Murder Read Free

be washed .
    Patient believes he is guided and controlled by an instinct that informs his mind .

4

London. Christmas, 1896
Dr Bond
    I stayed at Juliana’s on Christmas Eve, and after little James had been put to bed I helped her with the last of the present-wrapping and then we filled the stocking that hung from the edge of the mantelpiece before sipping sherry and allowing the enjoyment of the festive season to seep into us.
    ‘The calm before the storm.’ She smiled, raising her glass to me. ‘Merry Christmas, Thomas.’
    ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too, Juliana.’
    We sat back, enjoying the silence in that particular way that two people who had grown used to each other’s company could do. I was glad to see her looking healthier and more content. Her happiness made me happy, and even with the secret that I kept buried, I still dared to hope that one day she might consider me more than just a friend. Although I was now a man in my fifties and she not quite reached thirty, still I wanted to look after her. Even without my impossible feelings of love for her, I knew I owed her that.
    She had stopped wearing widow’s weeds – reluctantly, but with a pragmatism that I was beginning to see was a part of her core – a few years earlier, but her grief still clung to her, almost as corporeal as the monster my madness had convinced me was attached to Harrington’s back. Nothing in that time had been easy for her: her husband’s bloated body had been dragged from the river a few days after his death andshe, insisting on seeing him even though both her father and I strongly advised against it, had been heart-broken at the sight. Her pregnancy continued to make her sick, and her labour had been long and difficult – for a while, though we never told her, there were times when we feared we would lose both her and the child. And after that, she never regained the full bloom of health: though her red hair was still beautiful, it had lost its lustre, and her face had thinned. Much as I tried to encourage her back out into the fresh air, even suggesting she join me at the hunt as she had been used to, she always declined, and for the first year or so of little James’ life, she was little more than a ghost of her former self. Once she left her sickbed she moved and talked and walked, but her heart had gone in the river with her dead husband, and I rather felt that if her sickly child were to die too, it would be only a matter of days before she threw herself into the water as well.
    But little James did not die, and Juliana slowly came back to us – perhaps not with the joie de vivre that had been so much a part of her before, but she was still a young woman and I hoped that Time, Mother Nature’s healer, would rectify that. The young were resilient, and Juliana was an exceptional woman. I knew I was right in my decision: that it would be better she had to bear only the grief of a husband robbed and murdered rather than the truth of what James Harrington had become: a brutal murderer of women and the killer of his own unborn child.
    Juliana remained in the Chelsea house only until both she and the boy had recovered enough from the trauma of his birth, then her parents and I encouraged her to sell the property and move, though I confess it was not difficult – she needed no persuasion from us, for that house held few happymemories for her. Selfishly, I too was happy that I would no longer have to visit that street, for not only had Harrington’s parents died so horribly there, but the ghost of Elizabeth Jackson lingered too, every time my gaze fell on the nearby house where she had been employed.
    When Juliana moved into the new house in Barnes, the dark clouds I had carried with me everywhere began to lift. And as Juliana recovered, so did I.
    Now, as the fire died down, her pale face was beautiful, lit by the glowing embers. When she had married James Harrington she had been a girl, but now she had grown into a woman