The Vice Society (10 page)

‘You are not to clear this plot. Do you understand? This part of the ground is to remain undisturbed. No digging here.’ Mr Williamson looked from one grave-digger to the other. In that dark and enfogging place, he thought he could see a strand of glistening drool hanging from the chin of the shovel wielder.

‘Here – I have a shilling for each of you. Now go about your business elsewhere.’

A coin dropped into each filthy palm and the two trudged towards the bone house with the barrow. Presently, a fresh plume of sparks erupted from the chimney, casting a feverish red glare across the vaporous atmosphere of the burial ground. A nauseating pall drifted over the neighbouring properties.

Mr Williamson bowed his head momentarily before the grave and then turned to leave. But as he did so, he was startled by a large black dog barring his path to the gateway. It did not growl or bark, but sat looking at him with an uninterpretable gaze. He stepped boldly towards the animal, yet it did not move. Rather, it maintained its unnerving stare as if trying to communicate some canine intelligence.

‘Bruce!’ yelled a voice from the bone house, and the dog stood to trot over to his master without another glance at the departing interloper.

Still, I followed: south now towards the river and over Blackfriars-bridge. He arrived home just as the fog was reaching its impenetrable limit: a moist, almost viscous opacity wrapping all in its choking cloak. Bricks wept with it; timbers absorbed it; horses snorted at it; gaslight disappeared in it, and it clung in droplets to his coat as he stepped over the threshold to see the envelope waiting for him.

There was no stamp or postmark; evidently it had been hand-delivered. He took off his coat and started a fire in the cold grate, postponing the opening of what was likely to be a message of little consequence from the Society – perhaps something from the enthusiastic Mr Jute, or a bulletin from one of the ongoing investigations.

Only after he had made a pot of tea and eaten a supper of the previous day’s beef and potatoes did he sit in one of the two empty chairs before the fire to examine the letter. Following the rituals of experience, and to fill the hollow, silent time before he slept, he turned the envelope in his hands, smelled it, held it before the light and attempted to discern what he could.

There was no writing at all on the envelope, which was curious enough and suggested that it was not from the Society or, indeed, anyone who knew him. The quality of the paper was exceptionally fine. It was scentless and there was no trace of hair, fabric or other matter caught anywhere in the folds – in fact, it was quite pristine but for some minor marks where it had been slipped under the door.

He carefully opened the envelope with his pocket knife and folded out the letter, which was but a few lines written in a simple script. Brief it may have been, but the contents were to prove cataclysmic, leaving him sitting there, immobile, long after the fire had burned out and the chill of the night had crept into the house to sit beside him.

SEVEN

We may be assured that Mr Williamson’s bed remained unslept-in the night he received that letter.

Is it possible to conceive what thoughts entered his head when he saw those words stark and unequivocal:
‘She was murdered’?
His instinct and logic had always told him that this must have been the case – had not the details of that inquest seven years previously provided evidence enough of it? But to see it written thus must have made the outrage as fresh and painful as if it had happened the previous day.

Did those words cause him to imagine her there, atop the platform seeing all and being seen by the murderers – those three gentlemen – standing there with her? Did he imagine her face turning to meet the eyes of the others? Despite all she had heard from her husband about the evil of men, she would no doubt have exchanged pleasantries with her co-viewers. When had her smiles turned to a mask of horror?

Murder. The act – even the word itself – was an abhorrence.

Of course, he had done everything he could in those weeks and months following her death, including re-questioning all those appearing at the inquest (in his own time), and haunting the base of the Monument itself for a glimpse of those three men. But hard proof had been lacking, regardless of his certainty.

He had not wept that evening he received the letter. His lachrymal facility had withered years ago and been replaced with a stoical carapace nothing could penetrate. Rather – as the night had stretched out slowly towards the dawn – he had called upon his cool analytical powers and applied himself to the letter with more focused precision than he had ever used with the begging fakements he saw day to day. It was, as yet, his only significant clue in Katherine’s murder.

The letter had been addressed to his previous rank of ‘Detective Sergeant’, denoting that whoever had written it knew of him from his days with the Metropolitan Police. Since his official position was barely known to the newspapers (the Detective Force being necessarily subtle in its operations, and keen to protect its anonymity), this person must have garnered the information from another source – but one infrequent enough to be unapprised of his recent change in fortune. That is, unless the letter was intended for, and accordingly addressed to, a man who was known as an illustrious investigator.

This thought immediately prompted the logical next: the writer’s reason for sending the letter in the first place. If simply an act of good faith, the mysterious delivery and origins would seem unwarranted. What else was being hidden along with the sender’s identity? Could it be that they had a personal interest in the case which might be served by Mr Williamson solving it?

Following the argument through, the initial insistence that
‘You do not know me
’ was rendered quite unnecessary by the unfamiliar signature and the lack of originating address. Why mention that Mr Williamson did not know the writer when this was self-evident? One assumption was that he did indeed know (or know of) them, and that they had stumbled over their own earnest attempts to disguise this.

An alternative, of course, was that the writer wished simply to disassociate themselves from the case, a supposition reinforced by the phrase
‘nor is it necessary that you do so’
– a curious addition. If true, it suggested that the writer had no personal involvement and that any investigation would not need to touch upon their identity. What, then, was their interest in, and connection to, the two cases?

Admittedly, the whole thing could have been a tasteless hoax. If this were the case, however, it was the most convincing Mr Williamson had ever seen: one full of nuance, and credible because of its complex seeming simplicity. Its insistence on the
‘highest authority’
was intriguing. The high authority of the writer? Or of the source of information? Or of the murderer’s identity?

Mystery then piled upon mystery:
‘You will soon learn as much’
said the letter. Mr Williamson’s first thought was naturally that the writer was assuming he would re-start the investigation and discover the claims to be true. But was a further reading that something would happen shortly to confirm the letter’s veracity? He considered possibly related cases he had worked on recently at the Mendicity Society and could think only of the particularly clever begging-letter writer he had so lately pursued. A connection seemed unlikely.

Whatever else in the letter was dubious, it had indeed been almost exactly seven years since Katherine Williamson had died. True, the incident had caught the attention of the whole city at the time, but how many remembered with such precision one date among many once the newspapers had been thrown away and the next scandal had trodden over the last? Perhaps the letter writer had personally made time to check the date – or perhaps they, too, had some more personal reason to remember it.

A grammatical conundrum next presented itself. Where the letter said
‘this murder . .
.’, was it referring to the murder of Katherine, or, as correct grammar suggested, to the case of Mr Sampson? If the latter were true, this was a stupendous piece of news! What few newspapers that had reported the Holywell-street case had presented it as nothing more than a curious accident. Even so, Mr Williamson, who had spent years considering the facts of his wife’s death, could not immediately discern any conceivable link between the two cases other than the lack of key witnesses and a death by falling.

What, furthermore, was Mr Williamson to make of the odd construction:
‘Follow this murder to its conclusion’.
One might normally speak of a ‘solution’ to a crime, as the writer subsequently did. A ‘conclusion’, on the other hand, almost suggested that the end point had already been arrived at by its perpetrators, or that it was part of a story with a pre-defined ending. Some knowledge clearly stood behind the choice of words, which, in such a carefully evasive letter, were likely not to be purely accidental.

And finally, perhaps the most infuriating mystery of all: who, or what, was
‘Persephone’?
The name meant nothing at all to Mr Williamson. In truth, he did not even feel sure how to pronounce it. Its singularity suggested to him a theatrical
soubriquet,
but he could not recall ever having heard it or read about it in the theatrical sections of the papers. Indeed, he could not have said whether it was male or female, though the hand seemed feminine in his extensive experience. If it
was
the false hand of a skilled forger, it was the best he had ever seen.

In spite of his best efforts, and as dawn cast its weak light through his curtains, Mr Williamson seemed no closer to finally proving the murder of his wife. Infuriated and frustrated by the letter and all it signified, his mind seemed close to exhaustion. Within his hands lay the answer to the mystery of his life – his one unsolved crime – and he was determined to do everything to find the solution. If that meant taking some time off from the Mendicity Society, then so be it; they valued him highly enough to allow him that.

Three avenues of investigation seemed clear. There was the true identity of Persephone, there was the Holywell-street case, and there were the original facts surrounding the death of his wife. He would pursue all three, even if it led him to the very abyss.

At that moment, though, surrounded by his jottings and his memories, sleep mercifully overcame him and he slumped, as he often did, in that chair before the cold ashes of the fire.

His rest was brief enough. He had awoken shortly before lunch, sent a letter to the Secretary of the Mendicity Society requesting a brief leave of absence, and had set about gathering together various editions of the last few days’ newspapers. Saved from their future as kindling, these sheets allowed him to collate the few facts of the Holywell-street case. Naturally, the police would have kept back some key facts for themselves, but there was enough detail in the inquest reports for his keen mind to work upon.

Clearly, the young man who had run away from the scene was the key suspect. The landlady also had many questions to answer. Regarding the latter, there was one colossal barrier to Mr Williamson’s further investigation: he was no longer a policeman.

There was nothing to stop him, as an interested citizen, from questioning anyone he wished, but none had any obligation to answer if they wished otherwise. A less honest man might have pretended to be from the Detective Force, or at least capitalized on the name of the Mendicity Society to extract answers, but Mr Williamson was not that man. If he was caught doing the former, he could find himself fined or in gaol; if the latter, he might lose his one source of income and heap further shame upon his name. Criminality – but for one notable lapse – had always been anathema to his very being.

As he had feared, this state of affairs was proved to be exactly the case as he arrived at Colliver’s coffee house later that evening and sought out the woman herself, who seemed emboldened after her temporary escape from the questioning of Inspector Newsome.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ he had begun, extracting his notebook, ‘I wonder if you would mind me asking you a few questions about the recent incident here.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am merely an interested party. Now – on the night of the incident . . .’

‘I have spoken to the police already. I have nothing else to say to them.’

‘You admitted two gentlemen to the room, the victim and—’

‘Are you from the papers? I have talked to them, too. A load of animals, they were.’

‘Madam, if you would just spare me a moment.’

‘Are you something to do with the law? I am answering no questions to legal sorts.’

‘Please, madam – I will take only a few moments of your time. The matter is a personal one; I am not a journalist, lawyer or policeman.’