10
Mary Anne Nichols
[Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. Date: August 31, 1888]
In the pre-dawn darkness Sabien watched Charles Cross walk up the narrow, cobbled street. He saw him cross over towards the stable gates and kneel down beside the body of Mary Anne Nichols.
His eyes never left the porter for a second, studying every nuance of the man’s actions, considering whether he could have killed her and then pretend to discover the body.
The death had been reported by the Copernicans only a few minutes earlier and Sabien had not had time to research the background. He would introduce Maddox to Randall and his Black Museum when they got back to headquarters.
There were already other potential cases lining up in his journal, branching out from this first incident. It had everyone back at base running around like headless chickens. An unforeseen alteration in the timeline had that kind of effect on Copernicans. It was a causal incident that wasn’t part of their predicted course of events.
A second man walked over to join Cross. According to the rapidly updating entries in his almanac, this was Robert Paul, another carter. The two men look nervously around the street as they discussed what to do. They didn’t seem convinced that the woman was dead, and it was obviously too dark to see the blood pooling from the violent laceration in her neck.
One of them pulled her skirts back down and then they both walked off.
Sabien made a note of the time — it was 0345.
* * *
Before he could step out of the shadows, he caught the light of a policeman’s lantern. Shrinking back into the nearest doorway, Sabien watched the lamp light up the gruesome scene. Sabien heard the constable blow his whistle and then call out to a fellow officer.
“Here’s a woman with her throat cut. Run at once for Doctor Llewellyn!”
Sabien knew better than to stay any longer, the scene was becoming contaminated. More police arrived and the warm glow of candles began to flicker in the windows of the houses nearby.
He always preferred to work backwards; analysing a crime scene in reverse was like watching someone unpaint a picture. He could step back through the key moments, allowing his mind the opportunity to pick up the smallest detail, the finer nuances of the act.
He moved back through her timeline, until he was just within a minute of her death.
The street was empty, and the small figure of Mary was staggering her way along the row of cottages, holding her belly with one hand and a bottle in the other. She sang to herself, some musical hall ditty about ‘Sweet Molly Malone’.
There was no sign of an assailant, no stranger waiting in a doorway. Sabien slowed the moment, knowing that he couldn’t interrogate it for much longer. A victim’s death was like a dark void in the weaving threads of her lifeline. When you were observing it, or ‘ghosting’ as they called it, it was like a film that ends abruptly. He moved ahead and found himself looking down at her lying on the ground, her legs extended out and her skirt thrown up.
* * *
‘What did you see?’ asked Maddox as Sabien took his hand away from the body.
They were standing in the Old Montague Street mortuary, a building not much bigger than a shed on Brick Lane. Mary’s naked body was lying stiffly on the small table where Doctor Llewellyn had finished examining her an hour earlier.
‘They found the body at 0345, and the police were on the scene within minutes. I couldn’t get any closer to the time of death without inducing an observer effect.’
Maddox had heard about cases where the detective had got too close to the event and changed the outcome. They were trained to keep a safe temporal distance from the incident. They called it a Belavkin cordon.
‘Do you ghost all your victims?’ she asked, staring at the naked woman.
‘Only when I’ve got nothing else to work with,’ he said, putting his glove back on. ‘She was drunk, and the street was dark. I’m guessing it was a rape that went wrong.’
‘Have you read the surgeon’s report?’ she asked, holding up her almanac. A small version of the document had been copied down onto the page and she had pulled key phrases and magnified them.
‘An inch below on the same side, and commencing about an inch in front of it, was a circular incision terminating at a point about three inches below the right jaw. This incision completely severs all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed,’ she quoted directly from the text.
‘Would you like me to continue? They go on to talk about the disembowelling and how they were made by a left-handed person with the same weapon.’
Sabien’s eyes narrowed as he examined the gash on the neck, trying to imagine what it would take to drive a blade that deep into the throat. It gaped at him like a dark smile, but worse still were the wounds across her abdomen, which Llewellyn had closed temporarily with long black stitches.
* * *
He had told the Police officer on duty that he had come from ‘A’ division and was looking into any connections with the torso murders. Maddox was playing the part of a witness, and she was dressed as a ‘lady of the night’, as Pevensey had so delicately put it.
Sabien had warned Maddox that there were very few roles for female officers in this era. Women had a long way to go before they had the kind of equality to which she was accustomed. Most were either in service, or married, and the ones who were neither ended up in the rookeries of Spitalfields. She’d laughed, assuring him that she had done her homework, but he still had to remind her to stop gawping at their surroundings when they arrived in the back streets of Whitechapel.
Maddox wanted to visit the crime scene immediately, but he refused. There were rules that prevented their entering an event. Murders were chaotic moments in history, causing shock and trauma to all concerned. The Copernicans had spent years researching the temporal effects of different kinds of death and concluded that random inexplicable acts of violence caused the most psychological damage to the timeline, shifting the behaviour patterns of the masses in subtle ways that could take decades to repair. It had been less of an issue before the invention of the printing press, when news took longer to travel, but still had to be factored into their calculations.
Sabien never quite understood how the Copernican guild were able to accurately predict a course of events. Their temporal mathematics could calculate all the possible outcomes of an action based on millions of data points. He had been to their Hall of Calculus, a cathedral-like building that was really one giant calculating engine and used their machines to help predict the next victim of a serial killer. They always talked in odds, like bookmakers at a racecourse, trying to predict the chance of one event affecting another.
But their system was far from perfect.
* * *
Formulae scrolled across the pages of the notebook, his almanac, lines of possibilities wove out from Mary’s death, each one leading to another victim. There were no names, just symbolic references — it meant nothing to him. All he cared about were the actions.
‘They’ve identified another one,’ Maddox said, her eyes widening and pointing to the timeline as new details were added to the nodes.
‘Let’s deal with this one first,’ he growled, closing the book. ‘They’ll still be there tomorrow.’
11
Blavatsky
[Highgate Cemetery, London. November 1860]
The cemetery was covered in a fine layer of snow. The grieving family of Sir Charles Fellows trudged behind the black-draped carriage through the solemn avenues of tombs. The words of the priest’s eulogy were still in their thoughts. He had reminisced about those mausoleums Charles had discovered in the lost city of Xanthus, hoping that they all could find some comfort in his return to such a similar place some twenty years later.
The winter chill brought rosy glows to their pale cheeks and the frozen breath of the horses shrouded the mourners as the coffin was lifted out of the carriage and carr
ied into the vault.
Everyone secretly wondered about the identity of the mysterious benefactor who had paid for the reproduction of the Harpy Tomb. It was an accurate replica and a fitting memorial to the man’s discoveries, albeit without the seventeen-foot dais.
Without further ceremony the body was laid to rest along with the flowers and tributes from his friends and colleagues. The Royal Geographical Society and the British Museum both sent their condolences and some of his old colleagues had attended the service.
As they made their way back to their carriages, an old woman approached them. She was shuffling through the snow leaning on a stick. She wore widow’s weeds, her face covered by a heavy veil.
The woman approached Fellows’s widow and gave a slight curtsey.
‘Madam, my apologies but am I too late? Is the vault sealed?’ she asked with a heavy Russian accent.
Mrs Fellows was slightly taken aback by the question but seeing the bouquet of lilies the old woman was holding, felt obliged to answer. ‘No, but I believe the mason has been called.’
The woman nodded and continued past the party following their tracks back towards the tomb.
‘What a strange lady,’ Mrs Fellows said, watching the woman disappear beneath the columned arches of the Egyptian Arcade.
‘That was Madame Blavatsky,’ whispered one of the mourners. ‘The spiritualist.’
12
Black Museum
[Black Museum, Protectorate HQ. Date: 1930]
The Black Museum was a repository of criminal artefacts that had accumulated over the years in the basement of the Protectorate headquarters. No one knew when it had begun; the most popular theory was that it started as a morbid collection of the first Inquisitor, Victor Savarin, who was rumoured to have a penchant for revisiting the crime scenes a little too often for simple research purposes.
It was a macabre archive that had expanded over time and now occupied more than ten floors; each level going deeper into the history of human depravity — someone had once compared it to Dante’s descent into hell.
The lighting was kept low, hardly brighter than a candle, and the temperature was a constant sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The upper floors were divided into sections with categories entitled: Famous Murders, Notorious Poisoners, Murder of Officers, Royalty, Bank Robberies, Espionage, Sieges & Hostages, and Hijacking.
A spiral staircase wound down through the centre of the museum, the steps cast from black iron which were rumoured to have been forged from the bars of old prison cells.
They followed the curator, Randall, down to level four. He was an old man, his white hair stuck to his sweaty balding head and his shoulders hunched in a permanent stoop. As he descended, he rattled off the usual speech about ‘not touching anything,’ and how it was ‘strictly forbidden’ to weave with any of the objects.
Maddox rolled her eyes when he warned them that some of the exhibits were not suitable for sensitive souls. Sabien caught her eye and glared like an angry parent. He had warned her about Randall, how he was a bit of a dinosaur, one of the old guard that seemed to live forever.
He was an Antiquarian, the guild of ‘hoarders and the socially awkward’, according to her grandmother. They tended to be loners and Randall was no exception. He had obviously spent so long curating his macabre collection that he had lost all sense of what century it was.
The fourth floor was a maze of glass display cabinets, each one filled with carefully labelled weapons. Blood-stained carving knives were arranged next to garrottes and nooses, while above them on the upper shelves, the death masks of some of the most notorious criminals of the era grimaced down at them.
‘I hear we’ll be receiving a new exhibit soon,’ Randall said a little too eagerly, showing them into the nineteenth-century section.
Sabien spotted the newly printed cards of the ‘Torso Murders’ neatly pinned inside an empty cabinet.
‘What do you have on disembowelment?’ Maddox asked before Sabien could reply.
Randall stopped and stared over his half-moon glasses, mulling over the question like a dog chewing a toffee. ‘In the nineteenth? Not so much. Now you go down to the sixteenth and that’s a whole different story. Those Elizabethans really knew how to gut someone.’ He curled his hand and raked the air like a claw.
Maddox seemed unmoved by his theatrical demonstration. ‘We’re looking at a potential serial killer around 1888 — do you have anything from that year?’
Tapping his temple with his forefinger, Randall’s heavy-lidded eyes glazed over. There wasn’t an indexing system, Sabien had told her, the details on the thousands of objects in the museum were stored in Randall’s head.
‘I prefer to use the Holocene date, if you don’t mind,’ he reprimanded her. ‘There are two that spring to mind,’ he said, wandering off between the cabinets.
The Holocene date system was designed to reference the last twelve thousand years with a positive numbering system, using 10,000 BC as year zero.
A large map of London was pinned onto a corkboard on one wall. Red pins were placed at various locations around Spitalfields, and each had a small piece of twine attached to it with a key tied to the end.
Randall pointed to an area on the map. ‘Emma Smith, attacked by three men at the junction of Brick Lane and Osborn Street on April 3rd, 11.888. Died of peritonitis after one of them shoved a blunt object into —’
‘I don’t think we need all the gory details,’ muttered Sabien.
‘Into her vagina?’ Maddox finished the old man’s sentence.
Randall’s cheeks flushed. ‘Well I don’t think there’s any need for that kind of language!’
Sabien had to suppress a smile, he was beginning to warm to his new recruit.
The curator turned back to the map and pointed to the next pin. ‘George Yard, Whitechapel. Martha Tabram stabbed thirty-nine times — not quite a disembowelment though.’
Maddox studied the map. ‘Who is this?’ she asked, pointing at one particular pin.
‘Alice McKenzie, Castle Alley — but that was 11.889. Neck slashed from ear to ear.’ His lips twisted into a cruel smile as he drew a gratuitous line across his jowls with his thumb.
‘Who’s the Order’s overseer for that period?’ asked Sabien.
Randall looked through a list that was pinned to the side of the map. ‘That would be Donald Swanson. A transfer from the Scriptorians, he’s now a Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard. Swanson took the assignment for that particular era in 11.868.’
‘So what do you have on her?’ asked Maddox, lifting the key attached to Alice McKenzie’s pin.
‘Don’t touch —’ barked Randall.
But Maddox’s eyes had rolled back. She’d already made a connection to the cabinet that it would unlock. ‘You’ve kept her clothes?’ she asked in a wistful voice.
He blushed. ‘As evidence.’
She frowned, turning to Sabien. ‘There’s more here than just her dress. He’s got her head in a jar!’
The colour drained from Randall’s face and his bravado withered. Unable to look them in the eye, he stared at the floor. ‘It’s only for the brain, you know, not everyone has your talent Inspector. Some of us have to content ourselves with a little intuit — purely for research purposes.’
Maddox’s eyes returned to normal. ‘You intuit with a dead prostitute?’
The intuit process was supposed to be used to pass information between old masters and their students. Long after they had died, the brain was preserved and used as a biological storage medium. With the correct equipment their memories could be transferred to a new host. It was useful for passing complex mental concepts such as languages, allowing them to become instantly fluent.
There were those who used it for darker purposes. Plundering another’s experiences for pleasure was forbidden, but that did not mean it never happened.
‘Did you watch her die?’ Maddox asked.
Randall shook his head. ‘Never. I’m not a reaver.’
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13
Serial
[Nineteenth Division, Protectorate HQ. Date: 1930]
Maddox sat at her desk watching through the glass as Sabien paced around his office ranting. Chief Inspector Avery sat behind Sabien’s desk listening intently and nodding every so often. She couldn’t hear what they were discussing, but Sabien’s body language said enough.
The young officer sitting opposite her sniggered.
‘Sherlock’s got a bee in his bonnet about something.’
‘Why do you call him Sherlock?’
The man smiled. She’d already caught him eyeing her up in the canteen. He was the cocky one, the one who thought it was his duty to have the first crack at the new girl.
He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Because just like the illustrious Mr Holmes, he always solves the case. The inspector’s closed every single one — a hundred percent success rate.’
‘Except for the woman of course.’
The guy stared at her blankly.
‘Irene Adler. A Scandal in Bohemia. You have read the books?’
The officer shrugged and turned back to his report.
Maddox smiled inwardly and looked down at the records Randall had reluctantly given her on Mary Anne Nichols. She’d had a sad life: born in Soho in 1845, married at nineteen and produced five children and sixteen years later the marriage was over. According to Randall’s notes it was due to her husband having an affair with the nurse who had delivered their final child. Maddox suspected it was more likely because of her drinking. Mary spent her last remaining years in workhouses and charitable institutions — supplementing her income with casual prostitution. In her final days, she was staying at a common lodging house in Spitalfields with a woman known as Nelly Holland, who was the last person, apart from the murderer, to see her alive at 0230.
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