Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (21 page)

Jack the Ripper did not only kill prostitutes. As the intermedio claimed him and he stalked the snowy streets, he considered the last girl he had killed in Whitechapel, mere yards from where the vigilante gangs patrolled. He knew she was not a prostitute because she had told him so as she begged for her life, weeping as she urged him to reconsider, telling him that she was a match girl and that she had three young ones at home.

Every woman in Whitechapel had borne children. They bred like rats. The only remarkable thing was that she had three who were still alive. It didn’t save her life, though. Perhaps when her eviscerated body was discovered, her children would be put upon the mercy of the parish. They would have a better chance at life that way.

Still, they looked for patterns. If the girl was not a prostitute, they ignored her death, because murders were ten a penny in the stews and slums at the best of times. Resisting the lure of selling her flesh for coppers would, ultimately, cost her immortality. The victims of Jack the Ripper would live on through lurid newspaper reports and endlessly repeated gossip, the incandescence of their deaths on the public consciousness.

A murdered match girl with three hungry children at home was beneath anyone’s notice. He almost felt sorry for her.

Death by a swift cut along the forehead was another pattern that had enthused the press and public. That was why he had been quietly experimenting with different methods of dispatching his victims, greater use of the surgical instruments. It confounded the police’s search for patterns, allowed him to try new methods with murders that were sometimes ascribed to Jack the Ripper, sometimes not.

But a change was coming, he knew, and he had to be ready. He had to decide what to do, how to continue. If indeed he should continue. If indeed he was able to stop.

They saw things that weren’t there; they created patterns from chaos. It was like that parlor game illusion, the thaumotrope. A distinctly different drawing on either side of a piece of stiff card, the card twirled rapidly by way of a piece of taut string. The eye was fooled, seeing something that was not there, a conglomeration of the two drawings that came together to form something else entirely. The scientists called it persistence of vision, an insistence of the eye to continue to see what was no longer there, even as it was assimilating a new thing. The eye brought them together.

Because, if there was no pattern, then what was the point? The public, and the police, were brought up on fictions, tidy and patterned. Things had to make sense, because if they didn’t … then Jack the Ripper could be anybody. And perhaps anybody could be Jack the Ripper.

But things would change. A pattern would emerge, and it would give them the breakthrough they needed, and things would have to change.

14

T
HE
P
ROFESSOR
OF
A
DVENTURE

It was the barometers that finally brought Inspector George Lestrade’s headache brimming over to a point that he thought he might have to excuse himself, take a steam-cab home, and lock himself in a darkened room until Sunday had rolled around once again.

There were dozens of barometers, perhaps even a couple hundred, littering the cellar of the house in Kennington, which had been turned into a simple makeshift workshop. A wooden table, of the kind used by decorators for pasting wallpaper, was on the side of the room facing the staircase, overflowing with barometers of all shapes, styles, and sizes. Plain copper barometers, ornate wooden ones, decorative ones carved with cats chasing mice along their edges, industrial barometers with steel casings.

All of them with their faces smashed in.

Broken glass crunched under Lestrade’s boots as he paced up and down the cellar, putting him queasily in mind of walking on the backs of crushed insects. His constables had rigged up a sequence of oil lamps hanging from the low ceiling, but the light they shed gave him no inkling of what he was really looking at, save for the shattered carcasses of barometers, all smashed to smithereens, piled high on the long table and spilling onto the stone floor.

Lestrade stroked his mustache and closed his eyes.
Ratty,
they called him in the station canteen, though never, of course, to his face. On account of his tiny, dark eyes. That wasn’t what she said, of course, his secret love. He’d been shocked when Aloysius Bent had skirted around the issue the other day, because if it became common knowledge Lestrade would be ruined, consorting with a woman like that. But he suspected Bent knew far less than he was intimating.

Like stars,
she said.
Your eyes are like stars. Did you know that the light from some of those stars took so long to reach the Earth that sometimes the star was long dead?

“Like ghosts, then,” he’d pondered, as they had lain on their backs on a blanket on Clapham Common in the dead of night, the crowns of their heads touching as though they were telling the time, six o’clock, his feet to the south and hers to the north.

“The ghosts of stars.” She’d laughed delightedly, rolling her body like the hand of a clock until she was alongside him, half past six. She kissed him. “That’s what your eyes are like. The ghosts of dead stars.”

“Sir?”

Lestrade blinked at the sound of Constable Ayres descending the cellar stairs with a heavy footfall. The sweet memory had forced away his headache; now it came flooding back, as though a stopper had been released from a bottle.

Ayres wrinkled his nose. “Pew. What’s that smell, sir?”

Lestrade waved his hand at the smashed barometers. “Mercury, I dare say, Constable. Though if you are going to ask me why I think a man would smash up so many barometers, please do not. I have no idea.”

“Gives a man a headache, that smell, in an unventilated place like this.”

Lestrade smiled. “Shall we go back upstairs, Constable?”

The inspector followed Ayres up the narrow staircase, which ended in a wooden door that opened into the kitchen. The house in Kennington was spacious without being grand, functionally decorated—it lacked a woman’s touch, in Lestrade’s opinion, as had his own house until very recently, so he knew the signs—and well appointed. Probably worth a bit of cash. Ayres bobbed from foot to foot, as though it physically pained him to be standing on turf so far from the East End. Come to that, Lestrade wasn’t quite sure why the constable was here at all. The inspector had been sent down because, suddenly and most unfortunately, the boundaries of his patch seemed to have been stretched out of all recognition. And it was all down to that bloody Jack the Ripper, and Professor Stanford Rubicon’s dead maid. Killers who mutilated young women in the fog-wreathed streets of Whitechapel were not exactly a pleasant matter, but at least it was what he was used to. Now he’d been caught up in all this rather surprising business concerning Rowena Fanshawe, and the murder charge they had her up on. Lestrade would have been reluctant to admit it—especially to Aloysius Bent—but he had always been something of a secret aficionado of the penny bloods in general and
World Marvels & Wonders
in particular; he’d followed the adventures since the Captain Lucian Trigger days. Now Professor Miescher—Lestrade had known he was going to be trouble the minute he’d seen him—had somehow matched up the two lots of bloodstains. The ones found in Rubicon’s laboratories after the break-in and before the maid had turned up dead were evidently the same as the blood from under the fingernails of one Edward Gaunt, who had been found murdered in this very house apparently at the hands of Rowena Fanshawe.

Which meant Rowena Fanshawe had for some reason been involved in the burglary at Professor Rubicon’s rooms, which in turn meant that for reasons he didn’t fully understand, she had now become Inspector Lestrade’s problem.

“What brings you to Kennington, Constable?” asked Lestrade. “A social visit in the neighborhood?”

Ayres frowned. “No, sir. You said you were coming here, and I had something to tell you.”

Lestrade sighed. Why did he have to be surrounded by such dullards? “Of course, Constable. Out with it, then.”

Ayres withdrew his notebook from his overcoat. “We interviewed all the patrons of the Golden Ball who were present in the establishment on the night that Emily Dawson died. There were two gentlemen in particular who we were interested in, sir; they had propositioned Miss Dawson quite crudely as she passed the public house. We thought they might have been involved in her unfortunate fate. But we interviewed independent witnesses who confirmed that although the men had engaged Miss Dawson in ribald conversation and the girl had indeed appeared frightened at their behavior, they returned to the public house after speaking to her.”

Lestrade shrugged. “Well, we knew we were dealing with a ripper.”

“On that note, sir,” said Ayres. “We have two independent witnesses who have given testimony about a person seen in the vicinity of the alley where Miss Dawson was found. Both report seeing an individual dressed completely in black with some kind of hood or cowl over their face.”

Lestrade felt immediately cheered. This was the first time anyone had offered any kind of description of anyone possibly connected with the Ripper killings. Perhaps this was the breakthrough he had been waiting for.

“Get these witnesses into the station,” said Lestrade. “And have the artist come down. Let’s put together as near as damnation the best portrait of this masked man that we can.”

“Something else, sir,” said Ayres. “The morgue sent this in. It’s a note they found clutched in Miss Dawson’s hand. Only a scrap of paper, scribbled with what looks like a makeup pencil. One of those things the ladies use on their eyes.” He mimed a flapping motion across his face.

“Yes, yes,” said Lestrade. “What did it say?”

“They think she might have written it between being attacked and actually dying,” said Ayres. “On account of the blood on it. Only trouble is, it doesn’t make much sense.”

Ayres withdrew a brown paper evidence bag from his inside pocket and handed it over. Lestrade teased open the edges and peered in, twisting it until he could see the words scrawled on the tiny square of bloodstained paper.

“Lost yon toe,” he said. “What on earth could that mean?”

“And ain’t that an effing mystery!” boomed a jovial voice behind him.

Inspector Lestrade sighed. What was Aloysius Bent doing here?

*   *   *

“Why is it,” said Inspector Lestrade, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, “that whenever I attend a crime scene you are there, Mr. Bent? Perhaps I should have you arrested as a suspect.”

“Suspected of what?” asked Bent.

“Everything,” said Lestrade. “But chiefly, getting right on my nerves.”

Bent guffawed. Truth to tell, he could have heard everything he needed to by lurking in the hallway outside the kitchen. If that fool constable was stupid enough to leave the front door swinging open behind him, it would have been positively rude of Aloysius Bent to ignore it. But even after listening at the kitchen door a good while—and what was all this about broken barometers? He’d not quite grasped that—he couldn’t resist making an entrance to needle Lestrade. Having done so, he almost felt like giving old George a break; the inspector looked absolutely exhausted. All that Jack the Ripper business and now this. But at least Lestrade could clock off every night. With Rowena’s trial underway, Bent couldn’t see much rest in store this side of Christmas. And it would not be a very merry holiday if the Belle of the Airways ended up convicted of murder.

After the first morning in court, Bent had taken a carriage up to the East End to pay a little visit to Professor Stanford Rubicon.

The Professor of Adventure threw open the doors to his Bishopsgate complex himself; evidently, the Christmas season and the manner with which his former housekeeper had been dispatched had combined to ensure he had not yet procured a replacement maid.

“All right, Rubicon,” said Bent, stamping his feet on the doorstep and blowing on his fingers. “You got a pot of coffee on, or maybe a decanter of whisky?”

Stanford, in his usual outfit of multi-pocketed overalls pushed into shiny leather boots, glared at Bent from the doorway, his beard bristling. “You! You’re that damned journalist!”

“Calm down, Rubicon,” he sighed. “It’s me, Aloysius Bent. Saved your arse from the lost world a few months ago. Remember?”

Rubicon scrabbled in a breast pocket for a pair of wire-framed spectacles and hung them over his ears, scrutinizing the writer. “Ah! Bent! My apologies. I have a wonderful memory for names, but a shocking recollection of faces.” He paused. “Or is that the other way around? No matter; come in, come in. I have a pot of coffee on the go, or I would have if I could get the blasted stove to work. You wouldn’t have a look at it for me, would you?”

Like all men of academia—though once Bent had halfheartedly tried to source the provenance of Rubicon’s so-called professorship, and was convinced it was merely bluster and fakery—the broad, bearded man had little knowledge of even the simplest domestic affairs.
It’s a pity his housemaid got her head sliced off,
thought Bent as he fiddled with the stove. It was merely a gas tap not fully turned on, but he shook his head and rubbed his chin. “I can see the problem, Rubicon old chap. The, ah, flange has become uncoupled from the, erm, distressor. Going to take a professional.” He smiled warmly. “Best just to break the scotch out, I’d say.”

Over generous measures poured by Bent himself, he commiserated with the Professor of Adventure over the murder of Miss Emily Dawson. He took a deep drink and said, “Makes you wonder what she was doing out there on a Friday night. That Golden Ball is renowned as a rough-arse sort of place.”

“She was coming to find me at my club,” said Rubicon, staring into the honeyed depths of his whisky. “To inform me about the burglary.”

“Ah, yes,” said Bent, watching him closely over the rim of his glass. “I had heard something about that. Makes you wonder why she didn’t alert the constabulary first before coming to find you. It was such a foul night into the bargain.”