The Business of Blood

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  I threaded my fingers through his. I was not God. I did not need to forgive. Not yet. But I still loved him. And hated him. “Memories make for powerful ghosts...” I whispered.

  He nodded. “And some people deserve to be haunted.”

  “Reminiscences haunt me, too.” Another tear fell, but I didn’t want to drag my hands from his to do anything about it. “Memories of you and Finn and Flynn. Of Mary and me. Of you and me. Of Mary and him. I don’t sleep, but they torment me.”

  “Could you not let them go, Fiona?” The earnest expression on his face erased a few of his years. “Some memories are best buried with the dead. Only then can you make brighter ones.”

  I shook my head adamantly. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? No matter how deep I bury them, still they rise. With a vengeance, they rise. I do not think my ghosts will let me rest until there is justice.”

  He interrupted the trajectory of my tear with his knuckle. The air between us warmed with grace and sympathy as he nodded. “There is always a reckoning. I learned there always comes a time when you stop and turn around and face the adversary who chases you. If you take a stand against evil, good does win. Everyone gets their justice before God.”

  A caustic sound escaped me. “I wish I had what you have. I wish I had faith…in anything. A person. God. In an outcome. My own choices.”

  His exhalation was just as acrimonious. “Faith isn't always a comfort. Sometimes, it's a burden. But I have faith in your goodness, Fi. That you’ll do the right thing. You are at a crossroads, and you need to decide. Go to the authorities. Confess. Have faith that justice will be done in your favor.”

  Perhaps he was right. Maybe it was time I faced my demons, regardless of the outcome. “I wish…I wish you’d have let me try to make you happy.” More tears welled as I cast my gaze about the room. I hated this hallowed, hollow place. Hated that he’d chosen it over me.

  “There are days I wish that, as well,” he murmured. “But there is no choice we can undo by wishing.”

  He was the second man to tell me that today.

  If wishes were horses…

  “Did you love me?” It was a pathetic question asked in a pitiful whisper.

  “Oh, Fiona.” The lips Aiden pressed against my temple were anything but ecumenical. His hand on my back drifted to my waist. “My feelings for you cannot be reduced to a single word. You are my only temptation.”

  “Did you love me?” I demanded, lifting my hands to curl in his cassock.

  Palms bracketed my face as though I were in the way of their meeting for prayer. With searching, tender eyes, he mapped the topography of my features. “Of course, I loved you, Fi. I love you still. I pray to God for you every night...but—” His voice broke as his eyes snagged on my lips.

  “But?” I breathed.

  His grip on me tightened, moved, his fingers threading into the hair behind my ears. “There’s still a dread that lurks in my heart,” he confessed through his teeth. “A fear that I’d sit down with the devil if you asked it of me.”

  I didn’t know if I lifted my mouth to his, or if he lowered his lips to mine. All I knew, was that the kiss was both an invocation and a benediction. It contained all desires both conceivable and impossible. Sacred and profane. It awakened a hope inside me that was instantly crushed when he ripped his mouth away as though fighting a powerful adhesive.

  “I can’t,” he panted, surging to his feet and shoving his fingers through his tidy hair. “We can’t.”

  Every part of me felt bruised. My lips. My heart. “I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, gaining my feet. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, was distraught. I didn’t mean—”

  He shrank from my outstretched hand as though I carried the plague. “It’s best if I…I don’t see you for a while.”

  “Don’t say that,” I begged.

  Giving me his back, he said over his shoulder, “Take those beads to Croft or Aberline, Fiona. Unburden your conscience. Confess. Repent. Atone. As I must now.” He left me then, alone with the savior looking down upon me.

  I knew the tilt of his head was supposed to appear merciful and compassionate. But all I saw was vicious pity on the shiny, lacquered features of the Lord. A sort of gloating wistfulness. As if he really, truly regretted that things had turned out the way they had and would do something if only he could get down from that deuced inconvenient cross.

  I escaped the chapel as fast as I could, conceding the day’s battle for Aidan’s heart to the one being who could offer him what I could not.

  Forgiveness.

  12

  Nothing interrupts a good confession like a murder.

  At half-past nine in the morning, I’d been at H Division on Leman Street, marking the rise of Croft’s temper across his desk as I divulged the details of my encounter in Crossland Alley.

  Now, at quarter past ten, I held a handkerchief dabbed with lavender and rose water to my nose, wishing Katherine Riley hadn’t been slaughtered quite so close to a roaring fire in yet another poorly ventilated room in Whitechapel.

  It shouldn’t have caused me a vague sense of relief that her throat had been twice slashed on a carpet—a rather expensive one I noted. But after the tedious hours and sheer amount of chemicals it had taken to scour Frank Sawyer’s blood from untreated wood, I couldn’t help but appreciate that her cleanup should be a snap by comparison.

  Unlike the Sawyers’, Katherine Riley’s rooms were in a proper tenement, dissected into a parlor, a great room, a kitchen complete with cookstove, and a separate bedroom with the toilet facilities inside the house.

  In Whitechapel, this was luxury.

  Croft and Aberline had sufficiently recovered from their initial astonishment at the horrific familiarity of the victim’s placement and were now surveying her domicile for clues. There was a certain frenetic quality to their investigation. Something borne, I gathered, of a traumatic catastrophe revisited. The sense of security that the Ripper had become a failure of their past had been torn away from them. With the murder of Katherine Riley, he’d become a closed book reopened. The case file had long since been taken from their hands and given to someone closer to the top.

  To become another man’s failure.

  Even for men with whom the dreadful had become routine, I didn’t think they expected to see the likes of him again.

  Yet, here she was. A woman of a certain age. A particular class.

  Met with a specific, remarkable demise that, this time, had no apparent variances from the canonical Ripper murders.

  What had been her profession? She’d been too old to make such a nice living as a prostitute, even I knew that.

  Her throat was opened by two very deliberate, efficient slices. Her legs lifted and parted at the knees. Her middle skillfully cut from thorax to pubis. This time, the organs had been left inside the cavity. At least, several of them appeared to be visible through the narrow gash.

  As Dr. Phillips began his crime scene examination and report, I stood unobtrusively in the corner by a faded velvet chair that might have been expensive during the Regency. I occupied myself by counting the stab wounds on her chest and torso. Most of which were marked by vibrant red against the cream of her linen apron still tied behind her body yet sliced down the front along with her dress.

  I’d reached forty before conversation interrupted the tally.

  “How long has she been dead, you wager?” Aberline asked Dr. Phillips, who currently checked her rigidity by testing the flexibility of her elbows and wrists.

  Phillips was much more himself today than he’d been two mornings prior at the Sawyer autopsy. His thick, brown hair, liberally threaded with silver, was carefully styled, his beard trimmed and neat. He wore sleeve covers similar to the ones I used as he dictated post-mortem report notes to his assistant coroner, a sprightly medical student by the name of Nelson.

  “It has to be three days, doesn’t it?” I offered. “It’s my experience that it takes at least that long for rigor mortis to pass. An
d, unlike Mr. Sawyer, her corpse is not fresh.” I motioned to Katherine Riley’s limp wrists and the ease with which her joints moved.

  “Very good, dear,” Dr. Phillips praised. “But environmental factors are key. The stifling heat of this room could have sped up the process, and the ashes in the fireplace are not yet completely cold, though they’re safe to touch now.” He motioned to the cavernous fireplace with the syringe Nelson handed to him before he plunged the needle into her eye, testing the vitreous humors. “Her corneal fluids are quite cloudy. Lividity is not as advanced as I would expect for seventy-two hours. My estimation of her death would be a day and a half. Two, at most.”

  Nelson took vigorous notes in shorthand.

  “She could have been murdered at the very moment we were all attending the autopsy.” Crouching, Aberline retrieved the white ashes from the fireplace, testing them between his thumb and forefinger. “The killer must have remained with her for a time, then. Kept the fire going.”

  I’d spent a great deal of time catching up on my sleep. So much so, that the autopsy felt like yesterday rather than two mornings prior. “The Ripper’s never been known to keep vigil before,” I remarked. “Even with Mary, he couldn’t have stayed more than a few hours between when she was last seen alive and when her body was discovered.” And he’d had to have been working on her almost that entire time.

  I was proud of myself for being here. For not allowing the twisted mélange of tormented and excited emotions to manifest themselves in front of these men. I didn’t let them see how much Mary’s name still affected me.

  I couldn’t let on that I could feel the Ripper with me, with us, in this room. His evil lingered, much like the sickly-sweet smell of death would cling like an unwanted ghost to this dwelling for days. Maybe longer.

  It seemed ludicrous, didn’t it? To sense a presence so acutely? To feel his pleasure at the blood, at the deed. To absorb his rage. At whom, I wondered? At this poor victim? At someone with enough audacity to claim the Ripper’s hard-won infamy as his own?

  I kept that lunacy to myself.

  Well done, me.

  “You make an excellent point, Miss Mahoney. Our biggest mystery regarding Miss Riley here is to ascertain if she is, indeed, a Ripper victim.” Aberline brushed ashes off his hands and stood, looking as grim as I’d ever seen him. “I find myself certain there is a link between this butchery and the Sawyer murder. Perhaps the deeds were not committed by the same odious hand. But we have to consider that Ms. Riley is the Ripper’s brutal answer to a copycat killer.”

  Croft returned from the kitchen with several knives from the butcher block. He accepted an evidence bag from Nelson and placed them inside. “At the moment, the biggest mystery to me is why Miss Mahoney is allowed at this scene instead of being relegated behind the police constable line with the rest of the curious civilians.” He glared at me, gesturing to the door where a line of police constables already held back an anxious crowd.

  “If you remember, you expressly forbade me to seek out Thaddeus Comstock on my own,” I said as if that were sufficient explanation.

  “If you remember, I forbade you to follow me here, as well.”

  “Just so.” I made a production of gathering my skirts and readjusting my reticule and parasol. “In that case, I’m off to the offices of The London Evening Examiner. Good morning, gentlemen. I’ll give Mr. Comstock your regards.”

  I expected to make it five steps before Croft stopped me. I only managed three before his hand bit into my arm, anchoring me to his side.

  “I suppose I’ll stay right here, then,” I snapped tartly. “Though I’d take it as a kindness if you’d make up your mind.”

  Croft’s mouth opened, promising a remark every bit as thunderous as his expression, but Dr. Phillips beat him to it.

  “Thaddeus Comstock? The idiot who imagines himself a journalist?” Phillips frowned at the masculine hand currently gripping my arm.

  “The very same.” I tossed the ringlets I’d arranged to spill down my bodice back over my shoulder. I’d hoped they’d hit Croft in the face, but I didn’t dare turn to look.

  “That self-proclaimed Ripper expert has barely enough grasp of the Queen’s English to thread together a coherent thought.” Disgusted, Dr. Phillips stood with a great deal of ease and grace for a man of his age, pinning me with a narrow-eyed glare of his own. “Pray tell, why ever would you seek out his odious company?”

  “Because there’s a chance he might be Jack the Ripper.” I left that proclamation hanging in the air for a moment like a shimmering mist so each of the gathered investigators could process the implications. Turning to Croft, I poked at his chest. The joints of my finger crumpled unexpectedly against the muscle beneath his vest. I shook my hand, undeterred. “Now we can ascertain where he was yesterday. Maybe he celebrated his terrible Sawyer article by conducting this bit of savagery.”

  Phillips accepted a towel from the ever solicitous Nelson and began to clean blood and such from his fingers before peeling the sleeve covers away. His eyebrows dropped in bewildered increments. “Other than Comstock’s uncanny knowledge of the Sawyer scene, which you already pointed out could have been obtained in a variety of ways, why would he make a viable Ripper suspect?”

  Croft’s grip tightened. “Fiona, don’t—”

  “Because I believe he got the information for his article when he dragged me into a dark alley, put a knife to my throat, and interrogated me about the Sawyer scene, all the while insisting that he was Jack the Ripper.”

  “Good God, Miss Mahoney. How distressing,” Aberline gasped. “Are you convinced it’s him?”

  “That’s why I want to go visit him,” I declared. “To find out.”

  “Did he harm you?” Dr. Phillips asked, his eyes owlish behind his spectacles.

  “I’m almost entirely unscathed.” I held my free arm out to advertise my wellbeing.

  This morning, I’d donned what I considered my most flattering dress, a mahogany silk blouse with dark lace at the collar and sleeves that almost matched my hair. A fitted vest of crushed velvet in a lighter hue paired with the intricate pleats, drapes, and tassels of my skirt, shot through with pinstripes of dark, lush gold. I’d dressed thusly in hopes Croft would feel less like stretching the neck of a comely woman than a dowdy one. Though, judging by the murderous glint in his eye as he glared at me now, I had the feeling my efforts were for naught.

  “Why didn’t you inform us of your ordeal at the autopsy?” Aberline’s mustache drooped, conveying equal parts concern and effrontery.

  “Why, indeed?” Croft finally released me to cross skeptical arms over his intimidating chest.

  I stared at him for longer than an honest woman would, my guilt pulling hot blood to my ears with all the speed and noise of a steam engine at full tilt.

  Because I cannot trust the police with my secrets. Because, sometimes, I fear the Hammer every bit as much as I feared the Ripper. Because, should I fall, I would topple everyone who stands on my shoulders, dear Dr. Phillips included.

  “Because I…wanted to be certain the man who accosted me was Jack, and I am not yet convinced.”

  Croft snorted. “Because you wanted to do something foolish, like go after him yourself.”

  Also, that.

  Dr. Phillips stationed himself on the other side of me, patting my shoulder indulgently. “Come now, we credit Miss Mahoney with a great deal more intelligence than all that.”

  They did?

  “I never saw my assailant’s face,” I explained. “But his voice was excruciatingly distinctive. I’ll never forget the effeminate lisp, the waspish cadence. I wanted a chance to identify him lest I bring you yet another useless clue.”

  “You of all people know the importance of reporting a crime directly,” Croft snarled. “Crossland Alley is a stone’s throw away from Scotland Yard. I can’t imagine why you’d hesitate to run to us immediately. In fact, I can’t imagine why you were on the Strand at that hour in the first pla
ce. Just what are you hiding?”

  “Did he threaten you?” Dr. Phillips settled a gentle arm around my shoulders, simultaneously digging a finger into a sensitive spot below my ribs and causing me to gasp and reflexively crumple forward. He caught me deftly like a father would a distraught child. He tsked and tutted solicitously as I turned my face against his chest in a false gesture of distress. “There, there, my dear. How brave you are. Did he warn you not to go to the police?”

  “He—he did.” I grasped the lifeline he offered with both hands. “He said anyone I told would be in danger.” The catch in my throat was more from a sort of marvelous amusement than wretchedness. Just as Croft had cornered me, the genius doctor had rescued us both. It was not in my nature to play the damsel, but one did what they must.

  All thoughts of confession planted by Aidan had dissipated the moment poor Katherine Riley’s body was found. She was a stark reminder of why I must be allowed to continue to be who I am.

  To do what I do.

  If Jack was back, then I must be free to search for him.

  There was little doubt that I was the lesser of the two evils. Why should I hang, and he continue to terrorize all of London?

  I relaxed into Dr. Phillip’s hold incrementally. For a man who’d likely lived a half-century, he was surprisingly solid. He smelled of pomade and formaldehyde and strong lye soap. Not exactly a fatherly smell, but oddly comforting nonetheless.

  The scent of preservation.

  In lieu of a family—and in the absence of a beloved father—Dr. Phillips had become more than just an ally. Or merely a business associate. He’d become something of a friend.

  Aberline, as well.

  And, I supposed I didn’t want Croft to come to any harm, either. At least, most days.

  “I can’t, in good conscience, stomach the idea of risking any of your lives.” I looked up into Dr. Phillip’s benevolent features, wondering if he understood how honest I was in that moment.