I searched for the palpitations to prove Aidan wrong and found them, faint and fluttering, against my ribcage. I still had a heart, even though he owned pieces of it. And yet, I’d stood over too many corpses of those I loved, each time expecting my bleeding heart to just…stop. It should, I think. When a heart was broken as many times as mine, it shouldn’t work anymore. But somehow, it still did. It kept going.
And so long as it beat in its chamber, I’d search for the Ripper.
4
As it turned out, I identified all of Frank Sawyer’s organs without enlisting aid, and in short order. I tossed a canvas over the basin of innards and managed to look busy as Constable Hurst and Aidan ushered the frail Mrs. Sawyer toward Baker Street.
The yearning to seize upon Mrs. Sawyer and interrogate her about her husband caused my fingers to curl and bite into the meat of my palms. Where had he been during the Autumn of Terror? Who did he know? What were his sins, his proclivities, his nocturnal desires?
Did he do anything that might have angered the Ripper?
If anyone would know of or suspect a connection of any kind, it would be the woman who shared his life. His bed.
I asked Mrs. Sawyer nothing.
The poor widow’s capabilities seemed stretched to their limits by the task of placing one foot in front of the other.
She’d be useless to me now. To anyone.
I should know. I was intimately acquainted with the weight of the loss curling her shoulders forward. I understood the defeat echoed in every trudge of her work-worn boots. I sincerely hoped she had kind relatives with a warm hearth and a place where she could fall apart for a time. It would be difficult for her to return and face the home where she’d lost her family.
I’d never been able to. I’d left my entire island behind, and doubted I’d ever return.
Aidan paused as he passed me, his doe-brown eyes full of grace and sorrow. “I’m going to accompany Agnes to her sister’s in Lambeth. If you hear anything, Fiona…”
I nodded a silent promise to keep him informed, even as I searched for something else to gaze upon. Anything but his perfection.
Hao Long stood at the cart, mixing a solution of sodium bicarbonate to battle the deep stains in the porous wood.
Constable Fanshaw seemed chummy with the coroner’s carriage drivers if his level of absorption with their conversation were any judge.
I glanced over to the door of the common house and found it momentarily free of a guard.
As stout as the men were, no one dared shut a door through which the stench of death escaped on a crosswind.
I drifted away from Aidan and his sad charge and moved toward said cross breeze, which carried the solemn tones of Inspectors Croft and Aberline. I leaned against the brick under the guise of patiently awaiting permission to conduct my business.
As the fifth of seven children, and the only girl, I’d perfected the dubious art of eavesdropping at an early age. I posted myself against the wall adjacent to the door, taking care not to cast my shadow upon the scene.
“…position of the corpse that confounds me.” I identified Aberline by his East End accent filtered through his impressive mustache. “The grisly way he was done does mirror a Ripper murder. His throat slashed twice by a thin knife, sharp as you please. But that’s not what killed him, was it? There’s no arterial spray in the room.”
“Think you he was strangled first?” Croft speculated.
“That I do,” Aberline said. “I agree with Dr. Phillips’ post-mortem assessment. In’nt enough tissue left on the neck to assess ligature marks, but it remains the only way to explain the cause of death. The blood was drained, the torso most precisely vivisected, organs extracted. After which, the more…sadistic sexual wounds were inflicted.”
The room fell silent for a moment, and I imagined a cold shiver of male sympathy shared amongst the inspectors at the thought of poor Mr. Sawyer’s intimate dismemberment.
“But that he’s hanging inverted by only one ankle stymies me quite.” I pictured the circumspect Aberline, his hands clasped behind him, a ponderous posture he was often wont to assume. “Posing the victims thus was something the Ripper never did, and I don’t at all know what to make of it.”
I identified a dark, speculative sound as that of Inspector Croft. He was more often than not the last to speak. “The particulars of the Ripper murders were much detailed by the press and easy to replicate,” Croft stated. “I’m not at all convinced this is his work.”
“Though neither can we rule it out, can we?” said Aberline. “However, the question remains, be the killer the Ripper or an imposter, why hang this blighter upside down?”
“Dr. Phillips noted that hardly enough blood remained in the corpse to constitute a drip once the killer opened the body cavity to extract the organs,” Croft said. “It all drained from the neck first.”
“Do you suppose exsanguination was the murderer’s only intent?” Aberline sounded skeptical as his boots seemed to find every uneven floorboard as he paced around the circle of blood. “Perhaps someone with a penchant for Penny Dreadfuls and an inability to separate reality from evil and horror.”
“Reality is enough of a horror,” Croft muttered, and I felt the verity of his statement to the marrow of my very bones.
“How are there no footprints, other than the wife’s, leading from this mess?” Aberline redirected.
“The course of my next conjecture,” Croft said. “Have we completely cleared the wife of suspicion?”
Aberline tsked loudly. “It would be difficult for a woman of such small stature to string up a man of this size, but she could have had an accomplice.”
“She has an alibi,” Croft said. “But if she had an accomplice, it doesn’t matter where she was physically.”
“What do we know about her?”
“She works in a factory and took an extra night shift. Apparently, the couple recently found out Agnes Sawyer had conceived, and they were saving for a holiday to visit her parents in Bournemouth.”
A blade of distress slid between my ribs and hit its mark. The joy of a new child smothered by a tragedy such as this.
Poor Agnes Sawyer.
“I see.” Disappointment colored Aberline’s voice, but he didn’t dwell. “So, why dress him back up after the grisly work is done? And how did the killer manage to get the guts in the basin without making a bloody mess?”
They were quiet a moment, presumably examining the scene for any clues as to how the killer had done his deeds, and in what order.
Their silence gave me a chance to digest the information pertinent to my own motivations. Dr. Phillips, a local coroner, had done the post-mortem examination, which was excellent news for me. Since there was no sign of him about, I imagined he’d gone home. Proper autopsies were done during business hours, and one rarely found a coroner before eight o’clock.
What the good inspectors didn’t know was that the doctor and I had an understanding of a financial nature. A respectable man of almost unimpeachable morals, Dr. Phillips was also a scientist and tended to be swayed by logic above ethics.
I’d certainly be attending the autopsy, and because he was just as clever and cunning as he was principled, Dr. Phillips would be expecting me.
I shared the inspectors’ confusion over the obviously significant placement of Mr. Sawyer’s body.
In all the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, the violence had a very precise chronological order. First, he strangled the victims to unconsciousness if not death, after which he slashed their throats in two clean slices almost to the point of decapitation. That done, he’d commence with the mutilations. They began with thirty-nine stab wounds to the torso and genitals of Martha Tabrum and intensified in their unspeakable gruesomeness with each murder until Mary Kelly.
There was little you could do to a body that he hadn’t done to Mary’s.
Even Mr. Sawyer’s murder was only half as gruesome as most of what the Ripper had done. And, a
s Scotland Yard’s finest pointed out, Jack the Ripper’s victims were women.
All prostitutes.
He’d posed them on their backs, skirts flung above their waists, and their knees drawn up and parted as though to accept a lover.
Or a customer, as was most often the case.
In my darkest moments, I fervently hoped the knife was the only thing he’d penetrated their bodies with. When stuck in those moments, I was grateful that there was no way to assess if he’d defiled their corpses with his own body… I didn’t know what I might have done with that knowledge.
“Poor blighter’s lucky he’s so lean.” Aberline’s voice broke my dark reverie. “Can’t figure why he’s strung up by only one ankle, and the bent knee of the other leg behind the body, makes for a strange triangle, don’t it?”
“Indeed.”
I froze like a bunny in a hedge as Inspector Croft’s heavy footfalls told me he’d approached the threshold.
I held my breath and pressed my body against the outer wall as he leaned his shoulder on the doorjamb.
“I’ve more than a passing suspicion that the placement of the body is invariably more consequential than just the drainage of blood,” Croft surmised.
“Yes,” Aberline agreed. “But what the message could be, I can hardly make out. Do you have any ideas, Croft?”
The young inspector was close enough for me to hear the sandpaper rasp of his rough hand running over his evening beard. In the slant of light on the ground cast by the lantern within, I watched his shadow rummage about in his pocket and put something in his mouth. I flinched at the loud scrape and flare of a match.
He really did smoke too much.
Inhaling alongside him, I did my best not to wince when the match hit my boot. It blessedly went out instead of catching the wool of my skirts aflame.
“Pittura infamante.” In a voice as cavernous as Croft’s, the words invoked a Gregorian chant echoing in the halls of an old cathedral. The sacrosanct language spoken in a voice crafted for profanity lifted the fine hairs on my body.
“What’s that you say?”
“Pittura infamante,” Croft repeated louder on an exhale of smoke that disseminated into the pall of coal, steam, and mist of the London night with no more consequence than a tear would into the ocean. “It’s Latin for defaming portrait. A common enough practice in Italy from Ancient Rome all the way through the Renaissance, especially in the wealthy states of Florence and Milan.”
Aberline snorted. “I’ve heard of the Romans doing some rather dodgy, brutal things, but never this.”
“Well, the practice wasn’t known to be deadly. It was used as a form of public humiliation for crimes in which there was no true legal recourse. Things like bad debts, forgeries, libel, the defamation of an innocent woman, that sort of thing. The perpetrator would hang upside down from one foot until he could be sketched. Then, that sketch would be painted on a fresco in the square or disseminated somehow with the name of the subject and his offense.”
“Remarkable.” Aberline harrumphed, and I could hear the tiny clicks of his watch as he checked it. “How on earth do you know this?”
I wondered, as well. Croft had never struck me as a history enthusiast, but then I didn’t know what he did in his free time. I just assumed he prowled the night in search of evil until he retired to his lair.
He seemed the type of man who would have a lair rather than a home.
“I read,” he explained simply. Which, as usual for him, was no real explanation at all.
“Perhaps Mr. Sawyer owed money to someone dangerous,” Aberline theorized. “One of the local crime lords, perhaps. Someone from the High Rip Gang, or the East End Butchers.”
“It’s possible. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the Tsadeq Syndicate. The Hammer and his assassin are infamous for their escalating brutality.” A note of strain harmonized with Croft’s usual baritone.
“I would not say that name above a whisper hereabouts,” Aberline cautioned. “The Hammer has both devious minions in the East End and powerful friends in Westminster. To speak against him might be the death of your career. Or of you.”
Croft puffed out a dubious breath.
“You just said this pittura infamante was a Roman or Florentine practice.” Aberline deftly changed the subject. “I don’t see what it’d have to do with the Hammer. He’s a Jew.”
“I know he’s involved in this,” Croft insisted, his rumble intensifying to thunderous levels.
“And how do you know that?”
“I make it my business to know all I can about the Hammer. One of these days…” Croft expelled one more lungful of fragrant smoke, letting it carry away the end of his sentence. His hand appeared around the doorframe to crush the glowing end of his cigarette.
Without thinking, I stepped back to avoid his touch. The crunch of the cobblestones beneath my boot heel was louder than I’d expected, and I winced as Croft’s hand turned into a fist around the stub of his smoke.
I’d been caught.
I sprang to claim the first word before Croft could accuse me of doing something I ought not to do. I’d found this an effective technique when put on the defensive.
“Do you truly believe the Hammer is responsible for Mr. Sawyer’s death?” I blurted the question the moment Croft appeared around the doorframe.
If glares truly contained daggers, I’d have been stabbed as many times as Martha Tabrum—if not more.
He didn’t dignify my question with a response. Instead, he motioned to the two men in the coroner’s cart and Constable Fanshaw. “Let’s cut him down.”
The men instantly moved to comply, taking a stretcher and implements from the cart and marching past Croft into the room.
“I’ll help,” I offered.
Croft’s hands caught both my shoulders as I stepped forward, holding me away from his body like something distasteful. “You will stay out here until we’re finished.”
“All right,” I conceded. “Under one condition.”
“You’re hardly in a position to—”
“Tell me why you suspect the Hammer,” I demanded.
Croft scrutinized me from beneath dark brows. I didn’t see the cogs in his mind turning like I could with Aberline. That’s what made him so dangerous, I supposed. I could read most people, could tell what they were thinking, and often guess at their next move.
But not Croft.
His motives were as opaque as the Thames in January. He had the occupation of an honorable man and the demeanor of a villain.
I was sure he was going to growl something dismissive when he said, “The Hammer likes to send messages. To feed his infamy.”
I stood absolutely still, afraid to breathe lest Croft change his mind about sharing his ruminations.
“He began his empire here in Whitechapel, a Jewish immigrant like so many others, and through violence, terror, and incomparable cunning, he’s become the head of one of the most powerful organized criminal syndicates the empire has ever seen.”
This wasn’t new information because I knew the Hammer.
And he knew me.
“Why would you suspect a powerful, wealthy, Jewish gangster of murdering a poor Catholic in Whitechapel?” I queried, hoping to conceal from Croft just how much his answer meant to me.
“Because his hold on the East End is slipping since he relocated to the Strand. Rival gangs are becoming more prevalent. And bolder. He needs a demonstration of strength. Something to remind the people to fear him, even if it’s from afar.”
“But what message does this send?” I gestured toward the door. “And to whom?”
Croft leaned down, his eyes bright and marble-hard in his swarthy features. “That, Miss Mahoney, is what you’ll leave to us to find out.”
Unsettled by his proximity, I nodded pensively. Rather than focus on the masculine scent of him, I tracked the procession of the coroner’s aides as they appeared with no little jostling, and conveyed Mr. Sawyer on the
stretcher covered now in a white sheet.
I wondered how they’d gotten him down so quickly. I glanced at Hao Long, who shrugged his own mystification.
I puffed out a beleaguered breath, hoping they hadn’t made an even bigger mess. If Aidan were, indeed, paying my bill, I’d have to give him a discount. Two, probably. One for an old friend, and one for God.
Though I’d take a moment to acknowledge just how vast the coffers of the Lord tended to be and remember that you weren’t really supposed to charge him for services rendered.
Hardly seemed fair, if you asked me. Blessings didn’t pay the bills.
“Do you have reason to believe that Mr. Sawyer had connections to the Syndicate?” I asked and quickly discovered that I’d tested the edge of my limits regarding Inspector Croft’s indulgence.
His teeth had barely separated long enough for this unprecedented conversation. They’d now firmly bound together, a muscle ticking just below his temple. It seemed to do that more than was necessary, at least when I was about.
Which begged the question… “Why’d you tell me all that if you didn’t want me to know?”
His chin lifted toward the dark street at my back. “Because I didn’t want you out searching the night for the Ripper.”
“But you said you couldn’t rule him out as a suspect.”
“All right, my dear.” Aberline strode from the room, adjusting his hat and, once again, checking his watch. “The room is yours, I’m sorry to say.” He clapped Croft on the back. “Should we share a hackney to the hospital, old boy?”
“Yes, sir,” Croft nodded, never taking his eyes from me. “Constable Fanshaw will stay and secure the scene until Miss Mahoney is quite finished.”
He turned quickly on his heel and led the way toward Baker Street, but the bounder didn’t miss the glower I directed at him. I did not wish to be tended like a maiden fresh from the nursery, and well he knew it.
“It’s for your own safety.” Croft’s departing words carried the hint of a smile over his shoulder, though I was sure he was a stranger to the very expression.
The Business of Blood Page 4