The Thing About Thugs (13 page)

The streets of the rookery are never deserted, but tonight they seem particularly crowded. John May knows it is just his imagination, but Shields resents the people on the streets and once makes as if to kick an urchin who gets in his way. May restrains him in time; he does not want to attract attention. As it is, there are no gaslights in the area; the little light that falls on the garbage-strewn streets comes from behind shutters and windows.

The three men reach the opium den a little before midnight. They want to get there early enough to be allowed inside, but late enough to be seen by as few customers as possible. They are lucky. There is only one customer, a white-bearded lascar who was also there the first night, May remembers; the night he lost his temper and kicked the Chinaman. They will have to wait for him to leave.

The old woman with her knotted skull welcomes them and prepares their pipes. John May and Shields merely pretend to smoke — both belong to the intermediate working classes which, unlike the upper class and the lowest classes, seldom indulge in opium — but One-eyed Jack takes to the preparation with an alacrity that indicates prior and wide exposure. May just hopes that Jack does not get so high as to become useless; they need to be in their senses, all three of them, for the work they have set out to do. If only the lascar would leave now...

But the lascar is drugged and half-asleep on the dirty bed. May tries to poke and prod him, but he only smiles dreamily and sidles out of reach.

Perhaps, thinks May, the blasted nigger can be bribed to leave. Will he remember it tomorrow? It seems unlikely. In any case, who would ask him — and even if somebody does, he is unlikely to disclose to others that he is one of the last people to have seen the old woman alive. Suspicion is more likely to accrete to him. John May is sure the lascar will be careful not to mention that he was in the opium den that night. Perhaps a coin offered surreptitiously will give them the few minutes they need. Ten minutes at the most; maybe only five.

May shuffles closer to the white-bearded lascar, who makes vague apologetic noises.

Amir Ali walks up the avenue leading to the Captain’s house. It is late, almost midnight, and he knows that Nelly the cook will protest at his coming back at this hour, perhaps even complain to the Captain tomorrow. He wishes he could let himself in without anyone knowing but of course, none of the servants would trust him with a key. But as he reaches the house, he sees the Captain’s coach draw up — evidently, the Captain was out too — and Amir tries to slip in without being noticed. But it is hard to evade the eagle eyes of Nelly, who greets him with a snide remark: ‘If you are looking for that girl Jenny, she left an hour ago after asking for you. Where were you, murdering poor gentlefolk on the streets?’

Amir wishes her goodnight and walks inside, followed by a loud mutter: ‘Lordey! Thugs, murderers, cannibals — this city is no place for a decent woman; thuggism on the streets, no wonder...’ One day, he thinks, he will be tempted to take a bite of Nelly’s plump red cheeks.

It goes well. The lascar accepts the proffered coin and shuffles off to the street. Two minutes later, when the old woman indicates that it is almost midnight and she will soon close shop, One-eyed Jack, no worse for the opium he has smoked, stuns her with a neat blow of his cudgel, inflicted, as stipulated by John May, not on the crown but lower down, on the neck. Then, in less than five minutes, while John May stands by the door, Shields and Jack throttle the woman and saw off her head.

John May likes Jack. The man goes about his tasks with less emotion than any of them. May trembles despite himself as the old woman is throttled and decapitated, though he can only sense the struggle in the murk of the smelly, cluttered room. Shields curses and evokes both God and the Devil. But Jack works with the precision and apathy of a man slicing a carrot.

Everything has gone according to plan. It is only when the three leave the den and walk through the narrow alley connecting the building to the street, the valuable head in a bag carried by Jack, that the first and only bit of bad luck comes their way. They brush past a young woman who hustles past them, barely glancing in their direction, but May recognizes her as the pretty woman they had met while leaving the old woman’s den the last time.

A minute later, there is the sound of a woman screaming. The murder has been discovered sooner than they expected it to be. But the men are already some distance away; they increase their pace. At that moment, a dog comes sniffing at the bag carried by One-eyed Jack. Jack laughs and delivers a lusty whack with his cudgel. The yelping of the dog erases the woman’s screams behind them and sets dogs howling in street after street.

Nelly the cook was flustered, and bossier than ever. It was difficult to be housekeeper, cook and shadow butler rolled into one. For Captain Meadows’ household did not contain a butler or a proper housekeeper: Alec, the only other manservant, apart from that blackamoor Thug, the good Lord preserve us, doubled as butler and coach driver, and Nelly had to make do with two giggling, inept girls from the provinces as housemaid and kitchen help. Then there were the occasional part-time servants, such as Jenny, but they could not be employed for an occasion such as this.

Nelly could recollect the time when Captain Meadows’ parents were still alive: things used to be different then. Not that the Captain was not a thorough gentleman. Nelly had seen him grow into manhood and she knew he had a heart of gold. Perhaps his heart was too good, too ready to trust people, including niggers and cannibals. But he had been living alone for years, much of the time in places like India where, Nelly was sure, butlers and dinners could not be what they ought to be. He had assumed loose manners; he let Nelly take care of the household and confined himself to his books and library. This had become the practice, more so after his return from India. When Johnson, the old butler, retired, Nelly had written to the Captain — he was still in India those days — asking him if she should look for a replacement. But he had postponed the decision, and on his return, when Nelly brought up the matter again, he had said, But Mrs Clennam, what do I require that you and Alec cannot get me? It was a flattering answer, but it did mean a diminishment in the status of the household: Nelly was sure the Captain’s parents would never have condoned a house without a butler. It was a pity, for the Captain had recently inherited money — which had enabled him to quit seeking his fortune in India — and he could surely afford to live in greater style than his parents.

But then, Nelly could see it happening all around her: noble old houses were letting go of the fine distinctions that had maintained them; everywhere there was a bit of slippage, an element of decay. It was the times, sighed Nelly. Look at the turkey she had been boiling. It should have been ready ten minutes ago, but it was still tough. And the butcher had said it was in its juicy prime. No butcher would have tricked her in the past. No butcher could have tricked her; her eyes, it must be said, were not what they used to be.

Despite Nelly’s dissatisfaction, all was close to perfection. The tablecloth matched the ‘Turkey’ carpet and fuchsine curtains. The Captain left such matters, not only on these occasions but in general, to Nelly’s tastes, and Nelly was a diligent student of upper middle-class fashion. It was a dark, sober room, full of mahogany furniture, with an impressive multifaceted sideboard and arabesque patterns on the wallpaper. A wide mirror was placed over the mantel.

The girls had laid the table well. Of course, it had all been done under Nelly’s eagle eye. The cutlery and crystal evenly arranged, the hare soup, cotellettes a la maintenon, oyster patties and oyster sauce already placed, as they should be, on the table. The course to follow, once the guests were seated, would be boiled turkey and mashed potatoes, with stewed sea-kale. This would be followed by... Nelly went through the list in her mind, inhaling the smells of cooking that wafted in from the kitchen.

It was late. Nelly knew it was fashionable to eat late these days, but, lordey, this late? In the past, the guests would have been seated at the table at four or even earlier. Now, well, it was almost six, and the Captain had instructed her not to serve dinner before six. The guests were still in the drawing room, engaged in what sounded like an animated debate over that heathen, the thug. Why did the Captain have to call him in today of all days, on the day when Nelly hoped he would propose to the lovely Miss Mary?

The conversation in the drawing room was animated. It flowed almost tangibly, like the smoke in the narrow passages of air permitted by the objects that inhabited the room: a profusion of candlesticks (despite the glowing Argand lamp) and mirrors, clocks, Staffordshire figures, paintings, prints, engravings, drapery, ceramics and wax fruit, an aquarium, books, ferncases — a strange combination of the bachelor’s touch and that of an older woman which, the Major knew, had to be attributed to the cook. Mary, with her delicate sense of balance and harmony, would probably have a few things to say to both. He laughed inwardly.

Conversations did get animated, thought Major Grayper, drawing on his foul-smelling cigar, whenever Meadows brought out that joker in his pack, the thug from India. There he stood, a criminal by the look of him; he had a low, cunning appearance, though he was not as dark as the Major had expected him to be, more like a gypsy than a nigger. He was dressed in resplendent Oriental robes, something the Major would never have permitted, and he even spoke English. His head, which had just been callipered and commented on for perhaps the hundredth time by Captain Meadows, was almost a perfect oval, smooth, with dark, half-curling hair, and he had a small, carefully clipped and waxed moustache with pointy ends.

The Captain had been narrating the thug’s history to the company and had illustrated some phrenological points by measuring his skull with thread, scale and calliper. He had been helped in his endeavour by Daniel Oates, the journalist, who — with the exception of Mary, who was ensconced in a Wolsey easy chair at a ladylike distance from the thug — was the only other person in the gathering who had studied phrenology. The Major had read half a book or two, one by that chap Dr Andrew Combe who was perennially being quoted in Meadows’
circle, but he had desisted from following that branch of knowledge any further. It was not that Major Grayper disagreed with phrenology; he simply found it superfluous. If you knew anything about a man’s background and if you could observe him for a few moments, you could instantly place him within the criminal class or outside it. This man was marked not only by his murderous history but also by his wild cascade of hair and the way his eyes darted about every so often, as if he were hiding something. The eye, they say, is the lamp of the body. Major Grayper could never trust this Amir Ali. He said as much, after the thug had been asked to leave the company.

‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair’, quoted Mary, mischief in her bright blue eyes.

‘Mary’, remonstrated her mother half-seriously, but Captain Meadows simply laughed. So did the other young men and women in the room, all but Daniel Oates, who frowned in confusion, or was it irritation?

People like Meadows were well-meaning but naïve, thought Major Grayper. If they had not been so naïve, he himself, and people like him, would have less unpleasantness to deal with. Why, just this morning, the matter at the opium den...

The Major was an admirable person but he had no sense of timing, thought Nelly. Did he have to bring up the subject just as the saddles of mutton were being served? She had laboured so hard to get them right. And now she could see the ladies toying with the meat on their plates and even most of the men had lost their appetite. Only Daniel Oates was tucking away, but that man was always hungry, and the Captain, God bless him, was doing dutiful justice to her cooking.

The Major, of course, had not slowed down, even after providing a macabre account of the latest murder he had been called upon to solve this morning. A decrepit crone in some opium den in the rookery who had been discovered with her head, no, not just chopped off, but missing. Yes, the Major repeated, missing, and it was yet to be recovered. Then he provided a rather graphic account of the scene and suggested, with a gleam in his eyes, that the woman might be the victim of some madman, perhaps imported into the land from the colonies. Oh, how he was going on and on, encouraged by questions from Mr Oates, that greedy, gory pen-pusher!

Nelly prayed they would stop this tasteless talk before she signalled the girls to clear the table and bring in the cabinet pudding and the Jaune Mange. She had spent hours and hours on them, days, in fact, on the Jaune Mange, measuring out the boiling water and isinglass one day, mixing in the right quantities of sweet wine, lemon (with peel), loaf sugar and yolks of eggs the next, and finally boiling and stirring and straining it all into moulds today. It would be so unfair, so... so heathenish to let an unknown headless woman, and that too from the rookery, spoil her precious efforts.

The head stares at John May. He has locked himself into the room in which he works. He has roared at his children. He has slapped his wife. He has banished them from this part of the house. He has entered and left the room half a dozen times today. But the head just sits there, its locks stiff and snaky with blood, its eyes still staring, the coarse lips, the knotty skull, all of it a growing presence, minute by minute, a presence that takes over the room, his house, his very soul, sucking them all in. He wishes he were Shields, who must be drowning his horror and
fear in some tavern. He wishes he were One-eyed Jack, incapable of any feeling that does not pertain to his own animal appetites. But he is not; he is John May, provider, self-made man, rational worker, ex-taxidermist, ex-resurrectionist, now murderer.

He does not believe in ghosts, but he is haunted by the eyes of this woman. He has to tear them out. He has to strip her skin, dissolve her brains, clear the skull until it becomes the extraordinary museum specimen demanded by M’lord. With every cut of the knife, every drop of chemical, he will sear his own soul. And it will have to be done in secret. Even M’lord, the prime mover of his actions, will pretend not to know how he procured this splendid skull. Skull number 50. Or skull number 550. How many does M’lord already have; how many people has he employed to procure such samples, people like John May?