Chapter 1

Allow me to begin by requesting that you steel yourself, for the journey on which you are about to embark is not a happy one. It concerns a murder committed for love, and a letter of confession which would never be read. It concerns a killer and condemned, evil man – and the good man who I became, after my meeting with the devil. A doctor dying alone, composing a memoir of these events with his withering days. What could be more tragic? Perhaps only a life ruined by mundanity and emptiness, where passion is doused and all desire extinguished.

As I write I realise with anxiety that the whole affair is of debatable origin, though I shall trace the story as far back as the April of 1889: to a dreary night not unlike any other. London’s streets were concealed behind a drapery of fog and as I stepped out of a hansom and into the gloom I shivered in spite of my overcoat. Coins clinked as I handed the driver a couple of six-pennies, and I waited for the clatter of the wheels and the snorts of the horses to fade before I proceeded through the darkness.

The night was dedicated to my preferred business of the time: making use of the fine features bestowed upon me to acquire delicacies of the flesh. Girls are more impressionable than women, which is better even than cheaper, and were therefore my favoured companions on nights such as these. Nights when the rare desire for another’s body was threaded into my blood. Impossible to unpick with any needle, of morphine or the mind.

I paused under a streetlamp, the orange glow providing enough visibility to light a cigar. The match sputtered in the damp. Smoke curled away and was engulfed by the dense fog, but it at least smelled of something other than horse excrement and burned coal, or the ever-present odour of

human piss and sweat and suffering. I took a small tin box from my pocket and scooped a dusting of cocaine onto my finger. Tucking the box away I raised my finger to my face and snorted the powder into my nostril. Wiping the itch from my nose I blinked and released a deep breath, pressed the cigar back between my lips and continued on my way to the girl’s home.

She was the daughter of a drunk. I had been goading her for a month or two with whispered confessions of admiration although she had only recently begun to respond in kind. I forget her name but remember her hair, red waves which shone in the lamplight.

I rapped on the door and waited for several minutes before I rattled the handle. It was locked and I knocked again, with my fist this time to ensure she heard. After a moment the lock clicked and the door opened a crack and she peered out from inside, a single green eye regarded me.

’Dr Shaw!’ She threw the door open with delight.

I removed my hat as I stepped over the threshold. She wore a cotton nightgown, hair tumbling over her shoulders, porcelain skin silver in the darkness.

She closed the door behind me. ’What are you doing here?’

’I wanted to see you,’ I whispered. My fingers found her neck and she looked up at me as I brushed the curls away from her eyes, gentle silk against my thumb. As I leaned closer I heard a shallow breath and I realised that she was nervous. I straightened up. ’I had to at least speak with you.’

’My father will be back soon.’

’Let him come.’ I slipped her wrists into my hands and kissed her with all of the desire I could muster. At first she pushed away but a moment later instead slumped into me and cast her arms about my neck in a consensual embrace. Beneath the rustling cotton her flesh was warm and the scent of lavender powdered the air around her. Her heart quivered, even through my overcoat, to brush against my ribs and I knew that in this moment she was an insect falling into an inexorable flame.

She led me up a narrow staircase and past an open door with a silent crib on the other side, and into a bedroom which bathed in the moon’s pale glow. Lace curtains shifted as London exhaled but became still as I sat on the girl’s bed, the city’s breath baited in anticipation of the moments that were to follow. Outside the window, the fog grew denser and the light of the moon was extinguished. The walls crept inwards.

The girl sat beside me and I ran my finger across her cheek and kissed her again and she returned the kiss and slipped my overcoat from my shoulders. She ran her hand over my chest and neck and buzzed something into my ear that I did not understand. A familiar sensation washed over me, spreading from my fingertips to my toes. A dislocation of the soul, as if my mind were severed from my body and I were watching powerless through distant eyes. And all at once it seemed that it was somebody else stroking the girl’s hair. Somebody else pushing her back onto the narrow mattress. Somebody else wrapping his hands around her throat, and that other man’s arms seeping blood as the girl clawed at them with her dirty nails. Before me for my amusement, puppets playing silly games – I watched on with indifferent superiority tickling my heart. I was so above these creatures’ struggles. You cannot understand such bliss.

My reverie was broken by a crash from the bedroom door behind and the girl’s screams filled my ears as if arriving from a great distance. The baby’s wails shrieked through the wall with her screams and I clapped my hands over my ears to keep out the cacophony. The girl forced me from her with all her feeble strength and I toppled onto the floorboards, crushing my hat. I twisted my head around and the girl’s accursed father was swaying in the half-light of the doorway.

’What the devil is going on here!?’ He blundered into the bedroom. ’Who the hell are you?’

I pushed myself to my feet and collected up my overcoat. ’Dr Amon Shaw.’ I extended a hand but the buffoon slapped it away and clenched my collar.

’What were you doin’ to my daughter?’

I laughed. ’I mistook her for a harlot. She invited me in from the street.’

’He’s lyin’!’ The girl sobbed but her father shot her a glare made of buckles and knuckles and she shut her mewling trap and pulled the sheets up to cover the blotches on her throat, speckles of blood from the arms of the man who had throttled her.

’You’re a dead man.’ Her father slurred.

Any exchange of idle threats I would have won. But enjoyable as a triumph of wits would be, such a victory would prove as fruitless as it was satisfying. It was then with the intention of saving time for us both that I curled my fingers, retracted my fist and punched the girl’s father in his fat, bawled up little face. My knuckles meeting his mouth made a sound like raw sausage meat striking a butcher’s counter. He grunted and recoiled. I shoved him aside, he lost his balance and collapsed onto the bed, and I skipped around his feet and danced out of the bedroom door with his muffled rage echoing after me.

I took the stairs two at a time and leapt the final few, the curses of the girl’s father becoming louder by the moment. Upstairs the baby was still wailing in its cot and I was relieved when I flung the door open and sauntered out into the fog. The top of my hat was torn and crumpled where I had landed on it but I slipped it on anyway. Appearances must be maintained.

Not ten yards from the house the bulbous shape of the girl’s father appeared in the doorway behind me, a panting blackness in the mist. His insults came between heaved breaths. ’I’ll kill you, you disgusting, cretinous sore. I’ll rip out your eyes and eat them and shit them back into your skull!’

Drink and anger had made a fool of him, and as I turned to offer my retort he charged headlong at me through the fog, stubby legs shunting his bulk forward like the wheels of a steam engine. All I needed to do was step aside at the opportune moment and he flailed, tripped and fell onto the cobbles with a smack. The impact winded him and he gasped on the damp ground as I kneeled over him in the darkness. A few shadowy faces were peering at us out of windows above. I had to be quick. The girl lived near Holborn and the local constabulary did not appreciate disturbances, but I could not resist my opportunity to stamp my utter superiority into this oaf’s memory forever.

’The last thing I am,’ I said, ’is a servant of Satan. But you are an old fat drunk. What chance do you imagine you have of killing me?’ I patted his head and stood over him. ’In any case you didn’t see what you believe you saw, I can assure you.’

’I know what I saw,’ he said. And then he spat on my shoe.

The spit-stained toecap met his face with a dull thud. He groaned and crawled a few inches but I continued my assault, most of my blows landing in his ribs or belly. The fat thing howled and snorted but I had less than a minute to punish him for his mistake when I heard a copper’s whistle and saw a lantern light bobbing through the soup in the air. Using the cover of the fog, they had crept closer than I would have allowed on a clear night. London had betrayed me. I gave the girl’s father a final kick then turned and fled into the darkness, my shoes clattering on the paving and my overcoat flapping around my knees. The whistle blew louder and I heard shouts as the officers gave chase.

I darted from the main street into an unlit alley and the echo of my boots became a disorienting clapping that was reflected and repeated a thousand times. The mist rose up from the cobbles in thick brown plumes, as if the furnace of hell itself roared under the city’s streets. I materialised on a wide road, the screech of the copper’s whistle at my back.

I ran left and took the first alley I saw, followed by a series of arbitrary turns. My face was slick with sweat and mist, and the whistle racketed around in my skull like a fly caught in a jar.

London is a jealous mistress and I soon became lost. Signs and beggars and solid walls materialised from the fog just feet ahead and cost me precious seconds. Damn that dolt of a father. If he hadn’t come home just at that moment, there would have been nobody there for him to see.

The whistle blasts were still close behind but my coat was heavy and my legs were seizing up. I could hear rasping breaths and realised with horror that they were from my own throat. When pain shot through my thigh I decided to take my chances and face my predator. I came to a halt, coughing for air. The officer sprinted into the alley and threw himself at me. We tumbled to the ground and I tore at his skin and tried to bite his neck.

My savagery took the officer by surprise. I was on the verge of victory. But the coward pummelled me in the ribs with his truncheon and all of the breath was driven from my body. He pushed me off of him and kicked me in the head. I blinked away a dazzle of light and rolled onto my front and he beat my back and legs with the truncheon. Metallic blood ran into my mouth. For the second time that night, the familiar sense of distance took me as another officer arrived and joined the first. I watched as one of the indistinguishable uniforms knelt on the battered spine of the man who I should have been, and forced his bruised wrists into handcuffs.