Beside the machine is what looks to be an operating table, equipped with shackles for the patient’s wrists and ankles and a contraption to immobilize his head. “What is it?” I ask.
“Watch.” Gregor takes hold of the machine’s crank.
“Don’t touch anything! Dr. Poole mustn’t know anyone’s been here.”
“No worry. He’s not coming back.”
“How do you know?”
“He resigned. That is official story. Truth is, he was sacked.”
Ida Millbanks didn’t tell us. I suppose Dr. Poole didn’t tell her. “When was this?”
“End of July.”
The glass-fronted cupboards are empty. Mrs. Lipsky opens empty drawers beneath the worktops, which are filmy with dust. An enclosure with a glass screen lowered over the front contains a sink with water taps. The sink is dry. Probably no one has been in the laboratory these past four months. Mrs. Lipsky shows despair for the first time since the night her husband was arrested. This place seems unlikely to contain evidence that will exonerate him.
“Why was Dr. Poole sacked?” I ask.
“Because of the woman who died here,” Gregor says.
My heart leaps with the same hope that brightens Mrs. Lipsky’s face. Dr. Poole is associated with a death that occurred before the Ripper murders. “Who was she?”
“Her name was Emma Forbes. She was governess, and she was put in Bedlam for trying to kill herself. Dr. Poole, he did her favor. He killed her with this.” Gregor turns the crank on the machine. The glass discs spin. Sparks shoot from the wires, and a smell like the air during a thunderstorm fills the room. Mrs. Lipsky and I gasp. “He gave her big electric shock.”
The workings of electricity are as mysterious as magic to me, but I know that a big shock is akin to being struck by lightning—fatal. “What was Dr. Poole doing?”
“Scientific experiments.” Gregor uses the same hushed, fearful tone that a superstitious man would use to say “witchcraft.”
“What kind of experiments?”
Gregor shrugs. “Don’t ask me. I just clean up during midnight shift.” His discolored smile flashes. “I was here the night she died.”
Mrs. Lipsky and I listen eagerly as he says, “Dr. Poole brought inmates up here. All women. He kept door locked. I never went in because he cleaned in here himself. One night I’m mopping floor in ward, and I hear nurses talking. ‘Dr. Poole took Emma Forbes three hours ago and hasn’t brought her back.’ Nurse goes upstairs to see what’s what. I’m curious, so I follow her. She knocks on door, but there’s no answer. She tells me, open the door.”
Gregor jingles his keys. “She is lying there.” He points at the table. “Her stomach is cut open. Her guts are there, sorted into different piles. Bloody knife beside them.” Gregor points at the worktop. “Dr. Poole is taking pictures with camera. There is blood all over him.” Gregor curses in Russian.
Mrs. Lipsky and I are speechless, our shock laced with glee because here is eyewitness testimony that Dr. Poole cut and mutilated a patient and must indeed be Ripper Number Two.
“Nurse screams. Guards come running. Nurse faints. Guards carry her out and take me and Dr. Poole downstairs. They lock him in conference room and me in office next door. Bosses come talk to Dr. Poole. I listen. They ask, ‘Did you kill Emma Forbes?’ He say it was accident—she must have had weak heart. They ask him why he cut her up. He say he want to see what his treatment did to her insides, and she was already dead.”
A curtain opens to reveal a new dimension of the crimes: The two Rippers have different motives. Commissioner Warren kills for sport, but Dr. Poole kills for science. I don’t know why Dr. Poole chose my models for his experiments or what he hopes to learn, but I deduce that Commissioner Warren mutilates his victims not only because he enjoys it; he’s copying Dr. Poole so that all the crimes will be attributed to one man—Jack the Ripper. Warren must have viewed the bodies of the first two murdered women—Martha and Polly—and realized that the Ripper was choosing victims from my boudoir photographs, which both men had purchased from Russell’s Fine Books. I’m certain that he didn’t kill Martha and Polly; Mick and I found no souvenirs from them in his house with Annie’s rings. He didn’t know Dr. Poole would kill Liz Stride on the same night that he himself killed Kate Eddowes.
“Bosses tell Dr. Poole, resign. If he don’t, he will go to jail.” Gregor shrugs. “Same as being sacked, if you ask me. They tell me to clean up his laboratory, get rid of everything. I wrap up body and guts, take them to incinerator. Machine and table are too heavy. I can’t move them by myself, so I leave them. I put other things in dustbin, I mop up the blood.”
He obliterated the evidence. I ask, “Would you be willing to tell the police your story?”
“Hey. Whoa.” Gregor waggles his hands. “No police.”
“But your story is evidence that Dr. Poole is Jack the Ripper!”
“I don’t care if he is the devil! Bosses said not to tell anybody. I don’t want to lose my job.”
The same rush of anger I felt when PC Barrett resisted telling on Commissioner Warren overpowers me now. “I don’t care about your job! You have to tell. You should have reported Dr. Poole to the police long ago. He’s a murderer. You’re a selfish coward!”
Gregor glares at me. “You don’t talk to me that way.”
Mrs. Lipsky, alarmed by my outburst, says, “Sarah, please.”
Yesterday, I berated a shopkeeper who shortchanged me a halfpence; now I’ve blown up at this man who’s doing me a favor. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” I don’t understand why my temper is worse than ever. “Who is the nurse, and where can I find her?”
Appeased, Gregor says, “She quit. I don’t know where she is.”
“The guards?”
“Won’t talk either.”
My heart sinks. The only other people who know about Dr. Poole are the “bosses.” They must be aware of the Whitechapel murders and the similarities between the Ripper’s mutilation of his victims and Dr. Poole’s of Emma Forbes, but they’re keeping quiet to protect themselves from the scandal that would result were the public to hear that they covered for Jack the Ripper.
In desperation, I say, “Did Dr. Poole leave any papers?”
“I burned them.” Gregor watches my face fall and grins as if he’s played a joke on me. “I kept some. Just in case bosses give me trouble someday, I have something on them.”
I’m about to flay him for his ill-timed humor, when he frowns and holds his finger to his lips. I hear footsteps coming. Gregor grabs his broom and dustpan, extinguishes the lights, pushes Mrs. Lipsky and me out the door, and locks it. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a wad of folded papers, which he shoves into my hand. “Go!”
I stuff the papers in my apron pocket as we run down the passage. Gregor whistles and sweeps the floor, clanking his dustpan to cover our noise. Mrs. Lipsky and I are racing down the stairs before I realize they’re not the same ones we came up. The dim spiral of gray stone leads us to a passage where rocks protrude from the walls and bare rafters support the low ceiling. Muffled screams echo. A man is straddling a woman who lies on the floor. His trousers are pulled down to his knees. Her naked legs kick as he couples with her. Her mouth is gagged; her arms are immobilized by a garment that resembles a blanket with sleeves tied around her waist. Ferocious with lust, the man looks more animal than human, and so do the three men watching. The air stinks of sweat, liquor, and terror.
Mrs. Lipsky and I falter to a stop as we realize that the men are keepers from the wards, abusing a female patient. My anger explodes so suddenly that I don’t think before I snatch up a broom that leans against the wall.
“Sarah, no!” Mrs. Lipsky grabs my arm before I can hit the men.
They look up, see us, and their expressions turn savage. I drop the broom as Mrs. Lipsky and I run. The men charge after us to stop us from reporting them. Turning corners, we gasp with exertion and fright. The cellar is a huge labyrinth. Machinery thunde
rs and clangs. With the men close on our heels, we run up a ramp and emerge into the foggy night. They’re panting behind us like the hounds of hell. We find a gate and struggle to draw back the heavy iron bar. Then we’re running down a street alongside the hospital. I don’t dare look backward, but I hear the men gaining on us. Mrs. Lipsky wheezes; her pace flags. I slow down to let the men catch me so she can get away.
A carriage and horse appear like a mirage in the fog. “Help!” I cry.
The carriage door opens. “Sarah?” Hugh calls.
Mrs. Lipsky reaches the carriage, where Hugh and Mick have been waiting for us because Gregor didn’t want to sneak more than two people into Bedlam. Hugh and Mick pull Mrs. Lipsky inside. As I lunge for the carriage, hands seize my waist. I scream. My friends clutch my arms; the men have hold of my legs. In the fracas of pulling and shouting, I feel as if I’m being torn in two. I desperately kick. The men yelp and let go. My friends haul me into the carriage, and Hugh yells to the driver, “Go, dammit!”
The whip cracks; the carriage speeds forward. The men run after us, cursing as they’re left in the dust.
#
By the time we reach my studio, I have told Mick and Hugh what happened in Bedlam. My anger has cooled; I’m shaken because it almost got Mrs. Lipsky and myself killed. I vow to keep a tighter rein on my temper.
As I put on the teakettle, Hugh lounges in a chair, flexing his bandaged right wrist; it was sprained during the fracas. “What did Gregor give you?”
I pull the papers from my apron pocket, unfold them, and lay them on the table. We gather to look at three creased photographs.
“Damn!” Hugh turns his back on them.
The first shows a woman lying on the operating table in Dr. Poole’s laboratory. The camera was positioned above her, aimed downward. The image encompasses her naked body from neck to thighs. Her wrists are shackled. Below her flat breasts and bony ribcage, her stomach is cut open, the skin flaps held back by metal pincers. In the opening, a small organ shaped like a lumpy, inverted pear sits amid coiled intestines.
Mick, Mrs. Lipsky, and I are dumbstruck, revolted.
The second photograph shows a white butcher tray containing a ruler placed below the pear-shaped organ. A film of blood on the tray looks gray in the black-and-white print. In the third photograph, the female body on the table resembles Annie Chapman’s in the morgue—innards scooped out, body cavity empty.
Everything we’ve learned about Dr. Poole indicates that he is indeed Ripper Number Two, but we’re discouraged in spite of our success. There’s a great divide between finding this evidence and freeing Mr. Lipsky.
“What’s that?” Mick points to the organ on the tray.
I shake my head; all I know about human anatomy is what’s visible on the outside.
“It is her womb.” Mrs. Lipsky, a butcher’s wife, has seen animals taken apart.
Polly Nichols’s abdomen was mutilated, perhaps in a bungled attempt to remove her womb, but this possible connection between her and Dr. Poole brings us no closer to delivering him into the hands of the law. I turn over the photographs, hoping for clues written on the backs, but they’re blank. Then I notice something about the photographs.
“These are two different women.”
“You’re right,” Mick says, then points to one. “The dugs on her are bigger.”
And the woman whose stomach is held open by clips has a spot on her left arm—the initials T. C. “The other woman must be Emma Forbes, but this is Kate Eddowes!” I’m excited because another piece of the puzzle has dropped into place. “Kate wasn’t in a knife fight, and she didn’t go to the infirmary. It was Dr. Poole who cut her—and stitched her up.”
Hugh whistles; Mick cheers; Mrs. Lipsky and I smile. We’ve drawn a direct connection between Dr. Poole and a Ripper victim, no matter that Kate was killed by Commissioner Warren.
“Dr. Poole must have been the customer that John Kelly said she did ‘special things’ for,” I say. “She let him experiment on her, and he cut her open.”
“Didn’t Gregor say Dr. Poole was sacked for mutilating only one woman?” Hugh says.
“The ‘bosses’ probably don’t know about Kate. She wasn’t a mental patient. He must have sneaked her in and out of Bedlam.”
“Why would he let her go instead of taking her guts out like the other one?” Mick asks.
“Maybe he didn’t mean to kill Emma. Maybe her death really was an accident, and he seized the opportunity to do a dissection. Maybe Kate had a stronger heart.” Another idea comes to me. “He must have taken out Kate’s womb. That would explain the symptoms John Kelly described.” I know enough about anatomy to know that monthly periods originate in the womb, and the loss of it must mean no more periods.
“Dr. Poole, what secrets did you think you could find inside the cradle of life?” Hugh says.
None of us can answer for Dr. Poole.
“The timing is interesting,” Hugh says. “Dr. Poole was sacked in July. The Ripper murders began in August. I think that when Dr. Poole lost his facilities at Bedlam and his access to the inmates, he still wanted to pursue his experiments. He must not have tried it at his house because his patients or neighbors might notice that something fishy was going on.”
“So he started cuttin’ women in Whitechapel,” Mick says. “But what kind of experiments could he do out there on the streets? And why Miss Sarah’s models?”
None of us can answer those questions, either. Weary and discouraged, I say, “We still can’t prove Dr. Poole is Ripper Number Two. And it’s more important than ever to get him arrested.”
“Why’s that?” Mick asks.
“Because tonight we learned that Dr. Poole is capable of switching from one type of victim to another—mental patients to streetwalkers,” Hugh deduces. “Sarah’s models may be his favorites for some reason, but every woman who crosses his path is in danger, too.” He adds unhappily, “Since Gregor won’t talk, there’s nothing except Sarah and Rachel’s word to say that the photographs came from Dr. Poole’s laboratory in Bedlam.”
This is the same problem we’ve had all along: We’ve much evidence, but it’s open to interpretation, not conclusive enough to risk taking to the authorities. We’re like fishermen who’ve caught a net full of fish and aren’t strong enough to pull it into our boat.
“Don’t give up hope yet,” Mick says. “We’re going to Dr. Poole’s house soon.”
35
On 8 November, Mick, Catherine, Hugh, and I ride in a cab along Marylebone Road. “Shall we tell Ida what we’ve learned about Dr. Poole?” I ask. We’ve been debating the issue for days, and now, on our way to dinner with Ida, is the time to decide.
“I think we have to,” says Hugh, seated opposite me, next to Mick. “We can’t let that poor, sweet woman go on working for that monster.”
“He won’t hurt her. He only kills Sarah’s models,” Catherine says. The cab is fragrant with her rose-and-lavender perfume and crowded with her petticoats; there’s barely room for me on the seat beside her.
“Models that include you, dear girl,” Hugh says. “You and Mary Jane Kelly are still left.”
“I’m not like the others. He can’t know who I am because I’m not a streetwalker, I don’t live in Whitechapel, and even if he figured out where to find me, he can’t kill me because I have a bodyguard.”
“He can’t kill Mary Jane either, while she’s off the streets,” I say. “He might be restless enough to kill Ida even if she’s not his first choice.”
Our cab inches through unusually heavy traffic. The Lord Mayor’s Show is tomorrow. Every autumn, the Lord Mayor of London travels in a magnificent coach from the city to Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown. A procession of soldiers, dignitaries, marching bands, civic organizations, and followers—miles long, thousands of people—accompanies him. The Show is the biggest pageant in England, and it draws spectators from all over the kingdom. Tonight, people are gathering at the inns and public houses, st
rolling the city.
“If anything happened to Ida, I would never forgive myself,” Hugh says. “After fooling her into thinking I’m interested in her, the least I owe her is a warning.”
“You did it for Mr. Lipsky’s sake. And Catherine’s.” Mick steals a glance at Catherine, seated across from him, her skirts puffed up against his knees. She pulls her skirts away from him. He sighs sadly.
“If we tell Ida, we’ll also have to tell her that we befriended her under false pretenses.” I’m torn between doing the right thing and sparing Ida’s feelings.
“We tricked Ida. Being nice to her was an act. Why should she trust us instead of Dr. Poole?” Catherine asks.
“I can’t keep wooing her forever,” Hugh points out. “I’ll have to break it off eventually, and she’ll be hurt whether we tell her about Dr. Poole or not.”
“Can’t you make her understand why we did it?” I ask.
Hugh responds with a glum chuckle. “‘Your employer is the Ripper. All we care about is putting him out of action. You’re just our tool.’ That’s a tall order to stuff down her throat.”
“You’re so smart, you can think of a nicer way to put it,” Catherine snaps.
“If you think there’s any way to sugarcoat it, you’re not so smart,” Hugh retorts.
The responsibility that comes with our knowledge is wearing on us, and we’re turning on one another. It’s up to me to settle the argument. “I’ll tell her. After we’ve seen the laboratory.” Guilt forms in me like stalactites dripping acid in my stomach. PC Barrett’s deception still hurts me, and before this night is over, we’ll have caused Ida similar pain.
We climb out of the cab in front of Dr. Poole’s house. The foggy street is quiet. In the light from the lamp over its door, the house looks as inviting as a block of moldy white cheese in a mousetrap. I shiver, glad that Dr. Poole himself is in Cambridge.
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