Some old things are best left buried and unrevived. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good; quite the opposite sometimes.
What’s the worst thing about being a celebrity? The intrusive press coverage? Forget it! I do. No. It’s being roped into these charity projects, because nowadays you’ve got to be hands on, or they mark you down as a complete toe-rag. Oh, look at Lenny Henry, they say, look at Julie Walters: they weren’t prepared just to swan around like celebs, they got their hands dirty, their feet wet: they endangered some extremity or other. And if you present a program like I Can Make You a Star, you’re generally assumed to be someone who got where they are by being lucky, or sleeping with the right people, so you have to prove yourself all the more. Well, I got to be the presenter of I Can Make You a Star by sheer hard graft, and it tops the ratings because I am bloody good at my job. My qualifications: a first class honors degree in the University of Life, having passed my entrance exam from the School of Hard Knocks with straight A’s in all subjects. That’s the sort of bloke I am, as if anyone gives a flying fuck. Pardon my French. Anyway, that was why I was recruited to head up the Save the Old Essex Music Hall project.
The Old Essex: what can I say about the Old Essex? It’s a glorious relic of those magical bygone days of Music Hall? No, it isn’t. It’s a filthy, rat-infested, dry-rotten, draughty, crumbling, mildewed dump that hasn’t had anything to do with show business for well over a hundred years. Most recently it has been a hangout for winos and junkies; before that it was a warehouse and a motorcycle repair shop. Before that, God knows. The only reason it’s survived is that some nutter slapped a preservation order on it. A few of its original features have remained intact, not that they’re much to write home about. But I can’t say all this, can I? I have to say something like: “It’s an amazing piece of living history which must be revived to serve the needs of the modern community.” Call me a cynic, if you like. I prefer the word realist.
The Old Essex fronts onto Alie Street, Whitechapel, and it was in some godforsaken courtyard round the back of it that Jack the Ripper did for one of his victims. Which one? Look it up for yourself. I have never understood why people should take the remotest interest in that squalid old monster, whoever he or she was. Eh? Well, why shouldn’t it have been a she? I’m no sexist; I’m an equal opportunities sort of guy, me. I merely mention the fact, just to give you an impression of the kind of glorious, heritage-packed part of London we’re talking about. As a matter of fact it was shortly after the Ripper murder that there had been a fire at the Old Essex, after which it stopped being a theatre, and embarked on its checkered history as a hangout for bikers and junkies. God knows how or why it escaped the Blitz: the Devil told Hitler to give it a miss, I reckon.
It was a mad March day when I first saw the Old Essex and the rain was blowing in great icy gusts across the East End. Even though it was eleven in the morning the sky was nearly black, and streetlights were reflected fitfully in the water-lashed pavements. There were three of us who got out of the minicab outside the Old Essex, all kitted-out with yellow hard hats, Day-Glo jackets, and torches. There was Jill, a bloke with the stupid name of Crispin de Hartong, and me, Danny Sheen, as if you didn’t know. There was also supposed to be a camera crew, to film the whole thing for posterity, but their van had got lost—a likely story!—and they didn’t show up till a lot later.
Jill was the reason I was in on the project, as a matter of fact. Her name is Jill Warburton and she has some sort of cultural adviser job in the Mayor’s Office and had adopted this project as her baby. I hadn’t much taken to her when she first rang me up because she had a posh accent, but at least she wasn’t pushy so I invited her to come round to see me at my house in Primrose Hill. After a few minutes in her company I felt easier about her. I’m not saying she’s a raving beauty or anything, but she looks nice. She’s tall and quiet. She laughed at the jokes I made, and she wasn’t faking it. That counts a lot with me. I know it sounds weird of me to say this, but she seemed to me like a good person. So I agreed to help the project, before almost instantly regretting it, and that was why I was here, about to inspect a derelict building in the pouring rain.
The other bloke tagging along, Crispin de Hartong, was there because he was an architectural expert. He was also a minor celeb who pronounces on that TV property makeover show, Premises, Premises . . . you remember: he’s the poncy type who goes in for shoulder length blond hair, bow ties. and plumcolored velvet jackets. I got the impression that he had his eye on Jill, and maybe that didn’t exactly endear him to me.
The frontage of the Old Essex is mostly boarded up now to stop the druggies getting in. Jill undid a number of padlocks and we entered. At least we’re out of the rain, I thought.
We shine our torches around and immediately Crispin starts raving about pilasters and spandrels and architraves. I don’t want to hear all this rubbish, especially as I know he is just showing off to Jill. I only want to look.
We are in what I suppose was once the foyer. It is quite a narrow space and everything has been covered at some stage with a thick mud-colored paint. The floor is covered in rubble and bits of plasterwork that have fallen from the ceiling, some of them quite recently, so I am glad we are wearing our hard hats.
Our feet crackle and crunch on the floor. The most powerful thing in this area is the smell: it’s a mixture of damp, decay, dust, and death. You know when your cat has brought a dead rat or something into the house and has left its remains somewhere.
Then you get that awful sweetish smell that seems to stick in your nostrils and as you haven’t the nose of a dog and your cat can’t tell you, you drive yourself mad trying to find out where it is coming from.
The other thing that I don’t like is that there’s a draft that feels like it’s come straight from the Arctic, but, like the smell, I can’t locate its source. I wet my finger and put it up to gauge the direction, but it’s no use. Now I have a numb finger.
“Let’s go into the auditorium, shall we?” says Jill. She opens another temporarily padlocked door and we enter the Hall proper.
This is something of a shock. After the reeking claustrophobia of the foyer, it seems vast. The roof looks as high as a cathedral’s and we can see a little without our torches because gray shafts of light come down at crazy angles from holes in the roof and from broken windows on either side high up. Through these shafts of light little sprinkles of rain fall down from outside like silver dust. We have come in under a gallery which curves in a great horseshoe around the auditorium supported by thin wrought iron columns. Facing us is the desert of an auditorium stripped of its original seating, and strewn about with all sorts of debris from its motorcycle and junkie days.
“Watch out for the odd used needle,” said Jill. “As you can see we haven’t even begun the clearing up operation.”
Beyond the auditorium is an oblong black hole which I assume to be the orchestra pit and then the remains of a raised stage, its floorboards cracked and rotten, with a dirty great hole in the middle. Part of the stage is thrust forward into the pit beyond a great rounded proscenium arch behind which hang a few tattered threadbare remnants of curtains and stage cloths. Close to the stage, at either side under the wings of the gallery I can just detect the remnants of two long bars where customers once drank as they watched the entertainment. I feel as if I am breathing an eternity of dust and decay. I don’t think I would have liked the place even when it was alive. It would have been too much like a giant version of those Northern clubs where I once had a brief inglorious career as a comic.
“Get off! We want the bingo, not you, yer boring boogger!” That voice from the past echoed in my head almost audibly. I look round at the others, half expecting them to have heard something, but they were just staring at it all. I was left to my own thoughts. The night I “got the bird” in that club all those years ago was the night I quit the show business for tabloid journalism. It was the best move of my life. And now I’m presenting I Can Make You a Star, and the man behind the “Get off . . . yer boring boogger?” Cancer, heart failure maybe: he had been a fat bloke with a face like a potato. I can see him now through a haze of booze fumes and cigarette smoke, and his voice still echoes. No, revenge is not sweet.
Meanwhile Crispin had said the thing that people always seem obliged to say when they enter some great cultural edifice: “What an incredible space!”
I was happy to be spared the necessity of saying this stupid, meaningless phrase myself. Anyway, Jill was paying no attention; she was on her mobile to the camera crew.
“Look, where the hell are you . . . ? Hold on, you’re breaking up. . . . Look, just come now. . . . The doors are unlocked. . . . We’ll be here for another . . . fifteen minutes—”
I shivered and said: “Wouldn’t it be better to cancel them and come back some other time when the weather’s a bit better?”
“No, I’m sorry, Danny,” said Jill. “I just can’t afford to waste them. We’re on this incredibly tight budget.”
I thought of offering to pay for the camera crew to come back later, much later, but something prevented me. I thought it might lower me in Jill’s estimation, but why should I care about that?
“You know,” said Crispin, pausing after this introduction in that way people do when they feel they have something incredibly important to announce, “I have a theory that this could be a very early Frank Matcham.” He looked at me. “Matcham, you know, was the great theatre architect of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries and—”
“I know who Frank Matcham was,” I said. I caught Jill’s eye and she smiled, but even this little victory didn’t make me any happier. I was cold, I needed a drink; I was beginning to hate the Old Essex with a passion. The idea of waiting around here for another quarter of an hour for a poxy television crew made me livid. I strode away from the other two towards the bar on the left side of the auditorium.
“Careful how you go,” said Jill. “The floor can be a bit treacherous.”
As I crunched over to the bar, I heard her and Crispin having an earnest discussion about Matcham and architecture: “The Old Essex was thoroughly renovated in 1877 by the firm of Jethro T. Robinson who was Matcham’s father-in-law, and so it could be. . . . ” I didn’t want to leave those two together. After all, Crispin may have been a ponce but at least he was her age and her class; he wasn’t a twice-divorced forty-year-old father of three, as I was. But I felt so angry.
What was I doing here? I shone my torch. The bar was in surprisingly good condition with a fine marble top, cracked in two places and thickly overlaid with dust, but otherwise intact. I began to shift a lot of debris to get behind the bar. I had this vague idea, you see, that I might find some ancient bottle of Scotch or Brandy, or something. A likely scenario! Even a bottle of Bass would have done.
I managed to squeeze behind the bar by shifting several wooden joists and a broken chair or two. It probably wasn’t at all safe, but I didn’t care. There were some shelves behind the bar into which I shone my torch. Their contents consisted mainly of rubble, the odd dead rat and, as Jill had predicted, a used needle or two, but at the back of one I thought I saw a wad of paper. I reached in a gloved hand and tentatively drew it out.
It was a sheaf of handbills from the Old Essex days. They were singed at the corners and buckled with damp but still legible. I was excited almost in spite of myself. The date on the top sheet was 1888, the year of the fire at the Old Essex, the year it closed down. The acts were listed and some of the names were familiar:
GUS ELEN
ALBERT CHEVALIER
MARIE LLOYD
DAN LENO
LITTLE TICH
Then there were others who were not known to me.
LITTLE Miss ELLEN TOZER
The Juvenile Prodigy
THE GREAT ‘HERCULE’
Astonishing Feats of Strength
And then, this:
Mrs. MIDNIGHT
And her Animal Comedians
I don’t know why, but that name Mrs. Midnight struck a chord somewhere. Was her name really Midnight? It sounded too good to be true. And what, for God’s sake were “animal comedians”?
I looked up from the bar where I had laid out the papers and across to the stage. I was not shining my torch in that direction, but I thought I caught sight of someone sitting just behind the proscenium arch in what legits call the “prompt corner.” It looked like a great bulky old woman with a shawl over her head and shoulders, wearing a floorlength dress, but I could barely see more than an outline in the gloom. The figure was leaning forward slightly and quite motionless. The face was completely obscured by the cowl of the shawl, but I had the impression that it was staring in my direction.
I flashed my torch towards the figure and saw at once that it had been an illusion. It was no more than a pile of furniture and junk covered by a tarpaulin. All the same it had been uncannily lifelike. I switched the torch off to recreate the effect, but the magic had gone. It just looked like a pile of junk covered with a tarpaulin.
“Are you okay, Danny?” said Jill.
As a matter of fact I was shaking all over, but I said: “Come over here! Look what I’ve found.”
Jill was very excited by the old music hall bills; even Crispin was reluctantly impressed. I don’t know why—to please Jill I suppose—but I said I would do some research into the playbills and the history of the theatre. Then Crispin started offering me advice about how and where to research. I let him go on a bit; then I quietly reminded him that I had been quite a successful journalist for over a dozen years, so I did know a little about the techniques of research. Crispin shut up, and again I thought I saw Jill smile.
Finally the camera crew arrived and we did some fake shots of us arriving at the Old Essex and being amazed. Crispin repeated his line about it being an incredible space and his Matcham theory. He wanted me to ask him who Matcham was on camera, but I wasn’t playing ball. We were about to film my “discovery” of the playbills when the crew started to get technical glitches: jams in the camera, gremlins in the sound system, erratic variations in the light levels. The sound technician was particularly jumpy. At one point he said he had got the noise of some animal crying out in pain, perhaps a cat, on his cans; but the rest of us had heard nothing.
I know camera crews: they can be very touchy and difficult when they want to be. Perhaps it’s because they think they are doing all the work and us guys in front of the camera are taking all the credit. I could see they were getting into a state, so I tried to calm them down, but it was no good. The sound man said straight out that the place was giving him “the willies.” At this Crispin started to be very sarcastic until I told him to shut the fuck up. It was all beginning to get a bit hairy so I made a cutthroat gesture at Jill to let her know that I thought we should wrap. She understood immediately, gave the word and we cleared out. I wasn’t sorry to go.
For about a week or so I put the Old Essex out of my mind. I was heavily into meetings with some producers about hosting a new Reality TV show called Celebrity Dog Kennel. Apparently they were finding it hard to sign up even the B and C listers who were asking silly money anyway. In the end it was Jill who spurred me. She rang me up and asked me how the research was going. I was vague but invited her to have dinner with me in a couple of day’s time when I would tell her all about it. The following morning I took myself off to the newspaper library at Colindale.
I had already got the bare facts about the Old Essex from Mander and Mitchenson, that the theatre had suffered a very damaging fire on Saturday, December 1st, 1888, from which its fortunes had never recovered and it had been abandoned as a place of entertainment very soon after. So I began my researches by looking in the newspapers of that period for reports of the fire at the Old Essex.
Most of the national dailies contained little more than a few lines stating that the fire had been started shortly after the Saturday night performance and that there were no “human fatalities,” but that one man, a Mr. Graham, had been severely injured. I did, however, come across a passing reference to it in a letter to The Times on December 5th, stating that: “the recent riot and conflagration at the Old Essex provides further evidence of the extreme unrest among the denizens of Whitechapel following the appalling murders recently perpetrated in that district.” I presumed that the writer meant the Ripper murders, the last of which had been committed in November 1888. Rather fatuously the letter ended by urging the Metropolitan Police to “redouble their efforts in hunting down the person responsible for these unspeakable atrocities.”
Eventually I tracked down a more detailed account of the fire in a local paper called The East London Gazette. Monday December 3rd 1888. In it I read as follows:
“ . . . the evening’s entertainment at the Old Essex was proceeding as normal when, towards the end of the bill, there was introduced an act known as Mrs. Midnight and her Animal Comedians. In it a lady by the name of ‘Mrs. Midnight,’ dressed as a gypsy vagrant (but in reality personated by a Mr. Simpson Graham) appears on stage with a number of animals, including a cat, a Learned Pig, a miniature bulldog, a cockerel and a Barbary ape. These creatures under instructions from Mrs. Midnight performed a number of astonishing mental and physical feats. Especially notable we are told was the ‘Learned Pig’ Belphagor who was capable of solving elementary mathematical conundrums with the aid of numbered cards. On this particular evening, however, parts of the audience, especially those who had been drinking at the bars, became restive and took against Mrs. Midnight. These vulgar objections reached their height while the Barbary ape, called Bertram, was performing the act of rescuing the miniature bulldog, Mary, from the top of a miniature tower of wood and canvas, designed to look like a castle keep. Coins and other small hard objects were thrown onto the stage, one of which hit Bertram, the ape. The animal was so provoked by this act that he became visibly agitated and having reached the top of the tower, instead of rescuing the bulldog, Mary, he bit her head off.
“That disgusting incident, needless to say, only incensed the troublemakers further and a full scale riot ensued. The local constabulary was summoned and the theatre was cleared. The artists appearing on the bill, which included Mr. Dan Leno, were led to safety, but Mr. Graham remained behind because he was fearful of being set upon by the mob who were indeed calling for him. It was at this point that smoke was seen to be coming from one of the dressing room windows at the back of the theatre, though precisely when and how the fire was started has been disputed. Our reporter who arrived on the scene with the fire brigade was told by one member of the crowd that the reason for the animus surrounding ‘Mrs. Midnight’ was that her impersonator Mr. Graham (formerly, we understand, a medical practitioner) was suspected by many to have some connection with the Whitechapel Murders, though quite why he should have fallen under suspicion we have been unable to ascertain. The gallant members of the Fire Service, under their leader Captain Shaw, soon had the fire under control and were able to spirit Mr. Graham away unseen by the crowd. However Mr. Graham is understood to have sustained severe injuries from the blaze and his entire menagerie of ‘animal comedians’ has perished in the conflagration.”
As I was coming out of Colindale with my photocopy of the article I had a brain wave. My last job before TV celebrity took me to its silicone-enhanced bosom was as Showbiz Editor of the Daily Magnet. There I got to know Bill Beasely, the head of crime news. We had worked together on the Spice Girl Shootings and rubbed along fairly well. He wasn’t a bad bloke if you could put up with his smoker’s cough, and the fact that he smelt of gin and peppermints at nine in the morning. One of his fads was his fascination with the Ripper murders: he’d even come up with a theory of his own about it and done yet another Ripper book. I think his idea was that it was Gladstone and Queen Victoria in collaboration, which is loony of course, but not as loony as that daft American bint who thinks it was Sickert the painter. (I happen to own a Sickert. I’m not a complete muppet.) I thought Bill might know about this Graham bloke if he was a suspect.
I gave him a ring and he asks me over. I suggest meeting in a pub, but he insists I come to his flat. I don’t want to go because Bill is a bachelor—well so am I at the moment, but you know what I mean—and a bit of a slob and lives at the wrong end of Islington.
My worst fears are confirmed. There is even some old gypsy tramp woman with a filthy plaid shawl over her head crouching on his doorstep. She holds out her hand, palm upwards for cash. Luckily Bill buzzes me up fairly quickly when I ring the doorbell. His flat is on the top floor and is everything I had been dreading, and more. It is all ashtrays, booze bottles and books, plus a sofa and a couple of armchairs that, like Bill, were bulging in all the wrong directions. The books are everywhere. They look as if they’d spread out from the ceiling-high shelves like some sort of self-perpetuating fungus. It is ten in the morning and Bill offers me a Gin and Tonic. He’s barely changed in five years: a bit more flab maybe, a more phlegm-filled cough. I ask if I could have a tea or coffee.
He looks at me as if I’d demanded quail sandwiches and an avocado pear, but wanders into the kitchen to light the gas for the kettle.
“Does that gypsy woman regularly camp out on your doorstep?” I asked.
“Who?”
I went to the window to point her out to him but she’d gone.
Bill managed to make some proper coffee in one of those percolator things, but it was still filthy. When I mentioned what I was here about, Graham and the Ripper connection, he became all excited. What is it about Jack the Ripper and some people? He started pacing round the room, talking enthusiastically and pulling books out of the shelves.
“Ah, yes. Well of course Dr. Graham is known to ripperologists, but he comes fairly low down on the list of possible suspects, mainly because we don’t know much about him. But this new stuff you’ve dug up is fascinating. Perhaps you and I could collaborate on a new Ripper book about it?”
Not wanting to put him off at this early stage, I merely shrugged. “You called him ‘Doctor’ Graham?” I said.
“Yes. He was a doctor. Struck off, if I remember rightly. Of course being a doctor is always a plus when it comes to Ripper suspects. Anatomical expertise, you see. Knowing how to cut up bodies.” He is leafing through a rather squalid looking giant paperback entitled The A to Z of Ripperology. “Where are we? Ah, here we are! ‘Graham, Dr. Simpson S. Date of birth unknown.’ That ought to be easy enough to find out. ‘Medical practitioner with eccentric theories. Devised a treatment known as zoophagy in which patients were treated by being fed organs from still living animals, by means of vivisection.’ Bloody hell, that’s absolutely disgusting!” Bill, the ripperologist, seemed genuinely shocked. “ ‘Wrote a book on the subject: A Treatise on Brain Food, Or the Benefits of Zoophagy Explained . . . ’ Etcetera, etcetera. ‘Struck off the register for misconduct towards a female patient. Thought to have been suffering from the early stages of tertiary syphilis . . . ’ Ah! Listen to this! ‘Became an entertainer known as “Mrs. Midnight” who performed with a troupe of trained animals. The times and locations of his appearance at various East London music halls were said to have coincided with some of the Ripper murders, but this has not been confirmed. It is believed that he died in 1889 or 1890 in an institution for the insane, having been injured by fire in an accident.’ He gets two bleeding daggers out of five on the Suspect Rating. Wait a minute, there’s a book referred to here in the bibliography: Quacks and Charlatans, Alternative Medicine in late Nineteenth Century England by Harrison Bews. Might be worth a look.”
He then asked me why I was so keen on the Old Essex project. I tried to sound genuinely enthusiastic, but I think he saw through it.
After a pause he said: “The thing these restoration nuts don’t get is that some old things are best left buried and unrevived. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good; quite the opposite sometimes. I come from down that way myself, and my old Dad wouldn’t go near the Old Essex. He never really told me why, but he did say that just after the war they tried to turn it back into a theatre or something. I don’t know what happened exactly, but he said it was a disaster.”
That afternoon I rang Jill and proposed that we should meet for dinner in the evening at my local gastro-pub, The Engineer in Primrose Hill. I thought dinner at my house might seem a bit forward for her. She accepted.
Sometimes I’m a good judge, though that’s not what people say about me in I Can Make You a Star, but I thought Jill would like The Engineer and she did. The food’s well cooked and imaginative, all organic of course and that sort of rubbish; but it’s classy and modern without being pretentious and overpriced. She seemed in her element there.
You know how when you meet someone and you go away and start fantasizing about them; then when you meet them again it’s a terrible letdown? With Jill, it was the opposite. She was even better. I don’t want to go on about it but everything about her was somehow clear: clear skin, clear eyes, clear laugh. She dressed nicely but obviously didn’t worry much about her appearance. Her hair was mousy colored, not dyed.
Immediately I wanted to start talking about her and me, but I knew this would be fatal, so I told her about my researches. She gave me her full attention and seemed thrilled by the information I gave.
I said: “You don’t think it’s all a bit sordid and sinister?”
“Good grief no! Fascinating stuff. It all helps to raise the profile. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. You of all people should know that.”
I could tell she was teasing me, which I liked, but it was in the way you tease a favourite uncle, not a friend, or a lover.
Still, I had done well, so I told her grandly that there were a couple of books I thought I would look out at the British Library which might help. She stretched out her hand and touched mine.
“You know, when somebody suggested you to help raise money for the Old Essex, I didn’t like the idea. I thought you would be, well . . . I mean, your reputation, the kind of programs you do . . . ”
“I know. A case of Pride and Prejudice on your part.”
“Well, sort of. Not that I’d exactly describe you as Mr. Darcy.”
“You wound me, Jill.”
We both laughed, but she had wounded without knowing.
Then we discussed the practicalities of fund-raising events, television air time, recruiting other “names” to support the cause and all the rest of it. I realized that by now it was far too late for me to bow out of the Old Essex project, even if I wanted to, but I couldn’t because it would mean losing her. Then at the coffee stage, she said something, though I can’t remember how it came up. Mature people are supposed to take these things better than the young, but I don’t think that’s true.
She said: “By the way, you may as well know, I’m engaged to Crispin.”
“Crispin de Hartong?”
“That’s right.”
“But you can’t!” The words were out before I could stop myself. She seemed amused rather than shocked by my reaction.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a pretentious pillock.”
“Actually, he’s really rather sweet when you get to know him.”
There was something very steely about the way she said that.
I had offended her, so I apologized. Then I told her gently that in my very humble opinion I thought she deserved better.
“Thank you for your fatherly concern,” she said coolly.
“I hope I’m more than a father to you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Quickly I said: “And what does your father think about it all?”
“My father is dead; my mother lives in Leamington Spa,” she added, as if that explained the situation.
“I see.”
She giggled. I laughed. The rest of that evening would have been pleasant in a trivial sort of way if I hadn’t felt this great weight on my chest, brought on by her announcement. It was only then, I think, that I admitted to myself how much I felt about Jill. It often happens that when you confess to yourself, your feelings come to be like a physical pain. Call it heart ache if you like; I won’t. Since I stopped working for the tabloids I’ve tried to avoid clichés like the plague.
Shortly after eleven I put Jill into a taxi outside The Engineer, and kissed her chastely on the cheek. This was not like me at all. Then I walked slowly back to my house. I took a long way round so that I could think, but I didn’t really think at all. My mind was too full of Jill, and what a pillock Crispin was. I have a little Georgian terraced house in Princess Road. It was one of those ones with railings along the front and steps going up to the front door. I was quite some way off when I noticed that someone was sitting on my steps. It was no more than a squat black shadow in a long dress from this distance. A ridiculous hope that it might be Jill vanished almost as soon as it came. The figure was motionless. Perhaps someone had just dumped some black bin bags on my doorstep, but no; the form was too precise. It must be a tramp and I would have to give her or him something before they cleared off. The thought enraged me. Hadn’t I enough problems already?
As I approached I could see more clearly what it was. It was dark of course but there was enough light from the street lamps for me to tell. It was a tramp of some kind, a bag lady, except that she had no bags. She was a big bulky old woman in a rusty black dress. Over her head and shoulders was a plaid shawl, greenish in color I thought, but so dirty I could barely make out the pattern. It was only when I had come right up to her that I could see the face under the shawl and even then half of it was in shadow.
It was an old face, jowled and wrinkled with pale pendulous cheeks and a puckered, lipless, dog’s bottom of a mouth. I could not see the eyes clearly as they were shadowed by the thick overhanging brow, but I sensed that they were looking at me fixedly. Something about the heaviness of the chin and the thickness of the nose was making me suspect that the figure in the dress was not a woman at all but a man. This was confirmed when it thrust out a hand, palm upwards, from the folds of the plaid shawl. It was a big, heavy, dirty man’s hand and there were great scars on it like old burn marks.
He wanted money. Well, that was simple enough. I fished for pound coins in my pocket. Even so, the idea of coming close enough to this thing to give them filled me with loathing. I stretched out my hand to be able to drop the coins into his while remaining as far as possible from him, but just as I was about to let the money go he gripped my wrist.
It felt like a handcuff of ice. I screamed like a girl. I felt dizzy; I suppose I must have passed out; drink I suppose, but it had not been my imagination because when I came to I looked for the coins. They and the bloke in the dress had gone.
From that moment I became a driven man. The following morning I went to the British Library and ordered up Quacks and Charlatans, as well as A Treatise on Brain Food. In the B. L. catalogues, I noticed that Simpson Graham M.D. was also credited with another book entitled Mother Midnight’s Catechism, so I ordered that as well.
Research is like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Quacks and Charlatans had only a few pages about Graham, and was completely ignorant about his Music Hall Career, but it gave me this:
He had been a brilliant if erratic medical student and early showed an almost insatiable desire to make his mark in the world. . . . Dr. Graham developed the idea that ingesting organs, in particular the brain, from a living animal was extraordinarily beneficial to human health. Several times he gave a demonstration before an interested and alarmed public in which he trepanned a fully conscious dog or cat, an operation which can, if skilfully done, be executed without much pain to the subject. He would then proceed to dip a spoon into the brain pan and devour the contents until the wretched animal finally lost consciousness. Many colleagues poured scorn on his unorthodox methods, but very few of them objected from an animal welfare point of view. . . . After his disgrace, he continued to give lectures and demonstrations on what he called zoophagy (the eating of a still living being), often doing so in female dress for no apparent reason. Doubts as to his sanity naturally grew and he was finally consigned to an asylum.
I only skimmed though A Treatise on Brain Food, Or the Benefits of Zoophagy Explained by Simpson Graham M.D. Something about the very act of reading it, even in the antiseptic surroundings of the B. L. seemed poisonous. I did gather from a cursory glance that Dr. Graham was no stylist and did a lot of boasting. All the same, I couldn’t help noting down one passage which comes towards the end of this tedious little book.
If we could only overcome the contemptible prejudice against using our fellow human beings in such experiments I am convinced that the benefits would be extraordinary. At present criminals, condemned by law and society, are either executed or left to languish in unhygienic conditions, an unconscionably wasteful practice. How much better for us, and indeed them, if their living, palpitating organs and brain cells were to be used to refresh and rejuvenate a select few. With the skills that I have perfected, the suffering of the reprobates in question could be kept to a minimum; or indeed prolonged and exacerbated, if required, to point a necessary moral lesson. By ingesting these living substances and fluids the health and sanity of our finest men (and women) of genius would not only be enhanced but also greatly prolonged. Through this use of ‘living brain food’ as I term it, human lives of two or three hundred years might in the future, I sincerely believe, become a commonplace.
The third book, Mother Midnight’s Catechism was subtitled Zoophagy Explained to the Young. Graham did not claim authorship on the title page, and I am not surprised. It is printed on cheap paper and decorated with crude, muddy woodcuts. Nearly all of it is in verse. It begins:
How can you be big and strong?
Hear then Mother Midnight’s song . . .
Then there were a number of stories or anecdotes told in verse.
Edward ate a living mouse
And he learned to build a house;
David downed a wriggling rat,
And so he grew big and fat . . .
Concluding with the moral:
Make your meal off breathing things
And become as great as kings.
The final set of verses tells the story of a boy called Alfred who catches his sister out in the act of cheating him at cards. Thereupon he ties her to a chair and proceeds to cut her open with his “trusty knife.” It was all told in a light-hearted almost humorous way that was very difficult to gauge. How serious was the man being?
Then he cut a slice of liver
While she still did quake and quiver . . .
I wanted to be sick, so I started to skip this stuff, but I know it finished:
When he’d eaten all his sister,
Do you think that Alfred missed her?
No, for all her wit and vigour
Had been used to make him bigger.
All his wants she could provide him
By being safely there inside him.
I’d had enough, and I left the British Library in a hurry, nearly tripping over an old bag lady in the courtyard outside.
Then my mobile started to ring. It was Bill Beaseley. He seemed far away and his voice kept breaking up.
“Danny, I think I’ve found something which may . . . I’ll send you a . . . ” The phone went dead. I tried calling him but the line was engaged. On an impulse I rang Jill and asked if she would like to come to the recording of the final of I Can Make You a Star the following night.
“Great!” She said. “Can I bring Crispin too? I’m sure he’d be fascinated.”
I bit my lip and told her I would have two tickets biked round to her that afternoon. I could have sold them on eBay for silly money.
The following morning a rather grubby envelope arrived for me by first class post. It could only be from Bill Beaseley. Sure enough, inside was a photocopy. (Bill was one of those Luddites who refuse to use PCs and e-mails.) On the back of it he had scrawled:
“Page from a book called The Complete Ripper Letters, containing all the letters that were sent to the Police about the Whitechapel murders in both facsimile and transcript. This just may be the clue that clinches it!!! But don’t forget, we go 50/50 on any book deal. All right, mate? Bill.”
The facsimile showed a few lines written in a big scrawly handwriting on a scrap of paper. I got the feeling that the writer was trying to make his handwriting look rather more primitive and uneducated than it actually was. The legend above the facsimile read:
Note addressed to “Inspector Frederick Abberline at Scotland Yard,” which arrived 3rd October 1888, three days after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes. It was dismissed as a hoax at the time as, though the message had been written in blood, it was found to be the blood of a cat.
Here was the message:
I have eaten some of the lights out of them girlies as you will see. I’d send you a morsel, Mr. Abbaline [sic], only it’d be long dead and won’t be no use. Still we may meat, some time, but you won’t know me from midnight as I’m not wot I seam.
That night was the Big One. Well, you all saw the final of I Can Make You a Star, this year, didn’t you? The tenor in the wheelchair won it because of the viewers’ phone-in votes, even though the judges and I thought it should have been the blind juggler. Anyway the audience ratings went through the roof. Jill and Crispin came round afterwards for the champagne do with all the celebs. Jill was excited by it all and just thought it was a hoot, but Crispin was being very snotty and stand-offish, I’m glad to say. I kept my eye on them and, when I noticed that they seemed to be having a little argument, I came over. He was bored and wanted to go home apparently, but she wanted to stay. So I touched her bare arm and took her to meet some of my famous friends, purely because they might help out on the Save the Old Essex campaign, you understand. She loved that.
I was feeling pretty good the next morning, even when the doorbell rang shortly after seven thirty. Those bloody tabloids, I thought, they’ll be asking me to confirm some stupid rumor, or they want a picture of me looking rough in the altogether. I took care to dress carefully before I opened the door, but it wasn’t the press, it was the police.
“Good morning, sir. Could we step inside for a moment . . . ? Do you know a Mr. Bill Beasely of Flat C. 31 Congreve Street . . . ? Well, the thing is, sir, Mr. Beaseley was found dead last night . . . murdered, sir. . . . There was a notebook on the desk and it was open at a page on which your name and address had been written. . . . I wonder if you could possibly account for your movements last night. . . . ”
They actually asked me where I had been that night! I told them that my alibi was pretty impeccable as I had about twenty million witnesses to my whereabouts. Oh, says, the Inspector, all sophisticated, we thought those programs like I Can Make You a Star were pre-recorded. No, I said, you can check, it was all live, every fizzing second of it. I believe in live. If it isn’t live it hasn’t got that something.
I asked for details about poor Bill and they seemed happy to oblige. His skull had been split open with something like a meat cleaver and it looked as if part of his brain had been removed. That scared me, I must say, but I said nothing. They asked me if Bill had had enemies. No, I could not think of any enemies, but Bill had been a crime reporter, you know.
The next day I let the press have it, and by the time the late editions of the Evening Standard were on the streets, there was a nice little spread on the inside pages:
I CAN MAKE YOU A STAR MAN CLAIMS:
“I HAVE SOLVED RIPPER MYSTERY”
Well, not exactly, but near enough by press standards. I had given them a pretty coherent run-down of the evidence, and they got most of it right. The one thing I’m afraid I hadn’t told them about was old Bill’s part in my discovery, but I thought what with his murder and everything, it would just make things too complicated. I did feel bad about that for a while.
I had rung Jill naturally, and she seemed delighted by the news coverage.
“I’m beginning to think you’re a bit of a star too,” she said.
“You are too kind, Miss Bennett.”
“By no means, Mr. Darcy.” That was progress.
I discussed with her the television feature on the Old Essex and the Ripper suspect that I was arranging for the Local London TV News and the possibility of a full-length documentary.
Three days later Jill, Crispin, and I were down at the Old Essex with a camera crew. I had specially asked Crispin to come along as our “architectural expert,” which pleased Jill.
Once again it was raining, but not as heavily as the last time. We decided to film indoors first and wait for it to clear to do the establishing shots outside in the street. I did my stuff to camera about this wonderful old building and how it was steeped in the rich history of the East End, and then Crispin did his architecture bit. I wasn’t going to tell him that his material was bound to end up on the cutting room floor. He wasn’t bad, but he was too fond of his own voice.
Then there was a lightening in the rain so Jill and the crew went out to do the establishing shots. Crispin and I voted to stay indoors and drink the skinny lattes the P.A. had got us from the nearest Starbucks.
So there we were, the two of us, alone in the auditorium of that great dirty old Cathedral of Sin. It was so quiet; you could almost hear the dust falling through the shafts of gray light. Somewhere in the deep distance traffic rumbled in a twenty-first century street, but it was miles and ages away. Crispin started to look at me very intently, so I looked back at him. He was not bad looking, I suppose, in a rather girly way, with his shoulder length blond hair and his pretty mouth. The looks won’t last, though, I thought. I’m dark with good cheekbones. I may be forty, but I’m built to last. I go to the gym.
“You really are a little shit,” he said. I was astonished, but I said nothing. Crispin went on. “You may as well know; you haven’t a chance with Jill. She is, as you would say, ‘out of your league.’ You do realize that, don’t you?”
He was expecting me to react, to say something, but I didn’t. I just went on staring at him. He reckoned without the fact that I didn’t get where I am today without being a bit of a psychologist. After a pause, he started up again, but not quite as confident as before.
“I know all about your efforts to impress her. Visits to the British Library; dinners at gastro-pubs, tickets to that truly ghastly show of yours. It won’t do you any good, you know. She isn’t remotely interested in you, never will be, and shall I tell you why—? Good God, what’s that?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you see it? Some sort of flicker of light, there on stage, just behind the pros arch.”
No. Nothing. Then, yes, there was something. By the proscenium arch, I saw a yellow light flicker, like a candle flame.
Someone was holding a lighted candle on the stage. Then it began to move and we saw the outline of the thing that carried it. It was a big old woman with a long dress and a shawl over her head. Her back was to us. She looked like a huge huddled heap of old clothes. Slowly she began to shuffle away from us upstage.
“Excuse me!” said Crispin, in his best public school prefect voice. He was talking loud and slow as if to an idiot child.
“Excuse me, I don’t know who you are, but I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. This is a listed building, you know! Excuse me!”
Then he started to move towards the stage.
“Christ, where are you going?” I said.
“I want to know what the hell’s going on,” he said. “Come on!” I couldn’t stop him, so I just followed.
He climbed up onto the stage and I warned him about the floorboards. Dammit, there was a great hole in the middle of the stage; but he ignored me and I climbed up after him.
It was a funny thing. That great shambling lump of an old woman kept ahead of us the whole time as we threaded our way over piles of junk and rubble. We weren’t able to catch up with her, but she was always in our sight. It was almost as if she were leading us somewhere. Crispin called out to her several times, but she simply did not react. She shambled on with her flickering candle.
When she got to the back of the stage she turned right and went through a narrow brick archway. There was now no light apart from the candle and our torches. Once through the archway we were in a backstage corridor. It was all brick, black with age or fire. To our right was a stone staircase up which we could see a flicker of candle and hear the heavy footsteps of the old woman ascending, accompanied by long groaning breaths.
Surely now we could catch up with her, so we plunged up the dirty, lightless stair, barely considering now what we were doing or why.
At the top of the steps we found ourselves in another dim, black brick corridor. And we were amazed to see that the old woman, now practically bent double and so headless to us, was halfway along it, about twenty yards ahead, hobbling away. We shouted at her, but on she went regardless.
The corridor smelt of something oily and old, and when I touched the wall by accident a black tarry substance stuck to my hand.
At last we were beginning to catch up with the woman when she suddenly stopped in a viscous looking puddle, turned and then started to climb yet another staircase to her right. When we arrived at the bottom of this flight we heard her steps cease and saw that she had halted ten steps up, her back to us. The groaning breaths were beginning to sound like some dreadful kind of singing. I thought I could recognize some words of the old Music Hall song:
Why am I always the bridesmaid,
Never the blushing bride?
Ding dong, wedding bells,
Only ring for other gells . . .
With little shuffles she was turning slowly round to face us, and I knew now that my worst fears would be confirmed. As she moved she let the plaid shawl slip from her head to reveal a greasy white cranium planted with wild tufts of white hair, sprouting like winter trees in frost on a barren landscape. Half of her face I had seen before. There was the heavy brow, the wild gray eye, the great blob nose, the thick mannish chin, but the other half was a mangled mess, an angry chaos of fiery scar tissue, utterly unrecognizable as a face at all. Mrs. Midnight lifted the candle to his head so that we could see it all.
Why am I always the bridesmaid,
Never the blushing bride . . . ?
Then he hurled the candle down the stairs towards us. I thought it would extinguish itself in the oily pool at the bottom of the steps. But it did not. It guttered for a moment, then a great tongue of flame leapt up from the pool and began to lick at Crispin’s jeans. There was a roar and the next minute he was engulfed in flame. I took off my jacket and tried to smother the fire, but he was screaming and fighting me off. The only thing to do was to hurry him back down the corridor which was now spitting little gobs of flame from every tarry crevice. Before we had reached the stairs leading down to the stage, Crispin collapsed. First I beat out the fire on his body with my jacket, then picking him up in a fireman’s lift I carried him downstairs. Behind me the flames were roaring like an angry ghost.
I had got down onto the stage level with Crispin on my back. I thought we were home safe so I began to run across the stage, but I had forgotten how rotten the boards were. There was a crack and suddenly we were falling into a pit. Crispin broke my fall a little, but I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder and one leg appeared to be useless. We were in the dark. I could see nothing, but there was a reek of corpses all around us.
I had a mobile in my pocket and was able to summon help. They told me later that Crispin and I had tumbled into a cellar where they had also found a large number of dead cats in various stages of decomposition. What was odd, they told me, was that so many of the cats had suffered injuries to the head. Some of them looked as if the tops of their skulls had been surgically removed. I did not want to know.
I had broken several bones in my body and needed a couple of operations, so I wasn’t going to be pushed out of the hospital in a hurry as usually happens. I’m afraid Crispin was rather worse off. As well as other injuries, the fire had burned the beauty out of half his face. I genuinely feel bad about that.
I have a private room at the hospital, of course. In the evenings Jill, my angel, comes to see me with grapes or something else I don’t really want, but I feel better for her coming. I want to say something to her so much, but I can’t because I’m frightened of being turned down, rejected.
Get off! We want the bingo, not you, yer boring boogger!
And then, just recently, I have woken up in the early hours of the morning to find the great bulk of Mrs. Midnight crouched by my bed. From the folds of the plaid shawl Mrs. Midnight will take a kitten, still alive and mewing, and out of its trepanned head Mrs. Midnight will scoop a quiver of gray jelly with a teaspoon. “This is your brain food,” says Mrs. Midnight. “Eat up!”