Miss Birdseed

The public house had long been haunted by some strange presence that upset slop trays and let beer dribble out from the taps when no one was looking, but it was not really about this that the publican's wife had come to consult the occult detective, Joshua Samuels.

'That's just the Pimlico poisoner, that is' said Mrs Godalming with weird alacrity. 'Back in my grandfather's day, the pub was frequented by bigwigs from Westminster on their way to County Hall, where Maggie Struthers was strung up by her neck in the place of execution for killing her husband and child with arsenic. That was one of the last public hangings, that was, where you could go and buy nuts and get half cut. There were terrible tramplings in them days - hundreds died, they say - that's why they stopped it.

'But I ain't come here to talk about Maggie. She so enrages Mr Godalming, I find myself in league with the murderous old bitch' she cackled, showing that she had a few missing teeth. 'No, this is about something I hear you're a specialist in: runes.'

Samuels straightened in his chair. He could hear the Thames from his window and this steadied him, as did the quality of midmorning light pouring through the large window. Runic devilry was a terrible business, not one he relished. 'You've been threatened?' he asked.

'In a manner of thinking, I suppose. It's this way: sometimes in a pub like ours you get people who've got no business being among normal folk. There's a woman, used to be a birdfeed seller in Piccadilly. Must have gone mad or something, though, since according to folk she just vanished one day and was seen by a chaplain in the madhouse near to Clerkenwell a month later. She spent a year in there before she was released. These places...' Mrs Godalming snorted. 'Him indoors had an aunt in there once. You know what spinsters can be, go mad without a bit of sex. Lord knows why, it ain't ever been anything to write home about in MY experience.

'At any rate, they ain't run by practitioners, you know, just business men and God botherers. Probably let out Miss Birdseed to free up some cells, inflict her on the rest of us. She came into the pub one day and bought a sherry, seemed to be harmless enough, but then my old man caught her feeding a cat poking out of her dress, and another at her breast. Told me it looked to be suckling her, though I reckon that's just his dirty mind. You know what men are.

And of course, the daft git loses his dishrag. Slings her out there and then, cursing her all the way, until at the door a kitten escapes from her coat and he kicks it so hard into the street I hurl a tankard at him. Poor little thing... he might have ruptured its guts.

'The knock to his skull shut him up, anyway, but then Miss Birdseed turns to him with the most baleful eyes a Christian's ever seen, and says: "Curse me as much as you like, landlord. Whatever you've done to that child, though, will on yourself be visited." And just like that she's gone.'

The real trouble, it transpired, had occurred a week later when Mr Godalming found a pamphlet describing a recent criminal trial on top of a beer barrel in the cellar. The back was painted with a rune composed crudely of cartoon cats. Joshua Isaiah Samuels (as read the golden plate on his office door, making it seem as though he'd learned his trade from the Witch of Endor) studied the pamphlet in the cold cellar, holding it in one black-gloved hand.

The Godalming Arms' decline from the days when powdered periwigs consorted at its bar was apparent. Now it was dark and dingy, the central bar as much as the cellar. Discreet erotic etchings could be glimpsed behind the bar to suggest that women of the night might entertain menfolk upstairs for a portion of the proceeds. From a haunt of Disraeli and Gladstone to not quite a brothel. To dust we shall return.

Joshua froze. He'd heard in the shadows at the end of the room a low growling, as of a jungle cat. He remembered when a wolf escaped from the zoo and chased several children across Hampstead Heath. But the cellar's only ingress was the stone stairway down which he'd come... Joshua turned on his heel and returned to the ground floor.

Before leaving for the next leg of his investigative journey, he advised the Godalmings to hire some strapping young men to remove the barrels to a different room, and then not visit it again for at least six months.

The ferrule of Samuels' cane beat a melancholy tattoo against the rough stone in the asylum "near to Clerkenwell". He was followed by a pot-bellied man who'd formerly been a gaoler, Jenkin, the asylum's director preferring to stay in his office. A Dr Seward was due to inspect these premises in the coming weeks, and so far as Samuels could see, he was long overdue.

Joshua and Jenkin arrived at an empty cell. 'I'm surprised you haven't already filled it.' Jenkin grinned with more than a little sarcasm. He was chewing tobacco and Joshua got a glimpse of his muddy maw. 'You'll know why when you see' he said, taking a key from the ring at his belt and unlocking the large metal door.

With just a glance, Joshua both knew and saw.

The small, crude cell with its single barred window, bed of straw, basic hygiene implements, and cross on one wall was covered with letters from a runic alphabet, painted in blood now brown with time. 'Her own blood?' asked Joshua, sketching a few of the letters on a pad.

'None other. She was popular with birds, and then towards the end of her stay stray cats started coming through that window. We worried at first that she might be using them for this, but we didn't find no bones nor anything to figure such.'

'Jenkin speaks the truth' said Elmer Carston, the asylum director, a London philanthropist who looked about as suited to the workmanlike office of a charitable institute as a jungle cat would to a public house's cellar. 'She was an odd one, was Miss Birdseed.'

Joshua raised an eyebrow. 'That was your nickname for her?'

'Oh yes' said Carston, slightly abashed, 'the orderlies made it up, of course. I've only been down here a day. I don't see patients typically, since I'm not a doctor. But I received letters at home in Essex saying that the place was a shambles, so I'm keeping an eye on things until a medical man can take over as acting director.' He smiled. 'You can probably tell I'm better suited to raising funds at cocktail parties.' In his top hat and tails, he certainly did seem thus. The hat rested gaily on a stand by a window that overlooked an inner courtyard where one or two patients roamed, jealously guarded by gaolers the girth of Jenkin, or larger.

'Why was the woman first incarcerated here?' Carston rifled through the mass of yellowing documents that carpeted his desk. 'She was selling birdseed at the time' he said. 'Hence, of course, the nickname. A boy indebted to an opium den tried to steal her cash supply and she flew into a rage. The lad must have thought she'd be an easy mark, but derangement of the senses can confer great strength. You've heard about mothers lifting gun carriages from off their crushed children, that sort of thing? The same applies here.'

'It hardly seems fair to call the woman mad for defending herself.' Carston smiled. 'You don't read the papers, do you?' He showed a clipping from what looked like a personal scrapbook. An artist's sketch depicted a lad little older than 18, his face covered in blood, pouring down in rivulets. 'He'd troubled her before, the boy, called her a hag and threw rocks at her once. The new assault must have made her snap. She screamed for hours that he was the devil and the coppers, who came to take her away, the infernal one's minions. She almost blinded the lad in one eye.'

Joshua traversed the Limehouse district's Chinatown at a leisurely pace, passing the Chinese Freemason Society with its mysterious faceless frontage, just a blacked-out window and door beside a letterbox. He'd made some discreet enquiries at known opium dens, utilising connections at Scotland Yard to encourage the owners into giving up what they knew about the boy attacked by the birdseed seller.

Samuels had been a consulting occult detective for twenty years now. He was mostly employed by the professional force, who recorded his services rendered as “cultural consultancy”, reluctant as they were to seem reliant on one whom the press would think little better than a witch doctor. He kept his work discreet and was surprised at first that Mrs Godalming had known where to go.

He tried to steer clear of those who wanted him to contact their husbands and sons with planchette, produce flowers from the Elysian fields, and other spiritualist tricks. The tart and practical publican’s wife and her runes had intrigued him, however. And regardless what a reprobate her husband was, Samuels supposed it his duty to try to protect him from necromantic murder.

He traced the opium-smoking boy to a rooming house but on arrival learned that he was too late for an interview. ‘He was always a bad lot’ said the landlady, ‘and he came to a bad lot’s end. When the coppers found him - in an alley it was, near nude and robbed of all his coin - they said it looked like he’d been mauled by a panther. Getting mauled by that madwoman weren’t enough for him, I guess. Criminals, lowlifes, those were his sort. I’d have had him out in a flash if he’d brought them here, though one thing I can say for him is, he was always discreet, and paid on time.’

The landlady remembered something then and took from a cupboard under the stairs a handmade flip book that had belonged to the boy. The rest of his belongings had been disposed of; she couldn’t recall what made her keep it by. ‘He didn’t seem like no artist’ was all her speculation on its genesis.

As Samuels re-entered the street a woman brushed by him roughly. He saw her move away unhurried down the street, in a crumpled old hat with paper flowers and a shabby brown coat and bustle, like what a woman hawking roses might wear. Or a birdseed seller.

That evening he analysed the flip book. It depicted a young man in workman’s dungarees and cap running down an alleyway, a flock of pigeons in pursuit. At first it was just comical, some strange ridiculous cartoon that you’d see in a newspaper with a pithy political punchline attached. The young man’s fear and despair, however, were rendered too well, precluding laughter and inviting pity, the bags around his eyes to the drawn quality of his face. Samuels made a note to visit The Godalming Arms tomorrow.

During the night he heard a prowling about his room. ‘Is that you, Mrs Whitman?’ he called, half asleep, addressing his housekeeper. His muscles and blood turned to bricks and mortar when a sound as of feline growling reached his ears. He threw himself to the floor just in time as a large animal leaped across the room and slammed against the bedstead, and he saw in the moonlight four curved, gleaming teeth. He pulled the door open and barely escaped the wooden shrapnel as it splintered. Fleeing to the street, he grabbed his coat while barely thinking and soon collided with a bobby.

‘I suppose I must have imagined the big cat I saw’ he said half an hour later as detectives walked about the room.

‘Happens to the best of us, guv’nor’ said one. He looked at the door, now shattered in several pieces in the hall. ‘He must have been a hell of a brute, though, the thug that did this. Likely you woke and scared him before he could steal anything.’

By then Samuels had found in his coat a pamphlet, vandalised with the same runes he’d read in the Godalmings’ cellar. ‘That seems the most rational explanation’ he replied to the officer.

Come morning he took a hackney carriage to The Godalming Arms and wasn’t surprised to see a crowd choking the street outside. Before setting out for the pub he’d visited Scotland Yard and borrowed a policeman’s togs. ‘Call me the master of disguise’ he said, handing his hat and carefully folded tails to the inspector. His hands behind his back, custodian helmet angled down, he slipped the pamphlet he’d found the night before into the coat of a woman he recognised, her hat with its paper flowers a boat sailing the crowd.

‘His guts were everywhere!’ he heard the landlord’s wife cry out. ‘I told him not to go down there, I said to trust the gentleman, but he never could see beyond his own nose!’ Mrs Godalming was sat on a stool by the entrance to what would heretofore be her sole property. ‘She’s gone unhinged’ Samuels heard someone say. ‘Thinks the devil did him in. You ask me, he’s another victim of the opium gangs…’ The crowd gasped as a stretcher was carried out and blood soaked through its sheet; what seemed like stained and torn linen hung down, for its witnesses to realise that it was in fact the dead man’s loose offal.

Samuels visited the pub some days later and, locking eyes with the widow Godalming, was ushered with a gesture of her head to a back room. ‘I can’t say you didn’t do right by us’ she said as she served them both tea. ‘You told us not to use the cellar. My husband was a stubborn man, not half stupid sometimes, and mean.’ She looked to the window and dabbed at an eye. ‘I miss him, though.’

‘It may be some small consolation then’ said Samuels, drawing a paper from his coat, ‘to know that a form of justice has been done.’ He showed her a story about the finding of a woman’s bloodied coat and hat, covered in pigeons in a square not far from where they sat. The left side of Mrs Godalming’s mouth tilted up. “The pockets were filled with birdseed” she read aloud. Uneasily, Samuels noticed that both her eyes were dry. ‘Mr Occult Detective’ she said, ‘you might know your runes, but like all men, you’re naive about women.’

A door opened and through it walked a woman he recognised, dressed currently in a blouse and skirt. She was nursing a cat who was swaddled in cotton wool, and a pigeon was perched on one shoulder. The bird flew to a Davenport desk. Samuels rose to his feet in astonishment. The woman handed Mrs Godalming the cat as if it were a human infant, and the women locked lips, a grotesque parody of young marriage and parenthood.