The Candle Man (42 page)

‘Making those last two look the same, Henry,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I thought that was quite clever of George. We can attribute them
all
to this Candle chap. Alive or dead, if
we put a butcher’s knife in his hand and it happens that a leather apron is found upon his person, the people will have no doubt that their “Ripper” has been caught, and this
business will soon be forgotten about.’

Oscar shook his head. ‘George, you should have briefed this man differently. These deaths should have been made to look more varied. The newspapers report a dozen or more murders every
day. Unconnected murders would have passed without notice.’

‘Hindsight’s a very useful thing, Oscar,’ said Geoffrey.

‘We are where we are,’ said Rawlinson with a sigh. ‘There’s little to be gained raking over this, gentlemen.’

‘The Candle Man,’ said Warrington. ‘He
will
be this Jack the Ripper. The police will find him with enough evidence framing him.’ He looked at all of them.
‘Other than the prince’s indiscretion, there is no possible way to link the four women. They were all cheap tarts who happened to be plying their trade at the wrong time, in the wrong
place. The metropolitan police and Scotland Yard will have a credible culprit. They will be the heroes of the hour, and law and order will be seen to have prevailed.’

‘Five,’ said Geoffrey.

Warrington cocked his head. ‘What?’

‘Five tarts. The Kelly girl . . . ?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘And this Kelly lived in the same boarding house as one of the others?’ asked Oscar.

‘Yes, one of them. But these women change rooms all the time. They miss a rent, they lose their bed, they find another. It is not implausible that two of these whores might have shared the
same lodging house at one time or another. We can use or dismiss these casual associations to whatever end we want.’

The room was quiet. Through the wood-panelled walls, they heard the faint sound of several raised jovial voices coming from the Chelmsford Room. In the club’s main lounge, an energetic
game of poker was in progress. Warrington was sure the Lodge’s sergeant-at-arms would whisper quietly for the gentlemen in question to pipe down.

‘This chap will have to die. And this time, George, do please be sure he doesn’t slip through your fingers. And with regret, this Kelly girl, too. Do be
very
sure we have her
whereabouts before you dispose of the man.’

Warrington nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘But – and listen closely, George – his body will
not
be presented as this “Ripper” character.’

Warrington’s head jerked. ‘Why ever not?’

‘If the police have a body, if anybody recognises his face – that concierge, for example, at The Grantham – then we’re leaving too many lines of enquiry open. I want you
to kill him, George, and dispose of the body. That is all. He’s going to vanish and that will be all.’

‘But without the corpse, Henry, this Ripper story will just continue. You know what these awful bloody newspapers are like. The next tart who happens to die in a bloody manner will be the
Ripper’s next victim; and so on and so on. We give them a body and this ridiculous story will die.’

‘If we give the public a body, we give this Jack the Ripper a face. And how long before some enterprising writer or journalist decides there’s money to be made in investigating and
writing this Ripper’s life story?’

The others nodded at that.

‘I would like this matter concluded as simply, as cleanly and as invisibly as possible. By the time you have finished meeting him tomorrow, I want the body of one last Ripper victim and
this Candle Man back in London, in a sack . . . at the bottom of the bloody Thames.’

T
he small balcony outside their hotel window looked out upon the Mersey. Even at night, the docks all the way along the busy waterway were still
alive with industry. Orange gas lamps and burning pyres in metal bins dotted the quayside, their amber glow reflected on rain-slick brick and concrete.

The sky had cleared a space in the clouds for the moment, allowing the moon a chance to decorate the warehouse rooftops with its sparkling quicksilver reflection. A two-tone glistening
industrial landscape of cool moon blues dotted with pinpricks of orange. Quite beautiful.

‘They never stop, do they?’ said Mary. Even up here on the third floor of the hotel, she could hear the occasional clatter and grind of cranes working and the echoing voices of men
barking orders at each other.

‘Never,’ whispered Argyll into her hair.

She shifted within the comforting cradle of his firm arms, tilted her head backwards to look up at him. The moon picked out the firm, slender line of his nose, the line of his jaw, the diagonal
twitch of a muscle across his lean cheek and poet’s eyes that glinted deep within pools of shadow. So very, very handsome.

I love this man
. She was aware she said it aloud far too often. It cheapened the words and she worried it made her seem too needy. How strange a pair they were. Just over a month ago, it
was she caring for him. She was the adult, the mentor, the one to be wholly responsible for the other. And now it was utterly reversed; now she was being taken care of. Almost like a child once
again: carefree, unburdened with worries, able just to sit and play with fantasies whilst someone else worried about the mundane matters of tickets and payments and precisely which dock they needed
to present themselves at, and when, and to whom, and so on.

John’s ‘soon’ had all of a sudden become ‘tomorrow’.

This evening they were staring out one last time from their hotel balcony at the rooftops and cranes, chimney pots and masts. This evening was a celebration. A bottle of nice red wine with a
posh-sounding name. Mary had tried wines before, but always the cheapest, and found the taste quite revolting. But this wine was lovely. She sipped again from her china teacup, a two-piece set
he’d bought her last week after she’d fallen in love with them in a shop window. Despite eating not so long ago, it had quickly gone to her head. She wanted to giggle with pleasure,
giggle with excitement.

‘Tomorrow our adventure begins,’ she whispered.

‘Mmmmm.’ She felt his chest vibrate deeply.

‘I never even dreamed of America when I was young. The best dream I ever had was of escaping to London; can you believe that?’ She shook her head at how limited her imagination was,
how parochial her dreams had been. It all seemed so far away now, the soot-black and hopeless warrens of Whitechapel. The ever-present smell of decaying rubbish, the sharp tang of burning coke, the
meaty odour of a labourer’s sweat and the stale stew of alcohol on their breath. A dark hell of hopeless, rotting souls, grey-skinned mole men and women living, so it seemed, in an eternal
twilight of gas-lamp nights and fog-choked days. And so much further away, the always wet, brooding valleys of Wales, embracing suffocatingly small villages of narrow streets paved with slate.

‘Tell me something more,’ she said. He knew the sort of things she liked to hear about. He’d told her pillow stories of all the wonderful things that they were going to see and
do together in that big, wild country.

‘You’ll see that new statue they built in the middle of the bay,’ his deep voice softly rumbled. A soothing vibration. ‘That’s the first thing we shall see:
Laboulaye’s lady, Liberty, golden bronze and holding her candle, towering above our ship. We’ll sail into New York harbour and you’ll see the Brooklyn Bridge ahead of you. And as
many ships coming in and going out as we’ve seen here.’

‘Tell me about the wilderness, the frontier.’ She loved how he described it. The scale of it.

‘There’s so much sky, Mary. Horizons that seem to stretch to infinity. Out on the prairies, you can stand in the middle of a hundred square miles and not see a single tree. Just the
sweeping hummocks of spurs and hills covered in grass, and nothing but the soft whisper of it all stirring . . .’

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. A world of deep blue sky and a rich, swaying carpet of olive green. And air so clean. And no sounds of factory whistles, nor the sharp brittle
snarling of bad-tempered men returning home after work, nor the muted whimper of tears through a bedroom wall, the clunk of boots wearily undone and carelessly dropped on a bare wooden floor above.
Nor the muted murmurs that suddenly, without warning, became a man’s bark and the sound of a fist making contact. A million miserable noises from a million desperate people living cheek by
jowl in a man-made hell.

As he talked of the crystal white peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Platte River’s endless, looping energy, the haunting salt flats of Utah, he felt Mary’s
weight in his arms and against his chest grow heavier. And finally, when he stopped talking, he could hear her breath, deep and even.

She’s asleep now.

He bent down and scooped her legs up with his right arm and stepped back off the balcony, back inside to their hotel room. Carefully, still wary he might wake her, he laid her on the bed.

You know exactly what to do.

Argyll nodded.

So do it, then.

He looked down at her, fast asleep, a half-smile on her face. ‘She won’t feel a thing.’

That’s right.

‘She won’t feel a thing,’ he said to himself again.

Best to get on with it. Hmmm?

Argyll wasn’t sure how long the chloral hydrate powder would last. He’d stirred two spoonfuls into her first cup of wine and another two into her second, which was only
half-finished. The pharmacist had assured him that just one teaspoon of the powder stirred into a cup of tea was enough to guarantee a good and long night’s sleep. By the look of her, she was
thoroughly sedated.

Get the knife and get started. Remember, ‘John’ . . . you have a train for London to catch.

He looked at the room’s clock. It was five minutes past seven. His train down to Euston was due to leave at eight o’clock. Time enough to do what was needed and make his way to the
station. Time enough if, like the pig was saying, he got started now.

Argyll stepped away from the bed and reached for what he needed on the small round table beside the balcony door.

He realised his face was damp with tears as he stood over her. He knelt down beside her and stroked her pale cheek. ‘I’m sorry . . . so very sorry,’ he whispered into her
ear.

And then he began his work.

W
arrington was completely bemused by the man’s choice of meeting place. The very same place: the disused printer’s warehouse. If the
fool had the intention of evading them a second time, then he was feeling particularly optimistic. This time around, all the exits were known about and covered with men.

This time he had his two remaining Lodge men – Orman and Robson, the latter still limping noticeably from his last encounter with the Candle Man – and also two dozen constables and a
chief inspector, a member of their Lodge, commanding them. They were posted outside the building. They were going to see nothing of what went on inside and were under orders to prevent anyone
leaving until told otherwise.

What was perhaps more odd about this meeting was the time he’d chosen for it: midday. Although one would describe it as gloomy in here beneath the roof of metal spars, there were enough
holes and gaps in the moss-clouded glass tiles above that it was certainly not a darkness that this slippery bastard could take any advantage of. Pallid lances of light from the overcast November
sky outside stabbed the gravel and concrete floor. It was a still and quiet place, save for the soft burble of pigeons in the rafters.

This time, we’ll see and hear him coming.

He checked his timepiece; it was a couple of minutes to midday, according to the small gold arms on its enamel face. Warrington stroked the handle of the revolver in his coat pocket. He was
going to do it.
He
was going to be the one to pull the trigger.