The Vice Society (43 page)

‘You will discover soon enough. Goodbye, Noah Dyson.’

James Tattershall raised the pistol . . .

TWENTY-SEVEN

Snow was falling thick and silent now, smothering the gaslights like drifting duck-down. Inside the carriage, Mr Williamson wiped the condensation from the window and breathed upon his hands. Mr Newsome sat opposite him looking at a pocket watch.

‘It is almost two hours,’ said the inspector.

‘I can see almost nothing in this confounded weather. Your men must be half-frozen.’

‘I expect so, but they are used to being out in all weathers. Do you ever miss walking the streets, George?’

‘I still walk the streets, but no longer as a policeman. You saw to that.’

‘What was I to do? You abetted a prisoner in his escape from gaol. How could you remain a detective after that?’

‘I acted in the interests of a greater justice than the one that had gaoled him there.’

‘Who are we, as mere servants of the law, to make such decisions?’

‘An apt question – and one you might turn upon yourself.’

‘I fear that
you
are the one who has learned no lessons. You are still associating with criminals.’

‘I am still pursuing justice . . . Listen! Did you hear that?’

Had there been the slightest sound of breaking glass, half-muffled by the weather?

Mr Williamson opened the carriage door and squinted through the snow.

A chair crashed through the window beside the door of the house they were observing, carrying a billowing curtain with it and becoming lodged in the frame. A gunshot cracked into the night. A heartbeat – then another shot.

‘Let us go, Inspector! Rally your men!’

Mr Newsome made no attempt to move.

‘Inspector? That is the signal – let us take the criminals!’

‘I think not.’

‘What!’

‘Why hurry into a house where pistols are being shot? We have men at the rear and men in front. Anyone fleeing will run into their arms.’

‘But . . . Noah . . .’

‘Did you really think I would risk my life or those of my men for one such as he? Indeed, it is all the better if he has been murdered. Then I would have a certain conviction rather than a fabric of supposition to wage against their immunity of wealth and power.’

‘You have planned this all along.’

‘Is not planning one of the detective’s greatest tools?’

Standing with one foot upon the carriage’s iron step and one foot in the settling snow, Mr Williamson looked with loathing upon his former superior, who reclined with a smirk upon the leather seat. And he made his decision . . .

The carriage door slammed and he was half running, half sliding along Bedford-row to the street door. He bashed on it madly with a fist and looked around to see where the inspector’s special constables might be. They were standing well away from the house on the same side of the street where the residents might not see them. No doubt they were waiting for a word from the inspector himself.

No answer.

He listened intently for any sound of Mr Cullen’s cries at the rear, but there was only the maddening silence of accumulating flakes and the thud of blood in his ears. He wondered whether he should run around to the rear of the property. Frustration burned in his eyes. Something had to be done.

The window with the chair lodged in it was too far from the doorway to peer through, and railings barred his way. He grabbed a broom that had been left propped in the doorway and used the handle to smash a pane so that he might push the curtain aside and look in.

He saw the legs of a man lying immobile on the floor. There was blood on the carpet around the body.

‘Noah? Noah – is it you? Can you hear me! Move your legs if you can hear me!’

Nothing. No movement or reply.

Mr Williamson went back into the street and looked frantically towards each end of Bedford-row for signs of activity. There ... at the south end: two figures were ascending from below the street and running madly towards Brownlow-street, that narrow aperture connecting with Holborn. They were escaping.

He raced back to the carriage and wrenched open the door. ‘Inspector – two of them have escaped on foot. The houses must be connected below the street. We must pursue before they have a chance to disappear.’

‘I think not. As you have said, we know who they are and where to find them. Why chase across the city in this weather? Let us wait to see whether the street door opens. We have constables ready.’

‘We do not know who those two escaping gentlemen are. They may be entirely different but connected criminals!’

‘Or two gentlemen late for a show. I will wait, George, and so will my carriage.’

Mr Williamson looked back at the house. Was that Noah dying inside? Was he already dead? Were those running gentlemen the same who had murdered his wife?

‘D—— you, Albert Newsome! I follow justice alone!’ shouted Mr Williamson, and he was off running hazardously over the snow towards Brownlow-street.

He emerged into Holborn, where a cab was parked just a few yards away.

‘Did you see two gentlemen emerge from here a minute or so ago?’ he shouted to the cab driver. ‘They were running.’

‘Aye. Got a cab. They won’t be goin’ nowhere fast in this weather though, and no mistake. Though the way he’s lashin’ the ’orse, they’re in a right ’urry.’

Mr Williamson climbed into the cab. ‘Pursue that carriage with all haste! Catch it and there is a sovereign for you.’

They set off with a lurch.

The streets were virtually clear of traffic due to the weather, but it seemed both of the cabs were possessed by some demonic force. Whips cracked, equine nostrils snorted and hooves skittered over the stones, each vehicle risking a fall in the worsening conditions but neither making the least attempt at caution.

Holborn passed in a blur, its occasional human forms hunched and cowering into malformed shapes. Holborn-hill was becoming a pale sepulchre, made ghostly in its valiant illumination. On they raced, the distance between them unchanging and the flakes flashing about them in icy vortices.

And then, even above the rattle of wheels and the muffled clop of hooves, they all began to hear it:

Something like a colossal moan expressed from innumerable throats; something like the plaintive cries of thousands; something, indeed, one might expect to hear from the very fields of the damned: a cacophonous chorus of anguished and bestial cries punctuated by individual wails and yelps.

‘Smithfield,’ muttered Mr Williamson.

As if in response, the carriage pulled to an abrupt halt.

‘Can’t go no further,’ yelled the driver over the noise. ‘The other carriage has stopped and the gents has bailed out!’

Mr Williamson stepped down to behold the scene on upper Farringdon-street. A drover with dogs was leading a flock of sheep around the stopped cab across the thoroughfare and up towards the market. The animals bleated
en masse,
raising clouds of steam and pungent manure as they trotted blindly through the night towards their waiting pens at the market.

‘Which way did they go?’ shouted Mr Williamson to the driver.

‘Up yonder – up the hill with the animals!’

‘Here is your sovereign.’

‘Are you goin’ up there amidst the sheep?’

‘I am.’

And Mr Williamson pushed off through the beasts’ snowy fleeces towards the market, his coat collar pulled up and his shoes sliding in the reeking slush of ordure and ice. The close thoroughfare reverberated with animal cries and flowed inexorably towards Smithfield.

Into Cow-lane he progressed, pressing close against the wool of the sheep and being driven relentlessly along. Pigs joined the procession from another direction, grunting and snuffling their bristly hides against his legs . . . and up ahead . . . was that two top-hatted figures also caught in the ovine-porcine cataract, turning around now and then to look behind them?

‘Stop! Stop those men!’ shouted Mr Williamson, but his voice was dumb, dissipated in the whirling flakes and deafening babel. There was nothing to do but proceed at the pace dictated by the herd.

Minute by agonizing minute, the animals moved: cloven-footed and emanating the thick stench of manure. His hands grasped at rough, greasy wool for balance and they moved ever closer towards the end of that narrow artery. Slowly, mercifully, the buildings began to open and Smithfield market presented itself in a scene that, even in the heat of his pursuit, made him momentarily stop and wonder at its horror.

The vastness of that city-walled plain was a veritable inferno of torches blazing above endless ranks of pens in which 40,000 beasts writhed and shifted like waves in a swollen sea of flesh. Swine, sheep, calves, bulls and the ever-present yelping dogs sent forth billowing clouds of steam from their expirations, evaporations, evacuations and execrations against a bloody fate. It was scene from before civilization, from before history and the settling of cities. It was a scene of madness seen through the ceaseless swirls of snow now lashing and enveloping the marketplace. The phantasmal light of the gas flares at surrounding establishments cast a sickly glare over all. The noise was a palpable vibration.

He could not see the two top-hatted men.

Where to begin amid such chaos?

Two constables in oilskin capes were sheltering in a doorway close by and he ran to them.

‘Constables – two gentlemen came this way,’ he shouted. ‘They were wearing top hats and were not dressed for the market. Did you see them? They were most likely in a hurry.’

‘What business is it of yours?’ returned one of the men, a surly sort with his hand on his truncheon.

‘They are murderers!’

They looked at each other, sceptical.

‘Listen! I was once a policeman. I was Sergeant George Williamson of the Detective Force. Which way did they go?’

The name stirred something in the constables. They looked anew at the agitated gentleman before them, his legs soiled with manure and his reddened and pox-scarred face wet with snow. Could this man really be the great Williamson?

‘You will answer to Sir Richard Mayne himself if those men escape me!’

‘I think they went that way,’ replied the surly one, gesturing towards the corner of the market leading off towards West-street.

Mr Williamson took off at a trot, urgently scanning the crowds for the fugitives. Grotesque
tableaux
assaulted his senses: here a blue-aproned buyer with his spittle-sticky fingers in a calf’s mouth; here the flash of a switch and the moan as it pierced a bovine hide; here the flashing heat of the brand and the stench of burned hair; here a flaming torch illuminating the lumpen impassivity of a drover; here the bared teeth and darting legs of the sheepdog . . . and there, two figures rounding the corner of West-street . . . one of them with his hat knocked off and a bare cranium exposed to the elements.

He arrived at that corner just as a drover was leading a number of calves to the slaughterhouse district. Even there, at the market’s edge, the metallic tang of blood and fresh death was thick in the air. The animals sensed it; they smelled the hideous effusions of the bone-boilers and tripe-dressers . . . and they sent up moans of distress. Their eyes rolled back and their hooves hammered nervously through the filth.

Onwards he hurried, slipping ahead of the herd now, and driven by a goad more piercing than that wielded by any drover. The two men – around twenty yards in front – looked back phrenziedly and he saw their faces: one with a moustache, the other seemingly disfigured. Then they were gone.

It was futile to shout over the din of the animals. All he could do was chase towards them through the freezing mud before they could lose themselves in the labyrinthine yards and alleys.

At the place where they had vanished, he turned and looked down a narrow, twisting passage whose very walls seemed to glisten and steam with freshly butchered flesh. Perhaps three hundred carcases hung on hooks all along that hideous nook, leading towards a place where the poleaxe was wielded and knives parted muscle from bone. He gulped a breath and started to run.

It was a charnel parade of horror. All about him, bones glared white; yellow fat hung from flesh so recently alive; glutinous things dangled from cavities once vital with organs. There was a sweet, steaming smell of death that clogged his throat and forced him to breathe lest he vomit. This was the very throat of the city: moist, ravenous and corrupted beyond redemption.

He stopped, panting, and rested his hands on his knees. There was no sign of them – only a choice of two alleys. He looked for footprints, but the ground was so churned with slush and soil and two-toed treads that there was barely a trace to read. With no lamp to hand, he was venturing into an area of darkness to rival any subterranean chamber. His breath billowed about him in the falling flakes.

There . . . was that a footprint? A slipshod sliding arc where a man had almost fallen? It pointed towards an alley into which an onrushing herd was now being steered by lashes of the switch and the unintelligible oaths of the drovers. They would block the thoroughfare and leave no escape for the villains. He ran ahead of the cattle.