The Angel of Highgate (19 page)

Not long after, Mordecai’s mother was committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital, after which he never saw her again. With his father dead and his mother asylumed, the house was sold to pay off the voracious creditors and Mordecai was sent to live with a distant uncle. The man was a much-respected and deeply pious church alderman who crept into Mordecai’s room by night and sodomized him, then attempted to beat the carnal devil out of the young boy with birch twigs until his buttocks were striped and bleeding.

After six months of this treatment, Mordecai ran away, and became one of the many thousands of urchins living rough on the streets of London. In time, he wandered into the Seven Dials Rookery where he fell in with a gang of pickpockets and became their apprentice. Mordecai proved an adept thief, and as he grew older, progressed in the criminal hierarchy from dip to cracksman, to bully boy and so on up the ladder. Over the years, his innate Machiavellianism showed in a willingness to be more ruthless, despicable, and crueler than all others. By age forty, he had bludgeoned his way to the position of high mobsman, lord of the Seven Dials Underworld. Feared by all, Fowler’s word was the closest thing that passed for law in the rookery.

* * *

It was still early morning when Mordecai Fowler, Barnabus Snudge, and Walter Crynge materialized from the swirling yellow fog and tromped across the loose planks of a narrow footbridge spanning the reeking ditch that marked entry into the Seven Dials. The mobsmen’s luck had not been good that night, and they were returning home with just a handful of shillings bullied from the purses of terrorized Whitechapel whores.

It was dark in the rookery, as all the gas lights had long since been smashed by children whose mothers and fathers took a parental pride in their offspring’s wanton vandalism. But despite the gloom and blinding fog, Fowler and his cronies navigated the echoing alleyways with unerring familiarity, and soon arrived at the abandoned three-story factory building that served as Fowler’s lair.

This part of the building had once been a match factory. The large, high-ceilinged ground-floor rooms which had been the factory floor were now strewn with abandoned clutter. Narrow, creaking wooden stairways ran up to second and third floors where a warren of small rooms had once functioned as offices for clerks and accountants.

Fowler and his two cronies thundered up the swaying wooden stairs, passed through a darkened empty space, and then climbed another flight of stairs to the third floor loft. The loft had once been the storeroom for the match factory. A few half-empty barrels of tar, sulfur and other materials were scattered here and there, but most anything of value had been hauled out and sold long ago.

It was dark in the loft, except for one corner where stubs of candles guttered on a table around which fifteen or more black silhouettes huddled—more of Fowler’s mobsmen betting on a game of dice. Lit by the flickering candlelight, the motley assortment of grizzled, grimy, soot-streaked faces could have belonged to a coven of devils roasting a soul in hell. The men cursed and brayed at each other over the rattle of dice in a cup and the banging down of coins as bets were laid.

“Wot the bleedin’ hell are you lot up to?” Fowler bellowed. The men fell silent and cast guilty looks at one another.

“Go to, you lazy layabouts! Get yer arses out o’ here. There’s pockets to be picked, purses to be cut, mugs to be coshed, mischief to be done.”

The game broke up as the men evaporated into the shadows.

Fowler snatched a candle from the table and crossed the floor to a wooden door, which he unlocked with a large iron key. Inside he fired a match with a dirty thumbnail and lit a lantern hanging from the ceiling.

The room had once been the factory manager’s office. The hideous oak desk was still there, but in one corner sat a broken-backed bed, an iron-banded trunk fastened with an enormous, rusty padlock, and a sideboard that was the desk’s equal in hideousness. Piled atop the sideboard in a careless heap was Fowler’s swag: a collection of silverware taken from the many middle-class residences he and his “cracksmen” had burglarized over the years.

Fowler’s feet were hot and burning from hours of walking. His throat was parched. Atop the sideboard was a heavy stone jug of water. Fowler hoisted the jug and poured water into a tarnished silver goblet. For all his many vices, because of the ruin that drink had brought upon his family, he had been a strict teetotaler all his life. Despite the metallic taste of the goblet, the water was cool and refreshing in Fowler’s mouth and he drained the goblet and filled it again. As he quaffed the second goblet his eyes trailed along the silver strewn across the sideboard: tureens, tankards, serving trays, butter dishes, all of it of the very best quality. He had no love or appreciation of beauty of any kind, but he knew all the hallmarks and could differentiate the good stuff from worthless “tat.” This was all the “good stuff.”

The cutlery was kept in a cherry and walnut box lined with blue damask, against which the highly polished silverware gleamed brightly. His eyes trailed avariciously across the neat rows of knives, forks, and spoons until they came to an empty space.

Fowler yanked the goblet from his lips. Water ran down his chin and dribbled onto the front of his waistcoat.

An empty space.

In the room outside, the dice players had dispersed, and now five of Fowler’s highest ranking mobsmen, his leftenants, sat around the table playing cards. They all looked up, startled, when the office door banged open and Fowler’s ominous silhouette choked the open doorway. “Come in here, you lot!” he bellowed. “Crynge and Snudge, too. All of ya.”

The leftenants exchanged worried looks as they filed into the room. The High Mobsman stood behind the hideous desk. Crynge and Snudge took up their usual positions to his left and right. “Close the door,” Fowler said to the last man in the room. “And lock it up tight.”

The mobsman did as he’d been told and joined the others.

For several minutes Fowler said nothing as he stood glaring at the five men assembled on the other side of the table, his protruding lower lip jutting out even further than normal. His bushy mutton-chop whiskers bristled as the muscles in his jowls clenched and unclenched. Fowler was in a black mood—they saw that instantly. And when Mordecai Fowler was in a black mood, someone usually suffered, horribly and painfully.

“Someone’s taken somefink wot belongs to me,” he said slowly, black eyes moving from one man to the next. “A piece of me silver.”

The men exchanged stunned glances. Everyone knew that stealing from Fowler was suicide. Stealing his precious silver went beyond suicide. It was begging for a slow, painful, lingering death.

“Naw,” began Tommy Tailor cheerfully, “ain’t been stole, Mordecai. You probably just mislaid—”

“AIN’T MISLAID!” Fowler bellowed. “Ain’t mislaid,” he repeated, his voice lowered to a rumbling threat. “It was took. And by one of you barsterds.”

“But wu-wu-wu-we wouldn’t take nuffink o’ yours,” Whitey Smith stammered. “You nu-nu-nu-know that, Mordecai. It’s gu-gotta be someone else—”

“Ain’t nobody but you five allowed in here!” Fowler yelled. “So it had to be one of you.”

“Wot about Crynge and Snudge?” Tailor protested.

“They was wiv me the whole day. So I knows it ain’t them. That leaves you five.”

Each man blanched as Fowler reached into his coats and drew out a steel spike about eighteen inches long and less than the thickness of a man’s little finger with a point sharpened to infinity. Only the tip was a polished silver color. The remainder of the shaft was a dark mottled red that could have been rust or just as easily dried blood. The spike was set in a tortured lump of wormwood that served as a handle and around which Fowler’s thick fingers clenched. In the closest he had ever come to humor, Fowler had christened the spike “Mister Pierce.” He kept it in a leather scabbard inside one of his coats, and it was his favorite weapon, for it killed not by shock and trauma like a bullet, nor with the artery-severing quickness of a knife blade. Instead the thin, needle-like spike could be thrust through soft tissue and cartilage again and again, causing terrible suffering, but leaving the victim alive and screaming.

“Put your right hands on the table. All of ya.”

The men hesitated. No one wanted to be the first.

“NOW!” Fowler bellowed.

The five men leapt forward and placed their right hands, palm down, on the surface of the oak desk.

“Now, you’re all gonna swear an oath that it wasn’t you wot took my silver.” He took a step toward the table. All five men flinched and snatched their hands away.

“I didn’t tell ya to move!” Fowler screamed.

The five slowly placed their hands back on the tabletop.

Fowler reached inside his coats again, yanked out a pistol that had been tucked into his pants, and tossed it to Crynge.

“Mister Crynge, the first man wot takes his hand off that table… shoot him dead.”

“Right you are, Mister Fowler,” Crynge cackled.

The five men watched in growing terror as the cadaverous Crynge drew back the hammer and leveled the pistol at them. Only then did the awful gravity of the situation become apparent.

One of them would not leave the room alive.

“Now, I want you all to repeat after me—” he began, but was interrupted by Tommy Tailor.

“Mister Fowler, you know you can trust us lads.” Tailor flashed his gap-toothed grin. “It ain’t worth all this bother, now is it? All over a tiny little spoon—”

“Shut yer trap!” he barked. Tommy Tailor dropped his gaze to the table and licked his lips nervously.

“Now,” Fowler continued, “repeat after me: I swear—”

“I swear,” the men intoned as one.

“On my worthless life—”

“On my worthless life,” they echoed.

“That I ain’t never stole nuffink from Mordecai Fowler, and I never, ever would.”

The men repeated the line, stumbling over the words.

“So ’elp me Gawd.”

“So help me God.”

“There,” Fowler said, lips peeling back from his yellow tombstone teeth in an approximation of a smile. “That weren’t so bad, now wuz it?”

He turned as if to walk away but then pivoted sharply, raised Mister Pierce high over his head, and swung with all his might, driving the spike through the back of Tommy Tailor’s hand, pinning it to the tabletop.

Tailor let out an ear-splitting shriek and stared in wide-eyed horror at his impaled hand.

“Spoon?” Fowler bellowed in Tailor’s agonized face. “I didn’t never say it was a spoon wot was took! I just said it was me silver! Only the thieving rat-barsterd wot took it woulda known that!”

Tommy Tailor crumpled to his knees. Shivering with pain and shock, he tore his gaze from the spike and looked up at Fowler.

“I’m sorry, Mordecai. It was a mistake. Honest. I was just lookin’ at it. I wasn’t never gonna steal it. Honest I wasn’t. Hope to die—”

“Hope to die?” Fowler interrupted. “Oh, you’re gonna hope to die, all right. You’re gonna hope as hard as you can, Tommy me laddo.” He threw a glance at the other four, who had stepped away, cowering, from the table. “Hold ’im!” he barked.

Eager to distance themselves from Tailor’s guilt, the four mobsmen rushed forward, seized their former comrade, and dragged him to his feet.

Fowler’s huge hands rummaged through Tailor’s clothing with bruising thoroughness. They found something in his inside jacket pocket and yanked it out, holding it up for all to see. Almost lost in Fowler’s swollen fist was a tiny silver spoon of the kind used for teething babies.

“Wot’s this, eh?” Fowler yelled in Tailor’s face. “Wot the bleedin’ hell’s this?”

“I, I’m sorry, Mordecai!” Tailor stammered. “I’m sorry—”

“You greedy little barsterd!” Fowler spat. “You piece of filth! You think you can steal from me?”

Fowler looked at the spoon clenched in his massive hand and a thought occurred to him.

“You want this, eh?” He shook the spoon under Tailor’s nose. “You want it?”

“No! No, I don’t want it—” Tailor stammered.

“Well, you can bleedin’ well have it!” He yelled at the four men restraining Tailor, “Hold his head! Hold it tight!”

Fowler grabbed Tailor by the throat and began to squeeze. When Tailor opened his mouth to breathe, Fowler rammed the spoon in. As it twisted back and forth, the spoon broke off Tailor’s front teeth. The room filled with horrible choking as Fowler forced the spoon down his throat. When the spoon was halfway down his gullet, Fowler grabbed Tailor’s mouth and held it shut with both hands.

“Now swallow it, you vermin! Swallow it!”

Tears of pain and terror poured down Tailor’s face as he somehow managed to swallow the spoon, choking and gagging the whole time. Fowler let go of his jaws and stepped away, smiling. Tailor, convulsing and shuddering with pain and terror, had to be held up or he would have collapsed.

“I’m sorry,” Tailor rasped, his voice in ruins as his lacerated throat began to swell.

“Oh, you’re sorry now, are ya, Tommy?”

“I’ll, I’ll make it up to ya. Honest… I… I…” He tried to say more but couldn’t get the words out.

“You’ll make it up to me, will ya? All right, then.” He held out his empty hand to Tailor. “Give us the spoon back and I’ll let you off.”

Tailor, a broken man, choked out a sob. “I, I, I can’t give it back. It’s in me belly, ain’t it?”

Fowler became suddenly thoughtful. “Oh, I see. You can’t give it back because it’s in yer belly.”

He casually reached down, slid open one of the drawers in the table, and pulled out a large butcher’s knife with a ten-inch blade.

“Well, we’ll just have to go lookin’ for it then, won’t we? Only it might take a while, ’cause I ain’t no doctor.”

As Fowler stumped around the table, he stropped the knife blade up and down the leg of his trousers. At the sight of the butcher’s knife, Tailor broke down and started to sob and beg for his life. The other four mobsmen let go and began to ease themselves toward the door.

“Where d’you lot think you’re slopin’ off to?” Fowler screamed. “Get back here and hold him!”

The gang of stray mobsmen lurking outside the room, eavesdropping, exchanged horrified looks as the first bloodcurdling screams began. After ten minutes, none could stand it any longer and hurried outside. But even in the street, Tommy Tailor’s screams could be plainly heard, echoing down the dark, dank alleyways of the rookery. After half an hour the screams subsided into the groans of a damned soul being tortured in the lowest circle of hell. After forty-five minutes they were the convulsive gasps of a soul eager to quit a body that had become a prison of suffering. Then even that stopped and in its place there was an ominous silence.