Mayhem

by Sarah Pinborough

  ‘And a strange method it is, too,’ Charles said, peering closely at the large cavity at the base. ‘Why not just cut off her legs? It would have been an easier task than this. Less to clean up after too.’

  The body had been separated about an inch below her navel, as if bitten in half by some great sea monster.

  ‘I presume he wanted to get to her internal organs – those ones we don’t have – and he didn’t want to open her up through the stomach for some reason of his own purpose – although who can begin to reason the purpose of a madman?’

  ‘If anyone can, Thomas,’ Charles smiled, ‘it’s you.’

  I shrugged, slightly embarrassed. Charles Hebbert was an excellent surgeon and had a mastery of anatomy, but he had no skill in applying what he saw on the post mortem table to the workings of a man’s mind. For me, however, the two were inextricably linked.

  ‘And what could he want with her arms and legs?’ he continued, frowning. ‘Where are they?’

  My brain tingled. I looked at the torso again, and the dark brown hairs that still clung to the skin in the brutalised remains of her armless pit.

  ‘The arm,’ I said, breathlessly, looking up. ‘I think we already have one of her arms.’

  After a moment of confusion, Charles’ eyes widened with dawning realisation. ‘Of course!’

  Three weeks previously an arm had been pulled from the Thames at Pimlico, and Charles and I had both examined it. Perhaps I should – we should – have thought to fetch it immediately, but as gruesome a find as an arm might be, in the days since there had been plenty more bloodshed to occupy us. I cursed my tiredness and his bad dreams.

  ‘This isn’t Jack,’ I said, stepping back from the table. ‘This is Rainham.’ Somehow, that thought filled me with more dread, for it meant there was, without a shadow of a doubt, another killer stalking the streets of London. A second one.

  Neither of us spoke for a long while after that.

  6

  London. October, 1888

  Inspector Moore

  ‘Did Abberline send you over?’ Dr Hebbert asked, leaning against a bench laden with recently washed surgical instruments.

  ‘You’ve got an arm and a torso and we have a madman on the loose,’ Inspector Frederick Moore said. ‘Any help you can give us, we’ll take.’ His voice had a naturally rough edge so that no matter how politely he spoke he always sounded as if he didn’t quite belong with the middle classes. He made no effort to smooth it, for he was well aware that he also had a gravitas that belied his thirty-nine years and led to no shortfall in respect.

  Despite being both older and of the same rank, Walter Andrews stood slightly behind Moore, his slim frame almost hidden by the other’s thickset body.

  ‘She’s not one of Jack’s,’ Dr Bond said, carefully lifting the arm from the preservatives that had kept it from further decomposition for the best part of a month. It was well-rounded, and the fingernails were neatly filed. He didn’t need the doctor to tell him that whoever this woman was, she probably hadn’t been employed doing heavy manual labour. Still, he was always glad to have Bond on these cases. He was a good medical man, and his forensic knowledge was respected city-wide by the police. During the gruesome discoveries of the past few weeks, Moore had learned to value his opinion as well as his craft.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I’m not sure,’ Bond replied, his thick moustache twitching with a slight smile, ‘but it is my definite opinion.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree,’ Moore said.

  ‘So what are we doing over here then?’ Andrews asked. ‘We’ve got enough on our plate back at Division.’

  Moore watched as the doctor placed the arm alongside the torso and pushed them together.

  ‘Perfect fit,’ Bond said.

  ‘So there is a second then,’ Hebbert said as he and Moore stepped closer to the workbench.

  ‘A second?’ Moore asked.

  ‘A second killer at work on the streets.’ Dr Bond looked up. ‘I’d say whoever disposed of this poor woman is also responsible for the Rainham death.’

  Although Moore had not been part of the Rainham river investigation, he was aware of it, of course. If Bond and Hebbert believed the two to be linked, then he wouldn’t dispute it. His insides growled with tiredness and frustration. Another murderer then.

  Would he have preferred this to have been the work of Jack? Probably – each fresh body in that case was also, crudely speaking, a fresh clue, and perhaps they would have found something here to lead them to whoever was stalking Whitechapel’s streets. So far, they had depressingly little to go on, and now, instead of making that hunt easier, they faced a search for another madman in their midst. He looked again at the torso.

  ‘What can you tell us about her?’ he asked.

  ‘She was tall, perhaps five feet eight and a half inches, and somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years of age. The contents of her pelvis, including her uterus, are absent, although the positioning of her bones shows no indication that she’s borne a child.’ Alongside Moore, Andrews had begun to scribble in the small notebook he carried with him. They worked well together; Moore led and grasped the larger picture, but Andrews was the man with the eye for detail.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She’s been dead between six weeks and two months, and decomposition occurred in the air, not the water. It’s unlikely she died by suffocation or drowning – her heart is pale and free of the clots I would expect to find from such a manner of death.’

  ‘At least we can rule that out.’ Moore’s answer was wry. How the hell could anyone decide how this woman had met her end? The only thing he knew for certain was that it was at someone else’s hand. That was enough for him.

  ‘Why take the head?’ Andrews asked.

  ‘I would suggest to avoid identification of the victim,’ Bond said.

  ‘Makes it harder to start looking for the bastard who killed her.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bond lifted the arm and placed it in a vat of wine as he spoke, ‘given the way he’s disposed of her corpse, he may have a personal reason to keep her head. Perhaps he wanted a souvenir?’

  It was a grim thought. He was not a man at all predisposed to superstition, but the dark workings of men’s minds could be depressing.

  ‘And this was the same with Rainham?’ he asked. ‘No head?’

  ‘The Rainham woman’s body was found in eleven different sections,’ Hebbert said. ‘And no, the head was never recovered. She was of a similar age to this one, and she was no working girl either, if I recall – not like Jack’s Whitechapel victims, at any rate.’

  ‘And the body parts were pulled out of the river?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bond nodded. ‘Perhaps he’s getting braver with this one, leaving the torso where he did, but the arm came out of the water at Pimlico. And who knows where the rest of her will turn up?’

  ‘What about the dismemberment?’ Moore peered at the various cavities. ‘The cuts look relatively clean.’

  ‘I would say he knew what he was doing,’ Bond said. ‘He used a sharp knife. Perhaps a saw.’

  Moore glanced over at the table of tools. There were several of both such items. ‘So he could be a doctor?’ The same had been suggested of Jack, given the mutilations he carried out on the women after murdering them so viciously. Moore didn’t miss the sharp look that passed between the two surgeons.

  ‘As we told them at the Rainham inquest,’ Hebbert said, ‘it’s likely the killer had some knowledge of anatomy, but we doubt he was a medical man.’

  Moore didn’t argue, but he took that statement with a pinch of salt. It was natural for the two men not to want to bring their own profession under suspicion or into disrepute. He didn’t hold that against them – it wouldn’t stop him following any leads that might lead him to a surgeon, so they could be as defensive as they wished.

  ‘It was a hot day in Camden for the inquest, wasn’t it, Thomas?’ Charles Hebbert shook his hea
d slightly. ‘All of us crammed into that small space. I was glad to get outside, but God’s teeth, the whole city stank that afternoon. Do you remember the stench coming from the canal? Worse than anything I had come across in any mortuary for a while. Juliana and her young man had come to meet me, and they’d waited so long she complained her new dress reeked.’

  ‘I remember,’ Dr Bond said, smiling. ‘There were a fair few frockcoats in that inquest that were start to reek themselves, and probably ours amongst them. Standing on those steps while we talked was a great relief.’ He smiled again, and then his face fell slightly. ‘I remember,’ he muttered again.

  ‘I say,’ Hebbert turned to Bond, ‘why don’t you join us for dinner this evening? Juliana asks after you often – she’s very bright you know, very interested in our work. And Mary would love to see you too. What do you say, Thomas?’

  ‘Well, if that’s all you’ve got for us,’ Inspector Moore interrupted, never that good with small-talk of his own, let alone listening to that of others, ‘then we’ll head back and leave you to finish up your work. I don’t know whether to thank you or not.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Two murders by the same hand a year apart? Maybe he won’t strike again for another year. By then, at least, we should have found our Jack.’ He spoke more confidently than he felt. He would be more than happy for Jack to take a year’s absence from his work, just so they – and the rest of London – could get back to a decent night’s sleep.

  ‘Let’s hope we don’t see each other again too soon shall we, gentlemen?’ he added as Dr Bond finally looked up from his workbench. ‘And certainly not on the streets of Whitechapel.’ The two surgeons said their farewells and then he and Andrews left them to it as Hebbert again pressed Bond to accept his dinner invitation.

  ‘The good Dr Bond looks exhausted,’ Andrews said as they strode back to the main thoroughfare. ‘Did you see him as Hebbert was talking of Rainham? He paled and trembled – only for a moment, but I saw it.’

  Moore hadn’t noticed himself, but then, it was often Andrews who caught the tiny details. ‘We’re all tired,’ he said, ‘and the doctor isn’t such a young man any more.’ He snorted slightly. ‘Neither are we, for that matter. I have a feeling that we will all be tired for quite some time to come if this murderous summer continues into the winter.’ The October air was cold and filled with the fog from a thousand fires, all competing to heat damp, chilly rooms in the streets around them. Inspector Moore lit his pipe and added his own small contribution. ‘They say this woman was five feet and eight inches tall, or thereabouts? An unusual height for a woman. Perhaps we have a chance of finding out who she was.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Andrews said. He clearly wasn’t convinced, but then, neither was Moore if he was honest. Even without the limited physical evidence the torso and arm provided, the odds were against them. Not only were all their resources being ploughed into finding Jack, London’s population was in a continual state of change. Hundreds of people came and went every day, often – and especially those who had perhaps fallen down on their luck – giving no warning and providing no destination. For many, there was no one who would care where they headed. Some ended up in the river, entirely of their own accord, providing the dredgers with a ghoulish secondary income in jewellery, pocket watches and money. No corpse was ever brought to shore with so much as a penny piece on it. It was a grasping, desperate city they lived in, separated by such great divides of wealth and poverty. There were two Londons, he had concluded long ago: one that belonged to those who dressed for the opera, and one that was a mere survival pit for those who sold matches outside the Opera House.

  Moore himself belonged to neither, but he had spent so much time trawling through the muck of one that he found the other no more than an illusion of life; he always found it strange when he was called to interact with polite society. On reflection, he decided, that was probably no bad thing. The likes of he and Dr Bond stank too much of the gritty streets to ever be truly accepted by those gentlemen and ladies who made grand gestures of charity and talked of the ‘poor unfortunates’ as if they in any way understood the true hell these people lived in. He smiled as he smoked. He was becoming something of a cynic in his old age.

  ‘You know what this little trip of ours means, don’t you?’ Andrews pulled his overcoat tighter around his thin frame and hunched over slightly in the cold.

  ‘Yes, yes I’m afraid I do,’ Moore answered. They’d seen the torso first. This case was going to become their responsibility.

  7

  London. November, 1886

  Aaron Kosminski

  Even with the three rowdy children filling the small set of rooms with sound and movement from dawn until dusk, Aaron preferred to stay with Matilda and Morris in Greenfield Street than with Betsy and Woolf and their small Rebecca. Blood. All these years later, and he still couldn’t look at Betsy without thinking of blood. When she cooked for him, his stomach roiled in revulsion at the thought of her hands on what he was eating. He couldn’t understand how Woolf could touch her intimately, in that place, no matter how beautiful she was. He had made excuses so he hadn’t had to see baby Rebecca until there were no remaining traces of his sister’s blood anywhere, not even on his mother’s apron from helping her with the birth. He loved Betsy, but he couldn’t cure himself of the loathing he felt for her.

  He should have been at the barber’s. Matilda had given him a queer look when he had come back up the stairs so soon after leaving, but he had made some poor excuse about there being not enough work for him today. Knowing Matilda, she might check, but that was a problem for later. Not that being in the safety of their home changed things, as it turned out.

  His head had been quiet since they’d fled, blissfully free of visions. Their rooms weren’t luxurious, but after the Pale they were more than adequate, and the skills he had learned back then had secured him a position with various barbers on and around the Whitechapel Road. Their incomes might be small, but combined, and with Matilda’s housekeeping skills, the Kosminskis had no fear of starvation. Life might be hard, but London had lived up to their hopes after their long journey fleeing from the pogroms he had visualised so violently. They were free, though the past felt like it was forever in their shadow.

  Shadows. He shivered. His mouth tasted of rough metal – fear. More than fear, dread: endless dread. He stood by the window and looked out at the twilight. Normally he found the noise from the busy streets comforting, and felt the safety of people – even though so many were violent and criminal or drunk and aggressive. There was always the warmth of the Jewish community, many of whom, like them, had escaped and settled in this most exciting of cities. Their past sufferings united them, and now they gathered together and told stories of the old country, even thought the youngest among them, had no real memories of it.

  The old country was in his blood – his grandmother’s tainted blood. And after five blissful years of freedom, it was now screaming in his veins. Something was coming – something from the old country was moving like an icy wind through Europe. For the past few weeks Aaron had woken every morning with the taste of rot and stagnant water choking him, and an oppressive creeping dread that almost paralysed him with fear. Whatever it was, it was ancient: a parasite that would bring wickedness in its wake, infecting wherever it went. And no one would see it coming.

  He shivered and peered out through the brown fog that clung to the windows. Here and there dots of sickly yellow glowed dimly as they battled to break through the poisonous atmosphere. He wished for summer, where day and night did not mingle beneath the hanging shroud that coated the city most days, refusing to let more than a sliver of sunlight through. It was, he decided, like a manifestation of the awful foreboding he felt inside. When the first vague feelings of disquiet had gripped him two months previously, he had ignored them, trying to will them away by throwing himself into work and family with an unusual vigour, surprising Matilda with his willingness to do extra where he could – anything to keep b
usy.

  But now the visions were coming thick and fast, and the constant dread was unbearable. Blood, darkness, hunger, age: they crippled him.

  Paris.

  His head swirled with snippets of French, cobbled streets, drunk, wine, stumbling, soft skin. And then the blood: the feeding.

  He wanted to run, to gather up the children and flee as they had done before. Would his family listen this time? Would they leave this heaving river city that had become their home, where they had settled?

  The river: black, wicked, stagnant water.

  It wouldn’t stray too far from a river. It would need the water.

  He tried to push it from his mind, but the cold fingers gripped like a vice, digging into his brain.

  His family wouldn’t leave the city – and more than that, he couldn’t leave the city. The visions wouldn’t let him. That scared him the most: the visions sat like something slick, a wet dead thing in the pit of his stomach. Before, the visions had told him to flee; this time they demanded that he stay.

  8

  London. October, 1888

  Dr Bond

  I had been unable to extract myself from Charles’ invitation to dinner, and even once I was in the warmth of his home and seated at the table, I found it hard to shake my distraction. Rainham. Ever since the mention of Rainham at the morgue my mind had taken a different turn, and I had barely been able to focus on the inspector, let alone my colleague. Rainham. Not the inquest itself, but the reminder of how we had stood on the steps afterwards and chatted, looking out over the hubbub of Camden.

  ‘You should come here more often, Thomas.’ Mary smiled as Charles refilled our glasses. ‘You know you’re welcome for dinner whenever you wish.’

  ‘That’s most kind,’ I replied and was glad when Charles continued the conversation, asking Juliana about her recent botany studies. The study and drawing of wildlife was quite a hobby of hers. I let their chatter wash over me, making the appropriate noises when they were required, while in my mind, I was once again standing on those steps at Camden, and my eyes caught on a figure on the other side of the road. He had been standing perfectly still, and although his head had tilted downwards I had seen the glint of his eyes in the sunshine as they peered out from under the brim of his hat. He had been watching us. That in itself hadn’t registered overly with me as I talked; there were always a small number of ghouls or newsmen who would gather outside an inquest. What I now remembered noticing was how heavy and waxy his dark coat was; I could not conceive why anyone would wear such a garment on a day so humid that most sane men just wanted to rip away their collars and let their skin breathe. He was a tall man, and the black coat reached almost to his ankles. One arm had been tucked within its folds, even when he had suddenly ducked away and moved swiftly down a side street, perhaps having realised he had been observed.