The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  * * *

  And then he struck again. The eighth of September in the backyard of a perfectly respectable house on Hanbury Street. This time, the murderer hadn’t stopped at disembowelment. He’d pulled his victim’s intestines out of her body, and he’d taken her uterus with him when he left.

  “He took … what?” I said when Crow told me.

  “Her uterus,” Crow said. “It’s nowhere to be found. He got part of her bladder, too. But I think that was accidental.”

  “But … but why would he want her uterus?”

  “I have not the foggiest idea. Why would he want to cut her throat and disembowel her?”

  “Yes, I suppose motive is a useless avenue of exploration. What did he do with it? Put it in his pocket?”

  “He must have,” Crow said. “Even in Whitechapel, I think someone would have noticed a man carrying a blood-dripping internal organ in his hand.”

  “One can only hope,” said I.

  This victim, the third, was named Annie Chapman. Her story was much the same as Polly Nichols’s and Martha Tabram’s: alcohol, desperation, and a chance encounter with the wrongest of men, a man far worse than a werewolf. Werewolves were honest folk, and honest wolves. This man did not change his form—for no werewolf would need a knife to kill, or would think of using one—but the beast he was on the inside was far worse than any wolf.

  The Star was beside itself, proclaiming, “London lies today under the spell of a great terror.”

  “Which I suppose is true,” Crow said, “but it seems rude to point it out. And, oh dear, they go on to announce ‘There is another Williams in our midst.’”

  “Could it be Williams?”

  “What? No! You’ve seen his skull. No revenant can go running around without its head.”

  “I’ve seen a skull. Unless you can attest its provenance?”

  “Oh. I see what you mean.” He considered for a moment, head tilted birdlike to one side. “Well, even if the skull isn’t Williams’s—and even if Williams was the killer, which I’m by no means persuaded of—revenants follow the script, as it were, of their former lives. The Ratcliffe Highway man beat people to death with a ripping chisel. And he preyed on people he could rob. This fellow isn’t out for money.”

  “And he’s very fond of his knife, yes. Point taken.”

  “Also, honestly, if it were a revenant, I think they could track him. Revenants … aren’t very tidy.”

  “Do you think he’s a demoniac?”

  “Despite all the newspaper theorizing, no. There’s no disturbance in the aether, not around Nichols, not around Chapman. Even a deep-buried demon betrays itself with its metaphysicum morbi.”

  “The papers would be very disappointed if they asked someone who knew that.”

  “That’s why they won’t ask anyone who does,” said Crow.

  “At least it would be a clue,” I said.

  The most awful thing about this succession of murders was that the investigations ended in the same place every time: nowhere. Even when they finally found a witness who thought she had seen Chapman with a man, less than an hour before the body was discovered, she had only seen the man from the back and her description was useless.

  “She thought he ‘looked foreign,’” Crow said, still exasperated hours later. “By which we all know she meant she thought he was a Jew. But she’s basing that assumption essentially on the back of his neck, which is a deeply uninformative part of the body.”

  “True,” said I.

  “I suppose if she’d said he looked African that would be different. But her description is utterly meaningless, even if she’s right. Do you know how many thousands of Jews there are in London?”

  “I can’t even hazard a guess,” I said.

  “Neither can I. Gregson is all puffed up and pleased with himself. But it’s over nothing.”

  And that was as close as the investigators got. The doctors disagreed over whether the man was skilled with a knife, and if so, how skilled. The newspapers got hold of the ambiguity and howled that the murderer had surgical training, which was manifestly nonsense. The prostitutes of the East End, when asked, agreed that they were scared of a man they called Leather Apron. He bullied them, extorting money and roughing them up if they refused to pay. Several said he’d threatened them with a knife. And, of course, he was Jewish.

  But when they found him—sensibly enough in hiding, since being identified as the Whitechapel murderer on the streets of the East End was becoming perilously close to an immediate death sentence—he had an alibi.

  “It was almost worth it,” Crow told me, “for the look on Gregson’s face. Exactly like the frog that burst in the fable.”

  But the utter nothing of the investigation frustrated Crow horribly. The crime scenes were useless by the time he was called; the bodily mutilations were horrible, but if they meant anything, it was only to the murderer, and Elizabeth Long—she of the “foreign-looking” man talking to Annie Chapman outside 29 Hanbury Street—was the best witness they had.

  “It’s like he can turn himself invisible,” Crow snarled, then stopped short in his eternal pacing. “Do you suppose he can?”

  “You mean like a warlock?” I said dubiously. Witchcraft practitioners claimed—in their anonymously printed pamphlets—to be able to do all sorts of things. Invisibility was a popular one.

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking warlocks specifically. Mystics in several religions are supposed to have the power of invisibility.”

  “Are any of them religions that would condone what this chap is doing? Because my understanding has always been that mystics have to be quite observant.”

  “Um,” said Crow, clearly going down a mental list. “Drat. Even the Mithrates wouldn’t butcher women.”

  “I’ve seen theories that it’s someone Christian who believes he has a mission from God to rid London of prostitution.”

  “He’s chosen a shockingly inefficient method,” Crow said.

  “There is that. And it doesn’t explain the uterus.”

  “Nothing explains the uterus,” Crow said. “The best lunatic theory thus far is that it’s a doctor trying to obtain specimens.”

  I boggled at him.

  “I know!” Crow said. “No doctor would just rip a woman open on the street to take her uterus.”

  “No doctor would need to,” I said. “There are far safer and easier ways of acquiring specimens. Some of them are even legal.”

  “Aside from which, this fellow took two-thirds of her bladder, too, which I think says he was guessing.”

  “Blundering about in the poor woman’s pelvis. No, you’re quite right. Any doctor would take either all or none of the bladder, and that goes double for surgeons.”

  “Is there some other reason he could possibly need a human uterus?” Crow said.

  “You mean like a Hand of Glory? We’re back to warlocks.”

  “At least, if there is such a spell, it would be a reason.”

  “No, I quite see the attraction. Are there any secret societies or mysteries bloodthirsty enough to demand something like this as an initiation rite?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Crow. “But none of the angels of the mysteries will talk to me anymore. They say I’ve Fallen.”

  “But you haven’t,” I said blankly.

  “You can’t argue with the angel of a mystery,” said Crow. “But if it was an initiation rite, we’d have a lot more than three butchered corpses. Where are all the other initiates? Who are they killing?”

  This turned out to be an uncomfortably prescient question, for it was the next day that we received a desperately scribbled note, of which the only thing we could decipher at first was the signature: G. Lestrade.

  It took much squinting and trial and error, but we finally decided the note said: Please come at once. Arm found near Ebury Bridge Road.

  “Oh my word,” said Crow. “It’s him.”

  “It’s who?”

  “No one knows.” He
raised his hands mock defensively. “It’s true! People have been finding neatly butchered body parts in the Thames for years, and there has never been the slightest clue as to the identity of the butcher.”

  “You don’t think it’s…”

  “Oh, no. Miles apart. This fellow never does anything in a frenzy. Couldn’t be more different from the chap in Whitechapel. But I do see why Lestrade is so agitated. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  * * *

  We found Lestrade standing on the side of Ebury Bridge Road, looking as miserable as a molting sparrow. He greeted us gloomily and said, “I hate this cove.”

  He jerked his thumb at a burlap-covered object on the embankment behind him. “It’s over there if you want to take a look.”

  I followed Crow, although I did not kneel down with him as he twitched the burlap aside.

  I didn’t need to. The scent of the arm was immediate and horribly compelling, a mix of the foul water of the Thames, the stifling reek of old blood, and the sweet nauseous miasma of decay.

  I staggered a little, and Crow twisted to look at me. “Are you all right, Doyle?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said, although I did not sound either certain or as dismissive as I wanted to. The scent was so vivid that it was distracting, and I found myself bifurcated, part of me wanting to retreat to where Lestrade was standing, another part wanting to move closer.

  Get hold of yourself, I said to myself sternly and was at least partially successful. I did not change on the spot.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Crow said, eyes as sharp as diamonds, and at that moment I knew for certain that he knew. He knew, and he was offering to help.

  I shook my head. “I just lost my balance for a moment,” I said, willing it to be true.

  “If you’re sure,” Crow said doubtfully, but he turned back to his grisly prize.

  Lestrade, who could never stand to be left out of anything for long, came down the embankment to where I was standing and said, “A workman found it. Not a single solitary clue except what you’ve got right there. As per bloody usual, begging your pardon.”

  “You sound like this happens frequently, Inspector,” I said to distract myself from the dreadfully alluring (alluringly dreadful) scent of the arm.

  “Frequently enough,” Lestrade said disgustedly.

  “The first body—or I suppose I should say, the first part of a body—was found in 1873,” Crow said without looking up. “In Battersea.”

  “1873?” I said, horrified. “You mean this has been going on for fifteen years?”

  “Intermittently,” said Crow. “One in 1873, one in 1874. Then nothing until 1884.”

  “We thought we’d gotten lucky and he’d died,” Lestrade said.

  “Then one at Rainham in 1887 and now this. I can tell you nothing you don’t already know, Lestrade. It’s a woman’s right arm. It’s neatly butchered and has a string knotted around the shoulder cap, presumably for ease in carrying. It was removed from the body using seven separate cuts. Judging by the lack of calluses and the neatly kept nails, this was a bourgeoise. Either someone else earned her keep or—far more likely—she worked in an office.”

  Lestrade said, “But—”

  “No,” said Crow firmly. “A prostitute of this class would be missed—by her madam if by nobody else. Especially right now, with everybody jumping at shadows. Decomposition has already started. This poor woman has nobody to miss her.”

  Lestrade made a grumbling noise but didn’t argue.

  “The person who did this is definitely skilled,” Crow said. “Not like the man in Whitechapel. I don’t think you’d ever catch this man stabbing anyone thirty-nine times.”

  “So we’re looking for two men, not one,” Lestrade said. “That’s just grand.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Lestrade. It’s not becoming to a Scotland Yard detective. This man must be a butcher or a surgeon. Someone who cuts up dead—or anesthetized—creatures for a living.”

  “Do you know how many men in London fit that description?”

  “Probably not as many as the number of women who fit what we know about the victim. Nor as many men as look foreign from the backs of their necks.”

  Lestrade winced.

  We knew more than that.

  She had been a young woman, not more than thirty. She had never borne a child. Her last meal had included fish. There was no fear scent. She hadn’t known, in the last minutes of her life, what was going to happen to her, which meant at least that he killed them first, then carved them up, rather than the other way around.

  I could not tell where she had come from, but there was something else, something that was not exactly scent, although I had no better word for it. Let us call it scent, and let us therefore say that I could smell where the rest of her body was. I realized that I had felt—smelled?—the same thing when I was holding Williams’s skull, but the rest of his body was apparently truly lost. Not like this woman.

  Before I could think things through, or think at all, I heard myself say, “We need to find the rest of the body.”

  “Easier said than done, Dr. Doyle,” said Lestrade. “He never dumps all the pieces at the same place, and some he doesn’t dump at all. We think he keeps the heads.”

  “No,” I said. “We need to find the rest of her body right now.”

  Crow moved in a swirl of feathers and was suddenly between me and Lestrade, although whether he was protecting me from the inspector or the inspector from me is a question I have never had the brass-faced nerve to ask. “Doyle,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “do you mean you can find the rest of her?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I can find something.”

  “Something is always better than nothing,” Crow said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  It was all very well to say “Let’s go,” but I could not move at any pace swifter than a brisk crawl and—as we rapidly discovered—whatever it was I was following, I could not find it from a carriage. The driver of that growler surely thought we were lunatics, as we made him stop every two hundred yards or so in order for me to cast around like a blighted beagle to make sure we were still going in the correct direction. My leg objected quite strenuously to all the climbing in and out of the growler, but it soon became clear that we were going a distance considerably further than I could have walked.

  Lestrade did think we were lunatics, but he came with us uncomplainingly, using his authority to smooth things over when the cabdriver began to complain about our glacial progress. I was fairly certain that Lestrade thought Crow was a lunatic ninety percent of the time anyway (and a miracle-working genius the other ten percent); I was only sorry to be losing whatever credibility I’d had as a sane and rational person—and that only in the narrow back corner of my mind that was always assessing how other people saw me. The overwhelming majority of my consciousness was fixated on this not-exactly-a-scent and finding its origin.

  Also, not changing in the middle of Grosvenor Road.

  This was the first time I had ever been aware of that shift as something I had any control over. Previously, I had always and only changed in my sleep. But now I could feel the change wanting to happen, and I could resist it. It was not easy; it felt a little like holding back a sneeze, or, at least, I can come up with no better analogy. But it was possible, and I fought the urge fiercely.

  At some point in our endless procession along the Embankment, the fiftieth, or sixtieth, or one hundred sixtieth time I climbed back into the growler, Lestrade said inconsequently, “I had a brother, you know.”

  “Did you?” Crow said with obvious surprise.

  “He was a soldier, and he came home from Afghanistan with a terrible secret.” I could feel Lestrade’s gaze on me and carefully did not look at him. “We kept it for him as long as we could, but he got caught. Them bastards at the Registry trapped him. He committed suicide before they could send him to Colney Hatch.”

 
“Oh!” Crow said, as shocked as a child. “Oh, Lestrade, I am so sorry.”

  “Eh. It happened near ten years ago, now, and we were never close. But he was my brother, and they hounded him to death.” A long, long pause. “Pardon the pun, Dr. Doyle.”

  He knew. I went cold, then hot, and broke out in a sick sweat. I managed to croak, “Your dreadful puns are no concern of mine, Inspector,” acknowledging what he had said without making a confession. And there, if we were both very lucky, the matter would rest.

  On and on, along the Embankment, until Lestrade said with some surprise, “Here! That’s the new Yard building.” But that was nothing compared to all our surprise when I said, “How can we get in?”

  Lestrade looked fairly well dumbfounded. Crow said, “In?”

  “She’s in there,” I said.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Crow said to Lestrade.

  “You can’t stop here, guv,” the cabman added.

  Lestrade scowled frightfully but said, “All right. Wait here.” He strode across to the Westminster Pier, where I lost sight of him. It was a long, awkward, and increasingly difficult quarter of an hour before he returned.

  Crow had succeeded in enticing the cabman into telling stories about the strange things he’d seen driving a growler in London. I paced—slowly and haltingly—and tried not to imagine what the cabman would tell future passengers about us. And tried not to change.

  In that, at least, I succeeded. I was still human when Lestrade came back.

  “All right,” he said. “They want us to go around to the gate on Cannon Row.”

  The cabman drove us around the massive construction site to the side opposite the river. At the gate, Lestrade paid him off, and he said cheerfully, “Thanks then, guv. Good luck!” and rattled away.

  As we proceeded into what would one day be the basements and cellars of New Scotland Yard, the urge to shift grew stronger and stronger. I knew I would be able to follow the almost-scent much more easily. I was in more and more pain and walking more and more slowly and railing in furious inward invective that I had to bite my tongue to keep from spilling into speech.