The Candle Man (6 page)

Mary’s cheeks dampened with several more tears. She smiled. But inside she felt panic beginning to bubble up and give her away. She wondered where the devil she was going to take this
exchange next.

‘Come with me, love,’ said the nurse sympathetically. ‘You can look at him briefly, but not too long. He needs his rest.’ She turned to ask a colleague to take over on
the front desk and, with a firm arm around Mary’s shoulders, guided her away from the hustle and bustle of the foyer, through a pair of heavy swing doors.

‘I . . . I don’t want to be any trouble. I—’

‘I’m finished for today anyway,’ the sister said. ‘Staff cloakroom’s along this way anyhow. It’s no trouble.’ She looked at Mary, glassy-eyed and pale.
‘He is going to be just fine, the doctor said.’

They walked down the hushed passageway, finally taking a door on the left leading to the men’s ward. Heavy, dark wood doors again with frosted glass. The sister pushed one of them open a
few inches and nodded towards the row of hospital beds on the inside.

‘Third one along on the right. That’s your gentleman.’

Mary could see a man with bandages around his head like a comically large Indian turban. He was fast asleep.

‘See?’ said the nurse. She smiled. ‘You can relax. He’s on the mend, so he is.’

‘Could I . . . ?’

‘Go in? No. No visitors until the doctor says otherwise,’ said the nurse. ‘He’s still very poorly and not up to seeing anyone, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, right.’ Mary nodded. She struggled to wrestle back a puff of relief.

‘Speaking of which . . .’ The nurse nodded politely at the doctor as he approached the double doors.

‘Sister,’ he said, looking at Mary. ‘I’m sure you know there’s no visiting on the ward yet? Not until I’ve done my rounds.’

‘Sorry, sir. The lady here was awfully worried about the gent who came in early this morning. I was just showing her that he’s perfectly fine, doctor.’

He made a face. ‘Ahh . . . I see.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s “perfectly fine”. The head trauma was quite severe.’ He noted the
flicker of reaction in Mary’s face. ‘I mean to say he’ll live, but he’s experiencing some disorientation. Some confusion.’

‘Confusion?’

‘A forgetfulness.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘This can happen with a heavy blow to the head. “Amnesia”, we call it. A forgetfulness of everyday normal things. Most often
it’s a temporary condition that fixes itself in due course.’ The doctor deployed a well-practised reassuring smile for her benefit. ‘Even the most severe cases of complete
forgetfulness, when a patient doesn’t even remember their own name, these things, these memories, can fully return eventually.’

Mary looked up at him. ‘Is he . . . is he
that
bad?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘It’s very early yet. He has some swelling, a lesion inside his skull, which we’re tapping to ensure the swelling does not cause any more harm to his
brain. May I suggest you give him a day or two’s rest? Then I shall have a clearer understanding of his condition?’

‘Yes.’ Mary nodded. ‘Yes, of course. Whatever you think is best.’

The doctor nodded politely. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get started.’ He hesitated in the doorway, the door half pushed open. ‘Oh, what is the gentleman’s
name, by the way?’

Mary stared at him, frozen with panic. She hadn’t anticipated that: conjuring up a name.

‘His name? It’s for our records, you see.’

Mary’s mouth opened. ‘It’s . . . it’s John.’

‘John . . . ?’ The doctor raised an eyebrow, awaiting the rest.

Her mind was blank. Panic-blank. She licked dry lips as she raced to engage it, make it produce a credible name out of thin air. She saw the man huddled over on the street, bathed in the
flickering amber glow of the street lamp, and beyond him, on the side of a brick wall, a street sign.

‘Argyll,’ she said finally. ‘John Argyll.’

‘I
t wasn’t nothin’ like you said, Bill.’ Annie challenged him with a stare over the table. ‘You said it was some cheap
slapper. But she was class, you could see that. She ain’t some Miss Nobody from Who-Pissin’-Well-Cares. Somebody’s gonna miss her, an—’

‘And her nipper?’ Polly interrupted. ‘We told you, we only do
fresh-born
ones.’

Bill waved them silent. ‘Doesn’t fuckin’ matter, girls. S’all done now, right?’

‘The baby was old enough to be . . . I dunno,
christened
,’ snapped Polly, her voice rising above the rasping whisper they’d been sharing until now. ‘The baby could
be written in somewhere!’

Bill grabbed one of her hands and squeezed the knuckles until they bulged and ground painfully together. ‘Keep yer fuckin’ voice down, Polly,’ he hissed.

‘You’re hurtin’ me!’ she whimpered.

‘Course I’m fuckin’ hurtin’ you, love, ’cause you keep blabbin’ so loud we’re all gonna end up swinging on rope at the tuck-up fair. So you can either
speak softly, or shut yer trap.’

She nodded mutely.

‘Now . . . tell me what you two did with it.’

Annie spoke, tapping her clay pipe on the table and dusting the ash off with her hand onto the floor. ‘Like we does every other time. It’s just pieces now. Different
places.’

‘Good.’

‘An’ what about the woman, Bill?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s my business. She’s gone.’

They sat in silence for a while, watching the inn’s patrons from the corner booth. Watching the usual evening’s pattern unfold: working men delaying the moment they have to return
home with one final mug of the wet stuff; a row of tarts propping up the bar, puffing on clay pipes like royal trumpeters blowing a fanfare of smoke.

‘Like I told yer, we been paid a pretty penny for this,’ said Bill. ‘A gentleman put his pecker in the wrong place an’ we tidied up his consequences. That’s all
there is to it.’

‘We was talking,’ said Annie. ‘Before you turned up.’ She glanced at Polly, who offered her the slightest nod of moral support. ‘Reckon, ’cause you
wasn’t straight up with us, ’cause of that posh street where she was livin’, and on account of the baby not being a newborn . . . we ought to ’ave twice as much as we said
we’d do it for. S’only fair, Bill.’

He eyed her silently.

‘If you’d been straight with us from the first, we would’ve asked for more. That wasn’t just a normal crib-rat.’

He could hear the wobble of fear in her voice.

Silly bitch is scared of me.

Of course she was. She’d watched him nearly behead the woman in the hallway. Watched him do it calmly and professionally, like it was no trouble at all. Like he was cutting himself a slice
of bread from a loaf.

He casually drew a circle in the spilled beer on the wooden table, taking his time to answer. The thing was, given how much the gentleman was already paying, he could easily afford to double
what those two had asked for. Better still, that locket he’d found – that precious little locket that had fallen from the woman’s clothes, tucked away, something so precious, so
valuable – that locket made this job a whole different thing.

A different business contract altogether.

His other hand absently stole into the pocket of his coat, played with the warm, smooth surface of the locket, flicked open and closed the clasp.

A very different situation altogether.

He smiled. Why not let these two share a little of the good news? Not that he was going to tell them what he was holding in his pocket, or what it meant, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to
know there was chance of a little more gravy coming out of this pudding if they played along like good girls.

He was seeing the gentleman tomorrow. An agreed rendezvous in a dark place where matters could be discussed and payment made. Bill had never actually done business with a man who spoke like this
one did, like some duke or lord. Not just posh, but
old posh
. . . the kind that went back generations, had a coat of arms, went back to olden times.

He realised if he was going to play games with the gentleman, then he was going to have to play oh-so-cleverly. If he was going to tell him what he’d found on the woman, and that this
little discovery was going to significantly alter the original agreement, he’d better be bloody careful about it.

Gentleman like that don’t walk around the docks all on his lonesome, does he?

A gentleman like that most probably had a couple of lackeys tucked away beyond earshot and out of sight, but close enough to jump and chiv him at a sign: the lighting of a match, the deliberate
stroking of a nose.

And it would be a proper foolish thing pulling that item out of his pocket as proof he’d found what he’d found. Far better to turn up at their meeting without it. To describe it in
detail as best he could and assure the man it was being looked after elsewhere before moving the conversation on to how much the gentleman in question was going to have to pay to get the thing
back.

Bill smiled. He could be so very, very shrewd when he tried. As cunning as a fox.

‘Well?’ said Annie. ‘You ain’t sayin’ so much about what I just said.’

He sat forward. ‘Polly? Why don’t you go an’ get yourselves a coupla cups of mecks, an’ a pint o’ gatter for me? I need to talk a moment with Annie in
private.’

Polly’s eyes flashed irritation, but she got up. ‘S’pose.’

She slid out from the wooden booth and weaved through the pall of pipe smoke towards the bar.

‘Annie . . . ’ow long we known each other?’

Annie took a match, struck a light and touched it against the nest of tobacco in her clay pipe. ‘Years, Bill. Years.’

‘And you can vouch for Polly?’

‘She’s not tapped as many cot-rats as me. But she can do it. She’s—’

‘I’m asking if you can
trust
her?’

Annie cocked a head. ‘She’s a mate. I’d trust her more than I fuckin’ would you,’ she replied with a dry, wheezy laugh. She meant it, though.

‘All right, then.’ His fingers played with the locket, turning it over and over. ‘I’m seeing our pay man tomorrow night.’

‘I know that.’

‘I’m gonna be asking for a
lot
more swag than we settled on before.’

Her eyebrows arched. ‘Oh, and ’e’s goin’ to pay up, is ’e, Bill? Just ’cause you’ve decided to ask for more?’

Bill smiled. ‘Our pay man will cough up, love, because I found summin’ special on the girl.’

‘Special?’ She pulled the stem of her pipe from her lips. ‘What?’

‘Summin’ that I don’t think ’e even knows she ’ad on ’er.’

‘What?’

‘Summin’ nice an’ shiny . . . a keepsake.’ He was tempted to ease it out of his pocket, flash her a glimpse of it. But the public house was chock full of pocket dippers,
cly fackers, petty crooks whose magpie eyes would more than likely pick out the faint glint of polished gold in the gas-lit gloom of their nook.

‘It’s a whatcha call it . . . a locket. There’s a portrait in there. Portrait of a chap with the dead woman. A penny to a farthing tells me that’s the gentleman who
can’t keep his pecker behind his buttons.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Serious?’

‘Oh, yes. And I’m quite certain it wouldn’t take a person too much ’ard graft to find out the name what goes with the face.’ He was going to add that he actually
recognised the face; just couldn’t work out where he’d seen it before. Yet.

She looked at him with hooded, sceptical eyes. ‘Now, see, I would’ve thought you’d keep summin’ like that all to yerself. It’s not like you to share out unless
somebody’s got their fingers wrapped round yer curlies.’

‘You’re gonna look after it, Annie. Keep it safe for me while I go and have me chat with our man tomorrow night.’

‘Oh.’ She smiled. ‘So you
do
trust me, Bill?’

‘I trust you not to be a silly bitch and cross me. How about that?’

Annie looked over her shoulder at the bar. ‘And Polly?’

‘She follows yer lead, don’t she? If yer trust her, then that’s good for me. But,’ he said, sitting back on the bench, ‘either of yer mess me around, and
you’ll both find yerselves bobbing in the Thames.’

‘So? Where’s this locket, then?’

Not here . . . not now.

‘I’ll give it you tomorrow before I go see the man. And you be sure to find a safe place for it.
Very
safe.’