Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  All he had to do now was protect his investment.

  Polly Nichols didn’t yet know it, but she had less than a day to live. Lachley hoped she spent it enjoying herself. He certainly intended to enjoy her demise. He hastened his footsteps, eager to post his letter and set into motion the events necessary to bring him to that moment. James Maybrick would make the perfect weapon. Why, he might even let Maybrick have the knife, once Lachley, himself, had vented his rage.

  He chuckled aloud and could have kissed the fateful letter in his gloved hand.

  Tonight, he promised Polly Nichols. We meet tonight.

  * * *

  When Margo arrived at the Britannia Gate’s departures lounge, Victoria Station had taken on the chaotic air of a tenting circus in the process of takedown for transit to the next town. Not a cafe table in sight, either on the Commons floor or up on one of the balconies, could be had for less than a minor king’s ransom and it was standing room only on every catwalk and balcony overlooking Victoria Station. If many more spectators tried to crowd onto the concrete and steel walkways up there, they’d have balconies falling three and four stories under the weight.

  Besides the ordinary onlookers, the loons were out in force, as well, carrying placards and holding up homemade signs. Delighted news crews filmed the chaos while Ripperoons and assorted lunatics gave interviews to straight-faced camera operators about how Lord Jack was going to appear through an unstable gate created by a passing meteor and step off into the open Britannia amidst a host of unheavenly demons charged with guarding his most unsacred person from all earthly harm . . .

  It might almost have been funny if not for the handful of real crazies demanding to be allowed through, tickets or no tickets, to serve their lord and master in whatever fashion Jack saw fit. Margo, jockeying for position in the crowd, trying to get her luggage cart through, stumbled away from one wild-eyed madman who snatched at her arm, screaming, “Unchaste whore! Jack will see your sins! He will punish you in this ripping time . . .” Margo slipped out of his grasp and left him windmilling for balance, unprepared for someone who knew Aikido.

  Security arrived a moment later and Margo waved at Wally Klontz as the nutcase came after her again. “Wally! Hey! Over here!”

  “What’s the prob—oh, shit!” Wally snatched out handcuffs and grabbed the guy as he lunged again at Margo and screamed obscenities. More security waded in as a couple of other frenzied nutcases protested the man’s removal. Violence broke out in a brief, brutish scuffle that ended with Margo gulping down acid nervousness while security agents hauled away a dozen seriously deranged individuals—a couple of them in straightjackets. Standing in the midst of a wide-eyed crowd of onlookers and glassy camera lenses, Margo brought her shudders under control and shoved her way past news crews who thrust microphones and cameras into her face.

  “Aren’t you Margo Smith, the Time Tours special guide for the Ripper Watch—“

  “—true you’re training to become a time scout?”

  “—give us your feelings about being accosted by a member of a ‘Jack is Lord’ cult—“

  “No comment,” she muttered again and again, using the luggage cart as a battering ram to force the newsies aside. If things were this bad on station . . . What was it really going to be like in London’s East End, when the Ripper terror struck?

  And what if it’d been one of those madmen who’d grabbed Ianira? As a sacrifice to Jack the Ripper? It didn’t bear thinking about. Margo thrust the thought firmly aside and turned her luggage over to Time Tours baggage handlers, securing her claim stubs in her reticule, then lunged for the refuge of the departures lounge, where the news crews could follow her only with zoom lenses and directional microphones. It wasn’t privacy, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances and Margo had no intention of giving anybody an interview about anything.

  Once in the Time Tours departures lounge, she searched the crowd, looking for her new charges, Shahdi Feroz and the two journalists joining the Ripper Watch Team. She’d made one complete circuit of the departures area and was beginning to quarter it through the center when the SLUR-TV theme music swelled out over the crowds jamming Commons and a big screen television came to life. Shangri-La’s new television anchor, Booth Hackett, voiced the question of the hour in booming tones that cut across the chaos echoing through Commons.

  “It’s official, Shangri-La Station! Ripper Season is underway and the entire world is asking, who really was Jack the Ripper? The list of suspects is impressive, the theories about conspiracies in high-government offices as convoluted as any modern conspiracy theorist could want. In an interview taped several hours ago with Dr. Shahdi Feroz, psycho-social historical criminologist and occult specialist for the team . . .”

  Margo tuned it out and kept hunting for the Ripper scholar and wayward journalists, who should’ve been here by now. She wasn’t interested in what that ghoul, Hackett, had to say and she already knew all the theories by heart. Kit had made sure of that before consenting to send her down the Britannia. First came the theories involving cults and black magic—hence Shahdi Feroz’s inclusion on the team. Robert Donston Stephenson, who had claimed to know the Ripper and his motives personally and was at the top of several suspect lists, had been a known Satanist and practitioner of black magic. Aleister Crowley was on the cult-member suspect list, as well, although the evidence was slim to non-existent. Neither man, despite individual notoriety, fit the profile of a deranged psychopathic killer such as the Ripper. Margo wasn’t betting on either of them.

  She didn’t buy any of the Mary Kelly theories, either—and some of them were among the weirdest of all Ripper theories. Honestly, Queen Victoria ordering the Prime Minister to kill anyone who knew that her grandson had secretly married a Catholic prostitute and fathered a daughter by her, guaranteeing a Catholic heir to the throne? Not to mention the Prime Minister drafting his pals in the Masonic Temple to re-enact some idiot’s idea of Masonic rituals on the victims? It was just too nutty, not to mention the total lack of factual support. And she didn’t think Mary Kelly’s lover, the unemployed fish porter Joseph Barnett, had cut her up with one of his fish-gutting knives, either, despite their having quarrelled, or that he’d killed the other women to “scare” her off the streets. No, the Mary Kelly theories were just too witless . . .

  “You are looking very irritated, Miss Smith.”

  Margo jumped nearly out of her skin, then blinked and focused on Shahdi Feroz’ exquisite features. “Oh! Dr. Feroz . . . I, uh, was just looking . . .” She shut up, realizing it would come out sounding like she was irritated with the scholar if she said “I was looking for you,” then turned red and stammered out, “I was thinking about all those stupid theories.” She nodded toward the big-screen television where Dr. Feroz’ taped interview was still playing, then added, “I mean, the ones about Mary Kelly.”

  Shahdi Feroz smiled. “Yes, there are some absurd ones about her, poor creature.”

  “You can say that again! You’re all checked in and your luggage is ready?”

  The scholar nodded. “Yes. And—oh bother!”

  Newsies. Lots of them. Leaning right across the departures lounge barricades, with microphones and cameras trained on Shadhi Feroz and Margo. “This way!” Margo dragged the scholar by the wrist to the most remote corner of the departures lounge, putting a mass of tourists between themselves and the frustrated news crews. As Margo forced their way through, speculation flew wild amongst the tourists milling around them in every direction, eager to depart.

  “—I think it was the queen’s grandson, himself, not just some alleged lover.”

  “The queen’s grandson? Duke of Clarence? Or rather, Prince Albert Victor? He wasn’t named Duke of Clarence until after the Ripper murders. Poor guy. He’s named in at least three outlandish theories, despite unshakable alibis. Like being several hundred miles north of London, in Scotland, for God’s sake, during at least one of the murders . . .”

  A nearby
Time Tours guide in down-time servant’s livery, was saying, “Ducks, don’t you know, just everybody wants it to’ve been a nice, juicy royal scandal. Anytime a British royal’s involved in something like the Ripper murders or the drunk-driving death of the Princess of Wales, back near the end of the twentieth century, conspiracy theories pop up faster than muckraking reporters are able to spread ‘em round.”

  They finally gained the farthest corner, out of sight of reporters, if not out of earshot of the appalling noise loose in Victoria Station. “Thank you, my dear,” Shadhi breathed a sigh. “I should not be so churlish, I suppose, but I am tired and reporters . . .” She gave an elegant shrug of her Persian shoulders, currently clad in Victorian watered silk, and added with a twinkle in her dark eyes, “So you believe none of the theories about Mary Kelly?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even the mad midwife theory?”

  Margo blinked. Mad midwife? Uh-oh . . .

  Shahdi Feroz laughed gently. “Don’t be so distressed, Miss Smith. It is not a commonly known theory.”

  “Yes, but Kit made me study this case inside out, backwards and forwards—“

  “And you have been given, what? A few days, at most, to study it? I have spent a lifetime puzzling over this case. Don’t feel so bad.”

  “There really is a mad midwife theory?”

  Shahdi nodded. “Oh, yes. Mary Kelly was three months pregnant when she died. With a child she couldn’t afford to feed. Abortions were illegal, but easily obtained, particularly in the East End, and usually performed by midwives, under appalling conditions. And midwives could come and go at all hours, without having to explain blood on their clothing. Even Inspector Abberline believed they might well be looking for a woman killer. This was based on testimony of a very reliable eyewitness to the murder of Mary Kelly. Abberline couldn’t reconcile the testimony any other way, you see. A woman was seen wearing Mary Kelly’s clothes and leaving her rented room the morning she was killed, several hours after coroners determined that Mary Kelly had died.”

  Margo frowned. “That’s odd.”

  “Yes. She was seen twice, once between eight o’clock and eight-thirty, looking quite ill, and again about an hour later outside the Britannia public house, speaking with a man. This woman was seen both times by the same witness, a very sober and reliable housewife who lived near Mary Kelly, Mrs. Caroline Maxwell. Her testimony led Inspector Abberline to wonder if the killer might perhaps be a deranged midwife who dressed in the clothing of her victim as a disguise. And there certainly were clothes burned in Mary Kelly’s hearth, shortly after the poor girl was murdered.”

  “But she died at four A.M.,” Margo protested. “What would’ve kept her busy in there for a whole four hours? And what about the mutilations?”

  “Those,” Shahdi Feroz smiled a trifle grimly, “are two of the questions we hope to solve. What the killer did between Mary Kelly’s death and his or her escape from Miller’s Court, and why.”

  Margo shivered and smoothed her dress sleeves down her arms, trying to smooth the goose chills, as well. She didn’t like thinking about Mary Kelly, the youngest and prettiest of the Ripper’s victims, with her glorious strawberry blond hair. Margo’s memories of her mother were sharp and terrible. Long, thick strawberry blond hair, strewn across the kitchen floor in sticky puddles of blood . . .

  The less Margo recalled about what her mother had been and how she’d died, the better. “A mad midwife sounds nutty to me,” she muttered. “As nutty as the other theories about Mary Kelly. Besides, there probably was no such person, just a police inspector groping for a solution to fit the testimony.”

  Shahdi Feroz chuckled. “You would be wrong, my dear, for a mad midwife did, in fact exist. Midwife Mary Pearcey was arrested and hanged for slashing to death the wife and child of her married lover in 1890. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggested the police might have been searching for a killer of the wrong gender. He wrote a story based on this idea.”

  “That Sherlock Holmes should’ve been searching for Jill the Ripper, not Jack the Ripper?”

  Shahdi Feroz laughed. “I agree with you, it isn’t very likely.”

  “Not very! I mean, women killers don’t do that sort of thing. Chop up their victims and eat the parts? Do they?”

  The Ripper scholar’s expression sobered. “Actually, a woman killer is quite capable of inflicting such mutilations. Criminologists have long interpreted such female-inflicted mutilations in a psychologically significant light. While lesbianism is a perfectly normal biological state for a fair percentage of the population and lesbians are no more or less likely than heterosexuals or gays to fit psychologically disturbed profiles, nonetheless there is a pattern which some lesbian killers do fit.”

  “Lesbian killers?”

  “Yes, criminologists have known for decades that one particular profile of disturbed woman killer, some of whom happen to be lesbians, kill their lovers in a fit of jealousy or anger. They often mutilate the face and breasts and sexual organs. Which the Ripper most certainly did. A few such murders have been solved only after police investigators stopped looking for a male psychotically deranged sexual killer and began searching, instead, for a female version of the psychotic sexual killer.”

  Margo shuddered. “This is spooky. What causes it? I mean, what happens to turn an innocent little baby into something like Jack the Ripper? Or Jill the Ripper?”

  Shahdi Feroz said very gently, “Psychotic serial killers are sometimes formed by deep pyschological damage, committed by the adults who have charge of them as young children. It’s such a shocking tragedy, the waste of human potential, the pain inflicted. . . . The adults in such a person’s life often combine sexual abuse with physical abuse, severe emotional abuse, and utter repression of the child’s developing personality, robbery of the child’s power and control over his or her life, a whole host of factors. Other times . . .” She shook her head. “Occasionally, we run across a serial killer who has no such abuse in his background. He simply enjoys the killing, the power. At times, I can only explain such choices as the work of evil.”

  “Evil?” Margo echoed.

  Shahdi Feroz nodded. “I have studied cults in many different time periods, have looked at what draws disturbed people to pursue occult power, to descend into the kind of killing frenzy one sees with the psychotic killer. Some have been badly warped by abusers, yet others simply crave the power and the thrill of control over others’ lives. I cannot find any other words to describe such people, besides a love of evil.”

  “Like Aleister Crowley,” Margo murmured.

  “Yes. Although he is not very likely Jack the Ripper.”

  Margo discovered she was shuddering inside, down in the core of herself, where her worst memories lurked. Her own father had been a monster, her mother a prostitute, trying to earn enough money to pay the bills when her father drank everything in their joint bank account. Margo’s childhood environment had been pretty dehumanized. So why hadn’t she turned out a psychopath? She still didn’t get it, not completely. Maybe her parents, bad as they’d been, hadn’t been quite monstrous enough? The very thought left her queasy.

  “Are you all right?” Shahdi asked in a low voice.

  Margo gave the scholar a bright smile. “Sure. Just a little weirded out, I guess. Serial killers are creepy.”

  “They are,” Shahdi Feroz said softly, “the most terrifying creation the human race has ever produced. It is why I study them. In the probably vain hope we can avoid creating more of them.”

  “That,” Margo said with a shiver, “is probably the most impossible quest I’ve ever heard of. Good luck. I mean that, too.”

  “What d’you mean, Miss Smith?” a British voice said in her ear. “Good luck with what?”

  Margo yelped and came straight up off the floor, at least two inches airborne; then stood glaring at Guy Pendergast and berating herself for not paying better attention. Some time scout trainee you are! Stay this unfocused and some East En
d blagger’s going to shove a knife through your ribcage. . . . “Mr. Pendergast. I didn’t see you arrive. And Miss Nosette. You’ve checked in? Good. All right, everybody’s here. We’ve got—“ she craned her head to look at the overhead chronometers “—eleven minutes to departure if you want to make any last-minute purchases, exchange money, buy a cup of coffee. You’ve all got your timecards? Great. Any questions?” Please don’t have any questions . . .

  Guy Pendergast gave her a friendly grin. “Is it true, then?”

  She blinked warily at him. “Is what true?”

  “Are you really bent on suicide, trying to become a time scout?”

  Margo lifted her chin a notch, a defiant cricket trying to impress a maestro musician with its musicality. “There’s nothing suicidal about it! Scouting may be a dangerous profession, but so are a lot of other jobs. Police work or down-time journalism, for instance.”

  Pendergast chuckled easily. “Can’t argue that, not with the scar I’ve got across me arse—oh, I beg pardon, Miss Smith.”

  Margo almost relaxed. Almost. “Apology accepted. Whenever I’m in a lady’s attire,” she brushed a hand across the watered silk of her costume, “please watch your speech in my presence. But,” and she managed a smile, “when I put on my ragged boy’s togs or the tattered skirts of an East End working woman, don’t be shocked at the language I start using. I’ve been studying Cockney rhyming slang until I speak it in my dreams at night. One thing I’m learning as a trainee scout is to fit language and behavior to the role I play down time.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of the team,” Dominica Nosette flashed an abruptly dazzling smile at Margo and held out a friendly hand, completely at odds with her belligerence over the shooting lesson, “but I would be honored to be assigned to you for guide services. And of course, the London New Times will be happy to pay you for any additional services you might be willing to render.”