Chained in Time

by David Waine

CHAPTER 3

  The gentle September sun still warmed the many windows of the Wilberforce School the following Monday morning. At ten o’clock the atmosphere was benign in Miss Earl’s room as she wrapped up her precious free period by checking her preparations for the ‘A’ Level class that was due to arrive at any moment. Reprographics had made a good job of the photocopying she had required at short notice. Why she checked this, she wasn’t quite sure. It wasn’t as if they were unreliable; they had an admirable record for coping with her eternal last minute demands competently and without complaint. When one had a mind as agile and as inventive as hers, one constantly re-examined the requirements of whatever one was doing, and it was their job to support one in that. She also checked the newly expanded bibliography that she intended to give to Marie and Joe, hurriedly scrawled on the board because she had added these books to the list only that morning, and even Repro couldn’t manage that sort of demand.

  The bell rang and the corridor outside filled with the noise and bustle of hundreds of feet making their way to the next lesson, and half as many throats letting off their pent-up energy before another pedagogue stifled it for a further hour. The two of them would arrive in a moment and then the vague sense of unease that seemed to have taken an inexplicable hold of her since the previous evening would surely dissipate. She wasn’t one for putting any faith in omens or portents and she never read horoscopes. Jennifer Earl’s world was rooted in reality, where she could be in control.

  Nevertheless she still felt uneasy.

  By the time the door opened, she was bent over a pile of marking and did not look up, believing it psychologically valuable for her best students always to see her hard at work. For classes lower down the school, she would have waited outside the door and required them to line up quietly before admitting them in an orderly fashion. To do otherwise was to invite deafening chatter to disrupt the lesson from the outset. Such stratagems were unnecessary for the Sixth Form.

  Marie and Joe trooped in and took their customary seats before her desk, both automatically arranging their files, books and equipment while she marked on.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment.” She wasn’t really marking, merely skimming the final couple of paragraphs of a piece of third year work that she had really marked the previous evening. It was just for show. Finishing off with a totally unnecessary flourish of a tick next to the grade that she had already awarded, she plunged straight into the lesson without looking up.

  “Good morning to you both,” she began. “To return to late Victorian London, the London with which Karl Marx would have been familiar…”

  “Wouldn’t Jack the Ripper have been familiar with it too?” Marie’s voice had an unfamiliar cold and brittle edge to it.

  “I suppose he would, Marie,” replied the teacher, still busily sorting the many items on her desk. “The East End at any rate. Why do you ask?”

  “It was one of the books you suggested we research.”

  Miss Earl pursed her lips in mild disapproval. “I was rather hoping you would concentrate on reading London Poverty. That is the definitive work on the subject,” she pointed out with a hint of irritation, gathering the pile of marked books and crossing to the cupboard beside the door.

  “I did try,” replied Marie, her voice still uncharacteristically brittle.

  Miss Earl unlocked the cupboard and deposited the books in their allotted spot on the second shelf down. “Lame excuse, Marie,” she chided, not harshly. “It isn’t the most instantly readable of texts, but it contains all the information you will need and you shouldn’t dismiss it simply because it doesn’t have a very high entertainment value. London Poverty is required reading for any A-Level course that covers English Social History in the Nineteenth Century, so you may as well get used to it.” Only when uttering the final sentence did she actually look at the girl and discover that her gaze was not returned. Instead of sitting erect and alert, as usual, Marie sat slumped in her chair with her head hanging on her chest and a general air of exhaustion about her. Her face was pale.

  “That’s not what she meant.” Joe’s voice cut through the air like a knife. It was as hard as hers had been brittle.

  “I beg your pardon, Joe.” Jennifer Earl was taken aback.

  “Tell her, Marie.”

  The girl made no response, but simply remained where she was with her head bowed.

  “Tell me what, Marie?” A visibly concerned Jennifer Earl returned to her desk and hoisted herself into her favourite position.

  “It’s nothing. Shut up, Joe.” Her voice was a cracked whisper. She was on the verge of tears.

  He was not to be put off. He pressed closer to her, speaking softly but urgently. “No, you were right shook up about it. You told me; now tell her.”

  “What are you saying, Joe?” The teacher’s sense of unease was sharpening rapidly. Something was obviously very wrong, which was disturbing enough in itself, but the realisation that she was involved raised it to an altogether new level.

  Joe’s tone was not exactly accusatory, but she could tell that he held her responsible for what had happened to his dearest friend. “Look at her!” he snapped, flicking Marie’s chin up with his fingers. She flinched away from him, but not before Miss Earl had been able to take in the change. In place of the confident, self-assured girl she knew, sat one who had just returned from an enforced visit to Hell. Her cheeks were ashen. Her hair, normally glossy and flowing, hung in lank russet trails about her head. Her eyes, red-rimmed with dark shadows beneath, bore the residual brightness of many tears instead of their usual emerald sparkle. She was trembling. “She hasn’t had a wink of sleep all weekend, and it’s all down to that book,” Joe told her. “Tell her, Marie.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with her,” croaked Marie.

  “Course it has!” he replied vehemently. “She gave it to you, didn’t she?”

  Miss Earl’s unease crystallised into alarm. “Oh dear, am I responsible for something?”

  Marie shook her head. Unlike Joe, she did not blame the teacher for the state she was in. “No, it’s not that at all. It’s just that I had a funny turn when I read it.”

  Veils of incomprehension began to lift. Miss Earl had assumed that the girl would have researched London Poverty, as instructed. Now she realised otherwise.

  “Did you read Jack the Ripper instead?”

  Marie nodded. “Yes.”

  Miss Earl leaned forward, the stern professional mask deliberately in place lest someone misinterpret her intentions and accuse her of feeding inappropriate material to one of her charges. One’s back must be covered at all times. “That book was included on the list to provide corroborative detail, Marie. It was never intended to be your prime tool of research. I thought I had made that clear.”

  The girl nodded tearfully. “I know. You did.”

  “Tell me, Marie.”

  Gradually, comforted by the presence of Joe’s arm around her shoulders, Marie began to pull herself together. She took several slow, shuddering breaths before even attempting to speak. In a weak, faltering voice, she began to relate her tale. “Joe and I tried to start London Poverty, like you told us, but we couldn't get into it. After he went home I couldn’t face it, so I stopped and turned on the telly.”

  “You must have needed a break.”

  Marie nodded. “The news was on. It was about them finding the body of that girl, Mary Anne Nichols. I felt an icy chill steal over me.”

  A matching shudder ran down the teacher’s back. “I’m not surprised. Any young woman does, myself included. We must all be…”

  Marie cut her off. “No, it’s not that. I know all that and I’m careful. It’s what happened next.”

  There was an ominous pause. Miss Earl left her traditional perch on the desk to sit at Marie’s level in an adjoining seat. “Go on, Marie.”

  The girl took another shuddering breath before continuing. “I can’t really explain it. It sounds
stupid. The Jack the Ripper book was on the bed. I hadn’t looked at it until then. That’s more Joe’s sort of thing than mine and he'd been looking at it, but I felt compelled to pick it up and read it.” She began to shake again.

  “Compelled?”

  Marie nodded hard, staring at the floor between her feet. “The urge was so strong I couldn’t resist it. There it was, the first Ripper murder: Mary Anne Nichols.”

  Miss Earl rose to her feet and returned to her desk, flustered. “Do you have the book?” Marie fished about in her bag ineffectively, but Joe stopped her and retrieved the volume himself, handing it straight over. The teacher took it with a polite nod and opened it at the beginning. “According to this, the first victim was called Polly Nichols,” she said after a moment.

  Marie shook her head fiercely. “You’re reading the contents page. If you look at the chapter, you’ll find she used an assumed name.”

  Identifying the chapter heading from the contents page, the teacher thumbed quickly through the book until she found the relevant passage. “So she did,” she murmured.

  Joe looked up at her sharply. “You ought to know that.” His voice bore an undeniable hint of accusation now. “You’ve read the book, haven’t you?”

  A rather shamefaced Jennifer Earl laid the volume to one side, resolving to delete it from her recommended bibliography forthwith. “Well, no,” she admitted quietly. “I hear enough about male violence against women without reading it voluntarily. I threw it in with your other recommended books, which I have read by the way, because it was in the school library and was bound to contain corroborative evidence on the subject we are studying, which is poverty in Victorian London, in case you’ve forgotten.” She was aware that her voice was betraying an increasingly defensive tone and kicked herself mentally. “That is what we should really be concentrating on, not unsolved murders a century ago.”

  Marie’s eyes were frighteningly bright. “But do you see the parallel?”

  “What?” She was going to play this down if she could. The thought of the school’s star student going to pieces over work that she had set her to do was disquieting, to say the least. She returned the stare as hard as she could. “That both victims had the same name? Don’t you think you’re reading rather a lot into that, Marie? These crimes, horrifying though they both were, are separated by a hundred years. Mary Anne Nichols can’t be such an uncommon name. What you are looking at is surely a tragic coincidence.”

  Marie seemed to have recovered a little of her spirit by this time. The opportunity to share the burden was lightening the load momentarily, and a hint of desperate defiance crept into her voice. “Then try this for size,” she responded. “The original Mary Anne Nichols was killed on August 31st, 1888. Check it in the book. The new one was abducted on August 31st this year and may have been killed on the same day. The original was dumped in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel.”

  Miss Earl stopped her with a raised hand. “Hold on a moment.” Her own voice was shaking now. “I watched the late headlines last night. Wasn’t this poor girl found in — er — Derwent Street?”

  “Durward Street.” Marie stared at her, eyes blazing. “If you read on you’ll discover that Buck’s Row was knocked down years ago and Durward Street built on the site.”

  Jennifer Earl blinked in astonishment. Silence reigned for fully five seconds. “Really? That is remarkable.”

  The girl now pressed her point even further, her voice rising a semitone. “Isn’t it? Do you know the name of the detective in charge of the investigation?”

  The teacher shook her head.

  “Detective Chief Superintendent Abberline.”

  That rang a bell. Her alarm rising acutely, Miss Earl picked up the book again and thumbed through the pages. “Hold on. What does it say here? Yes, the officer in charge of the original investigation was…”

  “Inspector Abberline. Yes, he was.”

  Miss Earl shook her head in astonishment. “A relative, perhaps? An ancestor?”

  “More than perhaps, I think,” put in Joe severely. She did not dare turn to him for she could imagine the look on his face.

  “This sort of thing does happen, of course,” said the teacher, trying to retrieve her usual professional tone, in spite of the anxiety rising in her throat. “Successive generations of a family doing the same line of work. History is riddled with examples of it, especially in the armed and emergency services. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable coincidence.”

  Sneaking a peak in Joe's direction, she had never seen him look as angry as he did now. “Don’t you think the coincidences are beginning to stack up?” he asked earnestly.

  Putting the book to one side again, the purpose of the lesson now forgotten, Miss Earl leaned forward on her desk and addressed Marie gently. “Let me get this straight. Are you saying that there are so many parallels to these murders that you fear history may be repeating itself?”

  The girl, on the brink of tears, shook her head, but not in negation. “I don’t know. I hope not. That would be too horrible.”

  The teacher sat back, laying the book to one side. “It certainly would,” she murmured. “How much did you read?”

  “All of it. I didn’t sleep at all” croaked Marie through the tears, which had begun to flow again.

  Miss Earl watched her, ashamed now at having allowed her own self-interest to cloud her view of the girl’s predicament. She checked the book. “The second victim was — let me see — Annie Chapman?”

  “Killed on the eighth of September 1888 in Hanbury Street.” Marie quoted verbatim.

  The book snapped shut. “But today is the twelfth of September. I don’t recall any announcement of a girl, called Annie Chapman, being abducted on the eighth.”

  Marie sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Neither do I. Joe?” She looked at him imploringly.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “But it’s happened!” A strident shriek of panic cut through her normally soft-spoken tones. “I know it! Somewhere in this city somebody called Annie Chapman is dead, and her killer will dump her body on Hanbury Street, wherever that is.”

  An awful silence followed that statement.

  It was broken, eventually, by Joe. “And while you’re thinking about that,” he said solemnly, “just check the name of the fifth victim.”

  Lower Sixth ‘A’ Level History studies ended for the day at that point. Marie was despatched to the nurse on the supportive arm of Joe, he additionally armed with a note for the school’s counsellor to pop in and see her in the medical room as soon as physically possible. Watching them safely off down the corridor, quiet now that the marauding hordes were all in their lessons, Miss Earl turned in the opposite direction and went straight to the Head of Sixth Form’s office, praying that she was free. Within ten minutes, the pair of them sat in front of a very flustered Headmaster.

  Mr. Wilkes removed the spectacles from the end of his nose and attempted to stare more coolly than he felt across his vast desk at his young Head of History. He had just concluded a long, tedious and fractious telephone conversation with the Director of Education on the subject of funding. The school's requirement and the authority's allocation were, as usual, miles apart and the Director even more obstinate than usual, so he was in no mood for fun and games, even less for mindless hysteria. “I beg your pardon, Jennifer,” he said incredulously, “did I hear you correctly?”

  The students were of the unanimous opinion that the staff would address the Head as, ‘Sir,’ but were mistaken. Teachers, including the most senior, were on first name terms across the land in any school that considered itself remotely modern.

  Despite the familiarity of the address, however, there was nothing informal about the discussion. “I assure you I am not playing games, Robert,” replied Miss Earl urgently. “I have spoken with Marie and to say that she is distraught at these events in Whitechapel is a gross understatement. That she is beside herself
with terror is much closer to the truth.”

  Robert Wilkes sat back, drumming the tips of his fingers on the polished surface of his desk. “Teenage hysteria? Hormones and the like.”

  “Is it?” Jennifer Earl sat forward, her face grave. “The whole school knows about the poor girl who was killed, yet I don’t see them panicking.”

  “They haven’t read the book,” countered the Head defensively.

  “Some of them have,” returned the teacher almost aggressively. “I got it out of the school library and there are plenty of date stamps on it.” She sat back, fixing her supreme line manager with a flinty stare. “This isn’t girlish hysteria, brought on by overactive hormones, Robert; it goes much deeper than that.”

  “I agree,” added the Head of Sixth Form supportively.

  Robert Wilkes sat back reflectively, turning his attention to her. “You have spoken with the girl?”

  “I had a quick word her in the medical room on my way here,” she replied, “and I can categorically state that Jennifer is not exaggerating. This is a serious problem, Robert.”

  Mr. Wilkes considered these words carefully before framing his next question. “And she honestly believes that someone is trying to recreate the murders of Jack the Ripper?”

  Jennifer Earl nodded.

  The Head, now deeply concerned, turned back to his Head of Sixth Form, a fifty-two year old spinster, married to her job for three decades. “Angela, let us be absolutely sure about this. Have you ever known Marie to be prone to hysteria, any more than a teenage girl normally is, I mean?”

  Angela Hawthorn shook her head firmly. “Not at all, Robert. She is as level-headed a girl as any of us is ever likely to meet. She may only have come under my pastoral care a few days ago, but I was her English teacher for the past two years and can honestly state that I have come to know her as well as any of us. Given her past record of exemplary work and behaviour, I am convinced that we cannot dismiss this as hormonal.”

  “She is genuinely very frightened, Robert.” Jennifer’s face was grim. She stared hard at him and took a deep breath before continuing. “If she is right, and I pray to God that she isn’t, she also believes that her very name could mark her out as the final victim.”

  That was enough for Robert Wilkes. Thanking the pair of them for informing him so promptly, he went straight down to the medical room, himself, to find Marie being comforted by the school counsellor and the nurse, while Joe sat at her side, holding her hand. He sent the boy round all of her teachers with a note requesting work to cover the next couple of weeks.

  “This is a very trying time for you, Marie,” he said gently, “and the school will do everything that it can to help you through it. Hopefully whoever did this dreadful thing will soon be brought to justice and everything will return to normal. Until then, however, I think it best that you remain at home to recover.”

  “You’re suspending me?” Marie was shocked. She had never even received a detention.

  He shook his head with a quiet smile. “Not at all,” he assured her. “What possible reason could I have to suspend you? You have done nothing wrong. Shall we call it compassionate leave? You have had a terrible shock and you are not well. Seeing you as you are this morning, it is my professional opinion, based upon more than twenty years' experience, that you are not currently able to cope with the demands of your course as you normally would. This is through no fault of your own. We are organising work for you to take home, so that you won’t fall too far behind, and someone will pop in to visit every day, to make sure that everything is all right, and to collect the work for marking.”

  Reassured, she nodded.

  Rising to his feet, he smiled at her. “Good. When Joe returns with your work, I will run you home myself. Will there be someone in?”

  Marie nodded. “My mum.”

  “Very good,” he concluded, “I will telephone her at once and advise her to expect us both shortly.”