Mayhem (7 page)

I had reached the front door when Mary emerged from the drawing room. I jumped slightly, expecting her to be already asleep.

‘Thank you, Thomas,’ she said. ‘You must come again. I think your company is good for him.’

‘You might not thank me in the morning. I fear he is somewhat the worse for brandy. I have left him asleep by the fire.’

‘I shall look after him.’ She smiled softly as she passed me my hat. ‘I’m sorry he’s kept you up so late. You’re both working so hard; you must be tired yourself.’

My exhaustion and I were such companions now that it was almost amusing to hear someone mention it so lightly. ‘I shall cope,’ I answered, ‘and so will Charles.’

Outside, the night was cold, winter finally gripping the city now that the long, hot summer had died. The streets of Westminster were quiet. I looked back up at
the house and the glass of the windows glinted black back at me. I shivered and turned away, pulling my overcoat tight around me.

9

London. 18 August, 1888

She was crying. She couldn’t help it, even though it was making her nose run, which was making it harder for her to breathe.
It’s your own fault
: the thought came to her in her sister’s voice, even though Magda had been dead two years.
If you dally in wickedness, then the devil will surely come for your soul
.

In the corner of the gloomy workshop she could just about see where the four jackets lay discarded and forgotten. He hadn’t wanted them at all; they had been nothing more than a lure – a temptation – and she had succumbed. A choked whimper escaped her throat and immediately she tried to suck the sound back in, aware of her captor busying himself with the unseen contents of an open trunk a few feet away. Her head throbbed where he had struck her suddenly only minutes before, and the rough cloth he had stuffed into her mouth was so rancid she was sure she was about to vomit up the fried fish she had treated herself to that morning, and then no matter what the man was planning she would probably die. Fresh tears ran down her face.

He coughed and spat a ball of phlegm to the floor and she trembled. She had thought him a gentleman, but now she didn’t know what he was.
Yes
,
you do, Ava
, the ghost of her sister reprimanded her.
He’s the Devil, come to tear your soul from your body. And you have no one to blame but yourself
.

She pressed herself into the damp wall as if she could somehow squeeze through the bricks to freedom on the other side. Outside, she had been sweating in the summer heat and wishing for a cool breeze. Now her entire body trembled in the chill, as if he had transported her to an entirely different world. And perhaps he had.

Not so far away, her employer – her
ex
-employer – would be working hard on her sewing machine, not giving her a single thought – and why should she? She wouldn’t miss Ava or the jackets until eight that evening, when she was due to return them with the buttonholes and finishing done. Of course it had never been in her plan to return them, not once she’d met a fine gentleman who’d persuaded her to sell them to him.

More tears squeezed from her eyes as she heard the clank of metal on metal: he was removing items from the trunk and laying them out on the small workbench, muttering quietly to himself as he did so. How had someone so clearly caught by madness appeared so sane? Or had she simply been blinded to it by her own greed, by the thought of having some money in her pocket and being able to move on from
her tiny, grubby room and start again somewhere else in the heaving city? He held up something that glinted in the gloom. What was that? A knife? Too big; a saw? She mewled again and fought not to release the contents of her bladder.

Food had always been her downfall. She was tall, had been even as a child, and her mother always said she had been born with a man’s appetite to go with her height. She had become slimmer in these recent hard times, but even given her life of near-poverty since Magda died she still had a fair coating of flesh on her bones. Maybe that was why Katherine Jackson didn’t feed her during her working hours, like many other employers did – perhaps she thought Ava was managing perfectly well on the miserable four shillings a week she paid her. It was only a brief moment of anger, and then she cried some more, knowing this was not the truth. Katherine Jackson couldn’t afford to feed her and that was all there was to it. She too was struggling to earn some kind of living, but that hadn’t stopped Ava stealing the four jackets, which would cost Katherine dearly. She hadn’t even been afraid as she’d done it, that’s how wicked she was. She had smiled at Katherine and taken the garments, meeting her gaze shamelessly, and all the while her mind had been fixed on what she would treat herself to that evening – maybe a buttercake, that sweet taste she had never outgrown, or perhaps some German sausage. Her mouth had
been watering all the way to where she had agreed to meet the gentleman and sell on the coats. She would be happy never to see a buttercake again. She would sew buttonholes until her fingers bled if it would get her out of this dark and miserable place and back into the stinking sunshine.

He bent over the open box and took out something she couldn’t quite see, placing it with a heavy thud on the workbench before lighting a dusty lamp and turning to face her. She had thought that light would somehow appease her fear, but now she wished he would plunge them back into the gloom, where she could still pretend that perhaps he had forgotten about her. As his shadow stretched out behind him in the glow of the small light, all thoughts of food and sunshine evaporated from her mind, leaving nothing but terror. His blue eyes were wide as he stared at her, focused and curious and quite, quite mad.

‘Old blood,’ he said, a small smile on his face. ‘You have old blood. From home. I didn’t know what it was at first, this scent in the air every time you walked past. But then suddenly I knew: it was your blood that was driving me mad.’ He frowned. ‘And I’ve been so good – I’ve
tried
to be so good, for so many months. I thought – I thought perhaps I had control.’

Ava couldn’t stop herself shaking. She shook her head from side to side, as if somehow she could persuade him that she was not the girl he thought.
It wasn’t she who had the old blood, whatever that was; she couldn’t come from his home. He was an Englishman and she was a Polish immigrant.

‘It wants you,’ he said, softly, ‘and I have to give it what it wants.’ He picked up a knife from the table and Ava tugged desperately at the leather ties that bound her to the lead pipes, wishing she had tried harder to free herself, wishing she had fought back harder when he’d hit her, wishing that she had never started working for Katherine Jackson three months ago.

He held something else behind his back as he came closer to her and crouched down. ‘Can you see it?’ he whispered. ‘Can you see it?’

She stared at him, uncomprehending. What did he want from her? If she could just give him the right answer, then maybe he would release her. Maybe—

‘It’s behind me – always behind me. Can’t you see it?’

Ava’s eyes blurred with fresh tears. There was nothing there, nothing behind him; he was just a madman. A madman with a knife. She shook her head. No, she couldn’t see it—

‘
She
saw it,’ he said as his arm came from behind his back. He held a dead woman’s head high, gripping it by the hair. The skin had turned to leather and thinned against the bones, but the mouth was forever open in terror. ‘They
all
see it, in the end.’

As Ava screamed and screamed behind her gag,
her mind snapping at the horror of her impending fate, the man leaned in closer, and she did; she
saw
it. Magda’s voice had been wrong. The man wasn’t the Devil at all. The Devil was behind him.

10

Daily Telegraph
October 4, 1888

THE WHITEHALL MURDER

Very little additional information has been allotted by the authorities regarding the identity of the victim of the atrocious crime whose dismembered remains were found on Tuesday afternoon in the new Police buildings, on the Embankment at Westminster.

Sent to the Central News Service, 5 Oct. 1888

Dear Friend

In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit for ever. Do as I do and light of glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes three must be ripped. Will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke well well Jacky’s a very practical joker ha ha keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat
.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

11

London. October, 1888

Inspector Moore

‘I see your lot have been busy over at Whitehall today,’ Waring said, paying the waiter for their two tankards of beer. ‘More police officers than should have been in that building for quite some time, eh?’ Moore took a swallow and said nothing, but he watched the slim man carefully as he laughed at his own poor joke.

It had come as no great surprise to Henry Moore that Jasper Waring had wanted to meet him in a Whitechapel public house. The police were three days into their search of the area – a public relations act, more than with any real hope of catching their killer – and reporters were swarming the area eager for any tidbits of salacious gossip, anything they could print about any of the unfortunate women – about their pasts or those who knew them. The public was greedy for as much information as they could get; whether it was truthful or not was apparently irrelevant. Jack and his murders had proved, if such proof were needed, that there was a palpable excitement in fear. The newspapers were doing a roaring trade, and of course Jasper Waring would want to be at the heart of that.

Moore had to admit that Waring was smarter than most. He certainly had a nose for a story, and while he was no doubt relishing Jack’s antics as much as the rest of his breed, Waring was a man who would always be looking for something he could claim for his own. ‘Jack’, whoever he might be, was the whole of London’s business, and there were newspapermen better connected with the police than he who would get any information first. Not that there was much danger of that.

‘Those bloodhounds turn anything up?’ Waring’s eyes were sharp, but still Moore said nothing as he downed half his beer. The newsman would be paying for their drinks; that was always the unspoken agreement, and he intended to make the added time on his working day worthwhile. He was tired, and it had been a cold and frustrating day of supervising the policemen and dogs as they searched the Scotland Yard building site for more – or any – of the dead woman’s body parts. Their hunt had been as fruitless as the more high-profile one going on throughout the streets of Whitechapel, and eventually Moore had admitted defeat and sent the team, including Andrews, home to warm up.

‘Not like Jack, this boy, is he?’ Waring smiled, his expression a mix of wry and cheeky. Moore wasn’t sure he liked the young reporter, but he did respect him, and they had been useful to each other in the past; if that had not been the case he would have
just gone home. God only knew he could do with the sleep. He needed eight hours straight a night and of late he’d been lucky to get five or six before having to drag himself out of the depths of his slumber to head back to Division to trawl through yet more false leads.

As it was, now that he was here, the sheer force of life that filled the Princess Alice on the corner of Commercial Street was refreshing him. Much of the laughter was fuelled by drink, and much of the drink was fuelled by hardship, but at least there
was
some laughter. Londoners were strange folk, he had concluded a long time ago, never more alive than when in the presence of death. The food stands which had sprung up at the murder sites, the street theatres recreating the tableaux of the unfortunate women’s deaths: entertainment crafted by the grip of terror. Was it too much, perhaps, he wondered as he looked at the glazed eyes and flushed faces of those who filled the surrounding tables. There was something amiss in the people of the city, even he could sense that: a hysteria maybe. There had been too much violence done on London’s streets this year. It needed to slow down.

‘What makes you think it isn’t Jack?’ he said, finally addressing his companion. Waring wasn’t showing deep insight: the methods of murder were so different that although both were gruesome, they were unlikely to be linked. It was Dr Bond’s opinion that there were
two killers at work here, and he was very much inclined to agree.

‘The letter for a start,’ Waring said. ‘“I swear I did not kill the woman found at Whitehall”?’ He obviously noted Moore’s look of displeasure because he laughed slightly as he raised his beer glass. ‘Come, come: it came into the Central News Agency. It was hardly likely to be kept a secret.’

‘We’ve had more than seven hundred such letters arrive, and it’s unlikely any of them are from Jack himself. They simply add to the load of the investigation and my lack of sleep. You’d do best to ignore them,’ he said sternly.

‘It’s my job to make sure they get published, not to hide them.’

‘At least you’re an honest bastard. There is truth in that.’ Moore signalled the waiter for two more drinks.

‘And your lot have hardly been quick to connect them.’