great deal more
than cover the costs he’d incurred coming to England and his hotel suite booked for three months’ use.

There was also the principle. A fee was still owed.

He stroked the bristles of his sideburns, deep in thought, watching strands of organic sediment seesaw down through the jar’s murky water, past the kidney that was already beginning to
wrinkle and pucker.

The rooms were already paid for, the ship was already booked. He had a couple of months ahead of him now. A couple of months which he could use to lie low, perhaps even explore London a little
more. He knew the Victoria Docks quite well now and the Royal Albert Docks; Millwall, too. A warren of warehouses, backstreet water inlets and canals a man could lose himself in. A couple of months
to take his time, relax, read, meditate.

All he needed to do now was arrange a time and place to collect what he was still owed, and be sure to make it very clear when they met that he had in his possession, sitting on his hotel
room’s writing table, enough evidence to . . . well, to cause these gentlemen some serious problems. Just in case, that is, they were entertaining the notion of jumping him before he could
leave with his fee.

He picked up his ink pen and pulled out another sheet of the hotel’s writing paper from the drawer and began to carefully word an advert that would appear in the
Illustrated London
News
in a couple of days, if he managed to drop it downstairs in the concierge’s pigeon-hole before lunch time.

W
arrington acknowledged to himself that he was trembling because he was nervous; not as he’d earlier tried to tell himself that it was
because it was a surprisingly cool night for September.

‘Nervous’ was perhaps not the right word to use. ‘Scared witless’ did it more justice. He felt too exposed standing out here, even if it was the quieter end of West India
Quay. He looked up at the tall brick warehouses behind him. Gaslight lit a pair of windows from within; square amber eyes that regarded him suspiciously from on high. No doubt shipping clerks
working late on manifests and ledgers, ready for an early start for the dockworkers tomorrow morning.

By the wan light of the moon, playing hide and seek behind racing clouds, he checked the hour on his timepiece. It was twenty minutes past midnight.

He’s late.

According to Rawlinson, the Candle Man was never late. Wholly reliable in every important way, that’s what their American colleagues had informed them. But not reliable tonight, so it
seemed.

He’s playing games with us.

The murder of the tart called Chapman at the beginning of the week was his handiwork. That much was for sure. He’d made it quite clear with the ridiculously theatrical gesture: the
trademark candle of his left beside her body. What was the fool thinking about, doing that? And the way he’d mutilated her? Yes, of course, they’d instructed him to make it look like
the work of some deranged fool; some insane person to which no notion of motive or logic could be applied. But to mutilate her in the specific way he had . . . to leave her so
symbolically
arranged
? They’d had the devil of a time over the last week keeping as much of the details as they could out of the newspapers. Even with the tacit assistance of both Scotland
Yard’s and the Met’s chief inspectors, one of the policemen who’d first attended the scene of the crime must have spoken out of turn. Revealed enough details – none of them
officially confirmed, of course – to allow the scribblers on Fleet Street to start coming up with dangerously suggestive theories about Freemasons.

He’s warning us.

He knows. He suspects, at least.

That’s what Warrington was beginning to suspect. The Candle Man had somehow managed to figure out that they had no intention of letting him go on his merry way back to America. The man
must have figured out the stakes were too high. Which could only mean one thing.

He’s seen the photograph. He knows it’s Prince Albert
. And if so, then he’d probably understand how desperately important it was for this indiscretion to be completely
guaranteed. There were socialist rumblings in the capital; all over Europe, in fact. Next year was the centenary of the French Revolution. Socialist and working men’s groups were planning a
Europe-wide organisation, a congress of workers’ delegates, to meet to mark the occasion. Even now, editorials were talking up the notion that something similar to the French Revolution might
be sparked here in England. The Candle Man was clearly no fool. He had understood how the stability, the very future of this country – the British Empire, even – hung on how tidily
Eddy’s little mess was cleared up.