“That’s fucking ridiculous!” Croft exploded, his face reddening. “I can protect you. That is, we, the London Metropolitan Police, are perfectly capable of protecting ourselves. And you.”
“Language, Inspector Croft, I implore you,” Phillips admonished.
“You don’t have jurisdiction over me. I don’t reside in your borough.” I pushed away from Phillips, leveling Croft with a sharp look. “And I cannot say I know how safe I’d feel even if I did.” I pointed at Katherine Riley, not able to bring myself to look down at what remained of her now.
A vein had begun to pulse in Croft’s temple, and his shoulders bunched up to his ears. Wordlessly, he turned into what I assumed was the bedroom and began to slam about in there.
I’d been cruel. I’d questioned his ability to do his job, to be a man, and all in front of his colleagues.
Regardless of how I felt about Croft, I wasn’t proud of what I’d said.
Aberline diplomatically interceded. “What Croft is trying—and failing—to convey, is that there is more safety in knowledge than ignorance. The more you trust us, the better we can help. We hoped you understood that by now.”
“I do understand, Inspector.” My regret was conveyed in earnest, and I hoped that he could see that. “I never want to cry wolf.”
Cry Ripper?
“Yes, well…” Aberline checked his watch, and I tried to contain an aching fondness for him. “I’m going to assemble some constables to span the neighborhood and gather what information we can about Ms. Riley, here.” He regarded me as one would a particularly troublesome puzzle. Or a volatile one. “Best you stay with the good doctor, Miss Mahoney. At least until the press clears out. It wouldn’t do to have you photographed where you ought not to be, I’m sorry to say.”
“If you think that’s best, Inspector.” I feigned contrite obedience. I’d positioned myself inside the house in hopes of that precise outcome.
Sighing, he glanced into the bedroom and then back out to the street. “I’ll talk to the landlord about your services and fees and send an errand boy to fetch your Chinaman, shall I?”
I bit back a sly smirk. “I’d be obliged if you would.”
“You’d just insist on cleaning it up, regardless,” he muttered on his way into the humid afternoon. “Better to keep it aboveboard.”
“Nelson,” Dr. Phillips addressed his assistant by his given name. “Be a good lad and check the kitchen, the bedroom, and the facilities for any objects which might be responsible for these puncture wounds, would you?”
The young man balked. “Isn’t that the inspectors’ job? We already have the kitchen knives.”
“Do the inspectors have the proper training and precise medical knowledge to identify this very specific style of instrument and how it might penetrate flesh?” Phillips impatiently gestured to the copious wounds.
Nelson appeared unsure. “Likely not.”
“Likely. Not.”
Scurrying to the bedroom, Nelson seemed as reticent as I would be to share an enclosed space with a surly Inspector Croft.
“This is why I prefer to work alone.” I sensed more than saw Dr. Phillip’s invitation to join him as he dug into his medical bag and crouched over the corpse.
Using two instruments, he eased Katherine Riley’s middle open. “I suppose I only need six livers now,” he remarked in a register meant only for me.
“You’re going to use Ms. Riley’s?”
He nudged at it, the generally pink organ slightly dark and discolored in some places. In others, a whitish film clung to the outside and seemed to be eating away at it. “It is a bit necrotic. She was a heavy drinker at one time, I can tell you that much. And there’s some obvious hepatic damage I’m certain was caused by a venereal disease. Though, I’ll not know which until I get her on the table. Hepatitis, maybe.”
“You could consult Dr. Bond,” I suggested wickedly. “I hear he specializes somewhat in venereal diseases.”
“He most certainly does.” Sarcasm oozed from him as thick and toxic as blood. “In more ways than you know.”
“Look at her face,” I whispered. “How ghastly.” The Ripper had left it alone, and still, the memory of it would raise chill bumps on my flesh for a long time to come.
Katherine Riley hadn’t been a young woman, and her loose skin had pulled the thin, wrinkled lips away from a pair of false teeth. Ivory, it seemed. Another luxury. Her lids were likewise unnaturally wide, though her eyeballs had begun to dry and shrivel.
Phillips paused in his perusal of her insides. “She looks as though she’s seen a ghost, doesn’t she?”
“Do you believe in ghosts, Dr. Phillips?” I’d credited him with more sense, but one never knew the spectrum of another’s relationship with the hereafter.
His instruments made wet sounds as he worked, stirring smells that sent me in search of my scented handkerchief. “I believe that people are haunted by many things. But not the dead.”
“Do you think her soul is in a better place? Heaven maybe, or Hell?”
“What nonsense is this?” He threw an impatient look at me over his shoulder.
“I’m just curious as to your views regarding such things. A man in the company of so much death must have a great deal of time to ponder it.”
He returned to his work, sliding his instruments down the open seam of Ms. Riley’s body as he spoke. “I think Heaven and Hell are aspects of one’s self. They are both very limiting if you think about it. Both places from which there is no escape. That being said, I am possessed of an open and scientific mind. Should someone provide me irrefutable proof of the hereafter, I’ll take myself to confession and prostrate my soul before God. Until then, I’ll retain the opinion that people turn to the occult when they have not the intellectual nor the emotional fortitude for the scientific method.”
“You’re saying you think religious people are either lazy or willfully ignorant?”
“I’m saying I think it is a great deal easier to believe in a benevolent father figure than to consider that we are all supplicants to the chaotic and rather ruthless whims of both nature and time.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He wasn’t wrong. Hadn’t I bestowed that very assignation upon him only moments ago when he sheltered me from Croft’s ire? A benevolent father figure. Someone upon whose mercy I could rely.
“On the other side of benevolence, I suppose it’s hard for us to imagine that there’s no justice to be found for people like Katherine Riley,” I postulated.
“That’s assuming she’s deserving of justice,” he muttered.
“What do you mean? Do you know something about her?”
“No, nothing.” He shook his head adamantly, and the wan afternoon light glinted off a small patch of thinning hair on the back of his pate that was usually covered by his hat.
The whims of nature and time.
“I’m merely posing the question. What if St. Peter is, in fact, not up there tracking your sins for judgment day? What if vengeance doesn’t belong to the Lord, as the good book claims, but to us? Does that make life more precious, or less? Does it alter the significance of existence?”
I wasn’t sure. “It certainly makes death seem more tragic.”
“Does it?” Setting his speculum down, he scratched at the back of his head as though my gaze had caused an itch. “Depends on the death, I suppose.”
Didn’t it just?
“We need to find out if Katherine Riley had a child,” Croft announced from beneath the arch of the bedroom door. He brandished a small baby bottle with a rubber feeding tube and two tiny, hand-stitched booties. “If so, it’s been taken.”
Dr. Phillips made a speculative sound. “Impossible to tell just now, Inspector,” he said ominously. “Her womb has been taken, as well.”
13
Even I was allowed to join in the search for the missing child. We tore the place apart—the attic, the basement, the roof, the window wells. The pathetic gar
den out back. For all our efforts, we uncovered a worn baby blanket, a wooden rattle, and a few other tiny garments. One a little boy’s jumper, and the other seemed to be a christening dress.
The search fanned out after that.
Neighbors reported that they’d heard a baby in Ms. Riley’s home, but not regularly. They’d assumed she tended a child, or perhaps that she had grandchildren close by.
For as close as residents seemed to be in such crowded neighborhoods, no one knew much about Katherine Riley. She was pleasant, kind, and kept mostly to herself.
Maybe she was part of what my father used to call “the forgotten ones.” The lonesome aging sort with no one to shoulder their filial duties. Often isolated and neglected, especially in these communities of the underfunded and the overworked.
My father used to look after these people in our neighborhood. He was forever sending my brothers on shopping errands, or conscripting them to lift trunks, move furniture, or take our leftovers to Widow So-and-So.
Even I’d learned advanced reading at a three o’clock appointment every Wednesday with a mostly blind and completely childless septuagenarian professor named Donegal O’Dowd. My father had called him a “confirmed bachelor,” but now that I thought about it, he might have shared a few tendencies with Oscar Wilde.
And I didn’t mean their affinity for poetry.
I’d been inconsolable when poor Mr. O’Dowd passed on when I was sixteen. I still owned a book of Shakespearean sonnets he’d lent me. It was one of my most carefully guarded treasures, and yet I’d never taken the time to truly read it.
Strange, how you forgot to think about those people until moments like this.
I hoped Professor O’Dowd wasn’t lonely anymore…wherever he was.
Croft now paced behind the orderlies, who carried the remains of Katherine Riley out the narrow door. I won’t tell you what they to keep her contents from spilling. Needless to say, they stepped lightly and most certainly dreaded being jostled by the crowd.
“Where are you off to?” I asked Croft, aware he’d become like a hound en pointe. He had a colorful paper clutched in his fist, and I would stake my life that he considered it a lead.
“That is no business of yours.”
Inspired, I plucked the paper out of his hand.
It was an advertisement for a recent fundraiser for unwed mothers, unfortunate children, and orphans held at a local diocese some three weeks prior. Katherine Riley had been one of the patrons and organizers of the event.
Just wonderful. I tracked the stretcher draped with its white sheet as they loaded it into the coroner’s cart and pulled away with a sharp crack of the reins. She’d been a saint with a soft spot for women and children in desperate situations. What a bloody shame.
What a terrible loss.
Croft snatched the flier back. “It seems we both have work to do.” Plunking his hat low on his head, he squared his shoulders in preparation to part the gathering throng. “Good afternoon, Miss Mahoney.” With those words, he shoved into the crowd, which seemed to part for him as the Red Sea had for Moses.
I muttered a few of the words I’d learned from him.
An embarrassed cough beside me alerted me to Inspector Aberline’s presence.
“Pardon my profanity.” I made room for him in the doorway. “That man gets my Irish up like no other.”
“You’re not alone in that.” He traced Croft’s trajectory for a moment with a knowing smile as he broke from the thinning crowd and marched toward Whitechapel Road. “Do you know what his problem is?”
“You’re insinuating he only has the one?” I knew I was being unkind, but it was not even noon and already turning out to be a very trying day—the blame belonging in no small part to Croft.
Aberline’s mustache twitched in amusement. “Look there. Croft is the kind of man what walks in straight lines. London has no straight lines. Just twists and turns and labyrinthine corridors behind which any danger could lurk. For men like him, the vagaries of fate are untenable. It is difficult for them to navigate the chasms between what should be, and what is.
He spent some of his formative years as an underground ironworker. Chipping away at the stone until it gave beneath his will, shaping it with rough hands, sharp tools, and brute strength into something he could use. He attacks his cases—his life—in a very similar way.”
“With all the subtlety of a pickaxe?”
“Sometimes.” Aberline chuckled. “Does make for an excellent detective, though he does his best work in the field.”
I could see that. He’d seemed like a caged beast in his office this morning. A vicious dog needing to be let out.
Aberline glanced at me with frank speculation. “Do you like him?”
“Not generally.”
“No, I mean, do you like him?” He nudged me with his elbow. “Fiery women tend to take to Croft. They enjoy his indifference. Relish the chase. They like what happens when he lets them catch him.” Aberline winked before waggling his bushy eyebrows at me.
“I doubt that,” I said drolly but cut my grimace short when I marked Aberline’s expression. It would not do to seem bitter. Or interested. “My heart is not free to like anyone.”
“Pity.” At that, he turned back to Dr. Phillips, dismissing all notions of romance for only slightly more gruesome subjects. “We’ve gathered that Katherine Riley was, once upon a time, a prostitute who went by the name of Roxy the Doxy.”
I pressed my lips together, clamping them with my teeth. No matter how ridiculous the moniker was, now was not the time to be amused.
Not whilst gathered around her blood.
“She was popular with sailors and dock workers,” Aberline continued as he consulted his pocket notepad. “Apparently, there was even a song.”
“I’d give my last shilling to hear it,” Nelson remarked, earning him reproving glares from his superiors.
“By all accounts, she gave up that profession a decade ago. These days, either no one knows what she does for a living—what she did—or no one is willing to tell.” With a frustrated sound, Aberline took up his suit coat and hat. “The landlord’s agreed to your fee, Miss Mahoney. I’ll join the bobbies whilst you tend to the house, here. This calls for some good old-fashioned footwork.”
“It really could be him, couldn’t it, Inspector?” I asked, staring at the blood-soaked carpet and cold, white ashes in the fireplace.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Aberline paused at the door as we both turned to mark Hao Long’s patient progress with my cart through the hastily dispersing crowd.
People tended to lose interest once the body had been taken away. In mere moments, one would hardly be able to tell this street from any other crowded thoroughfare in Whitechapel.
Exhaustion and anxiety pinched the lines at the corners of the inspector’s eyes and lips, turning them a stark, aggressive white. “I’m afraid so.” Aberline shook his head, his shoulders heavy with regret. “Just when I thought the nightmare was long over. It’s been my greatest fear, you know? The return of the Ripper.”
“I know. Mine, too.” As I watched him leave, I swore he’d shrunk three inches in as many days.
Dr. Phillips was next to scuttle to the door, anxious to take his leave. “Well, Miss Mahoney. Must be going. Death waits for no man.”
“Nor woman,” I volleyed back.
He shook my hand like he would a respected male colleague, and somehow, it meant more to me than any kiss brushed against my knuckle, bow, or courtesy I’d ever received. “He’d wait for you, I’d wager. I think he likes you. He’d take his time with you.”
“He certainly keeps me in business.”
“Well, we can always count on him for that.” Phillips touched his hat. “Dying is the only thing people do with any regularity.”
I went to extract my hand from his, but he held fast, boring into me with his ice-blue gaze. “Miss Mahoney…I want you to be careful out there until we sort all this out. I a
m very distressed by your encounter in that alley.”
His concern melted me. “That is kind, Doctor. But I’m not the Ripper’s type, nor am I a denizen of Whitechapel. I am not afraid.”
“Yes, you are,” he argued gently but with alert perception. “And you should be.”
I hesitated, supremely uncomfortable under his observant eye. He was right, of course. I was not fearless, but I could be brave.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he rushed to correct any sense of undue impudence. “You possess good instincts. Fear is wisdom in the face of danger. Intuition is merely the brain assimilating actualities faster than the conscious mind can process. Just…step lightly, Miss Mahoney. For my peace of mind, if nothing else.”
“I will,” I promised, impulsively planting a kiss on his bristly cheek.
An ear-splitting shriek shattered our fond moment as a petite, harried woman carrying an infant swaddled in a patched shawl limped up the walk toward us. The commotion, courtesy of the little creature in her arms, was enough to set the local stray dogs to barking.
“Wot’s going on?” She blinked up at us from watery, dark eyes, sensing the increased police presence. “Is Miss Riley in there?” She tried to peek around us, desperately rocking from one foot to the other. “I need to tell ‘er I changed me mind. That I cannot do this anymore. I ‘aven’t got all the money, but I can pay ‘alf now.”
“What’s your name, child?” Dr. Phillips seemed more likely to retreat back into the odiferous house than deal with a hysterical woman.
“Mary. Mary Jean McBride.” She greedily eyed my dress and Dr. Phillip’s smart, tailored suit and expensive silk cravat. “Do you be one of ‘er couples?”
Dr. Phillips met my wide-eyed gaze with a look, his expression as aghast as mine. Couples? He was almost twice my age. More likely to be my father than my husband. Though, I supposed wealthy men took young wives with alarming frequency these days.
Tears streamed down the woman’s grimy face as she both leaned toward us and clutched the squalling child tighter to her. “Do you want a li’il girl? This is Teagan, but you can call ‘er wot you like. She’s usually a right angel, perfect li’il fing. She’s just so ‘ungry. I dried up after a week an I can’t afford the powdered stuff.”
The Business of Blood Page 15