Not until I saw the body.
The Ripper had gone to work. He’d warned me, hadn’t he?
Unlike the poor constable downstairs, Comstock’s murder was not the worst I’d ever witnessed.
That distinction still belonged to Mary.
I would say this, Comstock’s scene was undoubtedly the most creative. Artistically speaking, anyway.
We could consider the Ripper unblocked, then. No longer paralyzed by his previous masterpiece.
I wasn’t certain if the Ripper himself had whitewashed the lone brick wall, the stone floors, and the wainscoting beneath the windows of the old office, or if someone else had recently done so, and he’d taken full advantage of a perfect opportunity.
Painting an entire room would have taken a great deal of planning and forethought, and the Ripper was known as an opportunistic killer.
Perhaps he’d evolved beyond that now.
Maybe his fury had become more patient.
Mine certainly had, out of sheer necessity, if nothing else.
Had I placed a dunce cap on a corpse, I would have situated him in the corner to punctuate the significance. That this was my first thought before the horror set in should have disturbed me.
What actually bothered me was how long I waited before accepting that the horror wasn’t going to show.
I felt nothing.
Entering the room by myself was exactly how I imagined stepping into a painting would be. Surreal. Impossible.
Vibrant.
Even the tactile altered. The dirt gritting beneath my boot as I lifted it didn’t exist past the threshold. It was pristine and white in here. Silent. Empty.
Save for the blood. And the body.
My breaths were gunshots against a canvas. My footsteps cannon blasts. But an unholy, obsessive curiosity propelled me forward. I couldn’t see the details until I moved closer.
In the center of the room, Comstock sat propped up at a masculine oak desk dressed in a smart tweed suit and a silk cravat that matched his pocket square.
His throat wasn’t cut, at least as far as I could tell.
A lovely new typewriter sat perched before him, the metal parts gleaming. Two rivers of blood ran down the front of the desk like gruesome icing from a tall cake.
Comstock’s palms rested on the wooden top, bracketing the typewriter. His fingers would have been splayed. If he had them. The rivers of red drained from ten symmetrical stumps.
The dunce cap came low over his forehead. Down over empty eye sockets crying crimson tears. A river poured from his mouth, as well, lending his chin a ventriloquist cut.
His eyes. His tongue. His fingers.
All gone.
I tested my inner sensory organs. Still nothing.
A white paper full of words fluttered limply from the typewriter in a breeze I didn’t feel.
Another Ripper letter? A confession?
I had to bend down over the desk to squint at it. Two sentences repeated for the entirety of the paper in perfectly typed rows.
I will not touch Fiona. I am not the Ripper.
I both recoiled and sagged with relief.
There it was, churning my guts and chilling my skin. It throbbed in the shallow cut on my neck and stung in the stitches there. It had arrived, finally.
The horror.
19
He did this for you.
Why had the thought echoed through my mind in Croft’s grizzled baritone?
Because it hadn’t been a thought, I realized, as Croft stepped out from behind me and circled the desk, opening the drawer on the right.
Even his charcoal suit seemed lively against all the pristine white.
My heart violently rejected his words. “He did this chiefly because Comstock pretended to be him. Misrepresented the Ripper for his own gain,” I argued. “The Ripper is no magnanimous altruist. He’s a sadist. He took his own revenge, not mine.”
Croft motioned to the drawer.
I shook my head. I wanted nothing to do with whatever dreadful truth awaited me there.
“He may have murdered Comstock regardless, but he did this…”—Croft gestured at the gruesome tableau—“for you.”
“Easy there, Croft,” Aberline admonished. “It’s not as if she asked him to. And how do you know—?”
Croft cut Aberline off, his eyes boring into mine, electric with a barely concealed fury I didn’t understand. “You may not claim the right to see this, to be henceforth privy to what should be confidential to the police, to what your nemesis has done, if you refuse to look now.”
He was right, of course. I had to look. There was never any question of that. But I’d never wanted Croft to be wrong with more fervency than in that moment.
Jack did not do this for me.
I ventured forward, regarding the drawer with the apprehension one would a thousand spiders.
It wasn’t the tiny missing body parts all piled together in the rear of the drawer that stole my breath. It was the letter scrawled in red ink pegged to the bottom by the sharp end of a scalpel.
I did this for you, Fiona.
I slammed my lids shut. Grappling with my lungs, with my burning tear ducts, my careening heart. Those parts of my body betraying me.
Not now. I couldn’t fall apart now.
I swallowed thrice. Once for my tears, a mad gulp for air, and the last to force my heart from my throat back to my chest where it belonged.
I opened my eyes to a blurry, silent Aberline, and steeled every part of myself to finish the letter.
Do you like my gifts? I say gifts because Comstock is the first, and the second is this instrument he used to cut your neck. He claimed it was an accident, hurting you. Screamed it. What a dunce. Barely a brain at all.
Do not mind the mess. The inspectors will gather the trifles. The coroner will take the body. The rest can be demolished with the building. There is nothing for you to clean. Consider that a professional courtesy. Not my first.
During our time together, Mr. Comstock convinced me he was not responsible for the recent Whitechapel deaths, and neither am I. Look elsewhere, Fiona. You have so many questions. If only your father was not already a dead man. He’d provide some of the answers you seek.
You must not fear me. You are safe now.
Yours always,
Jack the Ripper
Fumbling in my pocket, I snatched out the letter I’d received this morning and hastily compared the writing.
An exact match. The script, the paper, the prose.
“What’s this, then?” Croft leaned over my shoulder.
Aberline joined our little conclave around the open drawer, casting his shadow across the words, darkening the red. “Miss Mahoney and I were at Scotland Yard examining this letter she received from the Ripper this morning when you summoned me here,” he told Croft.
“We still can’t be certain it is the Ripper, can we?” My voice sounded high-pitched and desperate, even to me. “I mean, this could still be the work of some other delusional reprobate. Someone mad enough to believe he is the Ripper.”
“Anything’s possible,” Aberline conceded. “But I think it’s safe to operate under the assumption that it’s him.”
“May I?” Croft reached around me to pinch the first letter between two large fingers.
That he asked, surprised me. That he asked gently should have worried me.
As usual, the hairs on my body, the fibers of my skirt, all tuned to his nearness, following him with some strange, magnetic awareness.
My skin prickled with such intensity, it hurt.
I surrendered the note to him and retreated to the front of the desk while both Aberline and Croft scrutinized the letters written to me.
By Jack the Ripper.
He did all this for me.
Never in my life had I received a gift so utterly unwelcome.
Poor Mr. Comstock. I searched his unfamiliar face. I’d never actually met him but for our encounter in Crossland Alley. Of cou
rse, I’d fantasized about hurting him. Or worse. He’d terrorized me that night, after all.
He’d been unscrupulous and ambitious, but I did believe he never truly meant me any harm.
He knew—even before I did—that I was an inexorable link to Jack the Ripper.
He’d been good at his job, and it had caused his demise.
What a death he’d borne for it.
Before Comstock, the Ripper had never developed a taste for live mutilations. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Comstock had suffered these terrible things. Had lost his fingers, his eyes, his tongue, before he died.
He’d been threatened into typing out those sentences again and again before the blood was spilled. When he’d still been in possession of his fingers. Confessions that would not absolve him to anyone but me.
I will not touch Fiona. I am not the Ripper.
God, how he must have hated me before the end. Or, at least, my name. He’d been punished like a naughty schoolboy. Humiliated. Terrorized.
I couldn’t fathom the torment he’d suffered. I didn’t want to.
The Ripper knew me.
The comprehension struck me with the force of a rogue wave, threatening to shatter my entire life against sharp, treacherous rocks. He had to be an intimate of mine. A dreadful surge of guilt singed the last vestiges of my self-control. He wasn’t just watching me as he claimed. He knew me. That familiarity was scrawled all over his letters.
The knowledge that I was innocent. That I didn’t tend to drink. He’d mentioned my dead father, who I rarely spoke of to anyone because his memory was sacred to me.
What could Francis “Frank” Mahoney possibly have to do with any of this madness? What did the Ripper know of him? What answers could he have provided me?
Sweet Jesus, had the Ripper been acquainted with my family? Was he an Irishman?
Not likely. He’d said I was unlike the drunkards of my island, not our island, which I took to mean Ireland.
Look elsewhere, he’d told me. Look to the victims. They are chosen because they are the same. Like mine.
Lord, maybe he’d been right in his initial letter. Perhaps I wasn’t clever enough for all this.
I stared at Comstock. And stared. And stared. Forcing myself to meet his non-existent eyes until they were all I saw set against a stark, white canvas. A blank paper I could fill with notes.
How were the Ripper victims the same?
All penniless Whitechapel prostitutes. All famously uncontrollable drunks.
The Ripper had mentioned drinking twice. Praised me for being unlike the notoriously inebriated Irish, and again unlike the drunken whores of the East End.
Was that why he held me in some sort of esteem? Was it why he assured my safety? Said I must not fear him?
Because I was a relatively sober virgin? The opposite of his previous victims.
I could not imagine any other innocence I’d maintained but for the strictly physical.
I thought of his canonical victims. Each murdered in a unique way, and yet, there were utter similarities that branded them uniquely his. He’d stabbed them in intimate places. Taken from them, the parts that made them what he hated. Women. Whores. Drunks.
“Just how did Comstock die?” I breathed the question, almost to myself.
Aberline glanced up at me as though I’d lost my mind. “I should think that’s rather obvious.”
“None of the parts he lost were vital,” I countered. “One can live without eyes, fingers, and a tongue, can they not?”
“Well…theoretically.” Croft grimaced at the body. “But a man can die in any number of ways from something like this. Often the pure terror of such brutality can stop a stout man’s heart, and you’ve already said that Comstock, here, was a nancy. He could have choked to death on his own blood, for all we know.”
That was true, enough, but something still ate at me. Something we’d not yet discovered.
“We won’t know the true cause of death until the surgeon arrives,” Aberline supplied. “But I hazard this could be enough for a lean man like Comstock to have bled out. It would have taken hours, poor sod.”
It didn’t seem like even half as much blood as Frank Sawyer had left on the floor, but I imagined a great deal of it still pooled in Comstock’s lower extremities.
Something I’d told Aidan at the Sawyer crime scene occurred to me.
The Ripper always takes something.
“I’ve a theory,” I announced.
“What’s that?” Aberline indulged me, while Croft didn’t bother. He studied this morning’s letter as though committing it to memory.
“When the Ripper kills, he directs his violence at what triggers his fury. With his female victims, he often damaged sex organs or took wombs. Livers. Kidneys. Intestines. Lips. The parts which could be used to ply their trade or to drink or process alcohol. He sliced their throats so they could not scream. So they could not speak. So they could not swallow. He took their voices first. And then the rest.”
At this, I’d even recaptured Croft’s attention, so I pointed to the drawer. “Are all Comstock’s…bits…in there? Both eyes and all ten fingers?” I’d seen his tongue, one that would never lisp at me again.
Croft made the gruesome count. “It’s all here.”
“The Ripper was true to his form.” I rounded to the left of the desk, examining Comstock closer so I could see properly. “He relieved Comstock of the parts that offended him. The tools of his trade Comstock used to tell sensational lies. If he left everything he cut off, what did he take?”
With grim syncopation, the inspectors blinked at me, and then looked down at the mutilated journalist.
Aberline patted Comstock’s linen suit vest and lower. “I can’t detect an open body cavity or aught in the way of sadosexual wounds.”
Croft lifted the dunce cap, and we all gasped and retreated.
The Ripper had replaced the top of Comstock’s entire skull with the dunce cap.
With surgical precision, he’d taken as his prize, the thing which had most offended him about the reporter.
His mind.
20
I gazed out of the carriage window at the Strand, brightly lit against the velvet night, avoiding Inspector Croft’s intense regard. He’d drawn the short straw, I supposed, and had been conscripted to conduct me home safely. I couldn’t rightly say how the decision was made. Too many events had transpired that day. Too many deaths to remember the trivial things.
Compared to all of London’s golden joviality, I felt like the word stark. Pallid. Bleak. Severe. As if all my sharp edges had been blunted, and my color drained until I was a iridescent copy of myself. A shade of Fiona. A ghost who hadn’t yet died.
Who was I, that such ghastly violence painted my days? It seemed the years were now all demarcated by some massacre or another. My family. Mary. And now…this.
Was I being punished for something? Was all this blood God’s own dunce cap for me?
What had I done?
I remembered being a very little girl, my pretty mother lecturing me about my possible place in Hell. You can’t pray with your eyes open, Fiona. Bow your head. Be humble. Close your eyes. Or the devil will take you where God can no longer find you.
How can I see God if my head is pointed down? my six-year-old self had argued. I can’t close my eyes, Ma. God doesn’t live in the dark, does he? How can I find him if I’m not looking up?
She’d stared at me for so long, I’d thought she might reach for the switch. Finally, she’d knelt in front of me, Baltic blue eyes sparkling with unshed tears as she pressed my little hands between her palms. Let me tell you a secret, she’d whispered. You’ll never find God. No one does. Not really. He isn’t here, with us, like we want Him to be. But we’re supposed to kneel to Him. To bow. To supplicate. Not in hopes that we will look up and find Him, but with the faith that He’s there when you are not looking. That He’ll be there when you die. Faith is blind, Fiona. If your eyes are open, th
en you can’t have found it. You don’t find God in the dark.
He finds you.
I’d never found my faith. I’d never really found God. I always prayed with my eyes open. Lived with my eyes open. Perhaps, even as a child, I’d known what kind of monsters lurked in the dark. And that God never stopped them from indulging their appetites.
The fear of standing alone and vulnerable in the darkness terrified me.
What if God didn’t find me? Only the monsters. I didn’t need to have faith in them, because they were tangible.
I never looked down. I never looked away. From anything. I never closed or averted my eyes.
I refused to be blind.
Eventually, because of everything I’d seen, I’d stopped praying altogether.
Everything my mother had said made sense now. Just as there was danger in darkness, there was safety, too. If your eyes were closed, you could believe that things could be different. That they might be better than they were. You could paint your own reality on the backs of your eyelids and look to it with all the hope your imagination could conjure.
It was too late for me now. Faith was something you had to learn early, something you could build with bricks of anecdotal evidence and pure, ecstatic hope mortared by unmitigated emotion.
I should have closed my eyes, I thought, watching the merriment bleed onto the streets. The laughing people, the gay revelers. They lived with their eyes closed. With their gazes down.
I should have closed my eyes. Maybe God would have found me in the dark…
Instead of the Ripper.
“You’ve something in your hair.” Before I could stop him, Croft reached into my disheveled coif and plucked from it a small shard of glass. It winked and sparkled like a diamond in the soft light of the coach, distracting me from my grim contemplation of the night.
“I was caught up in the riot today in front of parliament,” I answered his unspoken question. “My carriage was overturned by the mob. Both windows broken.”
The Business of Blood Page 22