Ripper

by Michael Slade

Now you don’t.

  Kchuck!

  He could already feel DeClercq’s death throes along the blade.

  BLACK CANDLES

  Vancouver

  11:55 A.M.

  Gill Macbeth was having one of those days. Last night the furnace in her home had conked out, endangering the African gray parrot and greenwinged macaw in her aviary. This morning her brand-new BMW wouldn’t start, leaking a trail of oil down the driveway to the street. Late for work, she’d been drinking a cup of coffee in the cab when a motorist smooching his squeeze had rear-ended the taxi. Gill had arrived at the hospital looking like she’d peed herself.

  And now to top the morning off that asshole Craven was back.

  “Back for more?” the morgue attendant asked, winking at Nick. He locked the autopsy gurneys into stations side by side while the cops waited for Macbeth to show.

  “Ice queen. Suits the place,” said the exhibit man.

  “But nice tits, huh, Nick?” ribbed the Ident man. “If her neckline gapes again, the dead won’t be the only stiffs in here.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” the attendant chided. “You’re talking about my boss.”

  “Here,” Nick said, producing a CD. “Play this when I give you the sign.”

  Macbeth glanced at her watch. Almost noon. Five more minutes and she’d be forty years old. Damn! Gill thought.

  Her accent wasn’t English, as Craven supposed. It was Barbadian, white Barbadian, by way of London schools. Gill’s mother was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth, so while her friends were learning how to cook from their moms, she was learning the ins and outs of cut-ting up a corpse. When Gill was twelve, her mother died from hepatitis, one of the hazards of the trade. Her father owned a string of Caribbean resorts—the Old Shades in Antigua, Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada, and Tobago—so he educated his only child to assume their collective helm. Which Gill might have done but for the mystery of Cole’s Cave.

  The year was 1968 and Gill was fifteen. One blazing hot summer day she and her boyfriend escaped the heat by going spelunking. Cole’s Cave wasn’t on Barbadian tourist maps. It was the well-kept secret of adventurous locals, a hole in an outcrop in a cane field in the center of the island. The cave was covered by vegetation hanging from the rock, the rumor being it was once a pirates’ treasure-trove. Just inside the hidden mouth were two rusted cannons, and beyond that the roost of several dozen bats.

  Gill and Tony drove a mini-moke to the field, then hacked through the cane with cutlasses while toads hopped out of their way. In each free hand they carried a rum bottle flambeaux, gasoline-filled with an oil-soaked rag in the bottleneck. Lighting these, they crawled into the cave.

  The entrance vault beyond the mouth reeked of batshit. Above them flying mammals screeched, disturbed by the flames. Flambeaux held over their heads to keep angry divebombers from clutching their hair, the pair traversed the cavern to enter the cave’s throat.

  A tunnel stretched before them, angling down. As they advanced, water soaked their feet, eventually rising to their waists to half fill the passage. Ahead, a smooth stone slide slipped from pool to pool, offering a playground grotto they thought they had to themselves. Storing the flambeaux on a jutting ledge, they romped and splashed and necked and petted like teenagers everywhere. Neither saw the body.

  Where the cave ended, no one knew. The far side of the grotto, the tunnel extended for several feet before it filled with water and disappeared. Some said the exit was north of here, between Animal Flower Cave and The Spout. Others said a rubber duck submerged in the cavern surfaced two weeks later south of Holetown. Everyone had a theory. No one knew for sure.

  “What’s that?” Gill said as they prepared to leave.

  “What’s what?” Tony said, following her arm.

  “My God! It’s a woman! There! Facedown!”

  The body was floating, fully clothed, in the water where the tunnel submerged and disappeared. Caught in the light of Gill’s flambeaux, blond hair fanned across the pool like Sargasso weeds.

  “Come on,” Tony said. “Let’s get out of here. What if she was murdered and the killer returns?”

  “We can’t just leave her, and not know how she died. Help me pull her out,” Gill said, stepping toward the pool.

  “Are you loony? What good will that do? Dead is dead. I’m out of here.”

  “Dead isn’t just dead,” Gill retorted. “There are consequences that—”

  Her flambeaux sputtered and snuffed.

  “Come with me,” Tony said, “or stay in the dark.” His torch threw hunched shadows up the wall. “Coward,” Gill muttered, forced to follow.

  Driving back to Bridgetown, they stopped to tell the police. Gill abandoned Tony to return with the cops, leading three men in white uniforms back into the cave. Bizarrely, the grotto tunnel was missing its blond-haired corpse.

  Was she murdered? A suicide? An accident victim?

  How did she get there, and where did she go?

  The mystery, never solved, plagued Gill’s dreams, in which she watched a facedown corpse turn slowly in a pool, until, faceup, it stared at her with her mother’s eyes. Why? the eyes beseeched.

  Every man since Tony had also let her down. Eventually Gill formed the opinion men were a waste of time. And now she was forty. The downslide years.

  Hand on the door to the mortuary, Macbeth paused. Craven and his cop cronies were laughing at a joke, including the morgue attendant in their ribald humor. Gill had a theory about men alone in groups, based on snippets overheard at a hundred opening doors. The glue that bonded men was lust for women’s bodies, always had been, was now, and always would be. Whether for chivalry or “second-stage” correctness, astute men learned to hide the fact and use false civility for subtle sexual ends. But boor or gentleman, they all sniffed your ass in secret.

  Which, of course, was why these women were both laid out on slabs.

  Gill took a deep breath and pushed open the door. Cops, she thought.

  Her first day on the job had felt like this: a naked woman in a tray surrounded by men. As Gill performed the autopsy one of them had said, “What’s a girl like you doing in a sexy job like this?” Her second day on the job, the victim was a man. As she examined bruising around the groin, a grizzled sergeant had chuckled, “You wanta play with one that works, mine’s alive.”

  And so it went.

  Ad nauseam.

  “Corporal. Gentlemen. What have we today?”

  “A doubleheader,” Craven said, “with yesterday’s MO. The differences puzzle me. We need your opinion.”

  First Macbeth examined the woman with stitches up her front, the corpse suspended from the totem pole. “Her face was skinned professionally, like the bridge victim. Tardieu spots indicate strangulation. Again the abdominal stab wounds precede and follow death. This time, for some reason, she wasn’t scalped. The fact only her face was skinned may be significant.”

  As Gill leaned over the body, scalpel in hand, she sensed a current of anticipation among the men. Fingers spreading the neck of her hospital greens, she caught Nick’s eye defiantly. “T-shirt,” she said, thinking, Thanks to a conked out furnace.

  Strains of classical music filled the morgue as Gill cut the stitches from throat to pubic bone. “Ah,” Nick said, index finger held learnedly in the air. “Symphony Number Four. One of Tchaikovsky’s best.”

  Gill frowned at the attendant, who sheepishly looked away. “Which do you prefer, Corporal? The andante or the scherzo?” she archly asked.

  Oh, oh, Nick thought, poker-faced. “How can one dissect a composition when the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts?” He had no idea what he was talking about. “Surely the artful question is whether one prefers Symphony Number Four to Number Six?”

  “I see you’ve done your homework,” Gill said facetiously. “There may be hope for you yet.”

  “Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky,” Nick said professorially. “Born 1833 in Kamsko-Votkinsk. He was—”r />
  “Thank you, Corporal. I know when he was born.”

  “Oops,” Nick said, snapping his fingers. “My mistake. Brahms was 1833. Tchaikovsky 1840.”

  Silence reigned, then Gill laughed. “Touché,” she said. “That drew blood.”

  “You lovebirds mind if we do some work?” the Ident man prodded.

  “An owl courts a mate by bringing her dead meat,” said the exhibit man.

  When the others stared at him, he added, “That’s a fact.”

  “So’s this,” Gill said, parting the cut stitches.

  “Christ,” Nick said. “She’s been stuffed.”

  Those who work daily with death develop black humor. Those who don’t—the serious ones—make up the casualties. The drinkers, the druggies, the breakdowns, and the suicides. Still, there’s a time and place for everything. This wasn’t it, so they weren’t laughing now.

  “Suture knots,” Gill said, pointing to the stitches. “The other one”—she led the men to the second corpse—“has the same skinned face, Tardieu spots, and painted crossbones. Her abdomen, however, wasn’t stabbed. I wonder why?”

  “Two killers,” Nick said, “with different psychic needs. The victims were iced one after the other. Stabbing the womb of the first woman sated whatever kicks are derived from that mutilation.”

  “Where was this one found?”

  “Off Southwest Marine, by the Point Grey Golf and Country Club.”

  Magnifying glass in hand, Macbeth examined the second corpse. Instead of being gutted, several large fishhooks pierced its torso skin, to which were attached the heart, liver, and other organs of the first victim.

  “Take a look,” Gill said, handing Nick the glass. She indicated black blobs on the woman’s breasts and thighs.

  “Wax?” Nick said, poking the lumps.

  “Black wax,” Gill said. “Dripped by candles.

  “The gutted woman was killed first,” she continued. “Her body was eviscerated, after which the organs were hooked to the second victim. The guts are an entrail offering like for the Oracle of Delphi.”

  Macbeth parted the heart and liver to reveal a pentagram scratched on the woman’s skin. “While still alive,” Gill said, “she was used as a human altar in witchcraft rituals.”

  JACK THE RIPPER

  Between Vancouver and New York City

  12:15 P.M.

  Robert DeClercq’s father died when he was nine. A few months later—two days before his tenth birthday—his mother passed away. A maiden aunt in Quebec became his guardian. When he was fourteen, she took him to Britain and France, doting on the orphan as if he were her son. The first thing Robert did once he mastered the London Underground was journey to Scotland Yard to see the Black Museum. The museum displays the Yard’s collection of crime souvenirs, gathered from its greatest cases over a century.

  Originally, Scotland Yard wasn’t Scotland Yard at all. It was a building at Number 4, Whitehall Place. Scotland Yard was the name of the lane outside its rear entrance, but cops being cops the world over they must have their own lingo, so the bobbies at Whitehall Place called it Scotland Yard. When the Metropolitan Police moved to a new building on the Embankment in 1890, they called their new home New Scotland Yard. This was the castlelike fortress on the River Thames which Robert approached that disappointing day. Now there’s a new New Scotland Yard in Victoria Street, but it’s not called New New Scotland Yard, just New Scotland Yard. Which means the old New Scotland Yard is new Old Scotland Yard, and the real Old Scotland Yard is old Old Scotland Yard. Police work can be so confusing.

  Robert expected a muster desk like in Hollywood films, manned by an English Clancy in blue with two rows of shiny buttons. What he got was Bunter and Jeeves.

  The butlerlike cop who blocked the door sniffed at his request, informing him there were bobbies who hadn’t toured the museum. “If you were J. Edgar Hoover’s son the answer would be the same.” Then Robert was given the velvet hum’s rush as only the British can do it.

  Oh well, time for Plan B.

  Armed with a copy of Matters’s The Mystery of Jack the Kipper, he tubed to Whitechapel in the East End. These days, minibuses conduct packaged Ripper tours, but back then passing time had shrouded Jack’s crimes. Robert set about tracking down the murder sites.

  Catharine Eddowes, the fourth victim, was killed in Mitre Square. None of the square’s angles matched the grainy photo he had of “Ripper’s Corner,” so Robert asked a passerby where the body was found. “That’s the corner,” the man said, pointing toward Aldgate and what was once Duke Street.

  A woman overheard the answer and disagreed. “Me grandfather was a mate o’ George Morris,” she insisted. “That’s the corner, ‘e told me, close to Sir John Cass School.”

  A sailor smelling of Guinness stopped to settle the dispute. His grandfather had known PC Watkins, he said, and that was the corner over there, indicating King Street, now Creechurch Lane.

  Robert tiptoed away before words became blows.

  Now, four decades later, as United Flight 272 winged toward Chicago, connecting with Flight 526 to New York, once again DeClercq was on the trail of the Ripper. Unpacking his briefcase book by book, he stacked the volumes on the seat beside him: The Jack the Ripper A to Z, Wilson’s The Occult, Huson’s The Devil’s Picturebook, Gray’s The Tarot Revealed, King’s Witchcraft and Demonology, plus several others.

  Three nuns and a priest in black and white were sitting across the aisle. The frowns on their faces deepened as each book joined the stack. Eyeing DeClercq suspiciously, the nuns crossed themselves.

  Symbols, the Mountie thought.

  History’s most baffling whodunit is Who was Jack the Ripper? Only in fiction has the mystery been solved.

  In the fall of 1888, London’s East End was home to 900,000 people. Most lived hand-to-mouth, earning pennies or stealing scraps to stay alive. Scotland Yard estimated 1,200 prostitutes walked the foggy streets, wretched women trudging the night in hobnailed boots, their few possessions stuffed in the pockets of their threadbare skirts, offering gin-puffed lips and scabby thighs to any man with thruppence or a loaf of stale bread. Meanwhile, stalking them was a demon in human disguise.

  How many victims the Ripper claimed is open to debate. Most “Ripperologists” accept five. The first, Mary Ann Nichols was killed on August 31, 1888. She was found in Buck’s Row at 3:40 A.M., lying on her back with her skirt pushed up and her throat slashed twice. The second cut had almost severed her head. Only at the mortuary was it discovered her stomach was ripped open.

  The second, Annie Chapman was found the morning of September 8th sprawled in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street. She, too, lay on her back, legs wide and skirt up, with her throat slit twice and her abdomen ripped. The killer had yanked her intestines out, throwing them over one shoulder before removing her sex organs, missing from the scene.

  The night of September 30th marked the “double event.” One A.M. in Dutfield’s Yard off Berner Street, a hawker almost ran over “Long Liz” Stride. Her throat was cut but her abdomen wasn’t ripped, perhaps because the horse-drawn cart scared the killer off. Within the hour, a bobby found Eddowes in Mitre Square. Her throat was slit and her face was slashed, nicking her eyelids and cutting off her nose and one ear. The body was ripped sternum to groin like a pig in the market, the entrails pulled out with one kidney and the uterus missing. What the killer started with Stride, he finished with Eddowes.

  September 27th, three days before the “double event,” a letter penned in red ink was mailed to the Central News Agency:

  Dear Boss,

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me
with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

  Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper

  Dont mind me giving the trade name wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha

  October 1st, the day after the “double event,” a postcard was mailed:

  I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, youll hear about saucy Jacky s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Jack the Ripper

  October 16th, a package was sent to George Lusk, president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. The parcel contained a rotting human kidney with a letter. The letter read:

  From hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  signed

  Catch me when

  you can

  Mishter Lusk

  The fifth and final victim, “Black Mary” Jane Kelly died November 9, 1888. Unlike the other women, she was killed indoors. “Indian Harry” Bowyer, who came to collect the rent, peeked through a broken window and found her body in Room 13 of Miller’s Court.

  The blood-soaked room was sparsely furnished with a bed, table, and two chairs. Wearing the tattered remains of a slip, Kelly lay faceup on the bed with her head turned toward the door. Her legs were spread wide in an obtuse angle, her abdomen ripped open and emptied of viscera. Intestines coiled from the cavity. Her uterus, kidneys, and one breast were found under her head. Her liver and the other breast were dumped by her feet. Flesh stripped from her pelvis and thighs was piled on the table. A pool of blood several feet wide had soaked through the bed. Her throat was cut to the bone, spattering the wall behind in line with her neck. Her face was slashed in all directions, severing her cheeks, eyebrows, nose, and ears. Her heart was missing.