The Angel of Highgate

20 LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD

“If your nightmare had a nightmare, it would look like Mordecai Fowler,” that was how the saying went in the Seven Dials Rookery.

The “rookeries” were underworld strongholds, slum-land enclaves inhabited by entire communities of criminals and their women and children. Rookeries existed in virtually every large city, including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and especially London, which was home to several. The most notorious of these was the Seven Dials, a squalid huddle of smoking chimneys and grime-blackened buildings that seemed to have been formed of filth and soot. Snaking through the Seven Dials was a labyrinth of narrow alleyways that wound through a dismal clutter of shabby forecourts, decrepit tenements, dilapidated warehouses, and abandoned factories.

The eastern boundary of the Seven Dials was marked by a narrow canal the locals called “Filthy Ditch.” It had originally been a tidal stream, but now was little more than an open sewer, for it was used by the inhabitants of the rookery as a place to dump all their unwanteds: old rags, rubbish, rotting food, dead animals, human excrement, and the occasional abortion. In summer, the reek from Filthy Ditch often drifted as far as the Houses of Parliament where ministers, confronted by a symptom of urban blight too noisome even for them to ignore, would resolve to forward a motion to appoint a committee to conduct a study to look into cleaning up the ditch. But then the summer recess would begin, the members would return home to their constituencies in the countryside, and the matter would be quietly forgotten.

Guarded by ferocious guard dogs and gangs of club-wielding thugs, rookeries such as the Seven Dials were too dangerous even for London’s Metropolitan Police force to enter, except in large numbers and heavily armed. Even then, the prospect of actually catching a criminal once hidden in the warren of buildings was slim, for the denizens of the rookery had cut hidden escape hatches and doors through walls and ceilings, into cellars and out of roofs. At the first blast of a Peeler’s whistle, a fugitive could flee through a maze of secret passageways, skylights, manholes, trap doors, tunnels, cellars and hidden entrances and exits. Because of the danger, and the meager chance of actually making an arrest, the police shunned entering such places except under the most exceptional circumstances.

If it was dangerous for the police, then it was doubly so for the honest citizenry. Anyone foolish enough to enter the rookeries would be lucky to escape with his life. Once a Protestant missionary, newly returned from spreading The Word amongst the savages in Africa, entered the Seven Dials for the purposes of ministering to the poor. The hapless missionary soon found the natives of the Seven Dials far more savage than any he encountered in the Dark Continent. The women attacked him first, beating him insensible and stripping him naked. When their menfolk arrived, they completed the job by shaving the missionary’s head, ramming his mouth full of hot mustard, and hurling him into the reeking canal.

Unlike most of the denizens of the rookeries, Mordecai Fowler was the product of a respectable middle-class family. Few of his childhood memories of that time remained, and those that did were bleak. Fowler’s father, a bank officer, suffered from a weakness for the drink. After his drunkenness led to a discrepancy in the books of some thirty shillings (which was never found), he was sacked from the bank and subsequently plunged even more precipitously into the ravages of alcohol. Over the weeks that followed the family’s meager savings were exchanged for small glasses of gin which Fowler’s father tossed down his throat. Soon little Mordecai, scarcely six at the time, grew accustomed to hiding in the closet under the stairs with his mother while angry creditors pounded their fists upon the door. Mordecai saw his father only infrequently during that period, which was just as well, for on the occasions when he staggered home, drunk and railing, it would end with a beating for Mordecai and his mother, whose loud wailing would go on for hours.

With no money to pay for school, Mordecai was left to his own devices, and spent most of his days running wild on the streets around his home. Mordecai had no friends, and being unnaturally small for his age, soon became the target of local bullies. Soon he began to shun human company and spent most of his time by himself, playing in the alleyways behind his house. Here Mordecai found new friends that he, in turn, could bully — rats. The junior Fowler whiled away many happy hours crucifying them against walls, amputating their arms and legs with an old pair of scissors, or dousing them with paraffin and setting them alight so he could watch them run in wild circles. How their agonized squeals made little Mordecai laugh. His experiments soon diminished the local rat population enough to make them scarce, and then he became the terror of the neighborhood cats and dogs.

But it wasn’t just the power of life and death he wielded over the lesser creatures that fascinated little Mordecai. More intoxicating still was his ability to induce suffering. He applied himself to the pursuit of this knowledge with a diligence he had never shown at school. He knew exactly the right size of rock to tie to a cat before he threw it in the canal, so it would frantically paddle for long, agonizing minutes before exhausting itself and being pulled under. After physics came self-taught lessons in anatomy, as Mordecai knew which tendons to sever so that when he set fire to the dog, its hind legs dragged uselessly as it frantically sought to get away.

By the time he was nine years old, an age at which most middle-class boys were playing with tops, or cantering a broomstick horse up and down the hallways, little Mordecai could have taught the agents of the Inquisition a trick or two.

Then one day the police came to inform Mordecai’s mother that her husband’s body had been dredged from the canal where he had fallen in a drunken stupor. At the news, Fowler’s mother began a keening that continued for days. Once the news of his father’s death reached the family’s creditors, they descended upon the house like buzzards on carrion, for they knew there was little chance of being paid with the family breadwinner dead.

For Mordecai’s mother, the breaking point came when the court-appointed bailiffs entered the house with a warrant to take away the family silver, the only items of value the family still possessed. Shrieking and wailing, she had to be restrained by police officers as bailiffs stuffed the plates, tureens, cutlery, and serving trays into canvas sacks and lugged them out. By this time the house was bare to the floorboards, and Mordecai and his mother were sleeping on bundles of rags. After the episode of the silver, Mordecai’s mother fell into a distraction, and wandered the house, moaning and sighing as she wrung an old polishing rag in her hands, her long gray hair hanging down in dishevelment.

Not long after, Mordecai’s mother was committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital, after which he never saw her again. With his father dead and his mother asylumed, the house was sold to pay off the voracious creditors and Mordecai was sent to live with a distant uncle. The man was a much-respected and deeply pious church alderman who crept into Mordecai’s room by night and sodomized him, then attempted to beat the carnal devil out of the young boy with birch twigs until his buttocks were striped and bleeding.

After six months of this treatment, Mordecai ran away, and became one of the many thousands of urchins living rough on the streets of London. In time, he wandered into the Seven Dials Rookery where he fell in with a gang of pickpockets and became their apprentice. Mordecai proved an adept thief, and as he grew older, progressed in the criminal hierarchy from dip to cracksman, to bully boy and so on up the ladder. Over the years, his innate Machiavellianism showed in a willingness to be more ruthless, despicable, and crueler than all others. By age forty, he had bludgeoned his way to the position of high mobsman, lord of the Seven Dials Underworld. Feared by all, Fowler’s word was the closest thing that passed for law in the rookery.

It was still early morning when Mordecai Fowler, Barnabus Snudge, and Walter Crynge materialized from the swirling yellow fog and tromped across the loose planks of a narrow footbridge spanning the reeking ditch that marked entry into the Seven Dials. The mobsmen’s luck had not been good that night, and they were returning home with just a handful of shillings bullied from the purses of terrorized Whitechapel whores.

It was dark in the rookery, as all the gas lights had long since been smashed by children whose mothers and fathers took a parental pride in their offspring’s wanton vandalism. But despite the gloom and blinding fog, Fowler and his cronies navigated the echoing alleyways with unerring familiarity, and soon arrived at the abandoned three-story factory building that served as Fowler’s lair.

This part of the building had once been a match factory. The large, high-ceilinged ground-floor rooms which had been the factory floor were now strewn with abandoned clutter. Narrow, creaking wooden stairways ran up to second and third floors where a warren of small rooms had once functioned as offices for clerks and accountants.

Fowler and his two cronies thundered up the swaying wooden stairs, passed through a darkened empty space, and then climbed another flight of stairs to the third floor loft. The loft had once been the storeroom for the match factory. A few half-empty barrels of tar, sulfur and other materials were scattered here and there, but most anything of value had been hauled out and sold long ago.

It was dark in the loft, except for one corner where stubs of candles guttered on a table around which fifteen or more black silhouettes huddled — more of Fowler’s mobsmen betting on a game of dice. Lit by the flickering candlelight, the motley assortment of grizzled, grimy, soot-streaked faces could have belonged to a coven of devils roasting a soul in hell. The men cursed and brayed at each other over the rattle of dice in a cup and the banging down of coins as bets were laid.

“Wot the bleedin’ hell are you lot up to?” Fowler bellowed. The men fell silent and cast guilty looks at one another.

“Go to, you lazy layabouts! Get yer arses out o’ here. There’s pockets to be picked, purses to be cut, mugs to be coshed, mischief to be done.”

The game broke up as the men evaporated into the shadows.

Fowler snatched a candle from the table and crossed the floor to a wooden door, which he unlocked with a large iron key. Inside he fired a match with a dirty thumbnail and lit a lantern hanging from the ceiling.

The room had once been the factory manager’s office. The hideous oak desk was still there, but in one corner sat a broken-backed bed, an iron-banded trunk fastened with an enormous, rusty padlock, and a sideboard that was the desk’s equal in hideousness. Piled atop the sideboard in a careless heap was Fowler’s swag: a collection of silverware taken from the many middle-class residences he and his “cracksmen” had burglarized over the years.

Fowler’s feet were hot and burning from hours of walking. His throat was parched. Atop the sideboard was a heavy stone jug of water. Fowler hoisted the jug and poured water into a tarnished silver goblet. For all his many vices, because of the ruin that drink had brought upon his family, he had been a strict teetotaler all his life. Despite the metallic taste of the goblet, the water was cool and refreshing in Fowler’s mouth and he drained the goblet and filled it again. As he quaffed the second goblet his eyes trailed along the silver strewn across the sideboard: tureens, tankards, serving trays, butter dishes, all of it of the very best quality. He had no love or appreciation of beauty of any kind, but he knew all the hallmarks and could differentiate the good stuff from worthless “tat.” This was all the “good stuff.”

The cutlery was kept in a cherry and walnut box lined with blue damask, against which the highly polished silverware gleamed brightly. His eyes trailed avariciously across the neat rows of knives, forks, and spoons until they came to an empty space.

Fowler yanked the goblet from his lips. Water ran down his chin and dribbled onto the front of his waistcoat.

An empty space.

In the room outside, the dice players had dispersed, and now five of Fowler’s highest ranking mobsmen, his leftenants, sat around the table playing cards. They all looked up, startled, when the office door banged open and Fowler’s ominous silhouette choked the open doorway. “Come in here, you lot!” he bellowed. “Crynge and Snudge, too. All of ya.”

The leftenants exchanged worried looks as they filed into the room. The High Mobsman stood behind the hideous desk. Crynge and Snudge took up their usual positions to his left and right. “Close the door,” Fowler said to the last man in the room. “And lock it up tight.”

The mobsman did as he’d been told and joined the others.

For several minutes Fowler said nothing as he stood glaring at the five men assembled on the other side of the table, his protruding lower lip jutting out even further than normal. His bushy mutton-chop whiskers bristled as the muscles in his jowls clenched and unclenched. Fowler was in a black mood — they saw that instantly. And when Mordecai Fowler was in a black mood, someone usually suffered, horribly and painfully.

“Someone’s taken somefink wot belongs to me,” he said slowly, black eyes moving from one man to the next. “A piece of me silver.”

The men exchanged stunned glances. Everyone knew that stealing from Fowler was suicide. Stealing his precious silver went beyond suicide. It was begging for a slow, painful, lingering death.

“Naw,” began Tommy Tailor cheerfully, “ain’t been stole, Mordecai. You probably just mislaid—”

“AIN’T MISLAID!” Fowler bellowed. “Ain’t mislaid,” he repeated, his voice lowered to a rumbling threat. “It was took. And by one of you barsterds.”

“But wu-wu-wu-we wouldn’t take nuffink o’ yours,” Whitey Smith stammered. “You nu-nu-nu-know that, Mordecai. It’s gu-gotta be someone else—”

“Ain’t nobody but you five allowed in here!” Fowler yelled. “So it had to be one of you.”

“Wot about Crynge and Snudge?” Tailor protested.

“They was wiv me the whole day. So I knows it ain’t them. That leaves you five.”

Each man blanched as Fowler reached into his coats and drew out a steel spike about eighteen inches long and less than the thickness of a man’s little finger with a point sharpened to infinity. Only the tip was a polished silver color. The remainder of the shaft was a dark mottled red that could have been rust or just as easily dried blood. The spike was set in a tortured lump of wormwood that served as a handle and around which Fowler’s thick fingers clenched. In the closest he had ever come to humor, Fowler had christened the spike “Mister Pierce.” He kept it in a leather scabbard inside one of his coats, and it was his favorite weapon, for it killed not by shock and trauma like a bullet, nor with the artery-severing quickness of a knife blade. Instead the thin, needle-like spike could be thrust through soft tissue and cartilage again and again, causing terrible suffering, but leaving the victim alive and screaming.

“Put your right hands on the table. All of ya.”

The men hesitated. No one wanted to be the first.

“NOW!” Fowler bellowed.

The five men leapt forward and placed their right hands, palm down, on the surface of the oak desk.

“Now, you’re all gonna swear an oath that it wasn’t you wot took my silver.” He took a step toward the table. All five men flinched and snatched their hands away.

“I didn’t tell ya to move!” Fowler screamed.

The five slowly placed their hands back on the tabletop.

Fowler reached inside his coats again, yanked out a pistol that had been tucked into his pants, and tossed it to Crynge.

“Mister Crynge, the first man wot takes his hand off that table… shoot him dead.”

“Right you are, Mister Fowler,” Crynge cackled.

The five men watched in growing terror as the cadaverous Crynge drew back the hammer and leveled the pistol at them. Only then did the awful gravity of the situation become apparent.

One of them would not leave the room alive.

“Now, I want you all to repeat after me—” he began, but was interrupted by Tommy Tailor.

“Mister Fowler, you know you can trust us lads.” Tailor flashed his gap-toothed grin. “It ain’t worth all this bother, now is it? All over a tiny little spoon—”

“Shut yer trap!” he barked. Tommy Tailor dropped his gaze to the table and licked his lips nervously.

“Now,” Fowler continued, “repeat after me: I swear—”

“I swear,” the men intoned as one.

“On my worthless life—”

“On my worthless life,” they echoed.

“That I ain’t never stole nuffink from Mordecai Fowler, and I never, ever would.”

The men repeated the line, stumbling over the words.

“So ’elp me Gawd.”

“So help me God.”

“There,” Fowler said, lips peeling back from his yellow tombstone teeth in an approximation of a smile. “That weren’t so bad, now wuz it?”

He turned as if to walk away but then pivoted sharply, raised Mister Pierce high over his head, and swung with all his might, driving the spike through the back of Tommy Tailor’s hand, pinning it to the tabletop.

Tailor let out an ear-splitting shriek and stared in wide-eyed horror at his impaled hand.

“Spoon?” Fowler bellowed in Tailor’s agonized face. “I didn’t never say it was a spoon wot was took! I just said it was me silver! Only the thieving rat-barsterd wot took it woulda known that!”

Tommy Tailor crumpled to his knees. Shivering with pain and shock, he tore his gaze from the spike and looked up at Fowler.

“I’m sorry, Mordecai. It was a mistake. Honest. I was just lookin’ at it. I wasn’t never gonna steal it. Honest I wasn’t. Hope to die—”

“Hope to die?” Fowler interrupted. “Oh, you’re gonna hope to die, all right. You’re gonna hope as hard as you can, Tommy me laddo.” He threw a glance at the other four, who had stepped away, cowering, from the table. “Hold ’im!” he barked.

Eager to distance themselves from Tailor’s guilt, the four mobsmen rushed forward, seized their former comrade, and dragged him to his feet.

Fowler’s huge hands rummaged through Tailor’s clothing with bruising thoroughness. They found something in his inside jacket pocket and yanked it out, holding it up for all to see. Almost lost in Fowler’s swollen fist was a tiny silver spoon of the kind used for teething babies.

“Wot’s this, eh?” Fowler yelled in Tailor’s face. “Wot the bleedin’ hell’s this?”

“I, I’m sorry, Mordecai!” Tailor stammered. “I’m sorry—”

“You greedy little barsterd!” Fowler spat. “You piece of filth! You think you can steal from me?”

Fowler looked at the spoon clenched in his massive hand and a thought occurred to him.

“You want this, eh?” He shook the spoon under Tailor’s nose. “You want it?”

“No! No, I don’t want it—” Tailor stammered.

“Well, you can bleedin’ well have it!” He yelled at the four men restraining Tailor, “Hold his head! Hold it tight!”

Fowler grabbed Tailor by the throat and began to squeeze. When Tailor opened his mouth to breathe, Fowler rammed the spoon in. As it twisted back and forth, the spoon broke off Tailor’s front teeth. The room filled with horrible choking as Fowler forced the spoon down his throat. When the spoon was halfway down his gullet, Fowler grabbed Tailor’s mouth and held it shut with both hands.

“Now swallow it, you vermin! Swallow it!”

Tears of pain and terror poured down Tailor’s face as he somehow managed to swallow the spoon, choking and gagging the whole time. Fowler let go of his jaws and stepped away, smiling. Tailor, convulsing and shuddering with pain and terror, had to be held up or he would have collapsed.

“I’m sorry,” Tailor rasped, his voice in ruins as his lacerated throat began to swell.

“Oh, you’re sorry now, are ya, Tommy?”

“I’ll, I’ll make it up to ya. Honest… I… I…” He tried to say more but couldn’t get the words out.

“You’ll make it up to me, will ya? All right, then.” He held out his empty hand to Tailor. “Give us the spoon back and I’ll let you off.”

Tailor, a broken man, choked out a sob. “I, I, I can’t give it back. It’s in me belly, ain’t it?”

Fowler became suddenly thoughtful. “Oh, I see. You can’t give it back because it’s in yer belly.”

He casually reached down, slid open one of the drawers in the table, and pulled out a large butcher’s knife with a ten-inch blade.

“Well, we’ll just have to go lookin’ for it then, won’t we? Only it might take a while, ’cause I ain’t no doctor.”

As Fowler stumped around the table, he stropped the knife blade up and down the leg of his trousers. At the sight of the butcher’s knife, Tailor broke down and started to sob and beg for his life. The other four mobsmen let go and began to ease themselves toward the door.

“Where d’you lot think you’re slopin’ off to?” Fowler screamed. “Get back here and hold him!”

The gang of stray mobsmen lurking outside the room, eavesdropping, exchanged horrified looks as the first bloodcurdling screams began. After ten minutes, none could stand it any longer and hurried outside. But even in the street, Tommy Tailor’s screams could be plainly heard, echoing down the dark, dank alleyways of the rookery. After half an hour the screams subsided into the groans of a damned soul being tortured in the lowest circle of hell. After forty-five minutes they were the convulsive gasps of a soul eager to quit a body that had become a prison of suffering. Then even that stopped and in its place there was an ominous silence.

After an hour, the door burst open and the four survivors of Fowler’s inquisition spilled out, eager to distance themselves from the blood-soaked atrocity of torn and mortified flesh splashed across the floorboards. Though they were hard, violent men themselves, many of them accomplished murderers and thugs, all were ashen-faced and trembling at the horrors they had been forced to witness.

Mordecai Fowler sauntered out of the room a few moments later, the front of his clothes spattered in blood and gore. He carefully wiped the sticky slime adhering to the small silver spoon on a rag that had once been a piece of Tommy Tailor’s shirt. Then Fowler blew on the spoon until it fogged with his breath and gave it a final polish on his sleeve, smiling at his own upside down reflection in the spoon’s tiny bowl.

As Fowler left the room, the four surviving mobsmen exchanged cowed glances. All knew that there was one less devil in hell that night, for he was walking the earth wrapped in the skin of Mordecai Fowler.