When her friend Meda fails to turn up for dance class one evening, 10-year-old Hilda is convinced that something bad has happened to her, despite Meda's family's reassurances. Unable to shake off her concerns, Hilda turns to her mother, Molly, for help. Molly runs the Jolly Bonnet, a pub with links to the Whitechapel murders of a century before and a meeting place for an assortment of eccentrics drawn to its warm embrace. Among them is Lottie. Pathologist by day, vlogger by night, Lottie enlists the help of her army of online fans - and uncovers evidence that Meda isn't the first young girl to go missing.
But Molly and Lottie's investigations attract unwelcome attention. Two worlds are about to collide in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on the rain-lashed streets of London's East End, a historic neighbourhood that has run red with the blood of innocents for centuries.
When her friend Meda fails to turn up for dance class one evening, 10-year-old Hilda is convinced that something bad has happened to her, despite Meda's family's reassurances. Unable to shake off her concerns, Hilda turns to her mother, Molly, for help. Molly runs the Jolly Bonnet, a pub with links to the Whitechapel murders of a century before and a meeting place for an assortment of eccentrics drawn to its warm embrace. Among them is Lottie. Pathologist by day, vlogger by night, Lottie enlists the help of her army of online fans - and uncovers evidence that Meda isn't the first young girl to go missing.
But Molly and Lottie's investigations attract unwelcome attention. Two worlds are about to collide in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on the rain-lashed streets of London's East End, a historic neighbourhood that has run red with the blood of innocents for centuries.
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Overview
When her friend Meda fails to turn up for dance class one evening, 10-year-old Hilda is convinced that something bad has happened to her, despite Meda's family's reassurances. Unable to shake off her concerns, Hilda turns to her mother, Molly, for help. Molly runs the Jolly Bonnet, a pub with links to the Whitechapel murders of a century before and a meeting place for an assortment of eccentrics drawn to its warm embrace. Among them is Lottie. Pathologist by day, vlogger by night, Lottie enlists the help of her army of online fans - and uncovers evidence that Meda isn't the first young girl to go missing.
But Molly and Lottie's investigations attract unwelcome attention. Two worlds are about to collide in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on the rain-lashed streets of London's East End, a historic neighbourhood that has run red with the blood of innocents for centuries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780727889058 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Edition description: | Main |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.71(w) x 8.86(h) x 0.94(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HILDA
Her name was Meda, and people said she looked like me.
She wasn't much of a dancer. Always half a step behind, like a buffering download. She had a habit of throwing an extra 180 degrees into each pirouette. Finished up facing backwards, looking at the audience with her broad shoulders and big round backside and wondering where everybody had gone. Mum said she looked like a plucked goose in a sparkly leotard, which was a bit upsetting, considering how often she told me we looked alike.
She only came to Streetdance class on a Wednesday night so her mum could earn a few quid cleaning offices at the end of Coronation Road. She didn't hold out much hope of turning Meda into a star. Her little princess wasn't an athletic sort. Used to be shiny and damp and pink by the end of the warm-up. If you pressed her cheeks you could leave big white fingerprints on her skin.
She had a surname too. Stauskas, or something not far off. Lithuanian. I can see her now. A furry hood on her puffer jacket and baggy knees to her leggings. Tall for her age and ungainly in that pre-teen way. All arms and legs. You wouldn't have felt safe taking her for a look around an antique shop. Wouldn't have let her pour from your favourite vintage teapot, though she would have loved to be given the chance. Liked old things, did Meda. Could have spent forever stroking a pair of fox-fur cuffs or staring into the back of a carriage clock. Didn't suit modern clothes, though her Mum dressed her like a pop star. Hooped earrings and hair pulled back too tight. Flashes of make-up on her cheeks. It just gave her a haughty kind of face that made me think of old Victorian photographs: all high necks and cameo brooches and lap dogs snacking on Turkish delight.
Her family lived in a flat between Bethnal Green and Stepney. Three brothers, a sister, her mum, dad and Uncle Steppen, squished together into five rooms on the second floor of a drab, grey-fronted old building with a rubbish-strewn balcony secured behind chicken wire and broken glass. She liked cartoons and knew how to use a sewing machine. She wore high-topped trainers with Velcro and her hands were always cold. She kept a handkerchief up her sleeve like old ladies do. She ate fruit like it was sweets and carried a miniature book of animal facts in the inside pocket of her coat. That was what got us talking. One of those 'who likes animals more?' contests that I used to be so competitive about. Meda rose to the challenge. Took me on with some degree-level knowledge on meerkats and told me I was 'talking bullocks' with my assertion that hippos only had four teeth. I took the defeat uncommonly well. Made her laugh with an impression of a King Charles spaniel on a motorboat. We tossed some facts back and forth about Siberian huskies and Alaskan Malamutes. We got to know each other the way kids sometimes can. Best friends in the time it takes to drink a can of Fanta. She spoke with an accent. I thought she might be from Liverpool or Newcastle but she explained that home was a city called Visaginas, which looked like a butterfly if you saw it from above. She'd had a Pomeranian when she still lived there. Sasha, she said, though I thought that was more of a girl's name. Had to be brushed twice a day and he'd been stolen once by some men who were having some kind of dispute with her dad over money. He was on a farm now, out in the countryside, with grandparents who could give him room to run around. Sasha, that is. Not her dad. I told her about my cat, Ripper. Big fat face and fur the colour of turning leaves. Told her she could come meet him if it was all right with her mum. She looked like I'd told her it was going to be Christmas every day from now on.
I was breathless when I introduced her to Mum.
This is Meda, I said, pronouncing it properly. She's Lithuanian. She's taught me to say hello and thank you and 'Welcome to the Jolly Bonnet'. She likes animals. Do you think we look alike? I do. She doesn't. We're going to open a sanctuary for mistreated dogs. But no Chihuahuas or yappy Yorkshire terriers. We don't like them. She knows her mum's number if you want to ring and arrange it. She doesn't live far from here. She walks herself home. You should let me do that. I know these streets. We could walk together ...
I can see her now. Can picture her face. Two big teeth at the front and two little ones where her fangs would be if she were a vampire. Not the prettiest of girls, though her mum was a looker. She would have grown into her looks, I think. I don't know if she would ever have got any more elegant. She moved as though it was her first day in a new body. Bloody liability at showcase events. Sylvie had to stick her in the back row after the competition in Putney. With her big frame and long arms she'd seemed the best of all of us to be entrusted with the job of catching little Reena as she somersaulted down from the top of our three-tier human pyramid in a dazzling whirl of sequins and pigtails. Meda got into position a moment too late. Reena hit the wooden floor like she had fallen from a plane, arms and legs still fully extended. The imprint she left on the polished boards looked like a gingerbread man. We all heard the thud. All saw our parents and brothers and sisters wince in unison as the dark-haired little Bangladeshi girl hit the ground and stayed there, mumbling incomprehensibly into the shiny wooden boards. We kept dancing, like Sylvie had taught us. Kept high-kicking and back-flipping while Beyoncé bellowed from the speakers that girls run the world. Only stopped when the sound technician pulled the plug on our music and the St John Ambulance man shouted at Paulette for accidentally kicking over the oxygen cylinder. Meda felt awful about it all, though she still grumbled when Sylvie moved her into the back line at the next class. Reena was OK by then, although a rumour went around school that she could no longer count past the number six and would only answer to the name of Kevin. Even in the back line it was hard to disguise Meda's inadequacies. I can see her now, staring intently at the other girls and mimicking our actions an instant too late. Had she made it into the cast of Riverdance, the chorus line would have toppled like dominoes.
She was good at making me laugh. Everything sounded funny the way she said it. She didn't smile when she told jokes, which somehow made them funnier. And she would get her words wrong sometimes. She would try and use phrases that somebody had told her we used in London but they always sounded weird coming out of her mouth. She would tell me that she had been 'bubble busy' instead of 'double' and it took us ages to work out that she was trying to say 'stone the crows' when she responded to some piece of gossip with the claim she had been 'stoning her clothes'.
I don't spend a lot of time wondering what Meda would have become. It's not that the thoughts make me sad or that I get all maudlin about it. I just don't think there's any way I could come up with an answer. We were only friends for a few weeks. You could count the amount of time we spent together in hours. One class a week, every Wednesday night, from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. Believerz street dance class. Two hours of sweating and giggling and trying to keep up with the black girls in the care of a passive-aggressive French lady who lived on runner beans and water and had once appeared in a video for a band I had never heard of and who Mum said looked like she was made out of varnished baguettes.
Outside of the classes and competitions I only ever saw Meda twice. She came with us to the Stepney Green city farm one blustery Saturday. Fed the goats and did impressions of the chickens and ate every scrap of the packed lunch that Mum had made us. Spent her pocket money on a hot chocolate and a little book about British birds. Picked up some leaflets from the display stand and spent a few minutes watching a man in a green jumper demonstrate traditional crafts and then chainsaw some tree stumps into wooden toadstools. She came home with us after that. Loved my room. Played with my stuffed wolves and Polly Pockets and grinned like something from a cartoon when she saw Mum getting ready for work and slipping into her Victorian wig and gown. She thought the whole flat was 'exceptional'. She liked that word. Mum's artwork, displayed corner to corner against bare brick walls, was 'exceptional'. The antique typewriters and microscopes and the dozens of dead mice displayed in top hats and wedding dresses on wall-mounted potato crates. The old doctor's bag and the antique stethoscope and the dozens of fat old books stacked like logs against the chimney breast. All were 'exceptional'. I could tell she was sad to leave.
Meda. My friend. Big and clumsy and happy to be in England. Loved having a friend who was a real Londoner. She was my friend and I was hers and if I think about anything other than what I know for sure, I might find myself conjuring up images of her worst moments, strapped to that stark white bed in that stark white room — watching her blood fall on to the starched sheets like rose petals on to snow. And I don't want to think about that. It brings back too many of my own memories. Memories of absolute darkness and brilliant, painful light. Memories of gleaming brass and shining glass and blood flowing into and out of my arm. Memories of a reflection — my face obscured behind a mask made of someone else's skin. And when I think of that, I feel myself growing bitter. Growing jealous of Meda. Of all the girls who didn't come back. They became one thing instead of another. They went from alive to dead. Their heart ceased to beat. Their blood ceased to flow.
I'm not so lucky.
I'm still somewhere in between.
CHAPTER 2MOLLY
Whitechapel. London.
Then ...
This is the Polly Nicholls snug room; back bar of the Jolly Bonnet. It is a small, comfortable space that smells of meat pies and furniture polish. It is illuminated with oil lamps and candles. It contains a cosiness; an air of autumn. At the centre of the room is a table made from an old wine vat, its surface stained almost black by decades of spilled wine and beer. A trio of rickety leather chairs are positioned like points on a masonic star. In one sits a straight-backed, short-haired woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in a Victorian costume that speaks of steam engines, hair grips, gaslight and clockwork. She wears tight black trousers, knee-high boots and a lacy, high-throated white top with three-quarter sleeves, which she has pinned below her delicate jawline with a brooch embossed with a red skeleton. Her hair is a henna-brown that clashes with the ruby of her fingernails and the black of her fingerless gloves. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles hangs on a chain around her neck. She is dressed to complement her surroundings, which give off an air of the sophisticatedly shabby; that luxuriously threadbare quality so beloved of glossy magazines.
The light flickers suddenly, as if a train has passed overhead. Black and gold, black and gold. A loose wire, perhaps.
'Cut it out, Polly,' says the woman under her breath. The instruction masks the sound of clumping footsteps. There is a fizzing sound and then the bulb flares bright white. The lamp pitches a golden blush on to the face of a young girl who is barging through from the main bar. She is a scowl of a thing; all wrinkled nose and bumpy brow. She's tall. A bit squishy in places. She looks like an overgrown cherub, with her big mop of honey-coloured hair, round eyes and apple-blossom cheeks. She slumps down in one of the armchairs and throws her schoolbag on to the other.
Molly looks up from her book. She looks tired. She has had to apply extra make-up to cover an outbreak of tiny pimples that has emerged in her hairline and on her chin. She suffers with stress-related eczema. She is working long hours and her tongue is stippled with tiny ulcers that betray her current poor health. There never seems enough time to eat proper meals any more.
'Mum!' says Hilda, looking at her expectantly. 'You're just sitting there. You've gone dead-eyed again. You look like a corpse.'
They sit in silence for a moment. Molly's eyes return to her book. Hilda folds herself deeper into her chair and looks up at the ceiling, where steam from her wet coat and sodden hair is vanishing into the darkness.
'What's wrong with Polly?' asks Hilda at last.
'In a grump. Sick of it. Not happy in the slightest.'
Hilda nods, understanding. Neither of them has any real belief in ghosts or spirits but they have taken to referring to the Bonnet's idiosyncrasies as being the work of 'Polly' — the understandably restless spirit of Jack the Ripper's first victim. Molly has encouraged Hilda to remain silent about this fact during group discussions at school. She realizes that, out of context, it sounds a little odd. Much of Hilda's life sounds odd on paper.
'It's probably the weather,' says Hilda, wriggling herself upright. 'Cats and dogs out there. Worse. Cows and zebras.'
'Unicorns and porcupines,' says Molly, playing along. They could do this for a while.
Hilda gradually lets go of her bad mood. The apartment she and her mother share is two streets away, in an old pumping station transformed into stylishly shabby apartments. It is a nice place, and home to her fat-faced cat, Ripper, but it is this bar, where her mum is boss, that she thinks of as home. It is a gift for any child with a vivid imagination. Her mind has invented wonderful stories here. She keeps telling her English teacher that she should come in for a drink. Gushes with enthusiasm over the fixtures, fittings and finery. Gets her eras in a tangle from time to time. Mixes up the Tudor with the Victorian. Tells her teacher that the bar is the kind of place where Guy Fawkes might meet with his co-conspirators. The sort of place a working girl, a soiled dove, might down a final tot of rum before evaporating into the murk of Whitechapel for an assignation with a madman's blade. A lot of effort and money has gone into the creation of such an illusion. Though this building on the corner of Brushfield Street is several hundred years old, it has only been a hostelry for a few years. When the Ripper was doing his bloody business, the premises was a print works. Its only real connection to the world's most famous serial killer comes in the form of the posters that were printed on the presses during the panic which followed the third of the Ripper's murders, when rich and well-meaning women began a campaign to provide greater comfort and safety for the unfortunates of the hellish neighbourhood where the murderer seemed able to strike with impunity. One such poster hangs above the fireplace in the main bar. It is the first thing that tourists see when they push open the creaking double doors and gaze at the shabby elegance of the Jolly Bonnet — Whitechapel's premier Victorian gin bar.
'Homework?' asks Molly. 'Hot chocolate on the way?'
'Julien is doing it,' replies Hilda. 'He said he didn't mind.'
'He's sucking up,' scowls Molly. 'An hour late this morning. We were supposed to clean the lines and do a tasting for the new puddings. And he was still in the same shirt as yesterday.'
'I like Julien,' shrugs Hilda. 'He's funny.'
'He's not funny,' says Molly, then concedes that perhaps she is being harsh. She likes her junior barman. He's twenty-three, Croatian and is tattooed from his ankles to his neck. He has a moustache waxed into tips and looks splendid in his braces, bow tie and button-down shirt.
'You used to give me a kiss when you got in,' says Molly. 'It was the best bit of my day. Too cool now, are you?'
Hilda rolls her eyes but smiles as she rises from her chair. She rounds the table and gives her mum a cuddle, pressing their cheeks together. Molly smells of Cool Water perfume; of cake, tea and hairspray. Hilda is all wet clothing and outdoors.
'Extra marshmallows,' says Julien, arriving soundlessly from the main bar and placing a large, copper-coloured mug on the table. It contains steaming hot chocolate and seems to have been topped with most of the pick'n'mix in London.
'I haven't forgiven you,' says Molly, giving him a harsh look. Julien mimes slapping his wrist. Molly, despite herself, sticks out her tongue.
'Your friends are coming through,' says Julien. 'Lottie. Sheamus. The little fat one.'
'That's mean,' says Hilda.
'Christine's not fat,' says Molly, waving her hand. 'She's got a gland thing. It makes her puffy.'
Hilda is considering her response when the staff from the pathology lab at the hospital troop into the snug. Lottie is leading. She is a small, curvy woman with olive skin and bright purple hair. She is wearing a long black leather jacket over a tight black hoodie — unzipped to show off the cleavage that is responsible for many of her thousands of followers on social media. Her chest is tattooed with an anatomically perfect sketch of the human heart and lungs. She is a pathologist by day and YouTube darling by night. She is also thoroughly filthy, a part-time burlesque dancer, and Molly's best friend.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Rush of Blood"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David Mark.
Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Cover,
Recent titles by David Mark,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Prologue,
Hilda,
Molly,
Mr Farkas,
Lottie,
Hilda,
Molly,
Hilda,
Molly,
Hilda,
Molly,
Hilda,
Molly,
Hilda,
Mr Farkas,
Lottie,
Molly,
Hilda,
Molly,
Lottie,
Mr Farkas,
Molly,
Hilda,
Mr Farkas,
Molly,
Hilda,
Molly,
Mr Farkas,
Hilda,