The Solitary House (24 page)

Charles sees it all as if in slow motion—the man bending to check whether the bench is dry—the young woman gasping and holding her hand to her face—the man turning to her and then following her line of sight—the woman sinking onto the bench—the man torn between his concern for her, and the horror of what’s suddenly before him. A moment later Charles has pushed straight past him and is on his knees, doing what he can to put himself between the young woman on the bench and the body of a young girl lying motionless on the damp hard earth. She can’t be more than eleven or twelve, and her thick red hair and pale white face are both ground in dirt. She has a
thin cotton shirt clinging to her shoulders but very little else, and a pair of shoes that are far too big for her, tied to her feet with string. Charles tears off his coat and is just tucking it round her when he realises that the young woman has joined him, and is quietly chafing the girl’s hands and rubbing her temples. In a few moments the girl begins to stir, and her lips look less bluish, and she eventually opens her eyes and stares, somewhat wildly, at Charles.

“Leave me alone—I ain’t done nuffin’!” she cries, pulling away from him.

“Hush, hush,” says the young woman. “There is no cause for alarm. This young man is just trying to help you.”

“He ain’t police?” says the girl in terror, huddling against her.

“No,” says Charles. “I’m not police.”

The young woman looks up at him. “Perhaps, sir, you might withdraw for a moment? I will endeavour to put her more at her ease. And then we can decide what best to do.”

Charles steps back to the bench, and takes up a position next to the man. They both watch in silence as the young woman rests the girl’s head on her shoulder, whispering to her gently all the while as she takes out her own handkerchief to wipe the dirt from her face.

“The lady seems to have a talent for compassion,” says Charles, in undisguised admiration.

The man looks at him quickly then resumes his careful assiduous gaze. “I doubt there is a man or woman in London who has more kindness and forethought for those around her than the lady before your eyes. The brightness about her is the brightness of angels.”

“Your daughter, sir?”

“My ward. These ten years and more. And she repays my care twenty-thousand-fold, and twenty more to that, every hour in every day!”

Charles falls silent; humbled, perhaps, by the barely suppressed emotion in the speaker’s voice. After some moments the girl seems calmer and the young woman helps her to her feet. She places an arm about the girl’s shoulders and brings her slowly towards them.

“Sarah has need of a hot meal, and then somewhere warm to sleep.”

Charles looks at her, and then at her gentleman companion. “I can fetch something from the stall on Park Lane.”

The young woman inclines her head, the wind gently rippling her veil. “If you would be so good. And in the meantime we will confer about what is to be done.”

When Charles returns with tea and a hot meat pie, the two of them seem to have reached a decision. As the girl crams pieces of pastry into her mouth without any refinement whatsoever, the young woman explains that she’s been living in a lodging-house in St Giles, “but has had a disagreement with the proprietor. When she was unable to pay for last night’s accommodation in advance he refused her a bed, which is quite deplorable, especially on such a cold night. Anything might have become of her.”

To Charles’s mind, ‘anything’ already has, and often. He glances at Sarah, who stares back at him, her eyes wary. An unspoken communication passes between them, and he knows that the version of events she’s given the young woman is very far from the truth of it. Perhaps she’s trying to protect her protector from the brutal reality of the rookery padding-kens; perhaps she has a shrewd eye for a soft touch; either way, the girl suddenly looks far more the whore she probably is, than the unlucky innocent the genteel pair clearly believe her to be.

“Where was it?” he asks. “The lodging-house?”

The girl’s eyes narrow. “Church Lane. McCarthy’s.”

Charles nods. “I know it.”

And he does. Last time he saw the place it was high summer and the largest of the small rooms had fourteen coarse beds, the grey linen rife with vermin and the occupants not much better. Even with every window and door open the stench was unbearable, and when he put his hand to the blackened wall he’d found it crusted with cockroaches. There was nothing but a bucket for sanitation, and no possibility of privacy for any personal function, be it menstrual, matrimonial, or excremental. In some rooms whole families were sleeping
in the same bed, even in the middle of the day; in others, two or three girls as young as Sarah had no choice but to share with men much older, and from there to actual prostitution was the smallest of tiny steps.

The young woman turns to Sarah. “We will accompany you. I am sure if we were to speak to the proprietor—”

The girl’s eyes widen and Charles quickly interposes. “There’s no need to trouble yourself, miss. I will see the young lady home. I am sure you have more important things to do with your day.”

The young woman seems to stiffen slightly. He cannot see her face through the veil, but her beautiful voice expresses gentle reproach. “There can be nothing more important than Christian charity to our fellow beings, Mr—”

“Maddox. Charles Maddox.”

“You undertake to accompany her safely to Church Lane?”

Charles bows. “I will consider it a sacred duty,” he answers, wondering, even as he says the words, what it is about this young woman that leads him to behave—and talk—so uncharacteristically.

She turns to the girl. “If you are again in difficulty, please apply to the Asylum for the Houseless Poor in Cripplegate. It is only open on freezing nights, but it is a respectable place. If you give my name to the superintendent, he will ensure you are treated well.”

She presses a card into the girl’s grasp but from the way Sarah squints at it, it’s clear to Charles, at least, that she cannot read. It’s high time to go.

Feeling more than a little foolish, he offers his arm to Sarah and bows to the couple. The man shakes the girl’s hand in farewell; more, it seems, as a discreet means of passing her a coin than for reasons of politeness. As he and Sarah walk back towards Park Lane, Charles sees the young woman standing watching them for some minutes, before her companion touches her gently on the arm and they turn away.

“Gawd, did you ever see the like?” says Sarah gaily, biting the sovereign then rubbing it against her bare thigh. “Fell on me feet there, eh?”

Charles frowns; it’s not so very different from what he himself is thinking, but putting it into such coarse words seems something akin to a profanity.

“She was very kind to you,” he says tersely.

“ ’Course she was. Makes no difference to ’er.”

“Do you want to go back to McCarthy’s? Or to that other place she mentioned?”

“Cripplegate—Christ no! ’Ave you seen the place? Tried it out when I first came to Lunnon. Terrible bloody dump. But I ain’t goin’ back to McCarthy’s neither. Some ’orrible old tooler wanted some for free, and then kicked off when I told ’im he could pay up or ’ook it. And then I was just settin’ meself up for the night on that bench when some bastard nicked me coat. Christ, it was cold!”

Charles looks sideways at her, but his sympathy stalls when he realises the young woman’s handkerchief is tucked into the neck of the girl’s shirt. And, more to the point, there’s a small grubby hand digging round in the pocket of the coat he has—perhaps unwisely—left wrapped around her. He hauls her round to face him and drags the coat, none too gently, from her shoulders and puts it back on.

Sarah laughs. “Don’t worry, mister—I ain’t robbed yer! And I didn’t rob ’er, neither,” she adds quickly, seeing his face. “She
gave
this to me, cross me ’eart.” She holds out the handkerchief in one hand and sets it fluttering in the breeze. “Nice bit a cloth, though—I know a few fogle-hunters’d give me a good few bob for this.”

Charles tries to snatch it from her but she’s too quick—suspiciously quick, in fact, and he catches hold of her wrist with one hand, and checks through his pockets again with the other. Only then does he let her go, and they continue, rather less comfortably, on their way.

“You don’t ’ave to come wiv me,” says the girl sulkily. “I’m all right on me own.”

“I said I would, so I will. Where do you want to go?”

Sarah shrugs. “I’ll find somewheres. Always ’ave before.”

Charles sighs. “I think I know somewhere you can stay for a day or so. If”—this with a glance at her shoes—“you’re capable of walking a mile or so.”

For a few shillings he can probably persuade Lizzie to put her up, and for a few shillings more ask her to keep an eye out for the girl for a while. Sarah’s chosen a dangerous profession; she may well need someone decent to turn to.

Sarah enjoys their walk far more than Charles does. He stops her at the first second-hand clothes stall they come to on Oxford Street and makes her invest part of her new wealth in a decent if rather threadbare military coat. It takes what he considers an unconscionable time to root through all the jumble, but Sarah eventually picks out a dark green merino shawl, badly stained on one side but fringed with bright emerald silk. Thus decked out she becomes animated, almost coquettish, and he’s forced to acknowledge that she has an eye for colour if nothing else. The green makes richer the red in her hair and the swing of the man’s coat flatters her slender tomboyish figure. For a moment—just a moment—he feels a distinct and absurd stirring of desire, which he stifles ruthlessly by reminding himself that this girl can’t be more than a few years older than the little Park Lane princess he saw earlier, as suffocated by her stiff plaid as she clearly was by parental anxiety. He quickens his pace and forces Sarah to run to keep up; the sooner this enforced excursion is done with, the better.

When they eventually reach the house near Golden Square there’s no sign of life, but that’s no great surprise at this time of day. He tells Sarah to wait at the front, and goes down the narrow alley at the side to the shabby one-up-one-down cottages at the back, thrown up some years ago on what was once a leafy garden. Lizzie lives at Number 5, but there’s no answer from her door. The only ground-floor
window is covered with a thick curtain, no doubt to keep in the heat from the meagre fire. Charles knows where she keeps the spare key, and decides that his own need to have done with Sarah is more pressing than Lizzie’s for a few more minutes’ sleep. When the door creaks open his eyes are momentarily blinded by the contrast between the bright sunshine outdoors and the darkness inside. He knows this room well—he’s slept here more than once himself—but as his senses adjust, something about it strikes a strange note. It’s a small squalid space, no more than ten or twelve feet square, sparsely furnished and damp for nine months of the year. But behind the bed, on the left-hand wall, the unplastered brick seems to him oddly dark—in fact not just dark but thick with something that—he sees now—is dripping its slow way onto the floor and congealing in pools on the bare boards.

Blood.

Appalling, inconceivable quantities of it. Charles stands there, almost stupefied. The room is like a slaughter-house and it’s only much later that he will realise exactly what it is that’s strewn about his feet in such raw glutinous slabs. For the moment, all he can see is what’s on the bed.
What
, not
who
, for identity—personality—self—have been brutally obliterated. It’s Lizzie, but he only knows that because he knows the little rose tattoo still visible on her right shoulder. She’s turned towards him but does not face him—cannot face him because someone has taken a knife to her skin and hewn her pretty features away, leaving only a sodden coagulating mass of flesh. The policeman in Charles computes—almost automatically—that this must have been some time after the killer hacked her throat through with such ferocity that he can see her spinal bones; the man in him has the tiniest moment of relief that she was spared that, at least. Though
whether she was still alive when her breasts were sliced off and her torso ripped open from neck to thigh, is far less clear. Coils of gut and offal are dragged across the tangled bedding, and her legs gape open in a gruesome parody of birth, or sex. Charles is hit suddenly by a memory—an image of himself on that bed—of Lizzie in not so very different a pose—and he staggers, reaches for the wall to stop himself sinking, and spews acid vomit all over the floor.

A moment later he hears a sound in the court outside and Sarah’s voice calling to him. He forces himself out of the room into the open air and shuts the door.

“Find a constable,” he gasps hoarsely, wiping his face with the back of his hand, then—louder—
“quickly!”

As soon as she’s gone Charles drops slowly to the ground and sits there, his back to the door, his mind and heart in tumult. It’s only when he hears the sound of feet coming back down the passage-way—five minutes later? ten?—that he opens his eyes and looks up. Sarah stands there, looking down at him, and beside her—amazingly—is the round red face of Sam Wheeler, who seems as astonished to see Charles, as Charles is relieved to see him. He tries to get up, only to see a cloud of prickling stars and slide back down. He feels Sam’s hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy, old mate. Looks like you’ve had a shock.”

“It’s in there,” says Charles weakly. “
She’s
in there.”

He doesn’t see Sam’s concerned look back at him, as he pauses on the threshold before pushing open the door. The next thing he remembers is Sam crouched down next to him, talking softly in his ear.

“The doctor’s on his way and I’ve sent one of my lads for reinforcements. But before they get here, I need you to tell me what happened. We need to get this straight. Just between you and me—you follow? So I know what to say.”

Charles is starting to stammer something incoherent when he realises there’s a strange tone to Sam’s voice. He looks up at him. “Christ, Sam, you don’t think I had anything to do with this?”