I looked at Crow. He said, “John Williams was a seaman. Granted, he does not seem to have been of particularly sterling character, if the men who were his companions are anything to go by. But it still doesn’t seem reasonable to assert that because that is so, he was able to split himself into two persons.”
“That does seem most unlikely,” I said cautiously.
He gave me a sidelong flicker of a smile. “And yet, at the scene of the Williams murders, two men were seen running away. Two sets of footprints were found. He cannot have been both men. It does lead one to wonder if he was either of them. In the aftermath, there were certainly persons who seemed overeager to see that the crimes were fastened irrevocably on the late John Williams.”
“But what were the crimes? You say de Quincey is inaccurate, and to be truthful, I hardly remember him.”
“So,” Crow said, cocking his head to the side like his namesake bird. “On the seventh of December, 1811, Timothy Marr, his apprentice, his wife, and his infant son were found viciously hacked and beaten to death inside his home. It was later determined that the assailants—and again, there were plainly more than one—had escaped across the barren land behind Marr’s house. No one knew of any person with a compelling reason to wish Mr. Marr dead—still less his wife and apprentice—and least of all his son, a child too young to speak and entirely incapable of bearing witness against his parents’ murderers. Someone must have hated Timothy Marr with a most passionate hatred.”
“Are they certain it was a person?”
“Footprints,” Crow reminded me. “And at the second murder site, they were seen fleeing, a tall stout man and a shorter lame man, having murdered a public house owner, his wife, and his servant just as viciously as they murdered the Marrs.”
“Are they quite sure they were the same men?” I said and saw the delight on Crow’s face.
“An excellent question, Dr. Doyle. On the evidence of the sheer brutality of both attacks, it does seem likely—more likely than that two such beasts—I beg your pardon, four—four such beasts were roaming the Ratcliffe Highway at the same time.”
I hoped devoutly that he had not noticed my twitch at the word “beast.” “Then are they sure it was a man?” I pursued.
“A demon would not have stopped,” Crow said. “The Williamses—no relation to John Williams—had both a granddaughter and a lodger above-stairs who escaped unscathed. A demon would have gone after the girl first. They are drawn to innocence.”
“There are other … creatures,” I said, for somehow I could not bring myself to say the word “beast.”
“True again,” Crow said. “But there was no stink of the unnatural about the scenes, and I think you know as well as I do, Dr. Doyle, that such creatures—even demons—leave a distinct odor behind them when they kill.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of the terrible stenches I had encountered in Afghanistan. And I noticed that Crow spoke as if he had examined the scene of the crime himself. “Is it the killing itself that does it?”
“Generally,” Crow said. “It’s why angels have no such scent. Now, a very ancient and powerful Fallen—who has killed many hundreds, if not thousands of people—will carry that stench wherever they may go. But no such creature has ever alighted in London, I assure you.”
“Thank you,” I said, not specifying what I was thankful for. “Thus, you believe that the murders were the work of human hands, which doesn’t surprise me. Humans are more than capable of evil. But from what you said, these seem to be quite in-human murders.”
“… Yes,” Crow said, having considered my choice of words. “Whether committed by a human being or not, they were definitely inhuman murders. Eight people, including an infant, brutally murdered, and for what seemed to be no reason. Naturally everyone was terrified. Naturally the magistrates jumped at the first halfway plausible suspect they encountered. Naturally when he committed suicide before he could be brought to trial, everyone was only too glad to take it as proof-positive of his guilt.”
“Suicide.”
“Maybe,” Crow said. “He was found hanged in his cell.”
“Ah,” I said. “He must have been rather ingenious to contrive that.”
“Quite. A determined man can be shockingly ingenious. But there is also the fact that at his arraignment, Williams said very clearly and loudly that he was innocent.”
“Bravado.”
“Oh, very likely. But if he meant it—or if he thought he could brazen it out—then it was much too soon for that kind of despair. But if he knew something—and he very well might have—then it was not at all too soon for someone else to silence him.”
“Permanently.”
“Oh yes. No clairvoyant would have touched him regardless.” Crow regarded me thoughtfully. “A gentleman named William Ablass keeps showing up around the edges of the case. He was a tall, stout man, very much like one of the men seen running from the scene of the Williams murder. He seems to have been an unpleasant sort of fellow. And it’s possible he knew Timothy Marr.”
“But even if he had a grudge against Marr,” I said, “why did he murder the Williamses? Or I suppose, conversely, if he had a reason to murder the Williamses, why did he murder the Marrs?”
“Would that the magistrates had asked that,” Crow said. “I don’t have an answer. It’s one of the reasons the case has never satisfactorily been resolved—even if John Williams were the sole perpetrator, which I don’t believe. So far as anyone knows, the Marrs and the Williamses did not know each other and had nothing in common—except that they were both within the orbit of a man with a great lust for murder.”
“But it only happened the twice?” I said. “If he did it for the love of killing—and he wasn’t John Williams—then why did he stop?”
Crow made one of his shoulder/wing shrugs and said, “If the true—or second—perpetrator was William Ablass, then presumably he was too canny to strike a third time, especially after John Williams’s ‘suicide.’ Also, he was a sailor. We don’t know that he stopped.”
I shuddered. And then I thought of something else. “Did the public house have an angel?” Some public houses did and some didn’t, on a basis that I had never fully understood, but that seemed both arbitrary and self-contradictory.
“No,” Crow said. “The murderer or murderers were seemingly very careful, for they did not allow their path to intersect an angel’s dominion on either night. The Pear Tree, where Williams lived and where a variety of peculiar evidence was found both before and after his death, did have an angel. But I regret to say that the Angel of the Pear Tree was a sodden drunk.”
“I didn’t know angels could get drunk.”
“We can’t via literal alcohol,” Crow said. “But there is a metaphysical equivalent, a kind of corruption. It often leads to the Fall.”
“Could the angel have…”
But Crow was shaking his head hard enough to disarrange his hair. “It isn’t the sort of thing one can conceal, Dr. Doyle. If the Angel of the Pear Tree had Fallen, everyone in London would have known. No, that angel embraced the Consensus in 1835.” His wings mantled defensively and he twitched them back before they started to spread to their full span, which would be a debacle of no small proportion—or expense—in this public house, which was not overlarge and which was becoming steadily more crowded around us.