Babbitt stared at the cracked and opened top of the egg. He’d once seen a head that had looked very much like that. Been responsible, in fact, for a head that looked very much like that. A troublesome juror who’d taken a very generous bribe but then made the foolish mistake of being greedy and asking for more.
That job had been one of the more satisfying ones. The man was rotten to the core.
‘Everything all right, Mr Babbitt, sir?’
He looked up at the waiter. ‘Yes, yes, quite fine. The egg is done to perfection, thank you.’
He’d decided to take breakfast this morning in The Grantham Hotel’s morning room. It was agreeably quiet this late in the morning. A trim and po-faced woman with her two young daughters sat on the far side of the laid tables, clucking in a whisper at how they should sit at the table, how they should peck at their food; two miniature versions of her, destined to be pickle-faced shrews like her one day. A solitary, portly, ruddy gentleman sat by the crackling fireplace, making a copy of the Times last as long as possible.
Babbitt’s attention returned to his own paper. His work of several nights ago had made a mere paragraph on the seventh page. One of a list of briefly reported murders and assaults. Just as he’d hoped they would, the police were assuming the killing to be a revenge attack perpetrated by some other villain with a grudge or a debt to settle. Tolly’s landlady had found his body later on the next day and had commented that she wasn’t entirely surprised that her tenant had come to such a violent end.
He found himself chuckling at the flowery prose used by the paper. No different to the press back in New York, squeezing every adjective for all its worth:
. . . violent criminal by the name of William Tolly was found brutally slain last night in his lodgings, on Upper Ellesmere Street. Said Mrs Amy Tanbridge, his landlady and the unfortunate soul to discover the body: ‘he looked like he had been in a frightful scrap’. Mrs Tanbridge claimed ‘there was blood all across the floor. I thought I had just walked into an abattoir’. Tolly is known to the local constabulary as a violent man with many local enemies . . .
Now, on to more important matters.
Tolly had helpfully given him the name of a couple of public houses and a woman. His best guess was that it was a pub in the same locale as he’d found Tolly: Whitechapel. Yesterday, he’d walked the area, noting them, their names, the names of the streets they were on, and annoyingly discovered that there were five ‘Rose and Crown’s within streets of each other and seven pubs with ‘Firkin’ as part of their name. Babbitt decided the one closest to the Turpin was where he was going to start. Just as he had with Tolly, he would dress the part, find a quiet corner and listen to the back-and-forth chatter. None of it was ever quiet. It always seemed to be bellowed out at full volume as if these people had only ever learned to communicate with a bawdy shout. And the trick of it was to arrive early in the evening and listen carefully to each new instrument as it arrived and added its tune to the orchestra of voices. And there was always a greeting from somewhere hurled out above the noise whenever someone entered, wasn’t there?
He would listen specifically for that.
Polly Nichols, if she was a tart, would have her regulars; a dozen or more pockmarked and raspberry-nosed old men letching at her and wondering if she was ‘up for it this evening’.
It was all about listening. Listening and watching and, most important of all, never ever being noticed. Just the slumbering drunk at one end of the bar.
If he had no luck tracking her down that way, he could ask amongst the men he spotted disappearing outside with other tarts. Those types had their favourites, didn’t they? Babbitt could affect the behaviour of a maudlin old soak asking after the whereabouts of his favourite ol’ girl.
‘Luverly Polly. You seen her, mate? You seen my luverly Polly Nichols?’ But asking around was an alternative he preferred not to resort to. Even drink-hazy memories could sometimes recall a distinctive face, a manner slightly out of the ordinary.
‘Aye, sir, ’e was tall, so ’e was. Tall with a dark barnet, an’ a pointy nose bit like ol’ Boney. An’ thinkin’ ’bout it, ’e spoke different to normal. Foreign. Irish maybe. American p’raps? An’ I ’member he was askin’ for Polly that night. Wanted to know where to find ’er, ’e did.’
He dipped a soldier of buttered toast into the yolk. It really was done perfectly, just as he’d asked for it: firm white with a soft, liquid yolk. He made a mental note to tip his waiter and the kitchen staff generously when it finally came time for him to check out and return home. They were looking after him wonderfully.
Polly. Hmmm.
The trick wasn’t going to be tracking her down. He anticipated that was going to be a relatively straightforward task. No, the trick was going to be convincing her to trust him enough to take him back to her place. The tarts here in the East End preferred doing their business in the open: backstreets, rat-runs, park benches. It kept business brisk and there was some notion of safety being outside where a scream or a shout would carry – and quite likely send an abusive client shuffling hastily away with his trousers and undergarment around his ankles.
The promise of the right money – no, showing her the right money, and exhibiting a manner that wasn’t going to unsettle or worry her – that’s how he was going to convince her to take him back to her lodgings.
CHAPTER 26
30th September 1888, Whitechapel, London
Mary had a good idea where to find her old acquaintances at this time of the day. Mid-morning, it’s where they usually congregated: Ramsey’s tea shop. Half a dozen of them usually sitting together around one table in the back, a thin veil of pipe smoke hovering above, and a table crowded with tea cups, a bottle of absinthe in the middle for those after a hair of the dog.
Henry Ramsey, the owner, was quite happy to have the tarts’ business in the back room, away from the rest of the decent customers who sat in the front with the big shop window looking out onto Goulston Street and where the tables all had nice linen and lace tablecloths. The girls were usually quiet, not too bawdy, generally nursing sore heads from the night before and most of them starving hungry for his stodgy potato pies and pastries.
Mary nodded at Ramsey as she weaved delicately through the patrons taking tea in the front parlour, heading towards the back room. He knew her face, if not her name, and his eyes widened at the sight of her.
‘Blimey!’ he uttered. ‘You gone an’ nicked the crown jools or something?’
She ignored the question. ‘The girls in back?’
‘Aye.’
She continued towards the rear of the tea shop, down a hallway, past the water closet and then pushed her way through a heavy curtain into a room with its own small window and a door onto the tea shop’s backyard, filled with sacks of tea leaves, flour and suet and stacked wooden pallets laden with freshly baked bread and an iron keg of milk.
She smiled. There they were. The girls.
‘I’ll be fucked!’ gasped Cath Eddowes. ‘It’s Lady Muck ’erself!’
The others gawped at Mary’s clothes, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Then all of a sudden she was confronted by the noise of questions and exclamations; a mixture of squeals of delight and caustic put-downs, and jealous hands reaching out to appraise the texture and quality of her skirts.
She picked out the face she was after. Liz . . . Long Liz. A clay pipe bobbed from the corner of her mouth as she chewed on the stem and muttered something to Cath.
‘Liz!’ Mary’s voice cut over the noise. She tipped her head at the backyard. ‘Can I have a word in private?’
Liz shrugged, got up off her stool, pushed her way round the girls’ table and stepped out through the open door into the yard.
‘Excuse me!’ Mary squeezed her way past the others. ‘Could I just . . .’
‘Ooh! Listen to ’er!’ said one of them.
‘Oh, ’scuse me awfully muchly, my lay-dee!’ giggled another, with a mock curtsey thrown in for good measure.<
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Outside in the yard, four walls of soot-covered brick surrounding just enough space for them to perch amid Mr Ramsey’s supplies. Above them the sky hung grey-white and featureless, as if London existed permanently beneath a drape of old sailcloth. Over the head-high yard walls, the clack and rattle of hooves and wheel rims echoed. Just another morning’s business.
Liz was sat on a stack of empty pallets; Cath, uninvited but there all the same, sitting beside her. They came as a pair, those two. Partners in crime, always looking out for each other. They always solicited for business together. But Liz Stride was the prettier one of the pair. Tall, fair and fine-boned, whilst Cath was short and heavy.
Mary closed the back door, muting the giggles and mocking ‘la-di-da’s coming from inside.
‘Cath told us yer come into some money,’ said Liz. ‘Howzat, then? You rob a bank?’
Mary laughed self-consciously. ‘Maybe I did.’
Liz eyed her through a thin plume of smoke. ‘You was always gonna get lucky. I knew summin’ like this would ’appen for yer. What is it a gentleman client payin’ yer good?’
Mary had decided to keep news of Argyll to herself. She sidestepped the question. ‘I need your help.’
‘You don’t look like you need no one’s ’elp,’ said Cath. Mary ignored her as she fished around in the small bag on her arm and pulled out the key on the brass fob.
‘This.’ She held it out for Liz to see. ‘It’s a key . . .’
Liz made a face. ‘Well done, love.’
‘It’s a key to a . . . room. A hotel room, I think.’
Liz plucked it out of her hand and quickly examined it. ‘Looks that way. So?’
Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know which hotel. It could be any.’
Liz, nearly forty years of age, was the know-things person amongst the girls, almost the mother-figure amongst them. Once upon a time, Liz had even a run a tea shop much like this one. Mary hoped she might recognise the hotel’s mark on the fob, or at least know someone who would know.
Liz looked up at her. ‘What’s goin’ on, Mary? You disappear for several weeks, an’ me an’ Cath an’ the others was starting to get bloody worried about you, what with them nasty murders goin’ on. And now, here you are, turnin’ up dressed like Lady Muck. What’s been goin’ on?’
On her way across the city, she’d rehearsed this, answers to the questions the girls were inevitably going to bombard her with. But she’d resolved not to tell them a thing about her man. Because they would undoubtedly want in on her scam; a share of him, a piece of him. But this, all of this, her ‘scam’, wasn’t about taking a vulnerable man for every penny he had. Silly and impractical though it sounded, a little feeling inside her was telling her this really wasn’t about the money anymore.
‘I ain’t saying. It’s my business.’
‘Well maybe I ain’t inclined to ’elp, then,’ Liz replied curtly, her slender fingers closed deliberately around the fob.
She’s not going to give me that back.
‘I can pay you. I got some—’
Liz slowly shook her head. ‘I ain’t after yer money, Mary. I’m worried for yer, love. All us girls is. Yer don’t get money like yer got without a bag full of troubles comin’ wiv it. Tell me what’s been goin’ on with you.’
Mary felt the wall of her own firm resolve begin to wobble, crumble.
‘Did you steal it, love? Is that it?’ She reached out to her. Stroked her lace shawl. ‘All this . . . the nice clothes and the proper talkin’ – it ain’t you, is it? What’s goin’ on? You in trouble now?’
Mary felt like crying for some reason.
Liz’s voice softened. ‘You in some trouble, dear?’
Lying, lying and more lying to John; she felt exhausted with the effort of it. Maintaining a fiction that with every new probing question of his was growing that much more elaborate and difficult to sustain. Trying to keep all that in her mind so that she didn’t contradict herself. Coupled with that, this contrived make-believe version of herself. This act. She liked feeling ‘posh’, and she knew a man like John wouldn’t ever consort with a common street tart, not even in the wildest fiction she could construct, but it was yet another layer of burden. To constantly keep in mind how to speak, how to step, how to hold herself. The daily trips out of the rented house in Holland Park to buy things for their supper weren’t just shopping trips; they were an opportunity to draw a breath, to compose herself, to recuperate. To catalogue and order every little lie she’d told John, to be sure she wasn’t going to trip herself up.
She realised she was exhausted. Worn down to a nub.
And the first tears began to roll down her cheeks.
‘Oh, dear, oh, dear, come on,’ said Liz. She grasped Mary by the arms. ‘Sit down, poppet.’ She pulled her down to sit beside her.
Mary didn’t resist. She nodded.
‘Now then,’ said Liz, gently stroking her shoulder, ‘why dontcha tell me what’s been goin’ on?’
Mary glanced up at Cath standing over them in the yard like Liz’s guard dog. Liz seemed to pick up on Mary wanting to speak to her alone.
‘Cath, ’ow about you join the others for a bit?’
Cath pouted like a child and then, with an irritable huff, she turned and headed for the back door. She pulled it open and, for a moment, the muted hubbub of conversation from the back room died away. Mary briefly spotted half a dozen curious faces from the gloomy back room craning across the cluttered table to get a look at what was going on outside. The door clattered closed and the muted murmur of voices inside continued once more.
‘Now then,’ continued Liz. ‘What sort of a pickle ’ave yer gone an’ got yerself into?’
CHAPTER 27
30th September 1888, Whitechapel, London
Mary told her everything, the whole lot: finding the nameless gentleman on Argyll Street and then tracking him down later in St Bartholomew’s hospital, his mind wiped clean. She told Liz that none of it had been planned, it had just come as a sequence of opportunities, and she’d taken each one as it presented itself to her.
And now, perhaps the worst thing of all, she felt something for him. Instead of vanishing like she should have done with his bag of money, leaving him alone in the Frampton-Parkers’ home to finally figure out he’d been abandoned by her, she was now hankering to get back to him, worried that he’d been on his own this morning far too long already.
‘But I don’t really know nothing about him, Liz,’ she said. ‘He . . . he might have a wife or . . . someone else lookin’ for him. I just need to know because . . .’ Because maybe the sensible thing was to take the rest of his money and run, to forget about him and her silly dreams of being Mrs Argyll. Not that she would ever be a Mrs ‘Argyll’. He had another name that was sure to surface one day soon.
Silly dream. Nothing ever came of dreams, not really. Not outside of the fairytale books she’d read as a child in her convent school.
Liz looked down at the key still in her hand. ‘And you want me to find out for you?’
Mary nodded.
‘Do yer feel safe with ’im, love?’
‘Oh, god, yes, Liz! He’s as gentle as a lamb, so he is. Like a baby, in a way. I’m almost like his mam.’
Liz nodded sagely. As Mary had talked, she’d been intrigued by the notion of a person’s mind wiped clean. ‘Gentle he may be, but he’s still a man, Mary. A man yer don’t know nothin’ about, really. Yer don’t know nothin’ about the man he is.’ Liz shrugged and corrected herself. ‘Or was. You got to be careful, Mary.’
Mary nodded quickly. ‘But listen, Liz. Just you, all right? Don’t tell the others, please. Just you.’
‘I won’t tell no one nothing. Promise.’
Mary fumbled in her handbag, into her purse, the coins jingling heavily. ‘I’ll pay you—’
Liz nodded. ‘I’ll take a florin. I think I know a bloke who’d take a look at this key and might know the ’otel. Dylan, ’e’s a locksmith, ’e might
recognise the fob, or the handiwork.’
‘Let me give you something too.’
Liz shrugged. ‘A sixpence for me troubles, I s’pose, wouldn’t go amiss. But look, Mary, this man—’
‘He’s fine, really,’ she said. ‘Like I said, he’s like a lamb.’
‘You ’eard about ’em recent murders, though?’
She’d seen large type on the front of some of the papers and whispers of gossip from passersby. She vaguely knew of the killings. Not that her mind had been on London news recently. But it was hard to completely ignore the large headlines, the imaginative illustrations on the front of some of the pennies that made creative use of the few lascivious details bribed out of the mouths of Scotland Yard’s detectives working the case.
‘Oh, lord, not him!’ Mary almost laughed at what Liz was suggesting. ‘He wouldn’t last no more’n two minutes here in White-chapel before some shivering Jemmy ripped him off.’ She laughed. ‘Gawd, no. It’s certainly not him.’
Liz shrugged. ‘Yer know ’im best, I s’pose. Just yer be careful, though.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Tell me, Mary – ’ave yer let ’im ’ave yer? Yer lifted yer skirts for—’
‘No! It’s not like that!’ Mary frowned. ‘He’s been a perfect gent, so he has. He’s treated me nicer than any other man ever has.’
Liz nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘So, I’ll take this key with me? You all right with that?’
‘Yes.’
‘An’ I’ll see what I can find out. If I find out which ’otel ’e’s in, yer want me to knock on the room? See who’s there? Find out ’bout ’im?’
Mary wasn’t sure she wanted that. The truth. It would almost certainly spell the end of her little fantasy world with John. There’d be a new name, wouldn’t there? This time, his real name. And there’d be the reason he was in England and – for some reason she was certain of this now – there’d be an anxious wife called ‘Polly’.