time. Only at moments of remarkable lucidity like this would he realise that life was slipping away from him, like water trickling through his fingers.
But how else could he play the hand he had been dealt? His father had been a miserable wretch who believed he had landed the best job of his life when he was hired to collect the excrement in the cesspools at the back of people’s houses. Each night he had ventured forth to unburden the city of its waste, as though Her Majesty in person would one day thank him for his labours. He was utterly convinced that this loathsome task was the cornerstone upon which the British Empire was founded: how could a country stay on top if it was drowning in its own filth? he would say. His greatest aspiration – to his friends’ amusement – was to buy a bigger cart that would allow him to shovel more shit than anyone else. If there was one childhood memory etched in Tom’s mind it was the unbearable stench his father exuded when he climbed into bed. Tom had tried to fend it off by nestling against his mother and breathing in her sweet smell, which was barely perceptible beneath the sweat from her toil at the cotton mill. But the smell of excrement was preferable by far to the stink of the cheap alcohol his father brought home with him when the blossoming of the city’s sewage system put an end to his absurd dreams. And now Tom could no longer fend it off with his mother’s fragrance, because an outbreak of cholera had torn her from him.
After her death, there was more room in the communal bed, but Tom slept with one eye open, for he never knew when his father might wake him up with his belt, unleashing his anger at the world on his son’s tiny back.
When Tom turned six, his father forced him to go out begging to pay for liquor. Arousing people’s sympathy was a thankless but undemanding task, and he did not know how much he would miss it until his father demanded he help him in the new job he had obtained, thanks to his cart and his ability with a shovel. In this way Tom learned that death could cease to be abstract and take on form and substance, leaving a chill in his fingers that no fire would ever warm. But more than anything, he understood that those whose lives were worth nothing became valuable in death, for their bodies contained a wealth of precious organs. He helped his father rob graves and crypts for a retired boxer named Crouch, who sold the corpses to surgeons, until during one of his frequent drunken binges his father fell into the Thames and drowned.
Overnight, Tom found himself alone in the world, but at least now his life was his own. He was no longer forced to disturb the sleep of the dead. Now he would be the one to decide which path he took.
Stealing corpses had turned him into a strong, alert lad who had no difficulty in finding more honest employment. He had found work as a street sweeper, a pest exterminator, a doorman. He even swept chimneys, until the lad he worked with was caught stealing from a customer’s house, and the pair were thrown out by the servants after a thrashing. But he put all that behind him the day he met Megan, a beautiful girl with whom he lived for a few years in a stuffy cellar in Hague Street, Bethnal Green. Megan was not only a pleasant respite from his daily struggle, she taught him to read, using old newspapers they fished out of the rubbish. Thanks to her, Tom discovered the hidden meaning behind the symbols that were letters, and learned that life beyond his own little world could be just as awful. Unfortunately in some neighbourhoods happiness is always doomed, and Megan ran off with a chair-maker who did not know the meaning of hunger.
When she returned two months later, her face covered with bruises and blind in one eye, Tom accepted her back as though she had never left. Although her betrayal had dealt the final blow to a love already strained by circumstance, he cared for her day and night, feeding her opium syrup to keep the pain at bay, and reading aloud from old newspapers as though he were reciting poetry. He would have gone on caring for her for the rest of his life, bound to her by pity, which might have changed back into affection, if the infection in her eye had not caused his bed to widen once more.
They buried her one rainy morning in a small church near the lunatic asylum. He alone wept over her grave. He felt he was burying much more than Megan’s body. With her went his faith in life, his naive belief that he would be able to live honourably, and his innocence. That day, in the shoddy coffin of the only woman whom he had dared to love, they were also burying Tom Blunt because, suddenly, he did not know who he was. He did not recognise himself in the young man who, that very night, crouched in the dark waiting for the chair-maker to come home; in the frenzied creature who hurled himself at the man, throwing him against a wall; in the wild animal who set upon him, beating him into the ground with angry fists.
The death cries of this man he had never known were also the cries that heralded the birth of a new Tom: a Tom who seemed capable of anything, a Tom who could perform deeds such as this without a flicker of conscience, perhaps because someone had extracted it and sold it to the surgeons. He had tried to make an honest living, and life had crushed him as if he were a loathsome insect. It was time he looked for other ways to survive, Tom told himself, gazing at the bloody pulp to which he had reduced the chair-maker.
By the time he was twenty, life had instilled a savage harshness in his eyes. Combined with his physical strength, this gave him a disconcerting, even intimidating air, as he loped along the streets. He had no difficulty in being hired by a money-lender in Bethnal Green, who paid him to bully a list of debtors by day, and who he had no qualms about stealing from at night. It was as though the morality that had guided his actions in the past had become no more than a useless obstacle preventing him reaping the benefits of life. There was no longer room for anything but self-interest. Life became a simple routine that consisted of perpetrating violence on anyone he was told to in exchange for enough money to rent a filthy, dank room and the services of a whore when he needed to relax. He was governed by a single emotion, hatred, which he nurtured daily with his fists, as though it were a rare bloom, vague but intense, aggravated by a trifle and often responsible for him arriving at the boarding-house, face black and blue, barred from yet another tavern.
During this period, Tom was aware of the icy indifference with which he snapped people’s fingers and whispered threats in his victims’ ears, but he justified his actions by telling himself he had no choice: it was pointless to fight against the current dragging him to where he probably belonged. Like a snake shedding its skin, he could only look away as he relinquished God’s mercy on his downward spiral to hell. Perhaps, in the end, that was all he was fit for. Perhaps he had been born to break people’s fingers, to occupy a place of honour among thieves and wastrels. And he would have reconciled himself to being dragged deeper into the ugly side of life, knowing it was only a matter of time before he committed his next murder, had it not been for someone who believed the role of hero suited him better.
Tom had turned up at Gilliam Murray’s offices without knowing anything about the job on offer. He could still remember the astonishment on the big man’s face when he walked in, how he had stood up and paced round him, uttering ecstatic cries, pinching his arm muscles and sizing up his jawbone, arms flailing like some demented tailor.
‘I don’t believe it. You’re exactly as I described you,’ he declared, to the bewildered Tom. ‘You are Derek Shackleton.’
With this he led him down to an enormous cellar where a group of men in strange costumes seemed to be rehearsing a play. That was the first time he had met Martin, Jeff and the others.
‘Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to your captain,’ Murray announced, ‘the man for whom you must sacrifice your lives.’
And that was how Tom Blunt, hired thug, crook and troublemaker, became the saviour of mankind. The job did far more than fill his pockets: it saved his soul from the hellfire where it had been roasting. Because, for some
