People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘I wanted to see you. Can I sit? I see Sally’s coat came in useful.’ He nodded at the black coat that was now acting as a curtain over the window.

  Mary sighed and walked over to the single wooden chair and set it down in the middle of the floor for Joe to sit on. He had meant for her to invite him to sit beside her, but she knew he would look for the moment to lean in and kiss her. He was obviously missing some comfort and regretting the firmness of his principles. He’d broken it off when Mary refused to disassociate from other prostitutes, women like Sally, who’d done a runner anyway.

  This was what men did, she had found. Women tolerated so much, waiting for their menfolk to keep their promises, then when they’d suffered enough, their feelings expired. Men, on the other hand, acted the cavalier, fled too fast from any complaining, then remembered what life was like looking after themselves and crawled back. To men like Joe, women were home. It was the reason she held so much esteem for Robert. To him she was a person, not a useful implement or a comforting concept.

  She patted the seat of the wooden chair and Joe sat in it while she returned to the saggy bed.

  ‘Like that, is it? I didn’t realise we weren’t friends, Mary.’

  ‘Friends don’t sit on beds together, else they end up as bedfellows.’

  ‘Why do you save such a tone for me? We were good once.’

  She sighed again. This was an inconvenient obstacle. She had her instructions and didn’t have time to waste on Joseph. It was clear he was hankering for a reunion. She would have to be swift.

  ‘I’m sorry, Joe, it’s only that I’m very tired. Won’t you come back another time? Perhaps you might have found some work and I won’t be so weary. Real friends should take care to give each other their best. I simply don’t have it in me today.’

  ‘Right,’ said Joe. ‘I can come back tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow, when I’ve had a good night’s rest,’ she said, knowing only too well she wouldn’t be there.

  He stood and took the two or three steps to reach the door. It was a poky little room, Number 13 Miller’s Court, with barely the space for one, yet they had lived together in those squalid surroundings, on top of each other, for some happy months. This was the Nichol, after all, where privacy was a luxury no one enjoyed.

  ‘Tomorrow then.’ Joe put his cap on and looked at the broken pane of glass in the window. ‘You should get that fixed, get another key for the door. It’s not safe like this – there’s a murderer.’

  Mary laughed. It wasn’t the murderer that frightened her. But not wanting to seem flippant, she said, ‘He cuts them up on the streets – I’ll be safe inside here.’

  ‘Still, better to have it fixed,’ said Joe as he pulled the door to.

  36

  Dr Shivershev left me in the Chelsea house with two dead bodies – my husband’s and my housekeeper’s. I considered it fortunate that I had my time as a nurse and had been among the dead before. He came back in the evening with his assistant, Walter, the man with the ginger whiskers. They brought with them a private coach, a rickety old thing that did not inspire confidence and looked as if it might fall apart if run too rigorously over the cobbled streets.

  We had packed Mrs Wiggs into an old trunk together with the bloodstained linen and the by now shrivelling organ I’d found in Thomas’s bag. It was her own trunk – she would have liked that, for at least she could have verified its cleanliness. Dr Shivershev showed me how to make corks from cloth to stop the leaking from her body as it stiffened and changed colour. Then he told me to change into her clothes, and he and Walter carried her out. I followed behind. The pretence was it should appear as if Mrs Wiggs were taking her luggage onto a coach and disappearing, never to return. If anyone were to have a casual glance, that’s what they would see. My story would be that she abandoned us, along with all the other servants, because of Thomas’s volatile behaviour. Only my survival would require an explanation.

  I had winced when putting on Mrs Wiggs’ clothes. The feel of her dress on my skin made me cringe, and her bonnet carried her smell: vinegar and cloves. Strands of her hair that had caught in the straw brushed against my face. I wobbled a little when I watched the two men lift the trunk between them and put it onto the coach. I was scared it would fall and that the lid would fly open, sending Mrs Wiggs tumbling onto the pavement. I must have looked ill, because Dr Shivershev slapped me on the back, the way a sailor would another. I stumbled forward into the road.

  ‘Made of sterner stuff, aren’t we? Remember we’re British,’ he said.

  I nodded my agreement but wasn’t sure. I wanted to ask him about the British part because I understood him to be of Russian descent, but I didn’t have the energy.

  He must have heard my question in his head because he answered it anyway. ‘I’ve always liked the way that sounds.’

  Walter drove us to Dorset Street in Whitechapel, where he and Dr Shivershev took the trunk from the coach and set it down on the pavement. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it, scared to blink, petrified if I should shut my eyes that something would happen.

  A skinny little boy ran up to Walter, who passed him some coins. They exchanged words, then the boy led the horse and coach away.

  ‘Where is he going?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ said Dr Shivershev.

  They picked up the trunk. It was night-time, maybe ten o’clock, eleven even. Fear of the Ripper had left most streets dark and empty. They bumped and jostled Mrs Wiggs between them as I blindly followed along a cobblestoned road made smooth by gutter mud and horse muck that had dried and then been made wet again with fresh rain. My feet kept getting sucked into it. The houses were tall and shallow to the pavement, with bitter little bricks and large, broken windows boarded up with newspaper and sacking. We came to a stop. In between two wooden doors there was a small archway – I would have missed it myself. We walked under it and into the dark. We were in the heart of the Nichol. The hairs on my neck stood to attention at the familiarity of it. I had come all the way back to my beginnings, as I feared I would. My circle was closing.

  We felt our way along the narrow alley and came out to a cramped and overlooked courtyard. There was the sound of damp, running water, muck underfoot and the smell of rotting rubbish. We passed dark stairs on the right and I heard the scurry of rats as we disturbed them and they reassembled behind us. A single lamp emitted a weak, quivering glow. There were seven little rooms around the perimeter. I doubted good things went on in any of them.

  We entered the door of 13 Miller’s Court, the dwelling of Dr Shivershev’s friend, Mary Kelly. Her dingy little room was cramped and sparsely furnished and the door would not open all the way because it hit something on the other side. This was intentional, a little trick to alert the occupant should a stranger intrude. I remembered that my mother used to do a similar thing.

  We had to wait outside while Dr Shivershev slipped through the gap like an eel and removed the blockage – a nightstand – so the trunk could be carried through. Once inside, he replaced the nightstand by the door, lit an oil lamp and set it down. There were half a dozen half-burned candles on the nightstand and I wondered if Mary had stolen them from the houses she charred in, though from what I’d seen of her in the Ten Bells, she didn’t appear the charring kind.

  Dr Shivershev sat on a wooden chair in the corner and gestured for me to sit on the brass bed butted up against the wall. I lowered myself onto it. It had layers of blankets and some of them looked to be quite fine, not the sort of quilts I would expect to see in a whore’s dwelling. Maybe they were gifts from Dr Shivershev, or other men. Perhaps Mary had purchased them herself with the money she earned from luring innocents to their deaths, unwitting suppliers of harvested organs to gentlemen’s collections. What if they had lured me here for the same reason? It would be one way of getting rid of me.

  Walter stood by the window with his back to the wall. Every so often he would peer through it, though it was
opaque. I guessed he did this to calm his nerves. There was a small fireplace in the corner of the room. I had started to feel the November temperature in my toes and hoped that when Dr Shivershev’s Mary came, she would light the fire, though I didn’t dare ask. Even so, I removed Mrs Wiggs’ tight bonnet from my head. That whiff of vinegar and cloves again.

  There were footsteps the other side of the door and we all sat up, rigid. I looked at Dr Shivershev and he raised a finger to silence me.

  ‘Goodnight,’ called a woman outside. ‘I’m going to sing.’

  The others visibly relaxed. It was Mary.

  The door opened and in she came, her slender frame slipping easily through the gap.

  ‘Who were you speaking to?’ Dr Shivershev asked her.

  ‘Only Margaret from the last house, the one in front of the privies.’ Mary had an accent, it could have been Welsh or Irish, with London coarseness, I couldn’t be sure.

  I stood up as she came in, embarrassed to be sitting on her bed, and conscious of what might have taken place on it, likely with my own physician. The movement made everyone turn towards me, as if I were about to make a toast. I blushed.

  Mary looked me up and down and gave a small smile, the type a woman reserves for a competitor. She kept her pretty eyes on me as she walked over to where Dr Shivershev was sitting, bent down and held his grizzly head in both hands to plant a lingering kiss in a display of affection for my benefit. I fought the compulsion to tell her there would be no threat from me. I could only imagine she thought my status as a middle-class lady might usurp her looks. Dr Shivershev, for his part, had that smug expression men adopt on such occasions. I wasn’t sure which one made me feel more nauseous. I had the horrible shivers of opium withdrawal, not to mention I had stabbed my housekeeper that afternoon and seen my husband murdered. I was hardly in the mood to jostle for male attention.

  ‘What are we to do now?’ I asked, eager to get on with the next part of the plan.

  Mary started to sing ‘A Violet from Mother’s Grave’ and set about making sure the only window in the room, which faced the courtyard, was covered. She used a scrappy old cloth nailed to the wall above it, and, bizarrely, a black coat.

  No one answered me, so I let out an exasperated sigh and sat down on the bed again. It creaked and squeaked like the string section of an orchestra. If Mary was a whore, I pitied her poor neighbours.

  ‘Mary, would you light the fire, and one or two of those candles,’ said Dr Shivershev.

  She did as she was asked. She wore a bright white apron, spotlessly clean, and a linsey frock with a red shawl about her shoulders. She didn’t have a bonnet. Come to think of it, on none of the three occasions I saw her had she worn one. Her fair hair hung a long way down her back and bobbed up and down as she moved. It made me think of Mabel. Mary had a similar charm, her open, wide-eyed face seemingly stuck in perennial girlhood. I didn’t doubt men found her attractive. They would surely describe her as ‘sweet’ or ‘fair’, but girls like Mary and Mabel had no need of words, they had adoration enough and no sense of what it was to be plain. They could remain oblivious as long as they still had their looks to fall back on. For the rest of us, it made no sense to build a world around something as fleeting as beauty anyway.

  It was obvious by the dwelling, her attractiveness, and the state of her clothes and furniture that Mary made a better than average living, and she didn’t look like she spent much time on her knees charring to me. On her knees maybe, but certainly not scrubbing.

  ‘Mary, what time do you have to meet our man?’ asked Dr Shivershev.

  ‘Oh, not till two, Robbie. We have plenty of time. Are you ready enough?’

  Robbie? Urghhh.

  ‘Right, I’ll be off, I’ll see you later,’ said Walter. He gave a wink to Mary, a nod to Dr Shivershev and a wary blank-eyed stare to me before he slipped out of the door. I was definitely the spare wheel in this arrangement.

  Mary moved the nightstand in front of the door and started singing again. In between phrases, she looked me over once more and said, ‘Sorry, it is my habit.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘To sing… When I’m nervous. It’s a habit of mine.’

  She stood over the trunk and Dr Shivershev joined her.

  ‘Right, are we ready, Susannah?’ he asked.

  ‘Ready for what?’ I said.

  ‘For surgery.’

  *

  At first I didn’t understand what he meant.

  The plan was to put Mrs Wiggs in Mary’s bed and forge a Ripper murder. I had assumed it would be arranged when I was out of the room. That was as much thought as I’d allowed myself. But now I understood that they meant me to take part in it. I actually laughed when I realised that.

  ‘Do we have long enough?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Yes. It’s not as if we’re trying to keep the woman alive. We can work quickly,’ Dr Shivershev said.

  ‘Good.’ Mary threw an anxious glance at me, then turned to him. ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘She will.’ Addressing me, he said, ‘Pretend we’re in theatre again, albeit in even worse conditions than at the London. Now, Susannah, help me move the body to the bed.’

  ‘I thought we were using Mrs Wiggs to replace Mary? Are we to take organs from her too… here?’ I said.

  Mary had dragged out a large wooden box from underneath her bed. She opened it, and inside was a full kit of surgeon’s knives, tools and apparatus.

  ‘We can’t leave Mrs Wiggs as she is, Susannah. It’s very clear she is not Mary. Even our inept Metropolitan Police Force will see that. We will make adjustments so that it is impossible to recognise her as Mary or anyone else. We are to set the scene for the next Whitechapel murder. This was your idea, Susannah – remember?’

  ‘I was defending myself,’ I said.

  ‘Ha! Good luck telling that to the peelers,’ said Mary.

  I glared at her, but she turned her back and moved to the window. She kept checking it, over and over, as Walter had, and then she started to sing again. Her voice wobbled, reed thin and high, like a warbling child. It grated on my nerves.

  ‘Same height, same build. Hair? Similar enough,’ said Dr Shivershev. ‘By the time we’re finished, those will be the only features by which to identify her. I will ask you again, Susannah, open the fucking trunk.’

  Mary let out a whimper and we both looked at her. She had sat in a chair and was staring off into the distance, beyond the tiny confines of the squalid room. For someone in the business of luring innocents to their death, she was a nervous thing.

  ‘Mary, check the window is covered. We don’t want any prying eyes,’ said Dr Shivershev.

  ‘I have done it several times already,’ she said.

  ‘Then you won’t mind doing it again!’

  I opened the trunk and unpacked all the linens we had stuffed around Mrs Wiggs. Mary had the job of burning these in the fire. She had to do this slowly, or else the flames crept too high and burned the mantel. She sat staring into the flames, singing that bastard song.

  Dr Shivershev and I lifted Mrs Wiggs onto the bed. He took a knife and sliced through her dress, running up her body as if it were an autopsy. He left her chemise underneath, which was a great relief because I did not want to look on her naked. Call me strange, but it would have felt an additional indignity for her. I hated her, but I didn’t want to humiliate her. I passed the clothes to Mary, who took them and burned them, piece by piece.

  Mrs Wiggs was a lot stiffer than when we’d packed her, which made the job of taking her out a little easier. Earlier she’d been a ragdoll, but now the blood had sunk to the bottom and settled, making purple and burgundy spots on one side. It was not so hard to reposition a body like that, only a little manipulation was necessary; in all honesty, it was just like removing a dead patient at the hospital, an inanimate object. I made a silent promise that I would reward myself with the luxury of remorse if I survived.

  We placed her in the middle
of the bed, her shoulders flat, but we had to leave her body inclined to the left, because of how she’d got twisted up inside the trunk. Her head lay on her left cheek.

  ‘You’re the expert, Susannah,’ said Dr Shivershev, ‘given your extensive interest in the Whitechapel murders. What do you suggest?’

  ‘It must be vicious, and you must cut the throat first, left to right. That is something he always does,’ I said.

  He knelt on the bed and lifted Mrs Wiggs’ upper body so that her back was resting on his legs. He held her face and chin in his left hand, and with his right he slit her throat. Her gaze remained fixed on the wooden partition dividing that room from next door. She had retained her flat-eyed expression and bloated face, but the blood only dribbled out of her neck.

  ‘The cut needs to be deep, all the way down to her spine,’ I said. ‘There should be more blood.’

  ‘We will collect blood and spread it by hand. If she were alive, it would spurt out and drain down the side of the bed. We will need to re-create that,’ he said.

  He opened her up, ripped her from the stomach upwards. I saw no point being sickened or coming over all faint, it would not help me. I imagined myself back in the hospital, assisting a doctor, as I had many times. I watched as he removed the surface of the abdomen and thighs and emptied the abdominal cavity, adhering carefully to the descriptions I provided of the previous victims as detailed at length in the newspapers.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘It’s too neat, too much like an operation. The Ripper cuts with venom. He tears, he is in a hurry and he has rage. You must make it… messy and take less care.’

  He nodded. ‘Right, then let us really give them something to write about in your precious newspapers.’

  When he hacked off the breasts as if he were sawing through meat, my cheeks watered, and I considered singing too. When he dumped them on the nightstand, I recited the Lord’s Prayer in my head, or so I thought.

  Dr Shivershev looked up at me, his forearms slathered in blood. ‘What did you say?’