Murder (6 page)

We said our farewells and I left them sifting through the little evidence they had. In truth, although of course I was not glad that Miss Camp was dead, I was happy for the distraction. Edward Kane had returned from his business in Southampton and was once again spending time in Juliana and little James’ company. Although he had not yet asked me outright for my verdict on the letters he had given me, I could feel his eyes searching mine when we met. I had managed thus far to avoid being alone with him, which meant that I had often declined dinner invitations, or left early on the pretext of work or a paper to finish, and this in turn had led to a little jealousy on my part over the amount of time Kane was spending alone with Juliana. She remained affectionate towards me, of course, and there were still times when I dined with her alone, but it was becoming clear that something in Kane’s nature – perhaps the same natural good humour that had
attracted James Harrington to him – was having a revitalising effect on Juliana. She had begun to laugh more freely, and her eyes sparkled at times, just as they had when I’d first met her.

I was not sure how that made me feel. I was glad that she was happier, but I could not deny that I wished very much that Kane would just go back to America and leave us to be happy together, alone – and perhaps then I would have the courage to ask her to become my wife.

Still, the Elizabeth Camp murder had given me the excuse I needed to avoid any conversation about the letters and to start seeing more of Juliana again: I could tell Kane that I had started them but not yet finished, and now the inquest was taking up so much of my time I could not spare any to focus on the letters right now. It was perhaps a little weak as excuses go, but Kane was a gentleman and he would not push me. I, on the other hand, might be able to start gently pushing him to one side, to ensure that Juliana’s fondness for him did not grow during my absence.

And so it was with a slight spring in my step that I came out of the police station, my thoughts on happier things than poor Miss Camp’s battered body.

‘Dr Bond!’ Newsmen all had the same tone, I had learned over years of working alongside the police: a blend of aggression and hunger as they vocally jostled for attention. ‘Dr Bond! Just a minute of your time, please. What can you tell us about Elizabeth Camp’s death? Do you think the killer will strike again?’

I scanned the street for a hansom, but luck was not with me.

‘I’m afraid I have to get back to Westminster.’ I turned, irritated, and stared at the reporter. ‘You should direct your
questions to Superintendent Robinson of the railway police.’

‘I expect I should.’ The man grinned. ‘But I helped you before, Dr Bond – in the vault at Whitehall, remember? Thought maybe you could return the favour.’

I stared for a long moment before suddenly I recognised Jasper Waring, the reporter who had persuaded Henry Moore to let his dog search the vault of the building at New Scotland Yard where the torso had been found. The dog had done better than the police bloodhounds, for it had uncovered an arm and a leg.

‘Smoker,’ I said, the dog’s name coming from somewhere buried deep in my subconscious. ‘How is he?’

‘Dead a couple of years.’ Waring lit a cigarette and offered me one, but I shook my head. ‘He was a good dog – won’t be another like him.’

‘He did well for us, I won’t deny.’ I looked around once again for a hansom, not entirely sure how to continue this conversation. The past had become determined to engulf me of late, and Jasper Waring and his terrier belonged in my memory and not my present. ‘But I’m afraid I still cannot divulge any of my findings to you with regard to Miss Camp’s death.’

‘It was worth a try, though.’ He grinned again, and I could not help but smile back. He had not aged, and I wondered if chasing the news somehow made men immune – it was as if they remained untouched, impartial observers of life.

‘Savage, wasn’t it?’ he continued. ‘Reminds me a bit of Jack – attacking a woman like that, with no motive, in a public place. No wonder people are scared.’

His light tone did not deceive me. He was trying to lure me into revealing something.

‘As I said,’ I commented dryly, ‘you will need to address your questions to the Superintendent, or attend the inquest.’

He laughed, a warm earthy sound. ‘Right you are, Doctor. Right you are. And I don’t blame you fellows for not wanting another Jack on our streets. I know how hard you and that other doctor worked.’

Finally a hansom rounded the street and I waved him down.

‘I worried about him for a while, if I’m honest,’ Waring continued. ‘Walking the streets of Whitechapel like that – those dead women must’ve right haunted him.’

I had only been half-listening, but at that I frowned. ‘I’m sorry? Who was walking the streets?’

‘That other doctor – Hebbert. I saw him, scruffed down a bit, but definitely him. Saw him a couple of times. We were always out that way during that time, had to be really. Sometimes I forget how much you surgeons help the police – and the things you see … Well, you must have strong stomachs, that’s all I can say.’

‘Yes,’ I said, forcing a smile onto my face as a chill settled into my stomach, ‘I suppose we must.’ I pulled the cab door open and tipped my hat at him. ‘Well, I bid you good day, Mister Waring, and I wish you good luck with the Superintendent.’

I kept the smile until I’d sat back in the seat and the wheels were rolling underneath me, and then it dropped like a stone. What had Charles Hebbert been doing in Whitechapel during that time? Had he been taking the opium too? If so, it was highly unlikely that our paths had not crossed, for though the periodicals might imply otherwise, the streets of London were not teeming with dens. I had been a regular poppy smoker myself at that time, and I was sure if Charles had been the
same, then I would have discovered it – or at the very least, I would have seen the signs.

Why did my heart beat so fast? Surely it could have been as Waring himself had suggested: Charles was simply scouring the streets to find some clue as to who might be perpetrating the terrible crimes. But I knew Charles – he was curious, but he was no policeman, and nor was he like me, a man with an interest in analysing the behaviours of others. He was a surgeon, and involved only in the meat of the matter.

As the shadows gathered in my mind, I cursed Jasper Waring for calling after me, for throwing more of the past at my feet: a heavy slab of darkness I wished so badly to forget.

By the time I reached home, Mrs Parks had my dinner ready, a fine roast pork, but I pushed it around my plate, barely picking at it, until eventually I declared I had work to do in my study and left the table. I could not breathe under her scrutiny. She was a good, honest woman but she remembered well how I had behaved those few years ago when my sleep failed me and madness came calling. My appetite had vanished first, and I was sure she kept one eye on me for signs of the malady’s return.

‘I ate a large lunch, I’m afraid,’ I said as I passed her in the doorway, all too aware of her disapproving eye falling on my full plate, ‘but the meat will serve for a cold supper later.’

‘As you wish,’ she said, and I thought I could hear her disapprobation as I ducked away from her and climbed the stairs, making a mental note to come down before bed and throw the meat out for the cats. I told myself this was so as not to hurt her feelings, but in my heart I knew it was because Mrs Parks could – with one withering stare – turn me in an instant back into an awkward, ashamed boy.

I sat in my study and gazed out at the gathering night. The glare of my desk-lamp on the glass of the window trapped a ghostly, intangible world of reflection, where everything was not quite as it should be.

Charles Hebbert had been walking the streets of Whitechapel during the Jack murders. I did not doubt Waring’s words, for he had no reason to lie. Charles had been different then, I recalled that much: he had been drinking and despondent – and what was it he had said to me one night? I glanced over at the window again. He had used a particular phrase,
Wickedness through the windows
, or something like that, and talked of bad dreams of terrible bloody things. I thought too of Harrington, as much as I wished not to. Many of the police – Henry Moore and Andrews included – had believed a surgeon could have been responsible for the deaths, even though we had firmly believed that it was unlikely. Could Charles have had suspicions that his son-in-law was Jack the Ripper? Harrington
was
killing women at that time, so perhaps Charles had come to believe he might be responsible for the Ripper deaths? Maybe that was why he had not been forthcoming with information when it was discovered that Elizabeth Jackson had lived in the same street as Harrington’s family home when it would have been more natural to mention such a thing?

I poured myself a brandy and calmed a little. That must have been it: he was simply suspicious. There was nothing strange about that, after all.

*

It was later, in the depth of the night, that I woke sweating and gasping from my sleep. My bedclothes had tangled around me and I fought free of them as if they were a live thing trying to drag me down into some unknown hell. Perhaps they did. The
dream that had woken me had already evaporated, but my dry mouth was bitter with its echo and my heart pounded.

Two things emerged in my mind from that subconscious wandering in my sleep. The first was that on the night that Alice McKenzie, the last of Jack’s victims, had died, I had dined with James Harrington. It was not a night I would ever forget, despite how hard I had tried. It was the night I had taken the strange opium and seen the
Upir
crawling up over his shoulder. Charles Hebbert had not been there. He had been dining at his club with colleagues.

The second thing that crawled, dark and uninvited, to the forefront of my thinking was something the priest had said: that Jack was simply a by-product of the
Upir
, part of the mayhem that followed in its wake.

I turned on a lamp, relishing in the glow of the light that returned the shapes that hulked threateningly in the gloom to simply objects of familiar furniture. I could not allow myself to be sucked back into the way I thought in that time. However real the things I had seen might have appeared to be, I knew that they could not exist. Harrington had been a killer; all else was simply drug-induced madness. There had been no
Upir
, and therefore Charles Hebbert could not have been affected by his proximity to it. The idea was simply absurd. The dawning realisation that I was even considering my old friend to be a Jack suspect made me feel as if I was once again hovering on the precipice of insanity.

There was only one thing I could do: I must prove to myself that Charles was innocent of these crimes. I would arrange a dinner at his club with him. That would be my first move. I would not think of the priest or the hairdresser or the
Upir
. I would do what I did best: work with the presented facts.

‘Do you live near a river in New York?’

‘Sure I do. The Hudson River runs right around the city – but I’ve never done this in New York, though.’ Edward Kane looked down at the small boy beside him and grinned. ‘And make sure those trousers stay rolled up. We’ll both be in big trouble with your mother if those get ruined.’

‘Maybe it’s the same river,’ James said. His cheeks were rosy in the crisp air as he crouched and rummaged in the wet mud revealed by the low tide and pulled out a large black pebble to add to the collection of odds and ends he’d put in his small pail. ‘Maybe it goes all the way from here to there.’

‘Maybe it does, son. Maybe it does.’ He took the boy’s hand and they walked further along towards the old steps that led up to the pavement and houses. ‘We need to head back. I’ve got to go for dinner with your grandfather and Dr Bond.’ He looked down at his own rolled-up trouser legs and muddy shoes and winked. ‘And I don’t think they’d like it if I showed up like this, do you?’

James giggled and shook his head. He sniffed in the breeze. ‘Why doesn’t Mother like the river? Should I not like it too?’

It was a small question, but so heavily loaded. Kane knew how protective Juliana was over her son. He’d seen enough evidence of it – the home-schooling, the distrust of strangers around him, and most definitely her insistence on keeping
him away from the river. Given how the boy’s father had died, that was no real surprise, but he wondered if she realised how much damage her cosseting could be causing. There were many gifts a parent could give to a child, but their own fears should not be one of them.

‘Rivers are beautiful. You know why I have one in my city and you have one in yours?’ The boy’s big blue eyes looked up at him as if he were the font of all knowledge. ‘Because rivers bring life,’ he continued. ‘They link people. Because of the river, products from all over the world can get to London easily. Your family business brings in produce from as far away as the Indies to the very heart of the city. Between the rivers and the oceans, and now the railways, we are bringing the world together.’ He paused, and then bent down and looked James in the eye as he said seriously, ‘But water can be dangerous. There are strong tides and currents that can drag you away. Plants grow on the bottom that can tangle you and pull you down. The thing with rivers is that you have to treat them with respect – as long as you do that, there’s no reason to be afraid of them. I’ve spent some of the best summers of my childhood messing around on rivers. But I was always careful.’

‘Did you go out in a rowing boat?’

‘Sure I did.’

‘Can we go in a rowing boat one day?’

‘As long as I can persuade your mother,’ Kane said.

‘Uncle Thomas never takes me on the river. I think he hates it as much as she does.’ James paused. ‘Uncle Thomas doesn’t play with me very much.’

‘He’s a very busy man,’ Edward said, ‘and he works very hard. But I know he loves you.’

They climbed the slick steps in a comfortable silence and left the river behind.