—do it Walter do it now—
“Oh, Walter,” he heard the woman, Mrs. Harrogate, murmur, as if from a long way off. “I am disappointed. You really must try harder to control it.”
—now now now now now—
He slid nearer. She was rummaging in her handbag. But as he reached for her neck, her stout little figure turned fluidly in the gloom, impossibly fast, something clutched in her fist, and then a fierce pain bloomed inside his skull.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate slid the mangler’s cosh back into her handbag, buttoned it fast. She had struck him so hard her wrist hurt.
Walter Laster, she thought. Well, well.
She knelt beside him and felt for a pulse but his wrist was cold, freezing really, cold as death, and she hesitated only a moment and then took off her hat and her gloves and laid her ear over his chest. She could not hear a heartbeat but she knew this meant nothing, less than nothing, and she carefully lifted his upper lip and saw the long yellow teeth, all the longer for the red gums that had withdrawn from them, just as she had been told would be there. His pallor was bloodless, the bluish-gray of bad milk. He was smoothly bald, his body hairless. Three red lines, like folds of skin, ringed his throat.
After that she stood, and adjusted her hat, and stepped gingerly over Walter to the dead woman on the cot. Something would need to be done about it, and like always, she supposed, it would be her having the doing of it.
She took a quick inventory of the miserable little room, the damp that was creeping up the bricks, the darkness almost like a living thing around the far wall, those strange three glowing fetuses adrift in their examination fluid. Then she got to work. There was a rag Walter had been using as a towel and she used this to scoop the dead woman’s insides back into her cavity and then she stuffed the two tidy eyeballs in as well and she rolled the entire corpse in the ripped blanket and lugged it, thumping, onto the floor, the stain already leaking through. She had got none of the mess on her clothes and she stood with her hands on her hips, satisfied. Then she lifted Walter in her arms and carried him outside into the courtyard and leaned him against the wall in the mud. His frailness surprised her, how light he was, in truth little more than dust and bone. Lifting his hand was like picking up a bird’s nest.
She went back down into the cellar and unbuttoned her handbag and took out the two jars of oil she’d brought and she poured them out over the bed and the wrapped body of the woman and the wood shelves. She stopped at the glass specimen jars. The fetuses floated, pale, still. She tapped a knuckle. The poor things. Teratological birth defects. There was still the pasted label on two of the jars from the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons. She did not know how a creature as pitiful as Walter Laster could have got inside such an institution, could have smuggled these things out. One more mystery. Well, well.
What was it that compelled her to do what she did next, a feeling, perhaps, an intuition, as Frank Coulton might say, something she had learned to trust in herself? She couldn’t say. But she took down the third of the jars, the one with the smallest fetus, its little eyelids closed like petals, its delicate features almost human. It was heavy, far heavier than Walter, and the formaldehyde sloshed unevenly against the glass walls as she lugged it outside. Walter still lay in the mud, unmoving.
It was getting late now. Back inside, she took a long safety match from her handbag, struck it on the brick walls, dropped it into the oil-soaked bedding. The room erupted into flame. She adjusted the veil over her face, the birthmark like a purple handprint that stretched across her cheek and nose and up over one eye, which she’d lived with all her life. It wouldn’t do to be stared at. Then she went calmly out, leaving the door standing open, and she scooped up Walter in one arm and draped her shawl over the jar with the other, and then, picking that up too, while the cellar whooshed and roared into flame behind her, and a drunk in the corner of the yard raised his bleary head, she made her way out through the fog to Bloom Stairs Street, there to hail a cab.
That was the thing about her job, what she did. There was a gruesomeness to it, an essential unladylike gruesomeness, which she enjoyed. Her husband, rest his soul, had seen it in her and loved her for it. Not that every day involved the burning of bodies—the kidnapping, yes, call it what it was, the kidnapping of opium-addled unfortunates. Homicidals. No, mostly she was a kind of manager, like in a bank, she supposed, or an insurance office, overseeing the jobs Dr. Berghast wished done in the capital and streamlining all of it for efficiency. Still, it was a life of secrecy, a life of deceit, even at its dullest. And Margaret Harrogate enjoyed it too much, was too good at it, ever to quit it.