The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  Pedachenko walked across to the door of the room. If he could open it, and take her by surprise, it would all be over in seconds. But in the faint yellowish light cast by the gas lamp on the opposite wall, the Russian could see that that wasn’t going to work, because the door was clearly secured by a latch operated by a key, and when he tried turning the handle and applied gentle pressure on the wood on the left-hand side of the door, near the keyhole, it didn’t move at all. The door was locked and could only be opened from the inside, or with the key, and that meant he would have to wait.

  He didn’t want to knock on the door, in case the noise alerted any other residents of the court who might still be awake, and who might then look out of their doors or windows and see him, so he retreated along the passage almost to the end, and then stopped in a position from which he could see the door of the room on the right-hand side.

  For what seemed a very long time nothing happened. And then, about thirty minutes after he’d taken up his position, he was rewarded by the sight he had hoped to see. He heard a click, and then saw the door swing open inwards. Obviously the girl had decided that she needed to try to find some more trade before she retired for the night.

  Pedachenko stepped out of the passageway and out into Dorset Street. He looked round, but the handful of pedestrians who were visible were all some distance away, and would certainly not be able to see him clearly enough to identify him, or hear anything that he said or did to the young prostitute.

  And at that moment, the Irish girl strode out of the end of the passageway and turned directly towards him. It was 3.45 in the morning.

  Friday, 9 November 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  Alexei Pedachenko turned to look at his latest victim.

  Mary was again dressed as he’d seen her earlier, wearing a linsey frock and a red knitted crossover – a kind of shawl worn over the shoulders and tied at the front – and was bareheaded. She was staggering slightly, clearly the worse for drink.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she murmured, her soft Irish lilt smoothing the words, ‘looking for a bit of company, are you?’

  ‘I might be,’ Pedachenko replied.

  ‘It’ll be sixpence to you, my dear, for as long as you like. Nice comfy room and a decent bed. You interested?’

  Pedachenko took a quick look up and down the street before he responded. He needed to be certain that they were still unobserved.

  ‘You won’t find nobody better than me,’ the girl said, misinterpreting his glance, ‘not at this time of night. And probably not anyway. I’m real good.’

  Pedachenko nodded.

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ he replied, satisfied that nobody could either see or hear them. ‘And it looks like I’m going to find out just how good you are. Lead the way.’

  Mary turned back the way she’d come, escorting the Russian down the narrow passageway and into the court. At the door she paused and glanced at him, but made no move to insert a key in the lock.

  ‘Got a bit of a problem with this door,’ she said, giggling. ‘Can’t find the key nowhere.’

  She grinned at him, then stepped around the side of the room to the first of the two small windows set into the wall. Pedachenko took a couple of paces after her, so that he could see what she was doing. Mary extended her left hand through the window, in which the pane of glass was broken, pushing aside a coat that obscured the view into the room. A moment later, the Russian heard a click as she released the latch on the door from the inside.

  ‘Here we are, love,’ Mary murmured, stepping back to the door and pushing it open wide.

  She took a match and lit a candle which provided a dim and flickering light, barely enough to chase away the shadows, then undid her crossover and placed it clumsily on a chair.

  Pedachenko pushed the door closed behind him, listening for the click as the latch made contact and secured it. Then he glanced around the room, which was tiny, dirty and very scruffy. But it was warm, the remains of a fire still burning in the grate, which was welcome after the chill of the night outside. The bed was small and cramped, and the sheets looked extremely insanitary, showing the unmistakable signs of recent sexual activity, and he knew that if he had been a genuine client of this particular prostitute, he would’ve thought sixpence to be quite an expensive price for what he expected to receive.

  But he had an entirely different outcome to the evening in mind.

  ‘You can put your clothes on that, if you’d like,’ the Irish girl said, gesturing to the chair she was using, ‘or keep them on, just as you prefer.’

  ‘I’ll let you make yourself comfortable first,’ Pedachenko replied, taking a small step backwards and looking at Mary with an expression that he hoped conveyed eager anticipation. There was no harm in letting the woman enjoy her last few minutes of life, and the belief that the man standing in front of her found her sexually attractive. The reality was that Pedachenko would rather have forgotten all about the prize he sought than engage in any kind of sexual activity with such a creature.

  ‘You’ll have to take off them trousers to take me proper, love,’ the woman said with a suggestive smile, ‘but just as you like.’

  Mary hummed contentedly to herself as she removed her frock and woollen stockings, shedding her clothes with practised speed and economy of effort. As she did so, she made sure that she showed off her figure to the best advantage, affording her client glimpses of her breasts and buttocks while she disrobed.

  Finally, she stood before him wearing only a thin linen undergarment that barely covered her torso.

  ‘You like what you see?’ she asked playfully, lifting the base of the garment to reveal her groin.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Pedachenko replied. ‘Go and lie on the bed.’

  Mary smiled at him again, turned away and walked the three or four steps to the old bed with its stained and discoloured sheets, wiggling her buttocks as she did so. At the edge of the bed she turned back to face her client and gestured for him to join her. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed, swung her legs up so she could lie flat, wriggled over to the other side to allow him room to get on it as well, and spread her thighs wide.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said, giving another smile.

  ‘And so am I,’ the Russian said, and strode quickly across the bed to stand beside her, looking down.

  And then, with the speed of a striking snake, he ripped the pillow from underneath the woman’s head, lunged forward and immediately forced the fabric down over her face.

  But though Pedachenko was quick, and despite her drunken and befuddled state, Mary still had the presence of mind to call for help in those last few seconds of her life.

  ‘Murder!’ she yelled.

  But then the killer forced the pillow down hard, muffling any further sound that she might make.

  She writhed and struggled desperately, fighting for her life, kicking out with her legs and flailing at Pedachenko with her fists. But it was to no avail. He was a man, strong and sober, and she was a slightly built woman who was much the worse for drink. In less than a minute, she began to weaken, and within three minutes she ceased moving altogether.

  The Russian lifted the dirty pillow off her head and stared down at her for a moment. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife and bent forward over her. It was time to complete the task he had set himself.

  He wasn’t sure whether or not the woman was dead, but he would take care of that straight away. He just needed to make sure he didn’t get covered in her blood.

  Pedachenko pulled the sheet out from under the still and silent figure in front of him and covered her body with it. Then he pressed the sheet down on her head to hold it in place, slid the point of the knife through the fabric and with a single swift stroke drove the blade of the weapon into, and then pulled it through, her throat.

  Blood spurted from the severed arteries and veins, turning the sheet crimson in an instant, but within a matter of seconds the flow stopped as her heart ceased
pumping.

  Then the Russian stepped back from the bed and looked around the room, listening intently. The woman’s cry had sounded alarmingly loud to his ears, and it was always possible that somebody outside had heard her call out. If so, he would need to get out of the room as quickly as he could, before a policeman could be summoned.

  He walked across to the window by the door, pulled aside the material covering it and peered out, but the court outside was still and silent, nobody visible, and he could hear no sound of footsteps. It looked as if he’d been lucky. Or perhaps a cry of ‘murder’ was not that unusual in that district of London in the early hours of the morning. Satisfied that the alarm had not been raised, Pedachenko stepped back and glanced around the room again.

  The only illumination came from the single candle the woman had lit when the two of them had entered, and the dim red glow of the embers of the dying fire in the wall opposite the door. He wanted to see what he was doing with this victim, and that meant somehow getting better light into the room.

  But before he did anything about that, Pedachenko stepped over to the door and tugged on the handle to make sure that it was still locked, and then turned his attention back to the windows. Obviously he needed to be certain that nobody could see into the room. The window beside the door was already covered by a coat hanging from a hook above it, the material hanging down and completely covering the panes of glass. The other window had a pair of thin and grubby muslin curtains pulled partially across it, and they would probably be enough to prevent anyone witnessing anything. He pulled those curtains completely closed, and then stepped over to the fire.

  There were a few small bits of wood and kindling on the floor beside the grate, and he put those onto the embers. The kindling immediately caught light and within a couple of minutes flames were licking at the wood, but it was obvious that within a very short time the fire would be extinguished. He needed more fuel for it.

  Pedachenko looked around the room. The chair and tables were of course made of wood, but he would need to break them up in order to put them on the fire, and that would create enough noise to wake up some of the neighbours. He had already ascertained that the partition between the room he was standing in and the adjacent accommodation was made of wood, and sound would travel through that medium very easily.

  He would have to use something else. His eyes fell on the clothes that the dead prostitute had discarded just minutes earlier. They would burn, he was certain, as long as he could cut them into reasonably small pieces. If he tried putting her entire frock on the fire, it would probably extinguish it immediately, or at best simply smoulder, producing smoke but no flames or illumination.

  He picked up the garment in his left hand, trod on the base of it with his foot, and slid the sharpened blade of his knife downwards, through the material, separating it into two halves. Then he cut each of those into about half a dozen smaller pieces, and placed the first of them on the fire. In moments, the flames had already started licking around the material, and shortly after that the cloth began burning fiercely.

  Now he had enough light to see exactly what he was doing.

  Pedachenko walked back to the bed and pulled the blood-sodden sheet off the body. The woman’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the discoloured ceiling above the bed, her limbs limp and flaccid in death. She looked almost peaceful, apart from the gaping wound in her throat, a slash which had virtually severed her head from her body, and the almost circular pool of blood on which her shoulders rested.

  The Russian stared at her for several seconds, then shook his head. He seized her left arm and left leg and dragged the body a couple of feet closer to him, towards the left-hand side of the bed, so that he could more easily perform the rest of his tasks.

  Before he used the knife again, he first positioned the dead woman’s limbs to his satisfaction. In life she had been a prostitute, arguably even an attractive prostitute, and in death he thought it was only fitting that her body should assume the same stance that it must have occupied so many times while she was working. He bent forward and opened both her thighs wide, so that they were almost at right angles to each other, completely exposing her genitals.

  He would do some work in that region later on, he decided, but first he would attend to the upper part of the torso and then her face. He changed his grip on the knife, placed the blade inside the neckline of her linen undergarment, and drew the blade swiftly down her body, easily cutting through the thin material, which he pulled to the sides to expose her breasts and stomach.

  The light from the fire was dying as the last of the material was consumed, so Pedachenko placed a couple more pieces on it to provide more light before he carried on.

  Then he stabbed the point of the knife into her chest below and between her breasts and began cutting his way down towards her groin. There was a lot that he wanted to do to this woman and, fortunately, he had all of the rest of the night to do it.

  Friday, 9 November 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  The landlord of Mary Kelly’s pitiful room was a man named John McCarthy, who operated from a shop located at 27 Dorset Street, and by the end of that week he was getting seriously concerned about the amount of rent Kelly owed. She was supposed to be paying him four shillings and sixpence every week, but she had failed to make payments for over six weeks and now owed him some twenty-nine shillings. Obviously the situation could not be allowed to continue, and that morning McCarthy summoned his shop assistant, a young man named Thomas Bowyer, and told him to call at 13 Miller’s Court to try to recover some of the arrears.

  Bowyer walked around to the premises and knocked twice on the door of the room but received no response. On the adjacent wall and close to the corner of the building, near the door, was a small window, inside which a piece of material was drawn across. Bowyer noticed that one of the panes of glass in the window was broken, and he reached in through the window to tug the curtain aside and see if Kelly was there.

  The first things Bowyer saw were two lumps of bloody flesh sitting on the table beside the bed and, beyond that, a mutilated corpse on the bed itself.

  Bowyer recoiled in horror at the sight and ran back to the shop in Dorset Street in a state of panic. When he got there, he stumbled out a halting and incomplete explanation of what he’d seen: ‘Guvnor, I knocked at the door and could not make any one answer. I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood.’

  John McCarthy immediately returned to Miller’s Court with Bowyer to investigate for himself. When he looked in through the window, as his assistant had done, the scene was even more dreadful than he had expected. The lumps of flesh lying on the table were bad enough, but it was the body itself which shocked him the most. Bone glistened white in the dim illumination, and the corpse looked like a butchered animal.

  McCarthy stepped back from a window and ordered Bowyer to go at once to the nearest police station to summon help.

  Bowyer did as he was told. He ran to the Commercial Street police station and burst in through the doors, panting from his exertions and clearly in a state of abject terror. Two detectives – Inspectors Walter Beck and Walter Dew – were talking together when he arrived, but it was several seconds before Bowyer was capable of uttering a coherent sentence to explain what he had seen. Finally, he blurted out: ‘Another one. Jack the Ripper. Awful. Jack McCarthy sent me.’

  Very shortly afterwards, John – also known as ‘Jack’ – McCarthy himself arrived at the station, having decided to follow his assistant, and was able to explain the situation in more detail.

  Beck and Dew pulled on their coats and hurried out of the police station along with McCarthy and Bowyer, and reached Miller’s Court at about eleven o’clock. McCarthy indicated the door to number 13, and Dew tried to open it without success. Inspector Beck moved to the window on the other wall of the building, stretched his arm through the hole in the glass to move aside the fabric – the old coat – hanging there so that he could see insi
de the room.

  Almost immediately he stepped back, white with shock, and told Dew not to look. But the other detective disregarded his superior officer and peered through the window himself. He later stated that: ‘When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day.’

  Within a very short time, the area around the room and Miller’s Court itself had become the principal focus of attention of the investigative machinery of the Metropolitan Police. At about 11.15, the divisional police surgeon, Dr George Bagster Phillips, arrived to inspect the body. Phillips took one look through the window and came to the immediate and reasonable conclusion that Mary Kelly was far beyond any medical help that he or anyone else could administer.

  Detective Inspector Abberline reached the scene about a quarter of an hour after that and took charge. At least, this time, there was no doubt about the identity of the victim because of where the body lay. But for some considerable time, none of the assembled officials entered the room, though it wasn’t the locked door that stopped them. The reason for their decision not to enter the crime scene was because of some confusion over the use of bloodhounds.

  ‘You are sure that dogs have been sent for?’ Abberline asked Inspector Beck for at least the third time.

  Beck nodded.

  ‘That’s what a constable told me. He was sent here with a message from the station.’

  ‘Very well,’ Abberline said. ‘So I suppose we’d better carry on waiting. The dogs will only be able to do anything useful if the body and the crime scene aren’t touched.’

  In the absence of anything better to do, Abberline had ordered that the area around Millers Court should be secured and cordoned off to keep out any spectators or reporters, and once that was done he sent uniformed constables to every building in the near vicinity to take statements from neighbours and any potential witnesses. Remembering what had happened at Goulston Street, he also summoned a photographer to record details of the scene. Not that there was any chance of this evidence being wiped away.