George Mann - The Executioner's heart

She heard the scuff of a boot against the dusty floorboards behind her and knew it was time. She would bring an end to this now. She raised the pistol and swung around, launching the lamp in the direction of the sound, then snapping out two brisk shots. The lamp clattered noisily against the wall, missing its target and dislodging a cluster of timepieces, which skittered across the floorboards in a chaotic jumble. The light guttered and blinked out, shrouding the room in a heavy cloak of darkness.

She clutched the pistol, her hand trembling. Had she hit her mark? She didn’t think so. She couldn’t hear anything other than the strangely symphonic chattering of the clocks and the thumping of her own heartbeat, pounding relentlessly in her ears.

She twisted from side to side, drawing the nose of the pistol through the musty air as if it could somehow cleave a path through the darkness or divine the location of her adversary.

For a moment she did nothing, standing alert and still, waiting to see if the woman would make a move. There was nothing else she could do. She’d lost all sense of her bearings in the immaculate darkness. She had no idea of where the doorway might be or which direction she was facing.

She started as she felt something touch her cheek: the cool, almost gentle caress of a metal blade. Involuntarily her arm came up in defence, knocking the other woman’s hand aside. She aimed a kick in the same direction, hoping to take the woman’s legs out from beneath her, but her enemy was still toying with her and had already danced off, melting away into the darkness.

She grunted in frustration. She had almost overbalanced with the momentum of her kick, and had to throw her arms out wide to stop herself from falling.

She righted herself a moment later, feeling a strange tightness in her chest. Was she having trouble breathing? It was as if she suddenly had a heavy weight bearing down on her, preventing her from drawing breath.

She gasped for air ineffectually and felt panic beginning to well up inside her. Her left hand went to her chest, exploring, as if drawn there, and she realised with dawning horror that something was protruding from it, right above her heart. With realisation came pain, a sharp, excruciating pain the like of which she had never experienced before. Her head swam, and she thought she was going to swoon. Her world began to close in around her. All she could think about was the blossoming pain and the long metal blade buried deep in her rib cage.

She screamed, a deep, guttural scream of horror and frustration and shock. She screamed so loudly that her throat felt raw and hot and bloody, so loudly that it drowned out even the noise of the clocks and the pain in her chest and the pounding in her head.

She toppled, falling backwards into the darkness, barely aware of the ground coming up to meet her.

There was no sign of the woman, but she imagined those black eyes watching her, boring into her, standing over her.

“Veronica?”

Veronica Hobbes heard her name being called, but the frantic voice sounded distant, and the pain in her chest had bloomed in intensity until it was all she could see; a bright, white light of pain, blotting out everything else.

“Veronica?”

Somehow, Newbury had found her. Somehow, remarkably, he had known she was there. But her last thought before the white light swallowed her was that he was far too late.

Veronica was already dead.

LONDON, FEBRUARY 1903

London had always been a place of death.

Sir Charles Bainbridge, Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, mulled this over as he considered his lot in life at six in the morning on a wet, dreary Wednesday.

Ever since the city was birthed on the banks of the Thames, since the Roman interlopers had destroyed the primitive settlements of the early Britons and founded the city proper, its streets had run red with blood. Oppression, suppression, festering rebellion, and bloodshed-each of them was key to understanding London’s history. And, some might say, its present, too.

Bainbridge wondered if there was something to the notion that it was the place itself that was rotten, haunted by the spirits of all those millions who had died within its boundaries. Did those spirits somehow exert their influence on the psyche of the modern populace? Was it this that drove people to commit such dreadful acts?

Newbury probably thought so. Bainbridge could imagine the argument now: both of them flushed with brandy, Newbury leaning across the table at his White Friar’s club, passionately gesticulating as he outlined his case. “Of course, Charles! Can’t you see it? There’s no doubt in my mind that the landscape plays a fundamental role in the development of a killer’s mind-set. And, in turn, that the history of that place also has a role to play. Spirits or not, the grisly biography of this city has a bearing on how its present populace behaves.”

Bainbridge, of course, would argue in favour of self-determinism, that people had a choice to behave however they wished to, but that wouldn’t wash with his friend. Newbury saw the world in ways that Bainbridge never could. It was this, Bainbridge believed, that gave Newbury his edge, the remarkable insight that had seen them both through so many scrapes. Bainbridge believed in absolutes-good and evil, right and wrong-but Newbury took a different, more complex view. He often berated the chief inspector for viewing the world in such simplistic terms, in plain black and white, and slowly, inch by painful inch, he was teaching Bainbridge to see in shades of grey.

Bainbridge grinned at the thought of his old friend. There hadn’t been many arguments in the White Friar’s of late, nor many other opportunities to spend time in each other’s company. Bainbridge had been busy-far too busy-and, if he was truthful, he’d been avoiding Newbury in recent weeks. It was cowardly to keep away, but it pained him to see his friend so in thrall to the dreadful weed to which he had pledged his allegiance.

The wastrel was intent on delving ever deeper into his addiction, despite assurances to the contrary. No amount of stiff conversation on the matter could dissuade him from his chosen path. As a consequence, he appeared to be growing weaker day by day: paler, drawn, his eyes bruised and sunken. When he wasn’t in the city engaged on a case, he spent all of his time locked away in his rooms, brooding.

Whether it marked him out as a coward or not, Bainbridge simply wasn’t prepared to watch while his friend slowly frittered away his life. And now even Scarbright-the valet Bainbridge had installed at Newbury’s Chelsea home to keep a watchful eye on him-had stopped reporting back.

Bainbridge only wished there was something more he could do, some way he could begin to understand the allure of the drug, the grip it exerted on his friend. Perhaps Newbury, too, was under the sway of malign spirits?

Bainbridge sighed. No, that would be too simple. And nothing was ever simple where Newbury was concerned.

Bainbridge glanced cursorily around the drawing room. Whoever lived here-or, rather, had lived here-had ostentatious tastes; the decor was of classical design, all white marble and gilded plasterwork. The walls were duck egg blue; the ceiling decorated with a large, elaborate rosette over a gaudy crystal chandelier. Ranks of portraits, showing gloomy-looking fellows in frilly shirts and plate armour, lined the walls.

Bainbridge thought it was all terribly gauche and embarrassing, as if the owner was trying desperately to cling to some former aristocratic heritage, a proud dream now long forgotten by the rest of the world. He supposed there were plenty of people who had found themselves in that position in recent years; the former scions of society, now fallen on hard times and replaced by the wash of self-made industrialists and opportunists who had identified their niche in the changing, modern Empire.