Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (3 page)

She said: ‘By the way, you may as well know, I’m engaged to Crispin.’

‘Crispin de Hartong?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But you can’t!’ The words were out before I could stop myself. She seemed amused rather than shocked by my reaction.

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a pretentious pillock.’

‘Actually, he’s really rather sweet when you get to know him.’

There was something very steely about the way she said that. I had offended her, so I apologised. Then I told her gently that in my very humble opinion I thought she deserved better.

‘Thank you for your fatherly concern,’ she said coolly.

‘I hope I’m more than a father to you.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Quickly I said: ‘And what does
your
father think about it all?’

‘My father is dead; my mother lives in Leamington Spa,’ she added, as if that explained the situation.

‘I see.’ She giggled. I laughed. The rest of that evening would have been pleasant in a trivial sort of way if I hadn’t felt this great weight on my chest, brought on by her announcement. It was only then, I think, that I admitted to myself how much I felt about Jill. It often happens that when you confess to yourself, your feelings come to be like a physical pain. Call it heart ache if you like; I won’t. Since I stopped working for the tabloids I’ve tried to avoid clichés like the plague.

Shortly after eleven I put Jill into a taxi outside The Engineer, and kissed her chastely on the cheek. This was not like me at all. Then I walked slowly back to my house. I took a long way round so that I could think, but I didn’t really think at all. My mind was too full of Jill, and what a pillock Crispin was.

I have a little Georgian terraced house in Princess Road. It was one of those ones with railings along the front and steps going up to the front door. I was quite some way off when I noticed that someone was sitting on my steps. It was no more than a squat black shadow in a long dress from this distance. A ridiculous hope that it might be Jill vanished almost as soon as it came. The figure was motionless. Perhaps someone had just dumped some black bin bags on my doorstep, but no; the form was too precise. It must be a tramp and I would have to give her or him something before they cleared off. The thought enraged me. Hadn’t I enough problems already?

As I approached I could see more clearly what it was. It was dark of course but there was enough light from the street lamps for me to tell. It was a tramp of some kind, a bag lady, except that she had no bags. She was a big bulky old woman in a rusty black dress. Over her head and shoulders was a plaid shawl, greenish in colour I thought, but so dirty I could barely make out the pattern. It was only when I had come right up to her that I could see the face under the shawl and even then half of it was in shadow.

It was an old face, jowelled and wrinkled with pale pendulous cheeks and a puckered, lipless, dog’s bottom of a mouth. I could not see the eyes clearly as they were shadowed by the thick overhanging brow, but I sensed that they were looking at me fixedly. Something about the heaviness of the chin and the thickness of the nose was making me suspect that the figure in the dress was not a woman at all but a man. This was confirmed when it thrust out a hand, palm upwards, from the folds of the plaid shawl. It was a big, heavy, dirty man’s hand and there were great scars on it like old burn marks.

He wanted money. Well, that was simple enough. I fished for pound coins in my pocket. Even so, the idea of coming close enough to this thing to give them filled me with loathing. I stretched out my hand to be able to drop the coins into his while remaining as far as possible from him, but just as I was about to let the money go he gripped my wrist.

It felt like a handcuff of ice. I screamed like a girl. I felt dizzy; I suppose I must have passed out; drink I suppose, but it had not been my imagination because when I came to I looked for the coins. They and the bloke in the dress had gone.

From that moment I became a driven man. The following morning I went to the British Library and ordered up
Quacks and Charlatans
, as well as
A Treatise on Brain Food
. In the B.L. catalogues I noticed that Simpson Graham M.D. was also credited with another book entitled
Mother Midnight’s Chatechism
, so I ordered that as well.

Research is like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Quacks and Charlatans
had only a few pages about Graham, and was completely ignorant about his Music Hall Career, but it gave me this:

He had been a brilliant if erratic medical student and early showed an almost insatiable desire to make his mark in the world. . . . Dr Graham developed the idea that ingesting organs, in particular the brain, from a living animal was extraordinarily beneficial to human health. Several times he gave a demonstration before an interested and alarmed public in which he trepanned a fully conscious dog or cat, an operation which can, if skilfully done, be executed without much pain to the subject. He would then proceed to dip a spoon into the brain pan and devour the contents until the wretched animal finally lost consciousness. Many colleagues poured scorn on his unorthodox methods, but very few of them objected from an animal welfare point of view. . . . After his disgrace, he continued to give lectures and demonstrations on what he called
zoophagy
(the eating of a still living being), often doing so in female dress for no apparent reason. Doubts as to his sanity naturally grew and he was finally consigned to an asylum.

I only skimmed though
A Treatise on Brain Food, Or the Benefits of Zoophagy Explained
by Simpson Graham M.D. Something about the very act of reading it, even in the antiseptic surroundings of the B.L. seemed poisonous. I did gather from a cursory glance that Dr Graham was no stylist and did a lot of boasting. All the same, I couldn’t help noting down one passage which comes towards the end of this tedious little book.

If we could only overcome the contemptible prejudice against using our fellow human beings in such experiments I am convinced that the benefits would be extraordinary. At present criminals, condemned by law and society, are either executed or left to languish in unhygienic conditions, an unconscionably wasteful practice. How much better for us, and indeed them, if their living, palpitating organs and brain cells were to be used to refresh and rejuvenate a select few. With the skills that I have perfected, the suffering of the reprobates in question could be kept to a minimum; or indeed prolonged and exacerbated, if required, to point a necessary moral lesson. By ingesting these living substances and fluids the health and sanity of our finest men (and women) of genius would not only be enhanced but also greatly prolonged. Through this use of ‘living brain food’ as I term it, human lives of two or three hundred years might in the future, I sincerely believe, become a commonplace.

The third book,
Mother Midnight’s Chatechism
was subtitled
Zoophagy Explained to the Young.
Graham did not claim authorship on the title page, and I am not surprised. It is printed on cheap paper and decorated with crude, muddy woodcuts. Nearly all of it is in verse. It begins:

How can you be big and strong?

Hear then Mother Midnight’s song . . .

Then there were a number of stories or anecdotes told in verse.

Edward ate a living mouse

And he learned to build a house;

David downed a wriggling rat,

And so he grew big and fat . . .

Concluding with the moral:

Make your meal off breathing things

And become as great as kings.

The final set of verses tells the story of a boy called Alfred who catches his sister out in the act of cheating him at cards. Thereupon he ties her to a chair and proceeds to cut her open with his ‘trusty knife’. It was all told in a light-hearted almost humorous way that was very difficult to gauge. How serious was the man being?

Then he cut a slice of liver

While she still did quake and quiver . . .

I wanted to be sick, so I started to skip this stuff, but I know it finished:

When he’d eaten all his sister,

Do you think that Alfred missed her?

No, for all her wit and vigour

Had been used to make him bigger.

All his wants she could provide him

By being safely there inside him.

I’d had enough, and I left the British Library in a hurry, nearly tripping over an old bag lady in the courtyard outside. Then my mobile started to ring. It was Bill Beaseley. He seemed far away and his voice kept breaking up.

‘Danny, I think I’ve found something which may . . . I’ll send you a . . .’ The phone went dead. I tried calling him but the line was engaged. On an impulse I rang Jill and asked if she would like to come to the recording of the final of
I Can Make You a Star
the following night.

‘Great!’ She said. ‘Can I bring Crispin too? I’m sure he’d be fascinated.’

I bit my lip and told her I would have two tickets biked round to her that afternoon. I could have sold them on eBay for silly money.

The following morning a rather grubby envelope arrived for me by first class post. It could only be from Bill Beaseley. Sure enough, inside was a photocopy. (Bill was one of those Luddites who refuse to use PCs and e-mails.) On the back of it he had scrawled:

‘Page from a book called
The Complete Ripper Letters
, containing all the letters that were sent to the Police about the Whitechapel murders in both facsimile and transcript. This just may be the clue that clinches it!!! But don’t forget, we go 50/50 on any book deal. All right, mate? Bill.’

The facsimile showed a few lines written in a big scrawly handwriting on a scrap of paper. I got the feeling that the writer was trying to make his handwriting look rather more primitive and uneducated than it actually was. The legend above the facsimile read:

‘Note addressed to “Inspector Frederick Abberline at Scotland Yard”, which arrived 3rd October 1888, three days after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes. It was dismissed as a hoax at the time as, though the message had been written in blood, it was found to be the blood of a cat.’

Here was the message:

I have eaten some of the lights out of them girlies as you will see. I’d send you a morsel, Mr Abbaline [sic], only it’d be long dead and won’t be no use. Still we may meat, some time, but you won’t know me from midnight as I’m not wot I seam.

That night was the Big One. Well, you all saw the final of
I Can Make You a Star
, this year, didn’t you? The tenor in the wheelchair won it because of the viewers’ phone-in votes, even though the judges and I thought it should have been the blind juggler. Anyway the audience ratings went through the roof. Jill and Crispin came round afterwards for the champagne do with all the celebs. Jill was excited by it all and just thought it was a hoot, but Crispin was being very snotty and stand-offish, I’m glad to say. I kept my eye on them and, when I noticed that they seemed to be having a little argument, I came over. He was bored and wanted to go home apparently, but she wanted to stay. So I touched her bare arm and took her to meet some of my famous friends, purely because they might help out on the Save the Old Essex campaign, you understand. She loved that.

I was feeling pretty good the next morning, even when the doorbell rang shortly after seven thirty. Those bloody tabloids, I thought, they’ll be asking me to confirm some stupid rumour, or they want a picture of me looking rough in the altogether. I took care to dress carefully before I opened the door, but it wasn’t the press, it was the police.

‘Good morning, sir. Could we step inside for a moment . . . ? Do you know a Mr Bill Beasely of Flat C. 31 Congreve Street . . . ? Well, the thing is, sir, Mr Beaseley was found dead last night . . . murdered, sir. . . . There was a notebook on the desk and it was open at a page on which your name and address had been written. . . . I wonder if you could possibly account for your movements last night. . . .’

They actually asked me where I had been that night! I told them that my alibi was pretty impeccable as I had about twenty million witnesses to my whereabouts. Oh, says, the Inspector, all sophisticated, we thought those programmes like
I Can Make You a Star
were pre-recorded. No, I said, you can check, it was all live, every fizzing second of it. I believe in live. If it isn’t live it hasn’t got that something.

I asked for details about poor Bill and they seemed happy to oblige. His skull had been split open with something like a meat cleaver and it looked as if part of his brain had been removed. That scared me, I must say, but I said nothing. They asked me if Bill had had enemies. No, I could not think of any enemies, but Bill had been a crime reporter, you know.

The next day I let the press have it, and by the time the late editions of the
Evening Standard
were on the streets, there was a nice little spread on the inside pages:

I CAN MAKE YOU A STAR
MAN CLAIMS:

‘I HAVE SOLVED RIPPER MYSTERY’

Well, not exactly, but near enough by press standards. I had given them a pretty coherent run-down of the evidence, and they got most of it right. The one thing I’m afraid I hadn’t told them about was old Bill’s part in my discovery, but I thought what with his murder and everything, it would just make things too complicated. I did feel bad about that for a while.