The Pierced Heart: A Novel Read online

  Buckingham Street, 16 June

  Dear Dr Sewerin,

  You asked me, when we parted, to write on my return, concerned about my injury and the consequences of so long a confinement in that accursed place. You will be relieved to hear that despite the impatience I expressed at the time, I took your advice and travelled slowly, and so have been in London only two days. But you may rest assured that the wound that alarmed you so much is healing—no small thanks to your own timely care, even if I was too crazed by fever to show my gratitude at the time. The effects of my enforced seclusion will, I fear, be of longer duration. You know the place, and do not need me to describe its horrors. Had I not met you, by chance, that morning in the forest, I might never have escaped them. You alone could guess where they had taken me, and you alone had the authority to act on that knowledge, and have me, at last, released. I will be forever in your debt, and it is a debt I would be honoured to redeem, if ever you decide to visit England.

  I have told no-one here of what befell me, and I have not yet decided what I should tell my paymasters. It is, after all, a tale so—

  He stops, pen in mid-air. He has said little—nothing, indeed—of what he endured all those weeks in the asylum, as if refusing to frame it in words might help expunge it from his mind. But the images, when they come, are unrelenting. Waking up in that place and knowing it for what it was. And then, day after day, night after night, the stench of urine, the wailing of the demented, and the pitiful shouting of those imprisoned by mistake, or malice. The chains biting into his wrists and ankles, and the whimpering of the man shackled likewise to the next bed, huddled and rocking, hour by endless hour. And worse than any of these, the silent attendants standing every morning on either side of his bed, wrenching his jaws open and pouring the bitter gruel between his teeth, after which he would lie for hours, half-dazed, staring at the stained and seeping ceiling, trying to force his mother’s face from his mind, telling himself that he is not insane—telling himself that this is not his family curse—that it is not his punishment for allowing Elizabeth to be lost—

  The sound of the doorbell downstairs breaks into his thoughts, and he listens intently for a moment, before quietly resuming his task. It is five minutes and more before there is a knock on his attic door and Billy’s pink face appears around it.

  “Mr Wheeler to see yer, Mr Charles. Sergeant Wheeler, now, should I say.”

  Charles sits back; he was not expecting his old colleague today—indeed any day—and he wonders if it is purely a social call. Half his heart will be happy to see him, and glad for his promotion, but Sam is far too sharp not to realise something serious has happened, and Charles is not sure yet if he has a story that will stand inspection. “Show him to the office,” he says eventually, getting to his feet. “And ask Nancy to make us some coffee.”

  Sam hates coffee, Charles knows that well enough, but it serves as a way of dismissing the boy and avoiding his shrewd Cockney stare as Charles shuffles down the stairs like a stiff old man.

  By the time he gets to the office Sam is happily ensconced, his feet up on the desk, eating an apple. He gets up smartly when he sees Charles and comes over to shake him by the hand, but he notices Charles’s injury at once—just as Charles knew he would.

  “How did that ’appen?” he asks, as Charles lowers himself painfully into the hard wooden chair.

  “I’m afraid I had a less-than-cordial encounter with one of my host’s guard-dogs.”

  Sam eyes him, chewing. “And there were me finking it were a nice easy number you’d got yerself. All expenses paid and a little ’oliday thrown in besides. So that were why you were away so long? Yer uncle didn’t seem to know when I called ’ere last week.”

  Charles nods, avoiding his gaze. “It took longer to heal than expected. And then I could not travel as quickly as I should have liked.”

  That’s not the half of it, Sam guesses that at once, but this is a friend not a felon, and he knows better than to press him. If he needs to know, Charles will tell him in his own good time. And in any case, this is not, as it turns out, a social call.

  “It were the Inspector as asked me to come. Inspector Rowlandson. ’E thought you might be able to ’elp us. ’Cause we’re stumped wiv this one, Chas, I don’t mind telling yer.”

  There’s no mistaking the bafflement on Sam’s round and likeable face as he starts to explain, though at first Charles is hard put to understand why, so ordinary does his story sound.

  “Two bodies were found about a month back—both girls, and both wivvin a coupl’a days. First was in the lake in St James’s Park, the next in an alley round the back of Shepherd’s Market, dead a good few days, the doctor said. And then there was anovver, about a week later, no more ’an a few yards away from where we found the second one. Reckon she’d been there quite a while, judging by the state of ’er. None of ’em much more ’an skin ’n bone, and all of ’em dollymops. You could tell by what they was wearin’. The ’igh-ups are terrified it might get out that there’s some sort’a madman loose in London attackin’ women. We’ve put more blokes on patrol but to be ’onest we just don’t have the men to spare.”

  “Well,” begins Charles, “I can appreciate their concern, but there are a lot of strangers in town for the Exhibition, and girls like that are easy pickings. Regrettable, but hardly unusual, surely. We must have seen dozens like that in our time—”

  Sam finishes his apple and tosses the core into the wastepaper basket. His face is grave. “As far as I recall we never saw none with their ’eads cut off. And not just cut off but nowhere to be found neever.”

  Charles stares at him, not knowing what to say. Sam puts a hand through his stiff carrot brush of hair and sighs. “And that weren’t all. It were weird—like nuffin’ I’d ever seen before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They all ’ad a great huge cavity, right ’ere, in the chest. It weren’t just the ’eads that were gone—the ’earts ’ad been taken out, too. To be frank wiv yer we didn’t realise quite what it was wiv the first one—after all she’d been in the drink so we just assumed—”

  “Assumed what?”

  Sam flushes a little. “Well, that she musta been ’it by somefing in the water. Come on, Chas, we all know what the river can do to bodies. ’Alf-mashed, some of ’em I’ve seen.”

  Charles shakes his head. “But that’s down to the debris, and the current. Neither of which applies to the lake in St James’s Park.”

  “That’s what the quack said, too. And now there’s been two more wiv exactly the same. So what do you fink it means, ’cause ’e ain’t got a bloody clue.”

  Charles looks at him thoughtfully. “Are the bodies still in the morgue?”

  Sam nods. He knows Charles of old, and knows he will want to see the evidence with his own eyes. “The last one’s still there. ’Ad to bury the first two—can’t keep ’em ’anging around too long in this ’eat. But I asked ’em to keep the last one as long as they could in case you wanted to see ’er.”

  The door opens then and Nancy edges carefully in with the heavy tray. Sam winks at her and makes as if to pinch her bottom, and as she dodges away the coffee slops from the pot and spills onto the floor.

  “Now look what you’ve made me do!” she cries, but she’s not really angry, and Sam knows it. Charles watches a slightly pink-cheeked Nancy put the tray down on the desk and start fussing with a cloth, not meeting his gaze, and he wonders suddenly how many times Sam has been round to the house recently, and whether it was really enquiring about Charles that drew him, or some other motive entirely. He finds himself smiling then—if Sam can overlook Nancy’s past, and Nancy can find someone who will care for her and love her daughter, then who is Charles to deny them, especially now Sam has a wage that could support a family.

  The Strand is thick with Exhibition crowds, all pouring the same way and most with little “London learning” as to the best way to move efficiently in a mob, so it’s heavy going in th
e heat until they reach the Haymarket and can strike north at their own stride. Here the pace is more sedate, with top-hatted courtiers strolling in ponderous pairs, and the occasional nursemaid with a perambulator and neatly starched small child. All of which is a very far cry from the gloom and the stink that greet them in the Vine Street police-station morgue. Charles has been here before, of course, many times, when he was still a policeman, but it’s an aspect of the job he always hated, and never more so than when it was the body of a child he was there to inspect. Or, as in this case, a barely teenage girl with no other choice but sell her body or starve. There’s a mortuary assistant swilling a bucket of water over the stone flags, and two more sweeping the floor with brooms thick with sodden human hair, but none of it is doing anything to dispel the reek of putrefaction in the suffocating underground room, screened from the street and snooping by windows painted green and running with moisture (paint, incidentally, so saturated with arsenic that some of the attendants here will not be long in joining those they attend upon). The lamps are lit to dispel the underwaterish murk, and the air is alive with flies. There are half a dozen corpses on the slabs, all in different stages of decomposition, as Charles quickly deduces from those body parts that protrude from the soiled sheets, and the slow drip of fluids onto the floor. Sam goes to find the supervisor, and when the three of them gather about the body they have come to see, and the sheet is lifted from her naked form, the hot stench that rushes to the back of Charles’s throat has him retching like a woman or a raw recruit. Breathe through your mouth, he scolds himself, his handkerchief clamped to his face, and concentrate.

  This beheading is no amateur job, he sees that at once. The neck has been expertly sliced in one arcing cut, and the knife, Charles suspects, was bought express for the purpose—no kitchen implement this, for it has scythed through the flesh like a butcher’s blade, or a surgeon’s saw. But there is one thing Charles did not expect—this corpse should not look like this—not after three weeks, not in this heat. By now she should be bloated, oozing, the skin splitting, the nails falling away. But she lies there, still all but intact, still—almost—human. And there’s only one way Charles can explain that.

  “Was there a lot of blood, where you found her?”

  Sam shakes his head, his voice muffled by his own handkerchief. “Funny you should ask—there weren’t no blood there at all. We assoomed he must’a done ’er somewhere else and dumped the body after.”

  “And the others—what did they look like—did they look especially pale to you?”

  Sam considers. “They was very pale, now you come to mention it. But I guess that’s not so surprisin’, given they’d ’ad their ’eads cut off.”

  Charles shakes his head. “You don’t bleed to death if you die that way. The heart stops within a few moments. This girl has lost far more blood than that. I just can’t understand how.”

  Charles looks again at the girl’s body. The pitiful thin legs and the skim of pubic hair. She was scarcely more than a child. He lifts first one hand and then the other, seeing fingernails torn by what was in all likelihood a desperate struggle against death, and marks of bruising about the wrists. She was constrained then, either by hand or tie.

  “And you never found the heads?” he says eventually.

  Sam shrugs. “To be honest, we weren’t really lookin’. If ’e’d killed ’em somewhere else they could be anywhere from ’ere to Whitechapel. But you’re sayin’ he might ’ave done it there, in the Market? It ain’t very likely, surely. I mean, ’ow could someone get away wiv doin’ somefing like this out in the open—right in the centre of bloody London?”

  “I’m not so sure,” says Charles, lifting one of the girl’s hands again. “You could get away with it, if it was in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning. And if you were as expert a butcher as this killer appears to be. And in any case look at this—here, under her fingernails. I’m pretty sure that’s rat faeces,” he says, as Sam first bends to look then backs smartly away. “I think that means this girl died exactly where you found her, in that alley. I think she was on the ground as he attacked her, and at some point she tried desperately to crawl away.”

  “So where do you fink the ’eads are? Did ’e take ’em? Like some sort o’ resurrection man?”

  “I don’t think so. A whole body would have been far more valuable, so why leave so much behind. And in any case it’s a dying trade. There just isn’t the demand for cadavers anymore, not since the Anatomy Act.”

  “So why then? Why does ’e do it?”

  Charles takes a ragged breath. “Because I think he takes pleasure in it.”

  Back out on the street, the strolling crowds are enjoying the sunshine, and the pub opposite the police-station has all its windows open, and paying pundits spilling (in some cases literally) onto the pavements. The air is full of shouts and laughter and the tinny repetition of a barrel-organ somewhere nearby. Charles suggests a quick pint, if only to wash the taste of death from their mouths, but for perhaps the first time ever Sam shakes his head in a quick no, saying he needs to report back to Rowlandson. The two part on a handshake, and as Charles watches Sam go whistling back up the street, he’s suddenly aware that he’s being observed. At the head of the alley at the side of the pub, where even the midday sun cannot reach, a man is watching. Watching and, it seems, waiting, for it is only when Sam is out of sight and earshot that he spits into the gutter, adjusts his collar, and saunters slowly forwards.

  “Mr Maddox,” he says, in a languid, musical Irish drawl.

  He does not offer his hand, and Charles doesn’t, either. But the two of them have clearly met, for Charles inclines his head in the briefest of nods. “O’Riordan. What do you want?”

  A wink then, and a smile that lifts only one side of his mouth. “Why, information, Mr Maddox. Don’t I always?”

  “I don’t think I should be talking to the press—for a start I’m not official any more, as well you know—”

  That smile again, and Charles can smell the stout now, too. “Well, wouldn’t that be the very reason I wanted to speak to you. Because you, as we might say, are cognisant without being obeisant, like yon wee Sam there.”

  Charles bridles. “Wheeler is an excellent policeman.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but the more admirable he is as a copper, the less use he is to me. He will feel bound to keep his mouth shut and his nose clean, especially with that nice shiny badge he has so very recently acquired. You, on the other hand, are free to apply judgement, and discretion, and—”

  “Don’t waste your breath flattering me, O’Riordan.”

  A shrug. “Will I be wasting my money offering you some liquid refreshment in this fine establishment here?”

  “Smells like you’ve had plenty already.”

  “Well, you took your time, didn’t you? Which is hardly surprising. In the circumstances.”

  “I’m not thirsty,” says Charles, turning away, but O’Riordan grabs his arm. “Look,” he hisses, and now all that Irish charm is fled, “I know all about it. Those whores with their heads cut off and their hearts cut out. First murdered, then mutilated, and their body parts scattered God knows where. Three, is it, now, or four? How many more before Bow Street owns up and admits what’s going on? How much longer before this town is gripped by a terror the like of which it has never known before? Because it will all come out, you know. Sooner or later. The tarts are talking, and you and I both know what that means. Better, surely, the police has a chance to present its case—prove what it’s doing to catch this fiend before more women die.”

  “I wouldn’t listen to every tale a whore tells you,” says Charles quickly, flushing a little despite himself. “It’s just some pimp—some street thug—”

  O’Riordan smiles. “Nice try, but you’re not going to fob me off that easily. I know you’ve seen those marks on the bodies, and I know you know what they mean. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate, not with where you’ve been spen
ding your time of late—”

  Charles stares at him for a moment, then looks away. A gesture O’Riordan clearly takes—or mistakes—for acknowledgement.

  “Look, Maddox, I’m no fool, and I’m no dupe, either. I know it sounds crazy—like something out of folklore or a bloody freak show—but if there’s another rational explanation, well I for one would like to hear it.”

  Charles is still silent, still staring resolutely into the middle distance; his face is motionless but his brain is in wheels.

  O’Riordan nods. “All right, have it your own way. If you change your mind, you know where to find me. But if there’s another—if that latest tart isn’t the last—”

  Charles glances quickly at him.

  O’Riordan’s eyes narrow. “Let’s just say I can’t sit on a story like this forever.”

  And then he spits again and walks away up the street.

  Charles turns towards the pub and shoulders half-blindly through the lunchtime crowd to the door, leaving at least one disgruntled customer splashed with drink. Inside, the taproom is loud and rowdy but he scarcely notices either the noise or the slightly stale beer the landlord clatters down in front of him. What the hell did O’Riordan mean? Whoever it was who killed those girls, he was flesh and blood, not some make-believe ogre out of a child’s nightmare. And what about that reference to where Charles has been? Was O’Riordan suggesting some madman committed those crimes—some escapee from a lunatic asylum? But how can the man possibly know about that? Charles has told no-one, not even Sam, not even Maddox. His heart is beating now, in fear of betrayal, but he tells himself he’s jumping to conclusions. There’s absolutely no way O’Riordan could have found out what happened to him in Melk. Though what he might know, Charles thinks, suddenly alert, is that he’s been on the Continent—that he is only just returned from Austria. It’s quite possible that news of that trip got round. So is that what he meant? And if you add that to the reference to folklore—