Twenty

Kipper waited in the fog. He wondered if the ‘fiend’ was waiting too. Perhaps he was close, perhaps waiting and watching too. The lights of the public house on the corner glowed a dim yellow and the murk muffled the sounds of the last straggling drinkers. The heels of a woman’s shoes clicked and clattered on the cobblestones. The wearer was negotiating prices with her client: a tanner in the hand or a bob in the mouth. The client was silent; Kipper supposed it must be a gentleman who did not wish to be overheard discussing such ungentlemanly things in the squalid Whitechapel streets.

Kipper found himself holding his breath until the pair had passed by to conduct their transaction in some other alley. Perhaps it would be over quickly and the dollymop would come back this way on her Molly, hoping to pick up one last punter as the pub closed its doors.

Out of the gloom came another figure, along with the odour of cheap lavender water. Kipper pressed his back against the wall, heedless of the damp seeping through his coat. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself by having to fend off a grubby business proposition. His heart pounded like galloping hooves against his ribs. He continued to hold his breath and his fingers tightened their grip on the police-issue revolver in his pocket. He hadn’t wanted it, had never fired one, but Bigby had insisted. Even the sight of it, he’d told Kipper, might give our fiend pause and that might be enough for us to nab him. Kipper didn’t share Bigby’s confidence that things would be as cut and dried as all that but it was comforting, he would admit, to have the firearm in his possession. Just in case.

The perfumed figure was a tall woman in a tattered red shawl. Her hair was piled high above a pale and painted face. She tripped and tottered from a little too much gin. If I was Foggy Jack, Kipper mused, she’d be just the kind of mark I’d be looking for... He shuddered, revolted. He didn’t want to think like a killer - like a fiend! - but Bigby suggested it would be useful to see things through Foggy Jack’s eyes.

Kipper watched the woman go by. Finer details were visible to him now: the paste earrings, the beauty spot on her cheek, the blue five o’clock shadow-

What the hell?

The shape of a man stepped out of the fog, stopping the woman in her tracks. Kipper saw a glint of steel as the man, barely more than a silhouette, brandished a cutthroat razor.

“Put your hands up, dearie!” scoffed a voice Kipper recognised as that of the first dollymop. The man wheeled around to find the whore and her gentleman client pointing pistols at his chest. The whore in the red shawl drew out a truncheon. She peeled off her wig and scratched at her undeniably male haircut.

“Gaw’, that don’t half itch.”

“Never mind that, Sergeant,” said the gentleman in the unmistakable tones of Bigby of the Yard. “Cuff the bastard and let’s get him down Bow Street nick.”

The fiend let out a roar of outrage. He swirled his cloak and slashed at the air with his razor, keeping the undercover coppers at bay. “Fools!” he snarled and his eyes flashed red beneath the brim of his top hat. “Your prisons cannot hold me.”

“They won’t have to, old love,” said Bigby. “You’ll be having your neck stretched before you can blink.”

The fiend threw back his head and laughed. His arm darted out and he cut the first whore’s throat. She fired her gun as she fell - the shot went wide and glanced off a lamppost. Bigby’s gun would not fire. A tendril of fog curled around the nozzle, yanked the weapon from his hand and hurled it down the street. The fiend slashed at Bigby, opening a gash in his cheek. Sergeant Adams - for it was he in the red shawl - stood his ground although Kipper could see his truncheon wobbling. Drawing his gun, Kipper strode forth to defend his sergeant.

Foggy Jack saw him coming and laughed again. Then he took everyone by surprise by dissolving into the fog - the laughter was the last to go - leaving the police one man down, empty-handed and more than a little stupefied.

“What happened?” gasped Kipper. “Where did he go?”

“Melted into air,” said Sergeant Adams with a faraway expression, “Into thin air.”

Kipper gaped at the man, not least because he had never seen Adams clean-shaven before, let alone in female attire.

Bigby knelt by the body of his fallen colleague (a Scotland Yard bloke by the name of Darby). Kipper offered him a folded handkerchief to staunch the gaping wound on his face. They stared at the spot where the fiend had been, within reach, within their grasp.

If one can grasp fog, that is.

The fiend had got clean away. Foggy Jack was free to strike again.

***

It took several stitches to fix Bigby’s cheek. The barber-surgeon advised him it would scar.

“Rather!” Bigby liked the idea. “A memento of my encounter with Foggy Jack. A close shave, you might say, what!”

Kipper’s mood was less ebullient. “I don’t know how you can be so chipper,” he complained. “He got away. I say ‘he’ but I mean ‘it’. That weren’t no human we saw tonight.”

Bigby stared at him and sucked contemplatively on his pipe. “Good lord, man, I do believe you’re serious.”

“I am!” said Kipper. “Foggy Jack ain’t a man.”

“Oh? Then what is he?”

“You said it yourself: he’s a fiend.”

Bigby chuckled as though a child had said something inadvertently amusing. “It’s just a word, old boy. Like one might say ‘opium fiend’ or ‘gambling fiend’.”

“Pipe-smoking fiend?”

“Ha, ha! Yes, exactly. Figurative language, old bean. Not to be taken literally.”

“Yes, but,” said Kipper, “if he ain’t no actual fiend, what is he? Where did he appear from? Where did he disappear to? And how did he get away? You saw it, same as I did. Same as Sergeant Adams did. How did he vanish like that?”

Bigby sighed, like a long-suffering parent having to explain something to a dim-witted offspring. “Well, clearly,” he puffed at his pipe, “It’s magic. Now, don’t get too excited and let the idea run away with you, Johnny. When I say ‘magic’ I mean ‘conjuring tricks’ of the sort one may see at any old music hall any night of the week. Think about it, man. Top hat and cloak. No stage magician worth his salt would be without them.”

Kipper’s jaw dropped. Bigby’s idea had merit and gained in plausibility the more he thought about it.

“Misdirection, old boy,” Bigby patted Kipper’s upper arm. “Oldest trick in the book of old tricks. Now, I must be off to Cricklewood to break the sad news to Darby’s widow - although I’ll neglect to mention the part about him being dressed up as a tart, what! Then I’d best show my face at home, let the wife know I haven’t left her. I say, do you have a little woman waiting for you, Johnny?”

“No,” Kipper muttered. “No woman of any size.”

“Well, you should get one,” Bigby advised. “Can get terribly lonely, can police work. Ta-ta!”

He left Kipper’s office with a jaunty salute. Kipper sat down heavily and thumped his blotter. The nerve of the man. And how the hell did a back-to-front like Bigby manage to bamboozle some poor cow into marrying him? It beggared belief.

“Tea, sir!” Sergeant Adams breezed in with a tray. “It’s perked me up no end.”

Kipper stared at the sergeant’s denuded face. “You look about nine years old,” he observed.

“Thank you, sir.”

“And for gawd’s sake, get back into uniform. That frock is doing nobody any favours.”

Sergeant Adams blushed. His face and neck turned red so it was almost as though his beard was back. Kipper felt terrible; Adams had been through an ordeal, had bravely faced the fiend at close quarters.

“Sergeant, I’ll need a list-”

“Done already, sir. List of all the conjurors currently working in London theatres and music halls, sir.”

Kipper marvelled. “How did-”

“Stands to reason, don’t it, sir? Our man’s a magician, ain’t he? Disappearing like that. Think about it, sir. They uses blades and all. Sawing women in half. Plunging swords through wicker baskets. Chucking knives at bints on spinning wheels.”

“Good god,” Kipper blinked. “That ain’t total nonsense.”

Adams grinned, brimming with pride. “Thank you, sir.”

“And that berk Bigby didn’t put you up to this?”

“Oh, no, sir! I just used me loaf, sir. Stands to reason.”

“Sit down, Sergeant. Join me in a cuppa. I’ll be mother.”

While Kipper poured, Sergeant Adams lowered himself onto a chair, taking care not to crease his dollymop’s frock.

“You’re a good man, Adams,” Kipper offered the sugar bowl, “Despite appearances to the contrary.”