Chapter 9
Stepney, Thursday 22 January
Sally Burnside was an early-to-bed-early-to-rise type and she had a set routine. Up at 6.30 on the dot, out of the door by 6.40 and on her route around the Stepney streets. She rarely changed the course she followed: down Stepney Green, along the High Street, cut through the patch of lawn around St Dunstan’s Church, and then west along Stepney Way before heading back east along Mile End Road.
This morning was no different, though she was annoyed with herself for leaving the flat five minutes later than usual, which meant she would either have to cut short the run or be late for the tube. The pavement along Stepney Green was completely clear of snow this morning. Rain in the night had washed away most of it and there had been no fresh falls. The roads were clear too, the traffic already building up.
St Dunstan’s had looked unusually pretty twenty-four hours earlier, a patina of snow adding to the weathered beauty of its ancient stone. Now, the walls were rain-soaked, and puddles lay along the path from the gate. Sally sidestepped them; she was used to running whatever the weather.
She speeded up as she took the path around the side of the church. Ahead lay a short avenue of trees, set ten yards back from the road. She ran towards them, past a row of old gravestones. She had her head down for the first ten paces, but looked up as she approached a bend in the path. That was when she first saw something odd.
She kept up a steady pace but felt distracted, finding it hard to stay focused. What was that in the nearest tree? Five more strides and she was forced to pull up. She was not looking where she was going, it was getting dangerous. She slowed to a walk, hands on hips, trying to steady her breathing. She was ten metres from the tree now and the shape and size of the object were clearer.
A few moments later she was directly under the branches. She had stopped moving and was standing looking up at the thing above her head. It was an amorphous, flat object. For several seconds it looked something like a grey tarpaulin hanging over the lowest branch of the tree, about three metres above her head. Then Sally decided it looked like a giant pizza draped over the branch. It was largely grey, but there were streaks of red and white and random patches of black. She walked directly under the weird shape, looked up and moved her head to follow the leading edge of the thing to the point where it hung closest to the ground, a spot a couple of feet above the grass. Then she saw it, a thing so unexpected, she felt a sudden jolt in the pit of her stomach, a spasm that made her whole body tense for a second. Close to the edge of the object, embedded in the grey and red, was an eye staring straight at her.
Chapter 10
To Mrs Sonia Thomson
12 October 1888
Was I ever without malice? You may be surprised to learn that, until recent times, this was not a question to which I gave any thought. But now, as I write this account for you, dear lady, I feel compelled to ask it of myself. And I think the answer would have to be ‘no’. I have always been wicked.
That is the honest truth and I never lie. Well, let me quickly qualify that. In this account of my experiences, I will tell the complete truth. I will not fabricate. All I write here is reality as I perceived it. I can promise nothing more.
But first we have to accept that there are many types of wickedness, do we not? There is the wickedness of those prosaic characters who stalk the nightmares of the innocent: the lumpen men, damaged or dull-witted individuals without finesse, devoid of any higher agenda. I would never put myself into that category, for I constitute a blend of wickedness with talent … great talent. It was only when I fully realised the extent and depth of that talent that I was able to channel my wickedness, and through this combination achieve greatness. But more of this later. Let me instead tell you the story of how I came to my great revelations, and how they secured for me my place in history.
Hemel Hempstead where I was born, William Sandler, on 10 August 1867, is a modest market town, genteel and pretty, and my parents’ house, set among cornfields just beyond the jurisdiction of the town council, was a comfortable place in which to be raised.
It would be churlish of me to complain about the situation of my home, though everything else about it was bad.
The house was called Fellwick Manor. Built by my grandfather in the 1820s, it was a vast, boxy affair with too many windows, each a different shape and size from the rest. The architect appeared deliberately to have forsaken any of the Georgian taste for symmetry and proportion. It had ungainly, overbearing gables and a broad, squat porch. The bricks were too dark, the woodwork too light, and, to top it all off, a huge phallus of a chimney reared up from the back of the property above the kitchen. The house was set in three acres of prime Home Counties countryside, which was really its one saving grace. Otherwise, it was a typical monstrosity, built to impress, the thoroughly vainglorious trophy of a successful member of the mercantile class.
And my grandfather was certainly successful. He had been spat out of his mother’s womb, the tenth of eleven children. All the others had wallowed in poverty, died young and vanished utterly from history. My father would never talk about any of his paternal relatives. He disowned them, just as my grandfather had done.
My father, Gordon Sandler, was a textbook example of the spoiled son of new money. Grandfather did all the work, made the fortune, and then his only son, my dear father, lived off it his entire life. Father was a husk of a man, tall and bone-thin, his face almost skeletal. He looked terrifying, even to me, his only son. I had only ever known him to be completely bald. He had black, piercing eyes, set too far back in his bony skull, and a black handlebar moustache. That was probably his only nod to fashion, yet it was an affectation to which he was entirely unsuited. My mother, Mary, was buxom, her hair perpetually scraped up in a tight bun. As a young woman she might have achieved an average prettiness, but the image I retain of her in my mind is all fleshy jowls and billowing black dresses. She scared me more than my father did.
Ours was an extremely religious household, though I myself could never understand what my parents saw to admire in God. My father was a lay preacher. With the fortune inherited from his father he had no need to make an honest crust: a full loaf was already provided. Instead, he gave himself over to the service of the Lord. Mother was equally pious, throwing herself into good works, helping the poorest of the local community — you can imagine the sort of thing.
There was no form of religious imagery displayed in our house. My parents were Calvinistic Methodists, a relatively new sect at that time. The only artistic expression of their religious fervour that they sanctioned was a tiny painting of Christ which hung in the parlour. In the hall, close to the front door, they displayed a framed letter from Reverend Griffith Jones, founder of the Order. According to family legend, my great-great-grand-father was Jones’s right-hand man. Jones, I believe, had a lot to answer for.
My parents recognised quite early on that I was not inspired by the Holy Spirit in the way that they were. Indeed, I was a difficult child in almost every respect, and grew worse as each year passed. This was partly because of my own peculiar nature, but exacerbated by the fact that my parents responded to my stubborn, uncompromising personality in only one, rather unimaginative way — they regularly beat me to within an inch of my life.
It became something of a ritual. After committing an offence, no matter how minor, I would be summoned to my father’s study. This was a very dark room on the ground floor, leading off the hall and facing south across the front garden, with a view of the road to Hemel Hempstead. However, I only knew this last couple of facts from my understanding of the geography of the house, for the curtains were always kept drawn in my father’s study.
The walls were panelled with oak and the only illumination in the entire room came from a couple of gas mantles: one close to the door, and another, larger one, above Father’s desk. The room was boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. I often wondered how the bastard could ever do anything in his ‘study’, and then I would wonder what he needed a study for. He was not learning anything, he did not seem to work. All he ever did
