Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller

by Shelly Dickson Carr

  Toby drew in a long breath. “You’d have thought Collin had challenged Brown’s manhood. He exploded, pummeling Collin like a prizefighter in a boxing ring. Collin fell to the ground, gasping for breath. Brown actually kicked him! Kicked him like a dog. And he was down, Katie, Collin was down. It was instinct on my part. I lashed out, pinning Brown’s arm behind his back, raising it until he cried out in pain. I didn’t leave off twisting it until I heard Dark Annie beg me to stop.

  “ ‘You’ve made a grave mistake, Tobias, graver than you can ever imagine,’ Brown hissed at me, and when I released him, ‘Touch me again, boy, and I shall see you hanged. Both of you.’

  “He stormed back to the front parlor, leaving me to revive Collin, still gasping for air, and to soothe Dark Annie, trembling from head to toe. ‘Oh, lad?’ she cried over and over. ‘Why did you want to provoke Gideon Brown of all people?’ She was so distraught she was sobbing. ‘Make an enemy of Gideon and yer won’t live to tell the tale. I knows ’im all m’life, and I wouldn’t put odds on yours, now that you’ve crossed ’im.’ ”

  Toby was silent now, staring into the fire. Katie could see the reflections of the flames undulating in his dark eyes.

  “The evening got worse,” he continued, clenching his fists until his knuckles turned white. “I don’t understand it, Katie. An honest man doesn’t strike a dog when he’s down, not like Brown struck out at Collin. He didn’t give him a sporting chance, just hammered Collin when he was down and gasping for air. If I hadn’t intervened—”

  Toby lifted his gaze to Katie’s. “Collin can be a boil on a blister, as the Duke likes to say, but he didn’t deserve such a thrashing. Brown should have swung at me, not Collin. I brought Collin there. It was my doing. Mine alone.”

  Toby’s eyes looked pained. He wrenched his gaze from hers and stared, unseeing, at the flames. “Had you asked me yesterday, Katie, if Brown was capable of losing his temper over Collin’s childish antics, I’d have sworn an oath, not. Collin didn’t even say anything so very inflammatory—nothing to provoke such violence, and certainly not with Georgie lying sick in the next room.”

  “So then what happened?” Katie asked, gently.

  “Reverend Pinker banged on the front door.”

  “Pinker? Why was he there?” Katie gasped.

  Toby explained that Major Brown and Reverend Pinker had shared a hansom cab to the East End. Pinker was on his way to the Mission House for Widows and Orphans, and Major Brown asked him to wait in the cab while he had a word with Dark Annie.

  “But here’s where it gets tricky,” Toby continued, his voice strained. “Dark Annie was crying uncontrollably. When she answered the door and let Reverend Pinker in, she begged him to intervene. ‘Don’t let ’im hand Georgie over to the authorities until he’s recovered. He’ll be taken to Bedlam Hospital. I can’t bear it!’ she sobbed. In the end, after a few words between the two men, Major Brown grudgingly consented, and it was decided that Reverend Pinker would stay with Georgie while the four of us—Major Brown, Dark Annie, Collin, and I—went to Hanover Street, then on to Twyford Manor.

  “ ‘Don’t disturb the lad,’ Major Brown warned Pinker. ‘Look in on him only if he cries out. He’s got a fever and may be contagious. Give a care, man.’ Reverend Pinker nodded, drew up a chair by the fire, and took out his Bible. He said he’d read the good book whilst ‘sitting vigil’ for poor, young Master Cross.

  “The last I saw Georgie, he was alive. After that, the only two people who came within arm’s length of him were Major Brown and Reverend Pinker. Both had ample opportunity to smother Georgie. Major Brown, however, was in Georgie’s room a long time. When he came out, he was pumped up full of energy. His nerves on edge. As if he’d done something terrible. That’s why he lashed out at Collin. A sort of scapegoat for his own pent-up emotions.”

  “But why smother Georgie?”

  “Keep him quiet.”

  “Quiet about what?”

  “Lady Beatrix’s opera glasses. He’d been searching the entire East End for Georgie. Dark Annie said he had spies everywhere. Maybe Georgie saw him kill Mary Ann Nichols. Georgie’s grandmother said one of her tenants heard Georgie arguing with someone who had a Cockney accent, but sounded like a toff. If ever a description fit Gideon Brown—”

  “But why kill Mary Ann Nichols?” Katie blinked at him. “What possible motive could Major Brown have for murdering her?”

  Toby’s dark brows creased over his even darker eyes. “I don’t know.”

  Katie sat bolt upright and gasped. “Of course! I’ve got it! If Major Brown causes a sensation in London such as Jack the Ripper did cause, with the thought of solving it, and thus getting the Queen to award him a knighthood, the Duke will have to consent to his marrying Lady Beatrix! He’d be Sir Gideon Brown. That was their deal. I overheard them making it in the Duke’s study. It makes perfect sense, Toby. What better way for Major Brown to distinguish himself?”

  Toby kept his gaze fully directed on Katie.“But for that plan to work,” he said, “he has to—”

  “Kill more girls!” she cried excitedly. “The crimes have to get lots of press if he wants to be a national hero when he solves them!”

  “If you’re right, that means someone will have to swing from the gallows. Major Brown has to make it look as if he solved the worst crime in history. The question is, who is he going to frame?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Toby. The murders never get solved. Major Brown doesn’t finish whatever he started. Someone stops him. Maybe that someone is us . . .” Katie took a deep breath. “But if our theory is right, something goes horribly wrong. Beatrix dies at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Why would Major Brown—assuming he’s the Ripper—murder his fiancée?”

  “Katie. When you described the murders to me, they all fit a pattern. The one that didn’t was Lady Beatrix’s.”

  “So either someone else will try to kill her and make it appear to be the work of Jack the Ripper—which in my time is called a copycat murder—or Lady Beatrix discovers what Major Brown is up to, confronts him, and he kills her.”

  “It’s Reverend Pinker,” Toby said, his jaw muscles tightening. “Major Brown is going to accuse Pinker. That’s why he brought him to Dark Annie’s house. To set him up.”

  Katie nodded. “But we can’t rule out Reverend Pinker as a suspect. He was alone with Georgie. Maybe Georgie said something. Or sang something that upset him. Maybe Reverend Pinker is Jack the Ripper.”

  “No,” Toby said with finality. “It’s Major Gideon Brown. I’d stake my life on it. He’s setting up the Reverend. It’s easy to do. Pinker’s weak, he gets befuddled, and he works in the East End. He wears a preacher’s collar. He’d be trusted by his victims. That’s the way Major Brown’s going to present his case.”

  “If this was an Agatha Christie murder mystery—”

  “Agatha who?”

  “Christie. She wrote Golden-Age detective stories. Grandma Cleaves says you can always figure out who the murderer is in Agatha Christie novels once you’ve figured out who stands to gain financially.”

  “Major Brown gains financially in this case if he marries Lady Beatrix. She has one of the largest dowries in all of England.”

  “Toby . . .” Katie said gently. “Tell me about Dark Annie. Did you go to Hanbury Street with Major Brown?”

  Toby nodded. A film veiled his eyes. “Major Brown made us accompany him to Georgie’s grandmother’s—he didn’t want to let Collin or me out of his sight. But I’d rather not talk about it, Katie. Not now, not ever.” He rested his head wearily against the back of the armchair.

  “You have to! It could save lives. It could save Lady Beatrix’s life. Please, Toby. If we work together on this . . . we might save those other girls. ”

  Toby winced, then his mouth settled into a grim frown. He took his time before continuing. “It was like this,” he said in a harsh whisper. “The cab splashed up to the curb in front of number twenty-nine Hanbury Street at half-past eleve
n. It was raining. The first floor windows were alight. I could see a fire-glow through the curtains. Nothing gave me pause. Nothing alerted me to danger . . .

  “We left Collin in the back of the cab—brooding. His face was bruised and bloody; his left eye, swollen shut. He refused to come with us. I didn’t want to go in, but Major Brown shoved me out of the cab, and I didn’t want to upset Dark Annie more than she already was.

  “Outside, the pavement was wet and slick. ‘Sit there like a toad on a log, for all I care,’ Major Brown shouted over his shoulder at Collin. ‘The day of reckoning for both you lads will come soon enough.’ Then he hollered like a madman, ‘You can bloody well run, but you can’t hide . . . not from me. Never from me! Idiots, the two of you. More fool me for ever trusting you, Toby. You’ve ruined any future you might have had at Scotland Yard. I’ll go the extra mile to see you’re never recruited.’

  “I ignored him. He was showing the true colors of a bully. And I’m not afraid of him. Inside, we warmed our hands by the kitchen fire. Major Brown seemed distracted and nervous, and whenever he glanced at me, he was scowling. Georgie’s grandmother asked me to fetch some fresh water from the pump out back in the courtyard, but Dark Annie said she preferred to go. I think Major Brown’s anger distressed her and she wanted to get away from him. Five minutes later, when she didn’t return, Major Brown went looking for her. All seemed quiet enough, but when he returned several minutes later, there was blood on his hands. Mrs. R’s back was to him. She was toasting bread over the fire on a long, two-pronged fork. She didn’t see him. He motioned me to follow and called out over his shoulder: ‘Stay put, Mrs. Richardson. We’ll be back in a moment.’ His voice was soothing and as if nothing in the world were out of place . . . as if he had no blood on his hands. He led me through a room full of ticking clocks and stacked boxes, out back, down the stairs into a shared courtyard with a recessed garden.

  “ ‘There, over there—,’ Major Brown said.

  “I heard the clocks ticking inside my head. Through the light drizzle of rain, and in the half-light from the moon, I saw Annie Chapman’s body on the ground looking like nothing more than a bundle of wet rags against the dark paving stones.

  “ ‘Miss?’ I remember saying as if she could hear me. ‘Are you all right, Miss Annie?’ I thought she’d stumbled. I wanted to help her get up. But of course I couldn’t. No one could—”

  Toby was silent for a long time.

  “Go on,” Katie urged, gripping her hands together.

  “She was dead. Or nearly so,” Toby answered, releasing his breath. Then he sat back with a jerk.

  What Toby didn’t tell Katie was how he felt when he saw Dark Annie’s entrails spilling from her gutted stomach over her hips, onto the wet pavement. It was as if he’d been caught in an exposed place, in front of a firing squad, rifles aimed straight at him. Fear gripped him so intensely, he quite literally couldn’t walk. He went down on his knees and crawled to her side. Her cheeks were warm; her eyelids, too. And when he closed them he tried hard not to look at the steam rising from her still warm, pulsing innards, as if her soul was a vaporous mist trying to ascend upward into heaven. But there was no avoiding the moist, coppery smell of her raw, open flesh. Or the fact that her heart was still beating. That’s when he vomited.

  It was a long while before Toby resumed his narrative. When he finally did, his voice held a tremor of rage.

  “Major Brown ordered me to wash my blood-smeared hands at the pump and return to the cab, and then get Collin safely back to Twyford Manor. I was to speak to no one. And like a frightened animal, I blindly did as he instructed. Collin was waiting in the cab. I told him nothing. But I instructed the cabbie to go immediately back to Dark Annie’s house, not Twyford Manor.

  “When we arrived, Dora Fowler was climbing the stoop, said she was visiting Dark Annie. Collin leaned out of the hansom window, all talkative and animated now that he saw Dora. She invited us to join her after at the Cock and Bull. Collin said yes. I said no and told him he was to stay put.

  “When I rang the bell, an upstairs tenant let me in, but the door to Dark Annie’s apartment was locked. No amount of pounding could rouse Reverend Pinker, who, I supposed, had fallen asleep, so I stole back outside and climbed into Georgie’s window. The one I’d unlocked earlier.”

  Toby continued staring into the fire. He knew he couldn’t tell Katie about this new horror. How Georgie lay dead on the walnut cot. How his mouth, slack in his dead face, still retained traces of the bright, promising young man he might have been. How his arms, draped over the top of the patchwork quilt, were soft and plump, and as lifeless as putty. Yet everything else in the room had looked the same. The faded blue wallpaper. The dark water stains near the ceiling. The porcelain trinkets on the mantelpiece. The sewing basket stuck full of pins . . .

  All precisely as before. Except that Georgie’s curly hair was fanning outward against the grey mattress. A portion of Toby’s brain noticed that the pillow was missing, but couldn’t make sense of it at first. Not until he began methodically searching the room and found it wedged in the bottom drawer of the low chest next to the rocking chair.

  And so it was that Georgie Cross, the market porter boy from Hanbury Street, who loved to sing and dance, and who fell in love with a different twist ’n’ swirl every month . . . had been discovered dead, smothered to death. Toby had hurried into the front parlor, but Reverend Pinker was nowhere to be found. His leather Bible, with its gold clasp, lay upside down on a side table, splayed open, as if hastily thrown down.

  Toby blinked up at Katie.

  His eyes looked so haunted, she rose from her fireside chair and took his hands. His fingers didn’t respond at first, just lay limp in hers. But when she squeezed, and he returned the pressure, she leaned over and brushed her lips across his. He tugged her toward him and returned the kiss, his lips hard and demanding.

  All too soon, he pulled away. He kept seeing Dark Annie’s consumptive eyes.

  “I tell myself she hadn’t long to live, Katie. Then I tell myself a dog shouldn’t have to die the way that she did. And Georgie . . . Georgie had his whole life ahead of him. Georgie wouldn’t hurt a fly. I keep asking myself who could have wanted them both dead?

  “The answer is the same person who bashed Georgie’s skull in at his grandmother’s house. The same person who was looking for something and said, ‘Hand it over!’ Georgie had something his attacker wanted. The pawn shop ticket. The opera glasses—”

  “Major Brown,” they said in unison.

  Chapter Forty

  Go Up and Go Down say the Bells of London Town

  “We need to tell the Duke.”

  “But it’s two o’clock in the bloody morning!”

  “No choice, To-bi-yas—” Katie enunciated his name, hoping to make him smile. She’d never called him by his given name before. “We’ve got to tell the Duke about Major Brown.”

  They argued until Katie finally got her way. The Duke of Twyford was a member of the House of Lords and had been the former Home Secretary as well as Director of Covert Operations for the Crown. He had the Queen’s ear and knew every influential person in Parliament. “We need his help,” Katie insisted.

  Grudgingly acquiescing, Toby threw open the door of Collin’s bedchamber and they moved along the hallway in the direction of the west wing. Katie lifted her skirts so as not to trip as they made their way past the marble staircase with its stained glass window and then, moments later, took a dogleg turn down a winding corridor. It was so quiet at this hour that each padded thud of their footsteps seemed to reverberate down the long, drafty passageway. Gas jets in their wall sconces had been turned down so low as to be mere flickers in the gloom, throwing elongated shadows of their tiptoeing silhouettes across the carpeted path.

  Leaving the main part of the manor house behind, they moved across bare floorboards, making it impossible to stifle the clumping sound of their footfalls. China bowls brimming with rose petals and orange peel h
ad been set into wall niches to mask the odor in the ancient hallway. And even though the passage was deserted, it felt to Katie as if the ancestral portraits hanging on the walls were eyeballing her. It’s like a movie set, Katie thought. Any minute the director will swoop out from behind the wings, shouting at us to take it from the top.

  “Katie?” Toby whispered. “What’s wrong? Not getting squeamish, are you? The Duke’s bark is worse than his bite . . . sometimes.”

  Katie stared at the faded, Rembrandt-brown portraits of her dead ancestors in their starched collars and hilted swords, and had an overwhelming premonition of disaster. Two people had died tonight. And although this was the past, and everyone in it as long dead as the dour-faced Twyfords staring down at her from their gilded frames, the reality of Georgie Cross and Annie Chapman’s murders weighed as heavily upon her as if it were all real. But it is! This is happening in the here and now! It’s me who’s not real . . . I haven’t been born yet! Katie’s stomach clenched and twisted like a dishcloth being wrung out to dry. She shuddered.

  Toby spoke softly but clearly. “Go back to your room, lass. I’ll handle this. ’Twas folly on my part to take you with me to speak to the Duke. In all likelihood the guv’nor will take one of his hulking daisy roots, give me a swift boot in the Khyber Pass, and send me packing. Katie?” He peered hard at her. “Have you heard a word I said?”