Murder as a Fine Art

4

“Among Us Are Monsters”

CHOLERA CAUSES UNCONTROLLED, rice-colored diarrhea that rapidly leads to dehydration and probable death. Three months earlier, in September of 1854, London had suffered its worst epidemic in decades, losing seven hundred people in the frighteningly short time of two weeks. Dr. John Snow had ended the outbreak when he proved that cholera wasn’t caused by breathing foul air but rather by drinking fecal-contaminated water. The center of the outbreak was the Broad Street area of Soho, and after extensive interviews, Snow determined that people who had access to the public water pump in that area were the ones who contracted the disease. Excavation revealed that the well had been dug next to a cesspit from which excrement was leaking. To the surprise of foul-air theorists, Snow ended the epidemic by the simple expedient of arranging for the pump’s handle to be removed.

Detective Inspector Ryan had helped Dr. Snow conduct his cholera investigation. When Ryan aimed the lantern over the wall and saw Becker covered with blood, lying beside two dead pigs near an excrement-filled ditch, he had no doubt where Becker needed to be taken for immediate medical treatment.

Ryan ordered a police wagon to hurry Becker to Dr. Snow’s residence at 54 Frith Street in Soho, near where the recent cholera epidemic had occurred.

The thin-faced, forty-one-year-old physician took a while to light an oil lamp and respond to the urgent pounding on his door.

“Who the devil?” Wearing a housecoat, he came to attention at the sight of two constables holding Becker.

“Detective Inspector Ryan says to give you this note, sir,” a policeman said.

Snow read the note with growing alarm.

“Take his foul clothes off right there. Throw them in the street. Then bring him into this vestibule. No farther than that. I’ll bring hot water and fresh rags. We need to clean him thoroughly before he comes into the office.”

Once cleaned, Becker was placed on a sheet on a chair in Snow’s office. Mid-Victorian physicians had desks in their offices rather than examination tables. After all, there wasn’t any need for an examination table. Physicians were gentlemen and almost never laid hands on a patient, except to determine the speed and strength of a pulse. The disagreeable task of actually touching a patient was left to socially inferior surgeons.

But Snow had once been a surgeon and retained some of his habits even after having been elevated to the higher medical rank. Holding his lamp, he looked closely at the bite marks on Becker’s arms and legs and exclaimed, “If the pigs were diseased, if excrement seeped into those cuts…”

Snow quickly disinfected the bites with a strong solution of ammonia, a shocking hands-on procedure for a physician to perform.

Becker grimaced from the sharp sting of the ammonia. The sounds of animals made him look around in confusion. On counters, he saw cages in which mice, birds, and frogs were agitated by the sudden commotion.

“Am I seeing things?”

“I use them for experiments to determine dosage,” Snow explained.

“Dosage of what?”

“I need to apply stitches to the worst of these bites. The pain will be extreme. This will help make you comfortable.”

The “this” Snow referred to was a metal container that had a mask attached to it.

Snow brought the mask toward Becker’s face.

“What’s that?”

“Chloroform.”

“No.” Becker pressed back in alarm. He knew about chloroform, a newly developed gas anesthetic. The previous year, London’s newspapers had printed stories about how Queen Victoria had made the controversial choice to be given chloroform during the birth of her eighth child. Dr. Snow was the physician she had chosen to administer it.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Snow assured him. “If Her Majesty trusted me, surely you can. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Becker emphasized. “But I don’t dare go to sleep.”

“Given the fight I gather you’ve been through, you can use the rest.” Snow again brought the mask toward Becker’s face.

“No!” Becker raised a hand, keeping Snow at a distance. “I can’t go to sleep! I want to be a detective! If you put me to sleep, the investigation will continue without me! I’ll never have this chance again!”


MEANWHILE, more constables arrived at the murder scene.

“Keep knocking on doors. Keep questioning neighbors. Widen the search,” Ryan ordered. “Ask for anything, no matter how slight, that wasn’t normal.”

Accompanied by two constables holding lanterns, he again climbed the wall behind the shop. Avoiding the two dead pigs, he eased down on the other side and crouched to study the footprints. They remained more perfectly preserved than he had dared to hope.

Good work, Becker.

The two constables handed down an empty pail, a pitcher of water, and a sack of plaster of Paris. Then they joined him. Recalling that he’d promised to show Becker how to do this, Ryan put water and the powder into the empty pail and stirred them, adjusting the proportion until the mixture had the consistency of pea soup. He poured the mixture into the footprints.

“Stay here,” he told the constables with the lanterns. “Don’t let anything touch the plaster as it hardens. I know this is harsh back here. I’ll have someone relieve you in two hours.”

Ryan made his way to the noisy street outside the shop, where he greeted privy excavators he had sent for. During the cholera epidemic, one of Dr. Snow’s arguments against the theory that miasma caused cholera had been that privy excavators, who constantly breathed foul air, didn’t contract the disease any more than other people did.

Since privies were normally excavated during the night—hence the term “night soil”—the four-member team, which consisted of two tubmen, a ropeman, and a holeman, hadn’t thought it unusual to be summoned at this hour, although the urgency of the summons had made them curious about what sort of emergency a privy might cause.

Their interest increased as Ryan explained. “The killer might have dropped something down the hole and used a stick to poke it beneath the surface. Excavate the privy and spread the contents over the courtyard. Don’t come through the shop. Use a ladder to climb over the wall in the alley next to here.”

As the night-soil men followed orders, Ryan saw a police wagon arriving with a bearded man whom he recognized as a sketch artist for the Illustrated London News.

“Same arrangement as the last time,” Ryan told him amid the nightmarish zigzag of police lanterns. “I keep the originals. You can make copies, but you can’t use them until I give you permission. That might not happen for several weeks.”

“What’s all the commotion?”

“How’s your stomach?”

“Am I going to wish you hadn’t asked me to come?”

“Not when your editor sees the illustrations. I want you to draw everything you can until your hand becomes numb.”

“It’s going to take that long?”

“I hope your wife isn’t expecting you to be home in time for church.”

“She moved out a month ago.”

“Sorry to hear it. But going to church might be something you’ll want to do after you finish this.”

When Ryan showed him what was in the shop, the illustrator turned pale.

“God in heaven.”

Ryan left him in the shop and stepped outside, discovering that Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne had arrived. Fifty-eight, with an aristocratic bearing and thick gray sideburns almost to his chin, Mayne listened to Ryan’s report, was shown the crime scene, managed to maintain an impassive, professional reaction, and looked as pale as the sketch artist when he emerged from the shop.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” Mayne concluded.

Ryan nodded. “And it wasn’t a robbery.”

“There’ll be considerable pressure from the home secretary to find the madman responsible,” the commissioner predicted. The home secretary controlled all aspects of domestic security, including London’s police department. He was Commissioner Mayne’s powerful superior. “Lord Palmerston will be eager for us to settle this in a hurry. Before there’s a panic.”

“I think we have both murder weapons. The mallet, and this.” Ryan showed him the ivory-handled razor.

“Expensive.”

“Yes. And the footprints don’t have hobnails on the soles, again suggesting a man of means.”

“Unthinkable,” Mayne told him. “A man of means wouldn’t be capable of this ferocity. The razor must have been stolen.”

“Possibly. We’ll check burglary reports to see if a razor like this is missing. Also we’ll question shopkeepers who sell expensive razors and see if anyone can identify this one. As for the mallet, the owner might not be difficult to find. There are initials on it.”

“Initials?”

“J. P.”

“No.” Mayne’s face seemed to shrink with distress. “Are you certain?”

“Why? Is there a problem?” Ryan asked.

“J. P.? I’m very much afraid there is indeed a problem.”

“We found him!” a voice shouted. “The murderer! We caught him!”

Ryan pivoted toward confusion in the fog. The noises grew stronger as lanterns revealed men yanking a figure into view. The figure’s rumpled coat was covered with blood. He struggled.

“Hiding in an alley!”

“Wasn’t hiding! I was asleep!”

“Fought us when we grabbed him!”

“What was I supposed to do? You attacked me!”

“Butchered Jonathan and his family is what you did, and that poor servant girl of his!”

“Jonathan? I never heard of—”

“That’s his blood on your coat!”

“I had too much to drink! I fell!”

“You killed my brother!” A man punched the captive’s face.

“Hey!” Ryan yelled.

The man struck again, the captive wailing and lurching back.

“That’s enough!” Ryan ordered. “Let him explain!”

“It’ll all be lies! The bugger slit my brother’s throat!” The man struck yet again, blood flying.

Ryan rushed to intervene. Abruptly the captive fell, people falling with him.

“I can’t see him! Where is he?” the brother demanded.

“Here! I have him!”

“No, that’s me!”

Bodies tumbled in the fog.

“There! Over there!”

The turmoil shifted toward an alley, the crowd chasing a desperate shadow. Someone swung a club and barely missed the fugitive’s head.

Ryan charged after them. Sensing someone next to him, he glanced that way and reacted with amazement.

“Becker?”


WEARING A CLEAN UNIFORM, Becker kept pace with Ryan despite the tightness of the stitches and bandages under his clothes. “I came back as soon as I could.”

“You should be resting.”

“And miss the chance for you to teach me?”

Ahead, the mob surged into the alley.

“He found a broken bottle!” someone screamed. “My eyes! He slashed my eyes! God help me, I can’t see!”

More people squeezed into the alley.

“I can’t breathe!” someone moaned.

Ryan strained to pull them away.

Becker did the same. Fifteen years younger than Ryan, taller, with broader shoulders, he yanked men out of the alley, throwing them onto the cobblestones.

The odor of alcohol was overwhelming.

“Move!” Ryan ordered.

But the mob was like a wall.

To the left, Ryan saw light through an open door, a heavy woman gaping out.

“There!” he told Becker.

They rushed past the woman and found themselves in one of the many taverns in the area. Charging past benches and a counter, they entered a corridor and reached a storage room on the right.

“The window!” Ryan yelled.

Becker ran around beer kegs and tugged up the window. Outside, the noise of shouts and curses was overwhelming. Ryan brought a lantern to the window, piercing the outside gloom enough to reveal the fugitive swinging a broken bottle at the mob. Faces were bleeding. In fright, the pursuers now strained desperately to retreat from the broken bottle, colliding with those behind them.

Becker’s long arms stretched through the window and seized the fugitive’s shoulders, pulling him inside. Out there, two men grabbed the fugitive’s legs.

The fugitive screamed as if he were being torn apart.

Ryan set the lantern on a table and grabbed a broom from a corner. With the pointed end, he thrust out the window toward the men clutching the fugitive’s legs. He aimed toward their chins, jabbing, striking so hard that a man cried out and grabbed his face. Ryan lunged the broom at the other face, and with a wail, the men out there released the fugitive’s legs.

Suddenly freed from resistance, Becker lurched backward, pulling the fugitive into the room, the two men falling onto the floor.

“Get away!” the captive shouted, swinging the broken bottle.

Ryan grabbed his arm and twisted until, with a scream, the man dropped the bottle, its jagged points shattering. Becker pulled handcuffs from his equipment belt, their new spring-loaded design holding the clasps in place as he used a key to lock them.

“I didn’t do anything!” the man screamed.

“We’ll find the truth of that soon enough,” Ryan said, trying to catch his breath. “How did blood get on your coat?”

“They damned near killed me. That’s how it got on my coat.” The man’s lips were swollen and mangled.

“If you passed out from alcohol and you weren’t hiding,” Becker said, “they did you a favor.”

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“The night’s so cold you might have froze to death.”

“Some favor. Freezing to death or getting beat to death.”

“You can thank us for stopping that from happening.”

“Where were you drinking?” Ryan asked, impressed by Becker’s effort to make the prisoner trust him.

“A lot of places.”

“What’s the name of the last one? When did you leave?”

“I don’t remember.” The man reeked of gin.

“Keep him here until he’s sober enough for us to question him,” Ryan told the patrolmen who’d joined them.

Still breathing hard, he and Becker went to the front room, where Commissioner Mayne waited in the tavern, looking much older than his fifty-eight years. His skin seemed to recede behind the sideburns that hemmed his jaw.

Outside, the loud noises of a scuffle filled the street, constables shouting, striking with their truncheons to disperse the mob.

“This is only starting,” Mayne said gravely.

“We can hope the gin will put them to sleep,” Ryan offered.

“No, this will become worse. I know from experience. The mallet and the initials on it. I—”

The commissioner suddenly stopped as he looked at the heavyset woman who helped to manage the tavern. A red-faced man who seemed to be her husband came in and stood next to her.

“I need to speak with you,” Mayne told Ryan, pointedly ignoring Becker’s presence. “In private.”

The tavernkeepers obviously thought it strange that the commissioner paid attention to a red-haired Irish ruffian instead of a uniformed patrolman.

“Constable Becker is my assistant,” Ryan said. “He needs to know everything.”

Although Becker couldn’t have expected that, he hid his surprise.

“A constable as an assistant?” The commissioner still didn’t look at Becker. “Isn’t that a bit irregular?”

“Well, as you indicated, there’ll be pressure from Lord Palmerston to solve this in a hurry and avoid a panic. We want to assure people I had access to every resource. If you can tolerate going back to the shop, no one will overhear us there.”

“Except the dead,” the commissioner murmured.


THE MAN FROM THE Illustrated London News was drinking from a flask when they came in. He showed no embarrassment at having been discovered.

“I don’t believe this is a job for me. When I couldn’t tolerate being in here any longer, I went outside and tried to sketch the riot, but—”

“For God’s sake, don’t put anything in the newspaper about a riot,” the commissioner pleaded.

“Don’t worry about me. I could hardly see anything in the fog, let alone draw it. But I counted at least two dozen reporters out there, so you can bet you’ll be reading about a riot on top of what happened here tonight.”

The commissioner groaned. “I’ll be hearing from Lord Palmerston for certain.”

“Things got so rough out there I came back to this damned place.”

The odor of blood remained strong.

“Definitely not a job for me.”

“Perhaps more to drink,” Ryan suggested.

“A lot more to drink. If I didn’t need the money…”

“We can use some time in here alone,” Ryan said. “The street’s quiet now. Perhaps some fresh air will help. Or the tavern down the street.”

“Some time in here alone? You’re welcome to as much of it as you want.” The illustrator quickly went outside and closed the door.

Commissioner Mayne stared toward the counter behind which the unseen but impossible-to-ignore presence of the shopkeeper’s body made the room feel small.

“The initials on the mallet. Are you certain they’re J. P.?”

“Absolutely,” Ryan answered.

“I was only fifteen, but I remember how frightened I was. How frightened my mother was.”

“Frightened?” Becker asked.

“My father never admitted to feeling threatened by anything, but I could sense that he was frightened also.”

“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.

“You’re both too young to have been alive then. Day after day, I read everything about them in every newspaper I could find.”

“Them?”

“The Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

As Ryan and Becker frowned in confusion, the commissioner explained.


Saturday, 7 December 1811

The events of that night caused a wave of terror throughout England that had never been equaled. Ratcliffe Highway derived its name not from rats but from a red sandstone cliff that dropped toward the Thames, but in 1811, there were plenty of rats nonetheless, and the desperation associated with squalor.

One of every eight buildings in the area was a tavern. Gambling was commonplace. Prostitutes populated every corner. Theft was so widespread that a fortresslike wall needed to be constructed between Ratcliffe Highway and the London docks.

Shortly before midnight, a linen merchant, Timothy Marr, asked his apprentice, James Gowen, to help him close the shop, which had remained open to accommodate sailors newly arrived in port with money they were eager to spend. Marr sent his servant, Margaret Jewell, to pay a bakery bill and bring back fresh oysters, a cheap, common food that didn’t need to be cooked. But Margaret discovered that the bakery was closed, as was every place that sold oysters. Disappointed, she returned to the shop, only to find that the door was bolted. As she knocked repeatedly, she attracted the attention of a night watchman making his rounds as well as a neighbor whose late supper had been disturbed by the noise.

The neighbor crawled over a shared fence, entered through an unlocked back door, proceeded along a corridor, and discovered the body of the apprentice. The young man’s head had been bashed in. Gore covered the walls. The neighbor stepped shakily farther into the shop and gaped at Mrs. Marr sprawled near the front door. Her head had been smashed repeatedly, portions of her brain leaking out. Terrified, the neighbor freed the bolt on the front door. A crowd rushed in, knocking him aside. Among them was Margaret Jewell, who looked behind the shop’s counter, saw the battered corpse of Timothy Marr, and screamed.

But the horrific discoveries were only beginning. Close inspection revealed that Marr, his wife, and his apprentice all had their throats slit. In Marr’s case, the cut was so deep that his neck bone could be seen. In a back room, the searchers found a shattered cradle and an infant whose head had been pounded, its throat cut the same as the others.


NO MONEY WAS STOLEN from Marr’s cashbox,” Commissioner Mayne said. “In a bedroom, a ship carpenter’s mallet with the initials J. P. was discovered. Its striking surface was matted with blood and hair.”

“But…” Becker hesitated, his thoughts in disorder. “That’s what happened here, except that two children were killed, not one.”

The commissioner seemed not to notice that Becker had violated protocol by speaking before Detective Inspector Ryan did.

Ryan now spoke. “Ratcliffe Highway is only a quarter mile away. Saturday, December seventh, eighteen hundred and eleven, you said.”

“Forty-three years ago,” the commissioner murmured.

“Today’s December tenth, not the seventh, but these murders happened on Saturday night, too, so it’s nearly the same.”

Mayne nodded. “I was raised in Dublin. My father was a judge in Ireland.”

Ryan hadn’t realized that Mayne was Irish like himself and had removed nearly all traces of his accent, the same as Ryan.

“In those days, before the railway, London’s newspapers and magazines were sent via mail coach. Thanks to improved roads, they traveled at an amazing ten miles an hour,” Mayne explained. “As word about the savage murders spread relentlessly, so did the terrified reactions to them. When the mail coaches reached the port at Holyhead, their contents were transferred to packet boats that sailed to Dublin. Before steam, the boats were at the mercy of the wind and storms. Sometimes it took two days for the boats to cross the Irish Sea. My father had political aspirations. The London news was important to him. Reports about the Ratcliffe Highway murders reached him five days after the butchery occurred.”

The building with its five corpses seemed to contract.

“Within my father’s memory, within anyone’s memory, so many people had never been murdered at once,” the commissioner continued. “Yes, a highwayman might shoot a traveler at night. Someone passing an alley might be dragged in and stabbed for his purse. A drunken brawl in a tavern might end in someone being beaten to death. But no one could remember three adults killed together, and the child! An infant! All murdered so violently.

“The news spread from town to town, gathering strength as local newspapers reprinted the details. No one could imagine what sort of lunatic was responsible. Receiving the newspapers five days after the murders, my father told a business acquaintance who visited our house that by then the murderer could have traveled almost anywhere. Indeed, the killer might very well have been on the packet boat that brought the news to Ireland. The killer might even be in Dublin itself. Then my father realized that I was listening at the door and closed it.”

The house of death felt colder. The commissioner looked at Ryan and Becker with terrible distress.

“People were afraid to leave their homes. They suspected every stranger. I heard of a wealthy woman who had locks installed on doors within doors in her house. Everyone was certain that every sound in the night was made by the murderer coming for them. Only gradually did the panic subside. But it quickly returned with greater force when twelve days after the first mass killing, there was another.”

“What?” Ryan asked in amazement. “Another? Twelve days later?”

“Only a half mile from Marr’s shop. Again in the Ratcliffe Highway area.”


THIS TIME, it happened on a Thursday,” the commissioner said. “A week before Christmas. A man named John Williamson owned a tavern. A customer hurried toward it just after closing time, hoping to get a pail of beer, when he heard someone shout, ‘Murder!’ The cry came from a half-naked man who hung from an upper window, suspended by bedsheets tied together.

“The half-naked man was a lodger in the tavern. He fell toward the street, where a night watchman caught him. As the lodger kept shouting, the watchman pounded on the locked front door while a crowd quickly gathered. They pried up a hatch in the sidewalk where beer kegs were delivered. When they charged into the basement, they found Williamson’s body. His head had been bashed in by a blood-covered ripping chisel that lay next to him. His throat was slit. His right thumb had been slashed almost completely off, apparently when he tried to defend himself.

“When the crowd ran upstairs into the kitchen, they found Williamson’s wife in a pool of blood, her head pounded in, her throat slit also. A servant girl lay near her, similarly mutilated. The lodger who’d escaped reported that he’d heard a loud noise and crept downstairs from his room to investigate. Close to the bottom, he’d peered into the kitchen and seen a man near Mrs. Williamson’s body. Dreading any sound he might make, the lodger had crept back up the stairs and tied sheets together to climb from the window.

“News of the slaughter spread everywhere. Fire bells clanged. Men grabbed pistols and swords, swarming through the streets, hunting anyone who seemed even remotely suspicious. One volunteer chased a man he believed was the killer but who was innocent and who pulled out a pistol, blowing off the volunteer’s face. Anyone who was foreign, particularly Irish, was assumed to be guilty.”

The commissioner paused after the Irish reference, seeming to take for granted that Ryan would understand the terror.

“Strangers hid and were blamed for hiding. Every window was shuttered. Watchmen were hired to guard houses and then were suspected of being the killer. As the mail coaches transported the newspapers to every community throughout the land, the panic multiplied. Isolated villages armed themselves, convinced that the killer would flee London and pass through their area, leaving more bodies in his wake. I remember being frightened when I overheard one of my father’s friends tell him, ‘We are no longer safe in our beds.’ I read that in London people hurried to churches to beg God for their lives, only to find notices nailed to doors that warned, among us are monsters.”

“Monsters,” Ryan said.

“Imagine everyone’s relief when an anonymous source directed investigators to a young merchant seaman, John Williams, who had recently returned from a long voyage and whose tendency to get into fights had attracted attention.”

“John Williams?” Becker asked, puzzled.

“That’s right. He rented a room at a boardinghouse a short walk from both murder scenes. A ship’s carpenter had previously stayed there and left a box of tools. Those tools included a mallet with the carpenter’s initials J. P. stamped by a nail into its top.”

“J. P. The initials on the mallet we found tonight,” Ryan said.

“You can understand why I’m troubled. The mallet was familiar to the boardinghouse’s owner. He identified it as the same mallet that was found at the scene of the first murders. The night of the second murders, Williams was reported to have acted strangely when he returned to the boardinghouse after news about the killings spread. Someone remembered blood on his clothing, which he claimed was due to a fight in a tavern.

“Williams was detained and spent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day in Coldbath Fields Prison, where he waited to be questioned after the holiday. But when the magistrates reconvened and spectators squeezed into the court, expecting to see the presumed killer being brought in for questioning, word arrived that prison guards had discovered Williams dead in his cell.”

“Dead?” Becker asked in surprise.

“A suicide. A pole extended across the top of his cell. The jailers used it to air out bedding. Williams had been allowed to keep his clothes and had tied a handkerchief around the pole, hanging himself. But more horrors were yet to come.”

“That’s difficult to imagine,” Ryan said.

“The authorities concluded that Williams’s suicide was the same as a confession. A public hanging normally demonstrated what happened to monsters. But that wasn’t possible in this case, so instead, on New Year’s Eve day, his body was placed on a horse-drawn cart. A slanted platform allowed his corpse to be fully in view. The mallet was put into a slot to the left of his head. The ripping chisel lay behind his head. Opposite the mallet, to the right of his head, another object was placed into a slot, soon to have a major role in the ceremony.

“Spectators gathered as the cart was led along Ratcliffe Highway. Numerous politicians walked before and after it, wanting to be seen by the crowd. The procession came to a halt at Marr’s shop, where the first four murders had occurred. The cart was positioned so that Williams’s corpse appeared to view the scene of his inhuman acts. After ten minutes, the cart was led to the tavern where the second set of murders had occurred. Twenty thousand people lined the streets, watching the procession. They were strangely silent as if stunned by the sanity-threatening crimes that Williams had committed. The only outburst came from a coachman who leapt down and lashed the corpse several times across the face.”

Ryan’s cheek twitched.

“The cart halted a final time at the crossroads of Cannon and Cable streets. Paving stones were torn up. A hole was dug. Williams’s body was dumped into it. The object that had been put in a slot opposite the mallet was pulled out. It was a stake.”

“What?” Ryan asked.

“A man acting as the equivalent of an executioner jumped into the hole and pounded the stake through Williams’s heart. Unslaked lime was thrown onto the corpse. Dirt followed. The paving stones were hammered back into place. When I heard about this, I asked my father why they used a stake. He told me it was an old superstition, that the stake was the only way to prevent an evil spirit from returning to commit more unspeakable crimes.”

“And the crossroads?” Becker wondered.

“Another superstition. If, despite the stake, the ghost of the monster somehow returned, it would be trapped forever, unable to choose which of the four roads to take. At first, the replaced paving stones were uneven enough that travelers could tell where the monster was buried and avoid the contamination of driving over his grave. But gradually the stones became level with the others. Over the years, people forgot where Williams was buried or that he was buried there at all.”

“I go through that crossroads often,” Ryan said. “I never realized.”

“Knowing that the terror had ended allowed me to sleep at last without worrying that Williams was outside in the dark,” the commissioner told them.

“And had it ended? Were there any further murders?”

“No, there were not.”

Something in the house made a creaking sound, as if a corpse had moved, but, of course, the noise could only be due to the cold night causing window joints to shrink. Nonetheless, Ryan, Becker, and Commissioner Mayne stared toward the closed door that led to the bodies in the hallway, the kitchen, and the bedroom.

“The murders here… do you think that someone found an old mallet and hammered the initials J. P. into it to draw attention to the parallel?” Becker asked. A troubling thought made him shake his head from side to side. “Or else… no, that’s hardly possible.”

“Say what’s on your mind,” Ryan told him. “If you’re going to work with me, I don’t want you holding back.”

“Could this be the same mallet that was used in the original murders?”

The door opened, startling them.

The bearded artist for the Illustrated London News stepped in.

“Is this yours?” he asked Ryan. He held a newspaperboy’s cap in his hands. “One of the patrolmen found this. He thought it looked like one you lost.”

“Yes. Thanks.” Ryan pushed the cap down over his head, at last able to hide his red hair. “How long do newspapers keep old issues?”

“The Illustrated has copies from eighteen forty-two, when it began.”

“We’re interested in eighteen eleven. And any illustrations that might have been made of a weapon used in a crime that year.”

“Weren’t any drawings in newspapers back then. We were the first to use ’em. Crime? What crime?”

“The Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

“Oh, right, them,” the artist said matter-of-factly.

“You know about them?” the commissioner asked in surprise. “How? You’re too young to have been alive in eighteen eleven.”

“Sure. I read about them last week.”

Becker’s voice demonstrated as much surprise as the commissioner’s. “You read about them?”

“ ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ”

“What in blazes are you talking about?” Ryan asked.

“The Opium-Eater. Thomas De Quincey.”

“Everyone knows who the Opium-Eater is. What does Thomas De Quincey have to do with—”

“I sketched him on Friday for our newspaper. His collected works are being published. He’s been talking to reporters so they’ll write about him and get people to buy his books. Undignified, if you ask me. But when was the Opium-Eater dignified?”

“I still don’t—”

“ ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ That’s something else De Quincey wrote besides the opium-eating book. Since I’d drawn a sketch of him, I decided I’d read what all the fuss is about.”

As if to make a point, the bearded man pulled out his flask and tilted it above his lips, finishing its contents. “De Quincey didn’t just write about being addicted to opium. This ‘Fine Art’ thing describes the Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

“What?”

“The Opium-Eater went on and on about them. The bloodiest thing I ever read. Gave me nightmares. He piled on so many gruesome details, it’s like he was there.”