The Thing About Thugs (25 page)

The woman continued, but only after some hesitation, as if she were no longer certain that she wanted to confess to this gathering.

‘So, you see, ma’am, I was very tired and half-asleep when I saw what I am going to tell you. I remember it only hazy-like...’

Qui Hy nodded, impassive and understanding, and absent-mindedly brought out the shilling again, twirling it between her thumb and fingers as if about to perform a magic trick.

The woman looked at the shilling and gave a short laugh. She squared her shoulders again.

‘But, of course, I remember enough, ma’am: one gas lamp was working further down the alley and it was not a dark night; there was a moon behind the drifting clouds. There were sounds of footsteps, and a pretty young filly came running. She was looking over her shoulder, and to be honest, ma’am, it did sound like there was someone running after her. But just before the turning up front, where that red-tiled house with dragon-shaped water pipes juts into the lane, a man jumped out in front of her and tried to grasp her just as she turned to look back. He was a short man, broadly built. The girl was taken by surprise, but she was a quick one, slippery and strong. She twisted in the man’s grip, half bending over and lifting him off his feet. She threw him over her hips, but he grasped her ankle and pulled her down too. They grappled in the mud, but she managed to thrust him down, and grabbing a brick or a stone, hit him on the head. At this the man let go of her, cursing, and she sprang up, ready to run away. It was then that another man, a tall one, stepped out of the shadows with a bludgeon and hit the girl a nasty blow on the head. I think she died right then, though of course, they did things to her that I will not narrate in the presence of men...’

Qui Hy was not convinced. She quizzed the woman closely about the girl and the men. Amir could not bear it and twice walked to the door, only to come back again. But as the woman answered, it became clear that she had certainly seen Jenny that night. Her description of the girl was accurate. Her description of the men who had assaulted and murdered Jenny was less precise until she said, with a start, ‘Oh yes, ma’am, I forgot to say this, but the man who hit her, the tall man with the bludgeon, he had a patch over one eye.’

At that, Qui Hy tossed the shilling to the woman. The woman grabbed it and disappeared with a hurried curtsy: she could sense the tense atmosphere in the room.

‘You were right, Amir beta’, said Qui Hy quietly. ‘It was not just any crime.’

The description offered by the woman had tallied too closely with the description of two of the three men Jenny had encountered in her aunt’s den: she had often described the men to Qui Hy and Amir.

Amir was sitting with his face in his hands. Qui Hy went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. The young man — not much more than a boy, I thought — was sobbing. Then Qui Hy looked in my direction. She knew I had been watching, and I knew that later in the night, when they had all left, she would ask me to repeat what I had observed, matching it against her own observations. She is a meticulous woman in her own way, a deep one.

It was a strange gathering. Take my word for it. See, I have nothing against niggers, lascars, head-hunters and the like. Dammit, I live with one of them, don’t I? You won’t catch me wrinkling my nose at attar or burnt incense or fried curry smells. But Qui Hy’s gatherings still take some getting used to. They always have some religious excuse: a kirtan or a millaad, she is not exclusive in her choice of deities to flatter. But when a gathering is called, say once a year, everyone knows that there is something in the air, something more solid than religion.

And the crowd that turns up: you cannot imagine a more villainous-looking and motley band of savages. You should hear the din they raise, in a dozen different languages. Had our house been in any other neighbourhood, the neighbours would have gone to the Peelers or the priest with nervous reports of the Devil’s Sabbath!

This was one of those occasions. Qui Hy’s place was packed with lascars, ayahs, beggars, some impossible-to-place oddities like Fetcher, and riff-raff, mostly but not entirely from the lands of Hindoostan. Many of them had come on short notice, informed by word of mouth or fetched by Fetcher. One ayah even had a pram with a white baby in it: she was supposed to be taking the frilly baby out for a walk in some nearby park. It was obviously an occasion, you could tell even if you were new to the gathering. Qui Hy had put away her baskets of pockets and threads for the day; I was up too, hunched in a corner of the room. Only Amir Ali was missing and I knew that Qui Hy had arranged for him to be absent.

After the chanting from the Ramayana or the Koran or some other heathen Bible was finally over and sticky sweets had been distributed and consumed with relish (by everyone except me — I survive such occasions of infernal music by puffing on my pipe more strongly than usual), it was time for the real business. Qui Hy cleared her throat and leaned forward in her chair. The conversations in the room — in different languages, various pidgins of English and, I suspect, sheer gibberish for the bloody heck of it — subsided into an expectant hush. Qui Hy did not beat about the bush; she never does on such occasions. She got to the point directly.

‘We have to find them’, she told the gathering, ‘and not just because it is the only way to clear Amir of the charges that might be laid on him every time those murderers collect a head for whatever devilish purpose they need such things.

‘No’, added Qui Hy, ‘now we have to find them not only to clear Amir Ali’s name, but also to prevent the boy from murdering someone or getting killed in the attempt.’

Gunga cracked his knuckles. ‘Why prevent him’, he said. ‘Why not help him?’

‘And be strung up like chickens?’

I knew that Qui Hy was law-abiding to a fault: the fault being that she was willing to break almost any law but only if she could be certain of getting away with it. Paddyji, she told me on one occasion when I was contemplating a harsh action on some English provocation that I no longer recall, Paddyji, the law requires names, and neither I nor you want our real names to be discovered, do we?

Now she continued, softly, in the tone of someone discussing a recipe, ‘Look, I like Amir: he is a nice boy. But do not think I am doing this just for his sake. I am doing this because we have to. If the beheadings go on and, God forbid, if Amir does something rash, he will invite attention to all of us. From one thug to a gang of thugs -look, look at yourself, you, me, we are a band of thugs. Every man-woman of us has thug branded on his face! Every sooty inch of us is terrifyingly thug-like! But even without that, do we want their attention, Gunga? I have this small place here, with my husband. It took me years to set it up: I do not want soldiers and policemen nosing around. You must have your own nest egg, Gunga; Zaibun Ayah there has her little business that is not entirely legal, so do you, Thapa Bhai, and you, and you. Look around you: this place you call Qui Hy’s dhaba, is it only a place we meet for a cup of chai, or will it seem far more sinister a place in the eyes of the Peelers? What is there to prevent them from seeing thuggery in this place, or devilry, or conspiracy? So, when I say we have to help Amir, I mean that we have to help ourselves. Not land ourselves in deeper trouble. No. That is not what I want to ask of you, and of those you know who are not here. I know that each one of you has his or her own circle of confidantes. Go to them and ask about these men: the man called John May, whose name we know because he bribed a lascar in the opium den, a lascar who overheard the three men talking but unfortunately came to us only now.’

‘Who was it?’ asked a tiny, sharp-featured, white-haired ayah, famous in the crowd for her malicious gossip and her trips as an escort between India and England: on eleven different voyages she had nursed the children of various British families being sent ‘home’ for schooling.

‘That is my concern’, said Qui Hy, just a little sharply. ‘When you came to me with your, ah, little problem after your fourth voyage, did I ask you for names? Have I ever asked any of you for names? Let me keep the names this time. Trust me. Instead, ask around for John May and his two accomplices, the short, squat man and the tall, one-eyed one, who sometimes carries a stick or a cudgel. Looks like the Devil, they say, so it should be easy for us, devils that we are, to recognize him.’ She broke off to chuckle silently.

Then she continued. ‘We have an idea where they meet, the pubs and beer-rooms. But we need to know where they go afterwards. Mark my word, they are doing this for someone else. It does not make any sense otherwise. There is something or someone bigger behind them. And those of you who work with English families, try and find out why the English might want to collect heads. Is it some secret rite, like what the Tantrics do back where I and some of you come from? Is it some rare custom that we do not know about? Let me know what you hear, but remember — say nothing. You are my eyes and ears, but we do not have a mouth. A mouth is something we cannot afford in this place...’

Sometimes I am surprised by my wife of so many years; I am surprised by Qui Hy. The English collecting heads? Tantric rites in Stonehenge? Voodoo in Westminster? I had to stop myself from laughing.

How much of it was just talk, I wondered, and how much of it was exactly what she meant?

For Qui Hy knows this city intimately, and yet can evince swathes of ignorance, as if her elaborate map of the place contains unexpected blank spaces. On occasion, I know she is only pretending, but sometimes she is in dead earnest. Things that an English woman, even a tune-crazed Irish ex-soldier like me, would take for granted, small mundane things, suddenly they loom in front of Qui Hy, totally illegible, or she reads them in a way that I could never imagine, a way far from the truth as I see it. Tantric rites! Skulls placed at the altar of an idol wearing a demon’s face?

Overhearing and watching them, as the others now joined in with a cacophony on inexplicable England, I had to stifle a laugh more than once.

But I agreed with Qui Hy’s plan. We have always agreed on the important matters of life. For different reasons, we do not want the bobbies here. It is not just what we may have to hide. It is best not to be forced into a defence of your habit, an accountancy of your hours — which is what the law will demand. Once you have to explain, defend, justify yourself, it hardly matters whether you lie or speak the gospel truth — every word rips a bit of you out of yourself and strews it where anyone can trample on it.

Daniel Oates, intrepid journalist, had just returned after witnessing the latest crime. Not just any crime: a new horror by the Rookery Beheader. For about eighteen months now, London’s reading public had thirsted after news of the Beheader and his crimes with such avidity that Oates, who had set himself up as the authority on this particular criminal, had become a household name. News of other events paled in comparison; it needed something like the People’s Charter or the Myall Creek Massacre in Australia or Grace Darling’s heroism in rescuing survivors from SS
Forfarshire
for public attention to be momentarily diverted. Otherwise, the London Beheader — with his fourteen recorded victims till date (though there was some chance that one of them had been killed in a common drunken brawl over a dog fight and then beheaded to mislead the police) — was what everyone wanted to read about.

Oates almost looked forward to the Beheader’s crimes. In the weeks when nothing happened, he felt disappointed, as if the criminal had let him down personally. Nothing had filled Oates’ life, and furthered his career, as much as the mysterious beheadings. They had even given him the idea of going to the colonies to write about the murderous cults of superstition and irrationality. He was negotiating with another paper for a series of articles titled ‘Crimes from the Colonies.’ He would like to start with places in Africa, then move to India and finally, perhaps, go to Canada and the Caribbean.

And wouldn’t it be excellent if the London Beheader turned out, as Oates had depicted him, to be a Hindoo thug or a cannibal from Africa? Oates wished Major Grayper would pay more attention to his theories.

I read out from the ripped sheet to her. She was perched at the foot of my bed, still stitching a pocket. She asked me to read it out again.

‘It is not by that Danny Oates, is it, Paddyji?’ she observed at the end of my second reading.

‘No’, I confirmed, ‘he writes for a rag; this is a poster put out by the police.’

‘Read it out once again, will you’, she said.

‘It is not a bloody Hindoo mantra, woman’, I growled, but I looked at her and was shaken by the sadness in her eyes. Qui Hy is not a woman given to melancholy. What was it in this poster that had moved her: the memory of a woman she had known, or the glimpse of a fate that might have befallen her too had we not met by accident so many years ago? Whatever it was, I looked away and did as she had requested. I read it out again.

GHASTLY
MURDER
IN THE EAST-END
DREADFUL MUTILATION OF A WOMAN
CAPTURE: ROOKERY BEHEADER

Another murder of a character as diabolical as that perpetrated in Back’s Row on Friday week was discovered in the same neighbourhood on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman was found lying in a backyard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging house in Old Brown’s lane, Spitalfields. The house is occupied by a Mrs Richardson, who lets it out to lodgers, and the door which admits to this passage, at the foot of which lies the yard where the body was found, is always open for the convenience of the lodgers. A lodger named Davis was going down to work at the time mentioned and found the woman lying on her back close to the flight of steps leading into the yard. Her body appeared broken, as if smashed on the ground or hit with terrible force a number of times, and not only was her throat cut but her head was also missing. An excited crowd gathered in front of Mrs Richardson’s house and also in the mortuary on Old Montague Street, where the body was quickly conveyed. As the headless body lies in the rough coffin in which it has been placed in the mortuary, it presents a fearful sight. The body is that of a Creole or Gypsy woman at least forty years of age. The height is estimated at five feet. The complexion is sooty but not negro black and there is a foreign-looking tattoo on the left arm.