The Detective and the Devil (6 page)

The dressing table had three drawers with locks, all of which were open. In one of the locks there was a key attached to a heavy-feeling gold chain. Again, it had been left untouched. The clasp
of the chain was broken, and there was a tangle of blonde hair wrapped within it. Horton opened the drawer. It was empty. He opened the other two drawers, and saw they contained an untidy
collection of letters and bills.

He imagined Mrs Johnson sitting here while her husband sat in his own little office, poring over his own books and correspondence, while their daughter slept in the other bedroom.

He placed the key in his pocket and went out of the bedroom, and into the third little room. He had seen the small bureau as described by Amy Beavis on his first visit to the house. The room was
as calm and tidy as everything else in this place. The desk of a City clerk, and a meticulous one at that.

He tried the lid, expecting to feel his fingernails bend against its unyielding weight. But to his surprise it opened. It was unlocked.

Within, no letters remained to be sent, or even to be read. Benjamin Johnson had not been disturbed in any work here. The desk had an end-of-day appearance, as if a careful man had tidied up his
place of work after its completion. A quill lay next to an inkpot and some paper. Three books sat in an orderly pile. At the top of the pile was the first volume of the Reverend Daniel Lyons’
The Environs of London
. Beneath that sat a thin and rather old volume with a grand frontispiece written in Latin, and, perhaps, in Greek. He had neither language. The final volume was also
thin, but more recently published, it would seem. It bore the title
Mathematicall Preface
, and its pages were much scribbled upon. The author of this book was given as ‘Dr John
Dee’, a name which tickled at the edges of his memory, but did no more.

It was an eclectic set of titles. He picked the books up. They felt heavy in his hands and oddly warm, as if Johnson’s reading of them had left behind some memory of itself. He noticed
that pages had been torn out of one of the books,
The Environs of London
. He put the books in a satchel he had brought with him, and then turned to the final object in the room, the one he
had been avoiding until now.

The maul leaned against the wall under the window, exactly where he had found it the night before. As if it were on guard. Horton picked it up in both hands, felt its malignant weight and
inspected its face and handle, remembering that other maul which he himself had retrieved from number 29.

But that maul, the property of a sailor, had been old and worn. The handle of this one was shiny and new, and although its flat face was too covered in the matter which once constituted the mind
of Benjamin Johnson, its pick-axe face was untouched and clean. The maul was brand new.

An unlocked drawer. A pile of books. A terrible instrument. Clean floors and walls. The stories of the house whirled round his head while he stood in front of the window holding the maul, as if
he might smash his way outside.

The day after their aborted theatre trip, Abigail walked to St Luke’s hospital at Moorfields. For three months now she had been working at the place, unpaid, as a nurse.
The job was part of a careful effort to place her feet back down on the normal earth and begin her life anew.

The previous year, she had taken herself to a madhouse, Brooke House in Hackney. She had been plagued at that time by terrible dreams, and these dreams had begun to bleed into her waking hours,
such that she could barely leave the rooms she shared with Charles in Lower Gun Alley in Wapping. Her mind had become an unreliable and tearaway thing, and she had been forced to mislead her
husband in order to get it seen to.

She had come out of Brooke House cured, or at least it had appeared so to her. The dreams had ceased. They had been replaced, though, by a lingering discomfort with her memories of the madhouse,
which were murky at best and in some instances, it appeared to her, full of queasy blanks. She went in disturbed (she avoided the word ‘mad’, even when thinking to herself) and she came
out relatively calm. Of what happened in between she had little idea.

It was this as much as anything that had taken her to St Luke’s, the great asylum formed the previous century by William Battie and intended to be a progressive and humane place for the
treatment of madness. Its great rival in all matters relating to mad-doctoring was Bethlem, which had just moved to an enormous new building in Lambeth, such that these gargantuan temples to the
infirmities of the mind seemed to bracket the metropolis, to pinch it between their stone fingers.

Abigail had worked as a nurse at St Thomas’s before she ever met her husband, so her skills were in some demand at St Luke’s, but she never asked for any money, nor was it ever
offered to her. St Luke’s provided her with something more valuable – an education in madness, and access to its investigators.

She watched the inmates while she cared for them, and tried to understand their lunacies: their manias, their melancholies, their hysteria. She spoke to the nurses and, when she could, she spoke
to the senior doctor at the place, whose name was Drysdale, and who had taken a particular interest in this intelligent woman who worked for nothing and asked such penetrating questions about
mental disorder.

He had become particularly interested when she mentioned Brooke House during one of her early visits. He knew something of the place, of its own Dr Monro and its former consulting physician, Dr
Bryson.

‘I have heard strange stories about the place,’ Dr Drysdale had said to her.

Abigail had not heard stories, but she had imagined them.

‘They say Bryson was involved in some odd investigations there. Involving mesmerism.’

‘Mesmerism?’ Abigail asked.

‘Yes, though I cannot think why a qualified doctor would indulge in such quackery. It is said Bryson had come to believe that one might be able to guide another’s thoughts using a
species of mesmerism. He called it
moral projection
. Did he speak to you of it?’

‘I . . . I do not recall.’

‘You do not recall his theories? Or you do not recall the doctor?’

This seemed an oddly penetrating question, and Abigail found herself wondering if Drysdale might help her understand things from the previous year somewhat better.

‘I do not recall the theories. The doctor . . . Well, I recall
a doctor
, of course. But none of his details. His face, his voice, how he treated me. None of it.’

‘That is most odd. Mrs Horton, I wonder if you would indulge me.’

‘In what way, doctor?’

‘I would like to examine you, in the mental sense. When you are here, perhaps we could spend some time talking about Brooke House and your memories of it. I am fascinated by the odd wisps
of rumour I have heard. Bryson’s theories, while fantastic, do in some way overlap with some of my own ideas. You are an intelligent woman who may have experienced something unique. Might I
make use of your brain, as it were?’

Drysdale had smiled when he said this, and while Abigail found his request odd, she also discovered she wanted to know more of what had happened to her. Wasn’t that why she had come to St
Luke’s in the first place? She would learn by talking to the inmates, and Drysdale would learn by talking to her, and who could say? Perhaps they would both learn things of interest.

So she fell into a pattern of working at the hospital and being spoken to, once or twice a week, by Drysdale in his consulting rooms. They spoke of many things – of her past, of her
husband, of her terrible dreams and of her oddly fractured memories of Brooke House. Some things that had happened there began to reveal themselves; other things stayed hidden. But she found her
intellect reviving and her mind calming under the regular activity, like a weakened leg recovering from injury. Charles knew of her working days at St Luke’s, of course, but she did not share
with him those sessions with Drysdale, because she knew his concern would be painful to her.

Abigail Horton had returned from St Luke’s and was reading inside the apartment, which she had freshly cleaned, when her husband returned from his work. He was still
wearing the clothes he had put on the previous day for their trip to the theatre. Indeed, she smelled him first rather than saw him.

‘Good afternoon, husband,’ she said, looking back down to her book. ‘How was the magistrate?’

He kissed her, and sniffed her hair as he often did, holding the curve of her skull in his hand, such that she wondered if he thought he could cradle the mind inside, protect it from its old
disturbances. Abigail lifted one hand from her book and placed it on his forearm, with an affectionate squeeze.

‘What is your book?’ he asked.

She smiled.

‘Ah, so you will give no answer on the magistrate. Keep it to yourself, then. It is a recent novel. By a woman named Austen.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’

‘I do. I like to read of clever people living in circumstances different to ours. Her world is full of wealthy soldiers and summer rain. She writes beautifully. I would like to meet
her.’

‘You sound besotted.’

‘Besotted? No. Intrigued by another woman’s voice.’

‘And does Mrs Austen make dinner for her husband?’

‘I would be surprised if she were married. She seems to find men oddly amusing creatures. I cannot think why. Wash yourself. You smell disgusting. I will prepare you some food instead of
writing my own novel.’

She stood and went into the little kitchen and looked out of the window into the street outside while she worked. Some boys were playing an elaborate game down there, watched by a fellow puffing
on a pipe. He shouted something to them and they laughed and scattered.

She went back into the parlour with a pot which she placed on the fire. She set a tray down beside his chair – a plate with bread and jam and a bowl of apples she had bought that morning.
Charles sat down to eat. Abigail returned to her book, and for a few minutes there was peace and a comfortable silence.

Abigail looked up from her book, and noted that her husband was in his turn looking at her. She examined him. Abigail was widely read in matters relating to chemistry, botany and anatomy. She
could, she believed, cut open his chest and take out his heart. She would hold it in her hand and watch it beating, but she would still have little idea of what it contained.

‘My husband has the stench of consideration about him,’ she said. ‘Which means my husband is working. Even while he sits with me.’

‘You are a more skilled investigator than I, wife.’

‘I think not. You are a dedicated sniffer of secrets. How goes this new case?’

‘It is a sad one. I do not wish to labour your peace with discussion of it.’

‘You do not? Do I have no say in the matter?’

She smiled as she said it, but there was a deliberate edge to her words. She wished to talk of the case, whatever her husband thought.

‘Well then. The case has some unique aspects, but the most remarkable of them is its similarity to the Marr and Williamson killings. There is a good deal of panic in the neighbourhood that
the same killer has returned.’

Abigail was no longer smiling, and the mention of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter chilled the air in the room, but she was listening closely. He continued.

‘The whole family was slaughtered: father, wife, daughter. The man was in the kitchen, laid out on his front. The mother was face down in the grate. The daughter was tied to a chair, her
throat cut. All the family members seem to have been attacked with a maul.’

She was distracted by the awful details. She had asked him, almost a year ago, that he share such details of his work when she requested it: ‘However grim, I wish to hear it.’ When
he had asked why, she had said she needed to test her own mind, to ensure its hardiness. It was a fragment of the same experimental regime which had been taking her to St Luke’s. It involved
frequent prods at her sensibility and understanding, probing for weak spots. She knew it made Charles uncomfortable.

‘Benjamin Johnson was the name of the husband and father,’ Charles continued. ‘He was a clerk with the East India Company. I spoke to the maidservant this morning, at her
father’s lodgings in Spitalfields. The maid told me Mrs Johnson and her daughter had been taking the air down in Brighton in the fortnight before their deaths. Mr Johnson had joined them
there shortly after they left, saying his daughter had been taken ill.’

‘His employer let him go?’

‘I imagine so. I have not yet spoken to anyone at the Company.’

‘John Company, they call it. Or the HEIC. H as in Honourable. And as I hear it, taking time off in such a way could be grounds for dismissal. The Company is not renowned for its treatment
of its clerks.’

‘You hear a lot, wife.’

‘Well, it is books that I hear it from. They speak, in their own manner. So, Johnson took some time off work, and in that time somebody killed him, his wife, and his daughter. The
maidservant saw nothing?’

‘No. She was told to visit the house every third day. She did so, and on one of these visits she discovered the bodies. And then, there is this.’

He took the gold chain out of his pocket, and handed it to Abigail. She held it in her cupped hands as if it were liquid that might run through her fingers.

‘The wife’s?’

‘Yes. It locked a drawer in her dressing table. The drawer was itself empty.’

‘My God, Charles, is that her hair on it?’

‘Yes.’

Abigail gazed upon the gold chain and the hair wound within it.

‘The clasp is broken. Like it was torn from her neck.’

‘Such was my reckoning also.’

‘A woman with a key around her neck. A key to an open drawer. A woman with secrets, Charles.’

‘Indeed. Secrets which someone else now possesses.’

‘Was she killed for these secrets?’

‘That is my task to uncover.’

‘Shall we keep this here?’

‘Yes – I imagine you have some secret place of your own in which it will be safe.’