The Candle Man (45 page)

But a wonderful life.

Babbitt-the-pig roared at him to stop his childlike mewling, to grab hold of his knife and finish the idiot standing in front of him. Argyll’s struggle was waning. The best he could manage
was to whimper a muted warning to Warrington.

‘
Kill me . . . now!
’

Kill me
. Those were the two words that Warrington thought he heard the Candle Man gasp. Looking back on it in later years to come, as he did almost every night he closed his eyes to try
and sleep, he found himself wondering whether he’d glimpsed tears on the man’s cheeks or whether that was an embellishment of the memory. Good god, it had actually almost sounded like a
plea. Hadn’t it?

Kill me – would you?

He was never going to know for sure.

Immediately following that mucous-thick rasp of a voice, the Candle Man lunged forward with a knife produced seemingly out of thin air. Warrington’s gun erupted in his hand as his finger
tensed with surprise. The shot
pinged
off the floor with a spark and a spurt of grit and dust erupted from a divot that was dug in the concrete.

A strong hand was suddenly wrapped around the wrist of his gun hand. The moment telescoped in time, feeling not like a half or a quarter second, but like a minute counted patiently. His eyes
followed the blurred glint of a long serrated blade whipping up from waist height with a murderous arc of intent towards his throat.

That eternal minute ended quite suddenly with the boom of another gun fired from somewhere inside the warehouse. Warrington lost his balance and found himself on his back on the floor, looking
up at rafters of corroded iron and lances of pale daylight spearing down through the roof, and a cascade, like snowfall, of bird fluff from the startled pigeons taking flight across the abandoned
warehouse.

Regaining his senses, he sat quickly up to see Babbitt, the Candle Man, kneeling on the floor beside him. He was burping gouts of blood from his mouth and down the front of his cotton shirt.

The Candle Man’s hand slapped the floor, fumbling to find his dropped knife. Warrington had dropped his own gun in the panic. Both of them now unarmed, on their knees, staring at each
other in a wordless silence.

The Candle Man’s fumbling hand found the blade and raised it half-heartedly. It wavered for just a second in the space between them, then a second boom, much louder, much closer, knocked
the man back as if a kick had been landed under his jaw. The Candle Man flopped to the floor, beside a tuft of nettles pushing defiantly up through a crack in the old warehouse floor.

Warrington heard the uneven approaching footsteps of a limping walk and looked up at the hand proffered to him, and Orman’s face beneath the brim of his billycock. ‘You all right,
sir?’

‘I’m fine. Quite all right.’

Blood bubbled out of the ragged hole in Argyll’s throat. He could feel it all slipping away – life, thoughts, sensations, all growing indistinct. The bitter, angry shriek of Babbitt
receding, dying with him. Cursing his betrayal, his stupidity, and finally leaving him alone in the final few seconds, while his brain fed on the last of the blood in his head. Giving him time for
one more thought, one moment of satisfaction, contentment even.

Mary Kelly. You’re free. Fly away, my dear. Fly away.

M
ary looked up the gangway, only four feet wide and busy with stevedores in heavy boots carrying oak crates of something fragile up towards a
master, barking orders at the top. She had the booking slip in her hand with instructions on whom to make herself known to; her few worldly possessions were packed tightly into a new travel valise.
All that was left now for her to do, for the rest of her life to properly begin, was take two dozen steps up the iron gangway and board the steamship.

She realised she was trembling like a mangy dog tied up outside a pub on a harsh winter’s day. A heady mixture of anxiety and excitement. Mostly the first. Mary wasn’t sure she had
the gumption to do this all on her own; another country, a whole other continent. And Mary Argyll – the name John had booked her passage under – facing all the unknowns it had to offer
on her own.

All she had was his promise to follow her very shortly. She had it tucked into the pocket of her coat, still in the torn-open envelope she’d found tucked beneath her pillow. Words
she’d read through a dozen times before she properly understood she was taking this ship alone.

‘Hoy! You down there!’

Mary’s head cleared and she glanced around, panicked for a moment that the mysterious men John referred to had finally clapped eyes on her.

‘Yes! You, love!’ She glanced past the broad shoulders of a bald man clomping noisily down the gangplank to retrieve another sack of potatoes for the ship’s galley. At the top
of the gangplank she saw a man wearing a dark forage cap and leaning on the ship’s railing. ‘Are you our fare?’

Mary nodded.

‘Right then, you comin’ aboard, or what?’

Well? Mary?

She looked along the quayside uncertainly, hoping to catch sight of John racing towards her to board the ship with her. But no . . . She was alone.

She looked up at the man in the cap. ‘All right . . . I’m coming up!’

A sharp gust of cool breeze spilled off the Mersey and sent her skirts and bonnet fluttering. She grasped at her dancing hem for modesty and then finally, sucking in a deep breath and waiting to
allow the surly-looking broad-shouldered man to step past her with his sack of potatoes, she followed him up the gangway.

T
he girl, Miss Hammond, stared at him in silence.

‘Good god,’ she whispered after a while.

The hubbub of noise outside the reading room had changed in nature over the last hour. No longer was it the polite curiosity at an unscheduled stop; the gentlemen standing outside in their
dinner jackets were now wearing life preservers, their voices raised with increasing concern as the ship’s crew busied themselves with uncovering the lifeboats and working the winches.

‘This is . . .’ Her words were slurred from the brandy. ‘This is . . . a
true
story? Prince Albert . . . ?’

The old man nodded. ‘It’s perhaps a lucky thing that he died so young. I shudder to think what other indiscretions might have needed to be cleaned up in his wake, if the silly fool
had gone on to become king. God help us.’

Her bright eyes, although glazed by the brandy, remained wide and round with incredulity. ‘But you . . . are a Mason . . . and you’ve now told me this story!’

He shrugged. ‘A secret needs to be passed along, my dear, or it just dies. It needs . . .’ He pressed his lips together thoughtfully as he hunted for the right word. ‘It needs
a host. Someone who can carry it for a while before choosing another to pass it on to.’

‘But . . . but why?’ She pressed a hand to her lips to suppress a belch. ‘You and your friends, you say you
killed
those poor women to keep a secret? Now you’re
telling me?’

‘Times have changed. We live in a new century, with different values, with new things to worry about. Not stupid princes that need to keep their flies buttoned.’

She gawped drunkenly at that.

‘Countries are readying for a war.’ He shrugged again. ‘It’s not such big beer anymore, my deathbed story. And anyway, I’m the only one of our little privileged
group left alive. I’m the only one left who knows about it.’ He glanced up at Reginald, the chief steward who’d wheeled her in here earlier, striding swiftly towards them, a
younger steward beside him.

‘And now you know, Miss Hammond.’ He smiled and spoke quietly as the stewards approached. ‘It’s
your
secret now.
Yours
to decide what you do
with.’

‘All right, Miss Hammond?’ said Reginald. ‘We got a space for you on a lifeboat on the port side. Best get a move on, though; the boats are gettin’ filled quickly.’
He turned to the young steward beside him. ‘Liam, lad, go make a last check on them cabins on our floor. Make sure we ain’t missed anyone.’

‘Aye.’

Reginald grasped the handles of her wheelchair and began to take her away.

‘Wait!’ She twisted in her chair towards the old man. ‘Is there not space for Mr Larkin too?’

‘Sorry, love, it’s women and children only, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, raising his brandy glass. ‘You go on, Miss Hammond. I have a hope, no, a feeling, that you’ll enjoy quite a few more summers, hmmm?’

She returned his warm smile. ‘I’ll . . . look after it, you know?’ Her eyes locked on his, her voice a whisper. ‘The secret.’

‘I’m sure you will. Now best you get going, my dear; you’ve a boat to catch.’

As Reginald wheeled her out of the room, he caught one last glance of her face, eyes still saucer-wide.

Alone again, Warrington topped up his brandy glass one last time and settled back into his armchair to listen to the growing cacophony of the approaching end. Not just voices raised in panic
now, but the sporadic crash of crockery from tables set in the dining room next door, wine glasses and top-heavy champagne flutes toppling and smashing, and the distant pop of another rocket
exploding in the night sky.

He pulled out a folded corner of newspaper and looked at it once again. The print of the photograph was smeared from being thumbed these last couple of years, the paper beginning to yellow very
slightly. But the face was still determinable, and yes, it could just be the same face. The features, as he vaguely remembered them in that crowded station hall, could quite possibly be hers.
Obviously she was a middle-aged woman now, but still a strikingly beautiful woman as well.

He’d lied, of course, the Candle Man did. The body they found at the boarding house in Millers Court wasn’t that of Kelly. They found that out later, after the news had hit the
papers, too late to want to attract attention by changing the victim’s name. And too late to find the young girl. She was going to be long gone to bother watching the ships and checking in
with the shipping agents again under her name Kelly, or the name they later discovered the pair of them had been using in Liverpool – Mr and Mrs Argyll.

He looked once more at the photograph cut from a newspaper: a strong woman standing tall and proud behind a lectern, flanked on one side by two gentlemen politely clapping. It was hard to be
certain from just this one blurry newspaper photograph. But Warrington was very good with faces. Never forgot a face. And he was sure it was the very same woman. Sure enough to have booked his fare
over and try and arrange a meeting with her.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Not kill her, for sure. The woman either knew nothing, or she’d chosen not to talk. And in the end, as he’d told that charming young lady,
it really didn’t matter anymore. A different world, with different things to worry about. Warrington just wanted to talk to her about the Candle Man. Perhaps she knew a little more about him;
perhaps she could put some of his own demons to rest. Perhaps she could strip some of the mythology away from the man. Reassure Warrington that, in the end, the chap was just a very proficient
shiv-man. Nothing more than that.

Just a talk, that’s all he wanted. Peace of mind for whatever time he had left.