The Detective and the Devil by Lloyd Shepherd Read Free Book Online Page B

answer on the magistrate. Keep it to yourself, then. It is a recent novel. By a woman named Austen.’
    ‘Do you enjoy it?’
    ‘I do. I like to read of clever people living in circumstances different to ours. Her world is full of wealthy soldiers and summer rain. She writes beautifully. I would like to meet
her.’
    ‘You sound besotted.’
    ‘Besotted? No. Intrigued by another woman’s voice.’
    ‘And does Mrs Austen make dinner for her husband?’
    ‘I would be surprised if she were married. She seems to find men oddly amusing creatures. I cannot think why. Wash yourself. You smell disgusting. I will prepare you some food instead of
writing my own novel.’
    She stood and went into the little kitchen and looked out of the window into the street outside while she worked. Some boys were playing an elaborate game down there, watched by a fellow puffing
on a pipe. He shouted something to them and they laughed and scattered.
    She went back into the parlour with a pot which she placed on the fire. She set a tray down beside his chair – a plate with bread and jam and a bowl of apples she had bought that morning.
Charles sat down to eat. Abigail returned to her book, and for a few minutes there was peace and a comfortable silence.
    Abigail looked up from her book, and noted that her husband was in his turn looking at her. She examined him. Abigail was widely read in matters relating to chemistry, botany and anatomy. She
could, she believed, cut open his chest and take out his heart. She would hold it in her hand and watch it beating, but she would still have little idea of what it contained.
    ‘My husband has the stench of consideration about him,’ she said. ‘Which means my husband is working. Even while he sits with me.’
    ‘You are a more skilled investigator than I, wife.’
    ‘I think not. You are a dedicated sniffer of secrets. How goes this new case?’
    ‘It is a sad one. I do not wish to labour your peace with discussion of it.’
    ‘You do not? Do I have no say in the matter?’
    She smiled as she said it, but there was a deliberate edge to her words. She wished to talk of the case, whatever her husband thought.
    ‘Well then. The case has some unique aspects, but the most remarkable of them is its similarity to the Marr and Williamson killings. There is a good deal of panic in the neighbourhood that
the same killer has returned.’
    Abigail was no longer smiling, and the mention of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter chilled the air in the room, but she was listening closely. He continued.
    ‘The whole family was slaughtered: father, wife, daughter. The man was in the kitchen, laid out on his front. The mother was face down in the grate. The daughter was tied to a chair, her
throat cut. All the family members seem to have been attacked with a maul.’
    She was distracted by the awful details. She had asked him, almost a year ago, that he share such details of his work when she requested it: ‘However grim, I wish to hear it.’ When
he had asked why, she had said she needed to test her own mind, to ensure its hardiness. It was a fragment of the same experimental regime which had been taking her to St Luke’s. It involved
frequent prods at her sensibility and understanding, probing for weak spots. She knew it made Charles uncomfortable.
    ‘Benjamin Johnson was the name of the husband and father,’ Charles continued. ‘He was a clerk with the East India Company. I spoke to the maidservant this morning, at her
father’s lodgings in Spitalfields. The maid told me Mrs Johnson and her daughter had been taking the air down in Brighton in the fortnight before their deaths. Mr Johnson had joined them
there shortly after they left, saying his daughter had been taken ill.’
    ‘His employer let him go?’
    ‘I imagine so. I have not yet spoken to anyone at the Company.’
    ‘John Company, they call it. Or the HEIC. H as in Honourable. And as I hear it, taking time off in such a way could be