I needn’t have worried about Charles spotting me. All his
attention was focused on the drunken men and women who filled the room. Several of the women, sweaty and much the worse for wear, were attempting to ply their trade, trying to lure men into the alley outside in exchange for a few pennies; some were doing better than others. One woman, however, was rejected at every table with such disdain that I wondered if she was at the point in her career where she would have to give away her services to find a customer who would take her.
She was not young – even if time had been less cruel to her I would have placed her at thirty-five or more – but with the jaundiced yellow of her sagging skin and several teeth missing, she could as well have been fifty or more. Her attempts to make up her face were now smears down her cheeks, rendering her eerily clown-like as she weaved unsteadily between the men who so cruelly brushed her off.
‘Go ’ome, Annie,’ the barman called out. ‘You’re putting the customers off their beer!’
There was a round of laughter and though the woman shouted something back, it was lost in the noise. She pulled her shawl around her, covering up her drooping breasts that had been threatening to escape the loose ties of her bodice, and stumbled towards the door. Hebbert watched her like a hawk. After a moment or two he put down his glass and slipped through the side door.
Not wishing to draw too much attention to myself, I exited the way I had come in and moved quickly round the corner, where I hoped to see Hebbert not far ahead. My heart sank as I was presented with a crossroads. I ran forward and peered both left and right, but with the noise of the pub so close by their footsteps were lost to my straining ears. My heart raced. I
had
to find them. I was now sure that Hebbert meant the
woman harm and I had to catch him in the act, but in time to still save her. What I would do after that I did not know, but at least this wretched Annie was so drunk no one would listen to her story; I doubted she would remember any details clearly enough, even if someone did.
I took a deep breath and turned to the right on instinct, my feet carrying me quickly into the darkness. The road narrowed, the slum houses on either side almost leaning in to touch each other, and here and there a black mouth of an alleyway loomed up out of the fog. Where had she gone? And where was Hebbert? I paused and looked around me, feeling lost in an awful maze, and then I heard something: a drunken giggle, a few slurred words, coming from somewhere down a tiny road on my left.
I followed the noise, barely able to see a foot in front of me. The fog deadened the darkness and made it a solid entity. I could hear them ahead now, the shuffle of shoes and the rustle of clothing, and a gruff voice that sounded so unlike the urbane Charles Hebbert I had spent so many convivial evenings with. As I moved more quickly, certain I should have been upon them by now, I could not help but wonder if it was the parasite that was aiding my hearing, if I was somehow attuned to its supernatural powers now that I was so close to a potential murder.
She laughed again, and then I saw, only a few feet ahead of me, a glint of steel in the night and the cream of exposed flesh.
‘Charles!’ I called out, grabbing at the shroud of his coat. ‘Charles, no!’
But I was too late. Her laugh caught in a gasp and then there was a short shriek that was over before it started. As Charles
Hebbert stared at me, bewildered, she slid down the wall behind him, her eyes open wide in shock, one hand flailing towards the cut on her neck.
‘Thomas?’ Hebbert said. ‘What are you doing here?’ He dropped the knife as if he had forgotten he was holding it and the intensity of his expression faded away, leaving only the face I knew – I thought I knew – so well: open, friendly, generous Charles Hebbert.
‘Get her shawl,’ I growled, crouching beside the poor woman whose head lolled sideways. The cut was bad and blood pumped from the slash, but she was still alive. I doubted we could save her, but still I had to try, and as Charles shakily handed me the tatty material I wrapped it as tightly around her neck as I could without strangling her. She murmured and muttered as I carefully pulled her up.
‘Take the other side,’ I snapped. Hebbert stood before me like a chastened child who had been caught stealing apples, awkward and ashamed.
‘Thomas, I—’
‘We can talk later. First we must find a hansom cab – we’ll take her to my house, but we need to hurry.’
The three of us stumbled forward, the woman still mumbling as she drifted towards unconsciousness, and I could imagine her warm blood seeping into my dark jacket, invisible in the night. Hebbert ran ahead and hailed a cab and we pushed the woman inside, seating her between us. I forced Hebbert into a jovial and lewd conversation, as much as the very thought disgusted me, so we looked like nothing more than two gents who were taking away a drunken unfortunate for a night of depraved pleasure. I kept my glove gripped firmly over the wound as I continued our charade. On the other side
of her, Charles Hebbert looked as if he might cry as he forced himself to laugh along with me. My skin itched, and I thought of red eyes and a slick black tongue winding round my neck to try and reach this dying woman’s blood. I fought back a fit of coughing, barely breathing through my nose, all the while willing the horse to trot faster before our façade fell apart and the cab seats were slick with blood.
We called the driver to a halt close by my house but not outside it, and as Hebbert distracted the cabbie with payment and small talk, I made a pretence of flirtation with the dead weight of woman I could barely keep upright.
‘I wouldn’t give ’er any more to drink,’ the cabbie said to Hebbert, ‘not if you want your money’s worth.’ He laughed at that, and Hebbert joined in. The sound made me shiver. The jovial laugh I had known for years was now a stranger’s laugh.
We maintained our awful pretence at merriment until the front door had closed behind us.
‘The kitchen,’ I said. The woman was still breathing, but her skin was deathly pale. ‘Then go upstairs and get my medical bag.’ Charles looked at me for a moment, still dazed. ‘Go!’
‘Thomas,’ he started, and then thought better of whatever he was going to say and ran to the stairs. I was glad. We had plenty to talk about, but it had to wait.
I heaved her onto the table and then pulled off my sweaty, blood-soaked coat and threw it to the floor before carefully unwrapping the crimson shawl and peeling it away from the wound. The dirty material clung stickily to the loose skin on her neck at the edges of the gash, and once I had forced it away, I could see the damage clearly. I had known the chances were slim, but I doubted very much that there was anything left we could do to save her. Although he had missed the
carotid artery, the cut was three inches wide and deep. Her clothes were soaked in her lost blood.
She gargled, trying to speak, and I leaned over her. ‘I am a doctor,’ I said, stroking her hair out of her face. ‘I am going to take care of you.’
It took her a moment to focus on me, and then her eyes widened slightly, her gaze shifting to my shoulder. Claws scrabbled at my back and I twisted around, instinctively trying to shake whatever it was away. But I could not. The weight of the thing that clung to me could not be shaken off.
On the table the woman tried to scream with the last of her breath, but a wet rattle was all she managed. I was filled with darkness, and tendrils of something thick, wet and rank slid up my neck and wrapped around my head confusing my thoughts and forcing me to look her way again.
Her eyes shone in terror and as she gasped her last I saw in their reflection the
Upir
, moving jerkily up over my shoulders, its terrible mouth open hungrily, its eyes two tiny pinpricks of soulless red. The air stank of the river and of all the things that had ever rotted in it.
‘Thomas.’
I jumped and turned, for a moment with no sense of who I was or who the plump, awkward-looking older man in front of me was. He was holding out my medical bag.
‘I have your bag,’ he said, and suddenly the weight shifted and the air cleared of the stench and I trembled, my face flushing as I panted, desperate to regain my composure. For those few minutes the
Upir –
I could not consider it a simple infection, not in that moment – and I had been one and I had felt its hunger and wicked delight and the ages of all the years it had existed. I was seeing through my eyes and Harrington’s
and all who had gone before us. It was overwhelming and terrifying and enticing all at once.
I fought the urge to vomit. My hands were cold and clammy.
‘Thomas?’ Hebbert said again. He looked afraid of me, and that almost made me laugh aloud. What had become of us? What
would
become of us?
‘It’s too late.’ I pulled a chair out and sank down into it, exhausted. I nodded towards another. ‘There is a bottle of wine in that cupboard. Fetch it and sit.’
He did as he was told, a biddable servant. In any ordinary situation I would have found his behaviour disturbing – the switch from violence to such passivity – but this was no ordinary situation. We were both locked in something beyond our obvious control.
‘Thomas …’ His hand shook, the wine threatening to spill over the edge of his glass. ‘I wish I could explain. I don’t know what has happened to me – what happened to me before. I had
hoped
– no, I had
prayed
for it all to be nothing more than dreams … nightmares.’
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked. There was no need for elaboration, for the use of the name. He knew whom I meant.
Tears rolled from his eyes and ran down his blotchy cheeks. ‘I do believe it must have been – but I cannot explain it; truly I cannot.’ His eyes met mine, desperate for some kind of understanding. I said nothing but sipped my wine and let my blood settle back down while my mind freed itself from the image of the thing I had seen in the dead woman’s eyes. There was no need for me to ask a question of him, for he had started speaking, and it was my experience that when a man began to bare his soul he rarely stopped until he was free of his burdens.
‘When I was young – very young – I sometimes … I had thoughts.
Urges
.’ Shame hung heavy in his stilted words. ‘Ones that I would never act on, Thomas, I promise you that: they
disgusted
me. But they were violent and angry. It was a lust, that is really the only way I can describe it: a terrible lust to hurt – no, not just to hurt, but to
terrify
women. To have power over them. I knew I could never give in to those lusts – I
would not
. I would not be that man. I met Mary and we married and I swear by all I believe to be good and holy that I never raised so much as a finger against her, nor against Juliana. I loved them both very much – Juliana is the world to me, you know that. That
other
part of me, well, I locked it so far down inside me that I had almost forgotten it existed. And then somehow, back in that terrible summer, the box opened.’
He leaned across the table, his voice suddenly urgent. ‘I was not myself. There was no intent in my actions – you must believe me. Even as the – the
events
were occurring, it was as if I was in a dream – a nightmare. There were spaces in my memory that I could not reach, or I would not allow myself to reach. I convinced myself the things I saw were simply that, bad dreams, and I tried to drown them with drink. But all the time I was terrified that there was something more to them.’ He shrugged, helplessly. ‘And then Harrington died and I was so worried about Juliana and her pregnancy that the nightmares simply stopped and I was myself again. You cannot understand the relief I felt. Until this past two months or so when they returned.’
He paused to drink. ‘Perhaps I should just throw myself in the Thames and be done with it, Thomas. I cannot bring the shame of a trial on Juliana. She has suffered enough. She could not bear—’
‘I am not going to tell Henry,’ I said, cutting him off. ‘We will find another way.’
He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘But … I don’t—’
‘Why did you kill Elizabeth Camp?’ I cut him off. ‘I know it was you, Charles. The pestle that killed her matches the one missing from the set in your study. Did she know something? Did she recognise you?’
He trembled visibly then. ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘she did not know me. But when I saw her one day while I was on the train to see Juliana, I recognised her. It was like being thrown into freezing water. I watched where she alighted and I followed her. I watched her return. Once I knew that this was probably a regular visit to her family I knew when I could strike. I just needed to wait for her to be alone in a carriage. One day she was. And then it was done.’ His eyes darkened with the memory of the deed.
‘You knew her from one of those times in Whitechapel?’ I avoided using the word ‘killings’. Charles’ mind was on the edge of broken, and with the wrecked body on the table in front of us there was no need to say more.
‘Yes.’ He could barely whisper the word.
‘And you thought she might implicate you, all these years after?’
‘No.’ He shook his head and more tears came. ‘No, it was not that.’
‘Then what? What could possibly have made you carry out such an attack?’
He stared at me for a long moment, two mad men locked in a world of insanity. Finally, he sighed, a terrible empty sound, as if releasing the last of his damned soul into the dark.
‘She made me remember.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘I could
not bear to remember.’ Neither of us spoke, the clock ticking the minutes of the night away.
‘What am I to do, Thomas?’ he said, eventually.
I already knew the answer. He could not stay in this city – not while the
Upir
was here. I would have no more deaths on my hands, nor would I be faced every day with my complicity in his evasion of justice.
‘You must leave, Charles – go abroad. Australia or America, somewhere far from here.’ I was tired and my heart was heavy. We had all been cursed in some way or another, and perhaps this time I was partially to blame. My curiosity had driven me to Kosminski, and that had been not only my downfall, but Charles’ too, and tonight it had cost an innocent woman her life. ‘Have Christmas with your family, but then you must go. You will feel better out of London, I promise you.’