Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller

by Shelly Dickson Carr

  “What is it?” Toby glanced up, pencil poised in midair.

  “Sir?” McKenzie puffed out his blue-veined cheeks.

  Major Gideon Brown swallowed hard and instantly made a show of composing himself. “I think . . . perhaps . . . it would be judicious for us to wait for Police Surgeon Llewellyn after all.” He took several deep breaths. “In my regiment in India I assisted in several field autopsies, but I’ve never seen anything . . .” His voice sounded strange and hoarse. “No need to come any closer, lad.” His green eyes contemplated Toby. “Just take down what I say. And steel yourself not to look.”

  Brown continued in a low, grim voice: “The unidentified female, whom we are calling Polly Jones, and whom I believe to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, has been . . . disemboweled.” He mopped his brow with his sleeve. “Polly Jones is wearing a pair of close-ribbed brown stays which are, in part, holding in her entrails.” He swiveled around.

  “McKenzie, the cutting shears, if you please. Sergeant McKenzie!”

  McKenzie was taking in great hulking gasps of air. The color had drained from his face and he looked ready to faint.

  Toby stepped to the wall, unhooked the cutting shears, and handed them to Major Brown who with great precision proceeded to cut away the girl’s clothing. When he was done, he took out his pocket watch and counted the minutes until Police Surgeon Llewellyn arrived.

  Two hours later the dingy mortuary with its low ceiling and dank smelling air was filled to overflowing with police officers. Dr. Ralph Llewellyn, after being severely reprimanded by Major Brown, was just finishing up the last of the autopsy.

  “In the lower left part of the abdomen there is a gash that runs in a jagged line almost as far as the diaphragm,” he dictated to Sergeant McKenzie, who was hastily scribbling it down in Toby’s notepad. “The perforation exposes both her large and small intestines, and the lower quadrant of the stomach.”

  Toby stood in the shadows trying to ignore the stiffening tension behind his eyelids and in his joints. Street lamps still burned outside, but already Toby could hear the faint stirrings of the city, the clatter of milk carts rumbling past. He could smell dawn in the air.

  Toby knew he should feel sickened at the sight of the poor dead girl, but he felt only numb as if her death weren’t real. He’d felt this same reaction before. Once when his grandmother had passed away—though he wasn’t allowed to call her “Grandmother” or claim kinship. She’d been laid out in the parlor of Twyford Manor, and it had been an afterthought on the Duke’s part, letting Toby view the remains of the Marchioness of Drumville. And then there was Elsie, his baby sister, whom he’d found dead in her cradle from an infected rat bite on a morning similar to this one. A morning full of promise, with dawn mist in the air and the clatter of milk carts rumbling down the street.

  “It’s a deep gash, completely cutting through tissue,” Dr. Llewellyn droned on, enunciating in a falsely pompous, upper-class voice. “There are several other incisions running across the abdomen, with three or four of the cuts perforating downward on the right side.” He raised his eyes and spoke directly to Major Brown. “Due to the severity of the wounds, I would speculate that the weapon was a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence. Wouldn’t you agree, Major Brown?”

  When Major Brown didn’t answer, Dr. Llewellyn eyed him with seething contempt. What did the blighter mean by rousing him from his slumber a second time in one night, and for a Whitechapel whore! The very idea. Trying to make a name for himself, no doubt. Well, he, Dr. Ralph Llewellyn, was far senior to this young upstart. He’d have a talk with the Commissioner in the morning. Still and all, Dr. Llewellyn knew he’d have to tread carefully. The girl had been brutally attacked, and he’d missed all the signs. So he’d finish the autopsy and cozy up to this young fathead. What choice did he have? He’d tell Major Brown that Mrs. Llewellyn was sick with palsy, otherwise he would never have been so preoccupied and neglectful. The lie ought to suffice, with the double delight that Mrs. Llewellyn was in the pink of health.

  “Dr. Llewellyn?” snapped Major Brown.

  Dr. Llewellyn fiddled with a flap of skin on the girl’s abdomen, snipped out a piece of intestine, dropped it into a glass jar filled with alcohol that would later be mixed with formaldehyde, and raised his gaze to meet Major Brown’s.

  “Does this remind you of anything, doctor?” Major Brown demanded. “Anything at all?”

  Bristling with resentment, Dr. Llewellyn made a prodigious show of stifling a yawn. “There’s been a report of several West End cats being eviscerated. Perhaps—”

  “Anything else?” Major Brown cut him off and cast a frosty gaze around the room. “Would anyone like to hazard a guess?”

  But no one spoke, whether because they were afraid to further provoke Major Brown’s ire, or because they simply didn’t know, Toby wasn’t sure.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Major Brown continued in a steely voice. “It reminds me of the ‘Feckless Fay’ case last December on Boxing day. ‘Feckless Fay’ lost her life as the result of a wrong decision. The girl took a shortcut home through a dark alley. Could this be the work of the same man?”

  Toby was glad that Major Brown was creating an uproar. It was far easier to concentrate on the undercurrents swirling around the dark, mildewed mortuary than to think about the poor creature lying dead on a stone slab, being prodded over by the likes of Dr. Llewellyn.

  Death had its indignities, but this . . . this was almost worse, Toby thought, watching Dr. Llewellyn cut up, examine, and dissect the girl like an insect under a microscope. It was the ultimate degradation. Far better to have drowned in the Thames than to be examined under a magnifying glass by this arrogant old fool with his brandy breath and his sharp-nosed, buffoonish face.

  At the sound of footsteps, Toby swiveled around just as Police Constable Jarvis burst into the room. “Sir, I done what you asked! I found ’er name! It’s Mary Ann Nichols.” He hunched over trying to catch his breath.

  When Jarvis straightened up, he gasped out, “She’s been living with her father and stepmother. Stepmother runs the Stag’s Leap Boarding House. The girl is nineteen and helps prepare meals for the lodgers. When not helping her stepmother, she does a bit of work making lace doilies for a few extra shillings. She’s got a boyfriend, Willy Makepeace, a printer’s machinist in Old Kent Road . . . goes by the name Mad Willy. Neighbors say he beat her somefin’ awful last week on account of she was steppin’ out wiff someone else. Her father was heard saying if Mad Willy went near his daughter ever again he’d chop him up into mince pies, on account of Willy done loosened several of Mary Ann’s teeth. I’ve got two men making the rounds lookin’ for Willy Makepeace. His mother says her little Willy wouldn’t hurt a fly. But like I says, neighbors told me he fair flew into a rage last week and beat Mary Ann somefin’ awful.”

  “Good work, Constable Jarvis! Excellent!” Major Brown clapped him heartily on the shoulder.

  “So ’er name isn’t Polly?” rumbled Sergeant McKenzie drawing himself up and rubbing his chin.

  Dr. Llewellyn sauntered across the room, his face blandly incurious. He reached for his silk hat hanging from an iron hook by the door, and brushed it with his sleeve while peering about the room. “My work here is finished. Our victim, it appears, is not a Whitechapel whore after all, but a rooming house serving wench. Mary Ann Nobody. Tut, tut.”

  Toby wrenched his gaze from Dr. Llewellyn’s face to Mary Ann Nichols’s yellow-tinged cadaverous one. Miss Katherine knows the dead girl, he thought. Outside the theater she said she needed to know if the dead girl’s name was Mary Ann Nichols! But how can that be? How was it possible that Miss Katherine would know the name of the victim? She’s only just arrived from America. Mary Ann Nichols and Miss Katherine were from two different worlds. Two different classes. Did Miss Katherine know the killer? Had she overheard someone threatening to murder Mary Ann?

  Toby determined then and there to find out. In the words
of Major Brown, he didn’t care if he had to drag Miss Katherine out of bed in her nightdress. He was going to get answers.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When I Grow Rich say the Bells of Shoreditch

  It was well after midnight when Katie tiptoed barefoot down the thickly carpeted hall, past the descending grand staircase, on her way to Collin’s bedroom. She was dressed in a high-necked granny nightgown beneath a frou-frou sort of robe that Agnes, the ladies’ maid, called a “wrapper,” made of yards and yards of silky material cinched around her waist with an enormous velvet sash.

  Katie felt like a wobbly birthday present all wrapped up with a big fat bow as she crept along the corridor passing several ancestral portraits, including the present Duke of Twyford, who frowned loftily down at her from his giant, ormolu picture frame. In the portrait, the duke was younger and looked less formidable, almost . . . comical. A crown of flaming red hair spiked up from his head and fanned out from his chin like wine-stained porcupine quills.

  “The curse of the Twyfords,” Grandma Cleaves had jokingly dubbed the redheaded gene that ran rampant in every generation.

  Approaching Collin’s door, Katie knocked softly, then turned the porcelain knob and slipped inside. She tried to close the door quietly behind her, but it slammed shut with a thunderclap bang.

  Startled, Collin dropped the book he’d been holding. It fell to the floor with a resounding thwack that mingled with the echoing bang of the door. Dueling loud noises in the soundless night.

  “God’s eyeballs, Katherine!” Collin cried incredulously. “You can’t come barging into a fellow’s room at this hour! It’s not done. Simply not done.” Collin tightened the felt belt around his dark-green bed robe. “I don’t know what they teach you in America, but here—”

  “Collin—” Katie jerked her head toward Collin’s manservant. “Get rid of him, Collie,” she whispered. “We need to talk.” Luckily for Katie, everyone in England, or at least here in the Twyford household, thought Americans were a nation of raucous heathens, so Katie was forgiven for not having the manners of a “well-brought-up” English girl.

  The manservant, an elderly man with bushy eyebrows, looked extremely put out, but said, “Very well, young master,” when Collin dismissed him. Before leaving, however, he shuffled slowly across the room and hoisted up a wicker laundry basket at the foot of the wardrobe. “I shall see what can be done about your waistcoat, Master Collin,” he said in a voice as dry as dust.

  “Never mind the waistcoat, Jeffries. Give it to the deserving poor. The blood will never come out, and you know it. You also know I can’t abide tainted garments. Gruesome business.” He visibly shivered. “And Tinker and Lady Jane Grey?”

  “In the basement, Master Collin.”

  “Good. Don’t let them out until . . . well, until dead cats stop showing up on our doorstep. Bloody nuisance. If I find the lunatic who did it, I’ll carve him up myself.”

  Jeffries clucked his tongue, nodded, and sent a portentous glance in Katie’s direction. “Shall I return in precisely five minutes, young sir, with ginger biscuits and warm milk?” He tapped a bony finger at the side of his long nose as if in secret code.

  “No, Jeffries. That will be all, thank you.”

  When Jeffries left, a disapproving frown on his wrinkled face, Katie hastened to the middle of the room. “Collin? How does Toby come and go as he pleases? Is there a side entrance? A servants’ entrance? You said he has a room over the carriage house in the stable block.”

  Collin acted as if he hadn’t heard her. There was a candle burning on the bedside table, another atop a desk strewn with books, ink jars, and an assortment of bugs caught in amber. The anatomy textbook Collin had dropped lay splayed open on the floor, spine up, like a miniature pup tent.

  Collin scooped up the anatomy book and moved across the room, his dark-green robe flapping around his ankles over a purple plaid nightshirt, which dragged along the floor. A matching plaid handkerchief embroidered with the Twyford crest sprouted out of the robe’s breast pocket. Katie wondered if a plaid stocking cap with a little tasseled ball might complete Collin’s nighttime attire. She’d seen similar outfits in pen-and-ink sketches of Ebenezer Scrooge. She glanced over to the four-poster bed. There, on the topmost pillow, laid out in a perfect triangle below the swagged canopy, was a purple plaid nightcap minus the tasseled ball.

  Trying hard not to laugh, Katie swiveled her gaze back to Collin who was clumping across the floor, his slippers slapping noisily against the polished oak floorboards. She watched as he flung the anatomy textbook onto the desk. Back home, in her own century, that exact desk with its inlaid leather blotter would stand in a corner of her grandmother’s library. And this room would be a guest room, the paneled walls a muddy brown, not this rich golden hue with its highly polished sheen. And the fig-leaf wallpaper on the opposite wall would be replaced by a yellow daffodil pattern.

  A raspy noise pulled Katie’s thoughts back to the present. Collin had just struck a match and was lighting several candles on his bureau, illuminating a framed picture of his sister as a young girl of about ten or eleven. The younger Lady Beatrix looked strikingly like Courtney at that age.

  Collin repositioned the picture so it wouldn’t be scorched by the candles and then thudded across the room to the fireplace. When he reached up to brighten the gas jets on either side of the mirrored chimneypiece, Katie caught a glimpse of his reflection in the looking glass. In the sputtering gas light Collin’s freckled skin had a smoky, shadowy quality, like a bruise. His tight-lipped mouth looked more mischievous than humorless above the velvet collar of his robe. And the expression behind the icy-blue eyes staring back at her in the mirror was almost . . . predatory.

  She felt a prickle of apprehension and swiveled her gaze away. Katie knew from Grandma Cleaves that in every generation since the nineteenth century there had been a Collin in the Twyford family, as well as a Prudence, like her Aunt Pru. This boy leering at her in the mirror, a glint of red peach fuzz stretching across his chin, was probably Grandma Cleaves’s great-great-grandfather.

  Turning full around, his back to the fireplace now, Collin laughed awkwardly. He had been staring at her in the mirror with something other than cousinly affection, and she much preferred her own Collin’s indifference. He usually treated her as if she were an insignificant fly in the ointment of his life.

  Katie glanced at the four-poster bed looming against the far wall. Carved into the headboard, below the canopy, was the family coat of arms: a unicorn leaping over a large stone. That’s my bed! Or it would be, with a different canopy, more than a hundred years into the future.

  At the sight of the flying unicorn Katie felt a pang of nostalgia — not for her old bed, but for her father, and how he used to recite the old English nursery rhyme: If wishes were unicorns . . . maidens would ride.

  Katie felt suddenly queasy. Her parents—who haven’t even been born yet—would die in a car crash on their way to Logan Airport to pick up Collin. Katie reached out a hand to steady herself against a high-backed chair by the desk. Why am I here? she wondered, blinking around. Why this house? This century? This room? This bed?

  “Not feeling well, Katherine?” Collin swooped in next to her and caught her outstretched arm, but the physical nearness of the boy who looked like her cousin but wasn’t, in a room she knew from a future century, with furniture she had a connection to, made her stomach muscles clench. It was as if something in this room were warning her, Turn back. Go home. Run!

  “C-collin. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe I was wrong. I should go home. I don’t belong here.” But what about Jack the Ripper? He’s going to murder Lady Beatrix. Can I save her? Can I actually stop a psychopathic serial killer? Katie blinked around the room as if seeing it in a new light. What am I doing here? What was I thinking?

  “God’s fish, Katherine! Of course you don’t belong here—in my bedchamber!”

  God’s fish? Katie let out a strangled laugh. Her nerves were
twitching like a fish on a hook, but not God’s hook. More like the devil’s. She plunked herself onto the desk chair, and absently leafed through pages of the anatomy book. A scribbled notation here, another in the margin there, a splatter of ink, blue-black against white parchment.

  “I vow, Katherine. You Americans have a strange sense of humor. You vex me, you do.” Collin’s voice was hoarse. Katie realized she was still laughing—a soft, crazy sound—as she flipped through the pages of the textbook.

  Collin began to pace the floor, finally settling in a tufted armchair by the fire.

  An image of Courtney playing her electric guitar flashed into Katie’s mind, along with another image of a waxwork Lady Beatrix being eviscerated. “I can’t go home,” she whispered. “At least not yet.”

  “But you must, Katherine! You simply must.” Collin nodded his head vigorously. “If staying here means gallivanting at all hours of the night and entering a chap’s room unannounced and, er, in a state of undress . . .” He drummed his fingers across his knees. “Then, yes. You should return home posthaste. A proper young lady does not enter a young man’s bedchamber in nothing but her dressing gown unless . . . I suppose . . . she’s married to the chap.”

  “I’d hardly call this a state of undress,” Katie muttered, tugging at the lace collar of the granny nightgown. There wasn’t an inch of her body that wasn’t covered. “I’ve got more clothing on right now than I’ve ever worn in my entire life, even in the dead of winter. But that’s not important. What’s important is why am I here? I mean really here? Right now, in this house? In this—”