Authors: Jonathan Aycliffe
Once, I thought I saw a dark figure standing in a field. Another scarecrow, I said to myself, put there to chase away the birds of spring. But it was surrounded by a flock of blackbirds, pecking the furrowed ground. The train rushed on and the figure was lost behind me.
Spitalfields was crowded and squalid, row upon row of dilapidated houses strung out between Shoreditch and Whitechapel. Not even the sunlight could do much to raise my spirits here. For the first time, it occurred to me that this had been the area of cheap lodging houses where Jack the Ripper’s victims had lived: Dorset Street, White’s Row, Fashion Street, Flower and Dean Streets. One of the bodies, Annie Chapman’s, had been found in Spitalfields on the eighth of September 1888, the second killing. It seemed appropriate.
I had brought my A–Z and marked on it in red ink the side-street behind which Lewis’s body had been discovered, Fashion Street. But I think I could have made my way there without assistance, blindfolded.
The police were still milling about in large numbers. Up and down every street within smelling distance of the crime, constables were knocking on doors, asking routine questions, receiving routine answers. ‘Not again,’ I heard one old dear remark as she opened her door and saw them on her step, a policeman and a policewoman, towering over her like undertakers.
I tried to get into the alleyway, to see it for myself, whatever there was to see. But the entrance was sealed off by yards of plastic tape and two burly policemen laughing at a private joke. Further along, a large white van had been parked near some police cars. It proclaimed itself to be the ‘Police Incident Unit’. People were coming and going through its little door like beetles. The sunlight scraped their carapaces. There was no blood in sight. Even the air smelled almost clean.
I turned to leave, and, as I did so, a voice called out behind me.
‘Dr Hillenbrand? Is that you?’
I turned. It was the policewoman who had been with Ruthven that first dreadful day, the one who had shown us Naomi’s clothes in their polythene bags. I do not remember her name, perhaps she never told me. To be truthful, I had scarcely noticed her.
‘Why, it is you, Doctor. What brings you here?’
I remember stammering, flushing, trying to hide my embarrassment. I was embarrassed, not only to have been caught out in my morbid curiosity, my uninvited intrusion on the realm of violence; but because I found myself suddenly, inexplicably aroused by the woman. The strength of my attraction took me completely by surprise. For a moment, everything became confused – my thoughts of Lewis, my search for his blood on the alley stones, Naomi’s death, Naomi’s clothes in plastic bags, the policewoman, her breasts, her legs, her closeness, the sunlight on my cheeks.
‘Are you feeling all right, Dr Hillenbrand?’
‘I . . . I . . . Yes, I’m all right. Just the heat. I . . . I’ve been travelling. Dafydd . . . Dafydd Lewis . . . I wanted to see where . . .’
‘You knew Dafydd Lewis?’ She was quick.
‘Lewis? Ye . . . yes, I knew him.’ I was flustered, torn between talk of death and a craving for sex. I felt sick.
‘I think you’d better come inside and sit down. You look flushed.’
She took me to the Incident Unit van, made room for me inside, found me a chair. The sexual feelings were passing, almost as quickly as they had come. It was then that it came to me, when this had last happened. I remembered the overpowering feelings I had experienced a few weeks earlier in bed with Laura.
The policewoman brought one of her superiors, a man I had not met before. He had been watching me as I came in, eyeing me as a butcher eyes a calf. I watched him cross the floor, a careful man stepping with ease through circumstances he knew and thought he understood. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, his skin was loose and pale, he looked as though he had not slept for nights. Perhaps he had not. The policewoman told him who I was.
He was sympathetic, said he knew all about my daughter’s case, that they were still doing all in their power to track down her killer or killers. I felt like telling him they were wasting their time, that Naomi’s killer was beyond their reach, had been beyond their reach for over one hundred years. And yet I still could not bring myself to believe that Liddley had been responsible for Naomi’s or any other recent death. He was a catalyst, that was all.
‘What brought you here today?’ the policeman asked. Gently, but firmly, as though suspicion might be heaped on my head for the simple act of being there.
‘I knew him,’ I said. ‘Lewis. I met him a couple of times when he came to my house taking photographs.’
‘Is that so? Didn’t you want to avoid them? The press, I mean.’
I nodded.
‘Yes, yes, of course. But Lewis got past our barriers, made himself useful. I got to know him.’
The policeman seemed to think about this. Then he said, ‘Your daughter was found near here, wasn’t she?’
I nodded.
‘Have you been there?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I never want to.’
‘And yet you’re here today, snooping about the scene of Lewis’s murder.’
‘Not snooping,’ I said, a little heatedly. ‘I don’t snoop.’ My embarrassment had left me warm. No one had offered me a cup of tea. I felt like a suspect, a murderer caught revisiting the scene of his crime.
‘I’m sorry. That slipped out: we get so many snoopers. No, of course not. You knew him. What was he doing here? Do you know?’
I shook my head.
‘Could it have had anything to do with your daughter? Was he helping you in some way? Was that it? Did he offer to carry out his own investigation, use his press connections to track down the murderer?’
‘No, never,’ I said.
‘Dr Hillenbrand, I want you to think this over. Your presence here today is a little odd. Inspector Ruthven was found murdered in the church where we found your daughter’s coat. Now a journalist who is a personal friend of yours turns up nastily murdered a couple of streets away, and you come along to check things out. Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?’
I nodded. What else could I do? It seemed peculiar to me as well. Just what was going on?
‘Think about it, Dr Hillenbrand. If there’s something you haven’t told us, even if it’s just a suspicion, let us know. Lewis could have been killed because he got too close to your daughter’s murderer. What was her name, by the way?’
‘Naomi. Her name was Naomi.’
‘Well, maybe Naomi’s killer is round here somewhere waiting for his next victim. Another little girl, perhaps. You may know something that could help solve these crimes. You could stop the next one being committed.’
‘You think there will be another one?’
He shrugged.
‘Maybe you know better than I,’ he said.
I did not answer.
‘May I go now?’ I asked.
He paused, then nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you need to get in touch, you can get me at Old Jewry. My name’s Allison. Detective Inspector Allison. You can ring any time. Just ask the switchboard to put you through.’
He stood and I followed him. At the door, I turned.
‘Liddley,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Look for someone called Liddley. That’s all I can tell you.’
He held me for a long time with his gaze, then nodded.
‘Liddley?’ he said. ‘Very well. I’ll look for him. If you remember anything else, let us know.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’
I went back out into the sunshine and down the little flight of steps. From nearby came the sound of traffic speeding along Commercial Road. I set off down the narrow street, watching the sunlight fall on brick, the closed doors, the twitching curtains. A door opened on my right and a man looked out, watching me pass, a Jew with a long beard, one of the last to stay in the district. On the pavement, Bangladeshi children played while their parents remembered another sky and another sun.
I had come so far for so little. God knows why I had told Allison to look for someone called Liddley. What had prompted me? Instinct, intuition, a flight of fancy? Or something more solid? I was getting in tune. With Liddley. With myself.
Perhaps it was the same instinct that helped me make up my mind what to do next. I had thought of nothing on my way up to Town except finding the site of Lewis’s murder, as though the place itself might speak to me. But it had told me nothing, nothing I did not already know. I could have gone on to find the place where they found Naomi, but something told me I was not ready for that again.
Instead, I found myself in Brick Lane. I think I had no idea where I was going until I made a left turn into a narrow street of dilapidated Georgian houses. At the end of the street, the tall black spire of an Anglican church was etched against the blue sky like a shadow. Even as I headed towards it, I felt a deep shiver pass through me. The day seemed colder, the sunshine less bright, less certain of itself. The sky lost its shimmer as low clouds scudded in from the east. My footsteps sounded hollow. There was no one in the street but myself.
The church seemed deserted. Between the low perimeter wall and the front door stretched two patches of choked and dusty weeds. The weeds were ornamented with sweet-papers, a crushed beer can, cigarette stubs. The noticeboard sloped forward drunkenly, as though about to crash on to the pavement. One of its glass panes had been smashed. There were shards of glass on the ground in front of it. The only notice was a yellowed, curling sheet of diocesan headed notepaper giving the irregular times for services. It would be only a matter of time before St Botolph’s became a mosque or a bingo hall or a carpark.
I pushed the main door. It opened easily, and I stepped inside. What little light crept through the windows lay exhausted on a place more wretched than holy. If this was God’s house, God must have been down to his last penny. The fabric was late eighteenth century, later than Christchurch, Hawksmoor’s neglected masterpiece on Commercial Road. Victorian restorers had done their best to cover the original interior. Modern shabbiness and occasional attempts to bring parts of the church into line with modern taste had made the worst of a bad job.
I stared for a long time at a cheap candlestick on the altar, at a shaft of light creeping towards it and falling short. Ruthven had once put forward the suggestion that Naomi might have been killed here, actually here in the church. But they had found no evidence for that. No bloodstains, no hair, nothing that might have led to that conclusion. Nevertheless, looking around me, sensing the squalid ambivalence of the church, the underlying unease, I understood why he might have thought of it. And perhaps, I thought, just perhaps, he had been speaking the truth.
The door to the crypt was on the right, between two large Victorian monuments. In spite of what had happened, it was unlocked. A lightswitch behind the door illuminated a naked bulb on the stairs and others lower down. A damp smell rose from below. There were thick cobwebs on the walls. I felt him, he was very close. But why? Why here?
The crypt was laid out in narrow corridors with cells on either side. The cells were low chambers, each with its own door. On some of the doors the names of families had been painted on wooden tiles. At first, several of the names puzzled me. They were French names: Le Houcq, Crespin, De la Motte. And then I remembered the Huguenots, how they had come to London in such large numbers after the
dragonnades
and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This must originally have been one of the French nonconformist churches they had built in Spitalfields.
I walked slowly down one aisle, then another. Where exactly had they found Naomi’s coat? I wondered. A rat scurried lightly across my feet. I looked down and saw an empty Guinness bottle and a paper bag that might have held sandwiches.
The spot where Ruthven had been found was still identifiable. Nobody had bothered rubbing out the chalk marking the outline of his body. There were still bloodstains on the floor. Someone had left flowers, perhaps one of his colleagues. Surely his wife had not come here. It occurred to me that I had never visited her. Quiet, it was so quiet.
I thought I heard a whisper behind me. Starting, I looked round, but there was no one there. I looked down at the floor again. Not far from the chalk-marks, I noticed something, a small bundle of cloth. I bent down and picked it up. It was Naomi’s scarf. I held it tightly in my hand, remembering the last time I had held it, tying it round her throat to keep her warm.
Slowly, I got to my feet. As I did so, my eye caught sight of the name-plate on the door in front of me. It did not register at first. Just another name, a French name like all the rest, belonging to a family of textile merchants: Petitoeil. This was the tomb beside which Ruthven’s body had been found. I remembered translating the name for Lewis: little eye. And I remembered Naomi’s words all those months ago: ‘He says he has little eyes, that his little eyes are watching me.’ And then I turned back and looked more closely at the name-plate on the door of the tomb. The last name bore a date of death that should have been familiar to me: 9 March 1865. The name was Jean Auguste Petitoeil: John Augustus Liddley.
I returned to Cambridge much shaken. The sunshine had gone as abruptly as it had come. I made the journey back through a darkening, wasted countryside. There was no need for me to check in the Register of Burials to know that John Liddley – Little Eye, Petitoeil – had been interred in St Botolph’s crypt beside his father, his mother, and who knows how many other members of his family. What I could not understand was how his hand had reached out from the grave to strike down three innocent victims, to bring them so close to the place where his bones lay. I began to wonder just how long we had, how long it was before he came for Laura and myself.
There was a message waiting for me at the porter’s lodge. My wife had called and would I please ring her back at my sister’s? It was the first I had heard from Laura in several days. During the past few weeks, we had spoken on the telephone half a dozen times and exchanged three or four letters. But neither speaking nor writing were easy for us, we both felt a terrible constraint, there were so many topics that we had to avoid.