Somewhere in the distance, a clock was striking the hour. Was it nine o’clock, or ten? I had completely lost track.
Outside, on Rose Street, a man was standing under the eaves to avoid the drips. I recognised him as the journalist who had spoken to me earlier: Mr Whitford. I lowered my face and hurried onwards, avoiding eye contact.
‘Mr Stanhope!’ he called after me, proving that he’d discovered my name. ‘Any comment for the Daily Chronicle? Are you an anarchist? How well did you know Miss Hannigan? When did you first meet her? Do you know why she was killed?’
I just wanted to get home. I was determined not to tell him anything.
‘I have no idea. I gave the police some help, that’s all.’
I set off down the passageway, picking a path between the curled figures sleeping under blankets. Behind me, I could hear Whitford in pursuit. He caught up with me at the corner of Greek Street, which was as hectic as ever.
‘They sent Hooper, their senior man. He doesn’t generally soil himself with this sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing?’ I hated that I was intrigued.
He took off his hat and beat it against his leg, sending a sparkling spray of water over his shoes. ‘Hooper prefers taking his carriage to Mayfair and dealing with a better class of criminal as a rule, especially when the top brass want things kept quiet. He has a reputation for being … how shall I put this? A prudent man, you might say. Or a lackey of the wealthy and powerful perhaps, depending on your point of view.’
‘I wish you luck, Mr Whitford. Good evening.’
He kept pace with me as I lengthened my stride. For a fellow of such ample girth he was surprisingly energetic.
‘See, that’s what’s got me inquisitive, Mr Stanhope. They sent Hooper to make sure the right story gets told. Right for them, of course. It’s a matter of note, you see, a murder in the house of socialists and anarchists. Either the victim’s one of ’em, which is a warning to all, or the murderer is, which is better still. Or both, of course, which is best of all.’
‘I have nothing to do with any of this. Please leave me alone.’
He grabbed my sleeve, not aggressively, more earnestly, trying to convince me. ‘I want to find out the truth, Mr Stanhope. The police found some papers. I was told they were plans to commit an act of vandalism on a large scale. A very large scale indeed. Was Mrs Hannigan part of it, do you suppose?’
‘Goodbye, Mr Whitford.’
I pulled my hat low over my brow and crossed the road between two carts queuing behind a donkey that was tail up, depositing its load while a boy caned it mercilessly.
‘You’re an interesting chap, Mr Stanhope,’ Whitford shouted. When I didn’t reply, he shouted louder: ‘I’ll find out the truth in the end, you know.’
The truth is not so simple, I thought. The truth is that I am a man, from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. I have a man’s thoughts and a man’s desires. And yet, if you were to look at my skin, Mr Whitford, heaven forbid, you would think I was female. That would be your truth. Whose truth is more important, do you think: yours or mine?
Such self-obsession I had. I hardly warranted it. He wanted a story about murder and scandal for his ghastly newspaper. None of us mattered to him; not me, not Dora Hannigan. Not even her children.
I had forgotten about her children.
I hurried back to where Whitford was still standing, writing in his notebook.
‘There’s one thing,’ I said, cursing myself for almost escaping, but not quite.
‘Changed your mind?’ he said, looking up. ‘Good for you.’
‘Dora Hannigan had two children. A boy and a girl. She had their pictures in a locket. Do you know where they are now?’
‘A boy and a girl,’ he repeated. ‘How old and what are their names?’
‘I don’t know. The brother’s the elder, perhaps nine or ten.’
‘Just nippers.’ He paused, sucking his pencil, and then wrote some more. ‘Could’ve been taken, I s’pose. Or worse.’
A fearful image formed in my mind of another shallow hole in that courtyard.
‘How did the police find their mother’s body?’
‘A dog dug ’er up.’
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Why is that good?’
‘If the children were buried there, the dog would’ve found them too. There’s a reason why cemeteries have deep graves.’ I was thinking professionally again. It was a comfort, like streetlamps on a dark night. I could see my way. ‘Ask around, will you? If they’re lost, the police need to start looking for them.’
‘I will.’ He blew out his cheeks and we were both silent, contemplating two small children lost in the city.
We shook hands, and this time I really did walk away, crossing over quickly and causing a cab driver to pull on his reins and bark abuse at me. I strode swiftly onwards, a man among all the other men, rushing home or spilling out from the pubs on to the pavement, talking, laughing and whistling. I was exactly like them, as far as anyone could tell.
When I came in through the back door, Constance was setting out some laundry on the rack in front of the stove. It was much earlier than I had thought, only a little after eight o’clock.
‘Have you been with Mr Kleiner?’ she asked.
‘No, someone else. Someone I used to know.’
She raised her eyebrows, and I could see her brain working. She liked to treat me as the unwilling hero of a romantic novella, with her as the author, chivvying me towards matrimony. Two weeks previously, I had asked her why she was so determined that I should be married and her father not, and she replied that my not knowing the answer to that question was exactly why I needed a good woman to take me in hand.
‘Was it a lady?’
‘No.’
‘A friend? You need to meet some new people.’ She didn’t approve of Jacob. ‘It’s no use being lonely, Mr Stanhope.’
‘I’m not lonely, thank you.’ I folded my arms, slightly piqued by her nosiness. It didn’t dissuade her.
‘What happened to that lady who came here before?’
I cursed myself for blushing. ‘As far as I know she’s still running her pie shop.’
‘You liked her, I could tell. What was her name again?’
‘Flowers. Rosie Flowers.’
It was a silly name, bequeathed to her by her late husband.
‘You should go and see Mrs Flowers. I’m sure she could cure your loneliness for you.’
She nodded firmly, certain she was right. Certainty is easy when you’re twelve.
I trudged upstairs to my room and lay on the bed with my face buried in a blanket. I remembered how it had been, a year before, the last time I was caught up in something. My side still felt stiff every night, and there was worse, much worse; things I wouldn’t name or think about. Since then, my life had become uneventful. It was numbness, rather than happiness, but it was all I wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought that John Thackery might take it away from me.
I was supposed to play chess that evening but couldn’t face it, so I dozed, and for a while was beset by the darkest of thoughts, my fears and memories mixing: light against a slanting ceiling, the taste of salt water in my mouth and the acrid stink of scorched meat. But I surfaced, blinking, when I remembered poor Dora Hannigan and her two children. How selfish I was; how crass. She was dead, and they were lost, and all I could think about was my own troubles.
Better if I went out to play chess with Jacob, especially as he had been known, on extremely rare occasions, to offer useful advice.
When I got to the Blue Posts pub it was packed, and I couldn’t see Jacob. Then I heard the unmistakeable growl of his voice at the bar.
‘Wait your turn!’
I squeezed through, explaining that my friend was aged and needed help carrying the drinks. When I reached him, he was confronting a large fellow with oil on his hands.
I was surprised when the fellow laughed. ‘Sorry, old man. Didn’t see you there.’
Jacob curled his lip. ‘I’m not bloody invisible.’
His fingers were turning white on the hook of his cane. He started to raise it, and I feared there would be violence, albeit of a brief and one-sided variety.
I put my hand on his arm. ‘Shall I take over? You go and find us a table.’
All the other members of the chess club played in the calm of the upstairs room, but Jacob had injured his leg a few months previously, tripping over a kerb near Southwark Park despite, he claimed, being as sober as a Nazirite. The stairs were steep, so we had taken to playing downstairs amidst the throng.
He waved a hand, apparently dismissing me, the bar, London and the whole of England in a single gesture. ‘You’re late. Five times I’ve asked the barman to serve me, but always someone else comes first. I ask for an ale, a porter, two whiskies and a chess set. Five times. Always another customer, as if my money isn’t good enough for this distinguished place.’ He waved his hand again, this time aiming at the peeling walls and collapsing furniture. ‘We should go somewhere else. The beer here tastes like piss and they water down the whisky.’
I steered him outside, where the air was less dense – the best that could ever be said for London’s noxious atmosphere.
He took off his hat and wiped his brow, and I could see the pink skin of his scalp beneath his grey hair. ‘That oaf is lucky I’m not still young.’ He tapped his cane on the ground as if considering rushing back to strike the fellow after all. ‘I was strong once, you know. I used to pull ships along the docks in Nikolaev; just me, on my own, hauling ships weighing tens of tons to be unloaded. They used to call me medved. The bear. No one argued with me in those days. They were afraid of me. I could have pulled their arms from their sockets, just like that.’ He mimed the motion and made a sucking sound with his mouth, and then a pop. ‘Now I am an old man, and no one is afraid of me. Not even you.’
Lilya, his wife, had once confided that she didn’t believe he had ever truly hauled boats along the docks in Nikolaev, despite the stories he liked to tell. She said he’d been a jeweller’s assistant before she met him, and then a jeweller, until they’d been evicted from their home and forced to flee across Europe. He was a jeweller still, spending his days peering through an eyeglass at the fine details of brooches and bracelets. I didn’t mind the pretence. If he wanted to convince himself that he’d once been a feared man with thighs like tree roots, who was I to deny him? Me, of all people?
‘Is your leg getting worse?’
‘Everything’s getting worse. All of me. Never grow old, Leo, my friend. When you’re young, your body and mind are one and the same. You think to speak, and you speak. Your voice does not creak and whine like an old door. You think to pick up a glass, and you pick it up. You think to stand, and you stand. Not so when you’re old. You think to stand, and you ache and shake and groan, and forget why you wanted to stand, and eventually it’s easier to stay seated.’
‘That’s not an answer. Is it still hurting you?’
He shrugged, leaning on his stick. ‘That’s a young man’s question. My back hurts, my neck, my feet. They punish me! They hate me! How can I tell which pain is greater or lesser? At least it means I’m still alive.’ He pointed his cane west, towards Hyde Park. ‘Let’s go to that place on your street. You know the one. What’s it called again?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Little Stanhope Street!’ He grinned impishly, waggling his beard. ‘Your very own. How I envy you! There is no Kleiner Street.’
The pub was called the Pitt’s Head, which I thought made it sound like a coal mine, and in truth the place was hardly better than that; dismal and dark with walls browned by years of smoke, and a boneyard of armchairs, padding spiked by their own skeletons, cushions bursting through their seams. But at least it was quiet and there was less likelihood Jacob would get us into a fight. We found a quiet corner near the fireplace and laid out the pub’s hoary chess set.
‘So?’ he said, his way of inviting me to speak.
I told him about the murder, and John Thackery, who called himself John Duport. I even told him about Dora Hannigan’s visit to the pharmacy, though not that I’d lied to the police about it. I was too ashamed. She had been a living, breathing person, and I had erased our encounter like a clerk rubbing out his mistakes. And that was before John Thackery had threatened to expose me. It was my own action, unforced.
I took a deep gulp of my porter.
‘You say this Thackery is wealthy?’ Jacob said, pulling a cigar box from his pocket and opening it up. ‘Maybe there’s something in it for you, if you help him.’
‘His father, not him.’
‘If his father’s wealthy, he is too. That’s how wealth works.’
I advanced my queen’s pawn two squares and sipped my drink. Jacob was three-quarters down his ale already, and he eyed me over the glass.
‘That woman’s death, do you think it was him? Is he the killer?’
Despite everything that had happened, I couldn’t deny that some part of me retained a liking for John Thackery – not perhaps the man he was now, but the boy he had been back in Enfield, with his restless hands and the thin fuzz of hair on his chin, like the fur on a caterpillar cocoon.
‘I don’t know. When we were younger, John was always quite gentle. But he’s more … fervent now. He asked to meet me again tomorrow.’
Jacob swapped his empty glass for my half-full one, and sat back, sucking on his cigar, exhaling slowly, almost chewing on the smoke as it left his mouth. ‘And you’re planning to do it, are you? Spend time with your old pal John.’
I sensed he was anxious, concerned for my well-being, but perhaps something else as well. He was my only friend other than Alfie, who was also my landlord. I rarely considered that I was Jacob’s only friend too, and he might be jealous of any other I might make.
‘He’s not my pal. I was hardly the same person last time I met him, was I? And he said he had information for me. Something important. There are things I don’t understand about all this. The dead woman had my name and address. She came to the pharmacy. It can’t be a coincidence.’ I indicated his rank of untouched pieces. ‘Are you playing or not?’
He grimaced and matched my pawn, seasoning his jacket with ash.
‘She’s dead now. What difference does any of it make? She won’t come back to life.’
‘I know, but … she had two children as well. They’re missing.’
He took a deep breath. ‘How long?’
‘I don’t know exactly. A day, maybe two.’
He nodded, his lips pressed together. He had seven children of his own and loved them devotedly, though he tried his best to hide it.
‘That’s very sad,’ he said. ‘But not your problem.’ He blew out another thick coil of smoke. ‘You of all people have cause to be careful.’
Most of the time, Jacob ignored what I was under these clothes, treating me as a young man in need of his guidance and wisdom. Whenever reminded, he shrugged and offered nothing. I think he imagined my previous life was a part I’d once performed in a play or a character I’d made up, which wasn’t all that far from the truth. I had been constructed from little more than petticoats and bonnets, and hadn’t been sure there was anyone real inside.
‘Are you listening to me, Leo? I said you must be careful. You have a history of foolishness.’ He put his hand on my arm and squeezed it. ‘Remember what you said you wanted? A quiet life. No problems and no excitements.’ He drained my glass. ‘And a dog. Did you get a dog?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? Every man should have a dog.’
‘You don’t have a dog.’
‘Lilya has a dog. It’s our dog.’
‘He’s her dog.’
‘You’re avoiding the point.’ He produced another half a cigar from the box and lit it, surveying me through the smoke. ‘You never do what’s best for you.’
I moved my queen’s knight to aggress his pawn.
‘I want to know what he has to say, that’s all.’
I’d spoken more sharply than I intended, and he sat back, his moustache twitching. ‘You’re like another son to me, Leo, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
I looked away towards the bar while he wiped his eyes.
When I looked back, he was moving a pawn to defend the one my knight was threatening. His hand was shaking, and he had to take care to place his piece without knocking over another, and then it was my turn to wipe my eyes.