Legacy of the Ripper (19 page)

"What do you mean, what I've turned into?"

"D'you mean to tell me that you still haven't caught on? Even after what I've told you? You have the soul of the Ripper within you, Jack. I knew that, which is why I ordered Michael to lace your food and drink with the Rohypnol. I knew that when the time came you'd begin your own version of the Autumn of Terror. It was just luck that brought you here to Brighton and into my sphere of influence, where I could observe and try to control the limits of your excesses. By drugging you I had thought that we could control your movements enough to prevent the deaths of any innocent victims, but I was wrong wasn't I, Jack?"

Jack's face took on a puzzled look. He had no idea what the man meant.

"I don't know what on earth you're talking about," he said. "What have I got to do with the deaths of innocent people?"

"Oh, come now, surely you can't be so naïve. There've been two murders in the town in recent weeks. Who do you think was responsible?"

"You can't seriously expect me to believe that I've killed two people without knowing anything about it. I'm not so gullible as to be taken in by a story like that. Just what the fuck are you trying to do to me?"

"Listen to me, Jack. We drugged you in the hope that we could prevent your mind, which was already teetering on the verge of murderous intent, from going over the edge. I had a feeling that after your experiences with the journal and all that it means you'd be easy fodder for the influence that emanates from its pages."

"What influence? What the hell are you talking about? How could my mind be influenced by reading the journal?"

Even as he spoke the words Jack knew that the man was correct. All the while he'd read the pages of the journal of the long dead Jack the Ripper, he'd felt that something real was contained within the yellowed pages of the ramblings of the murderer. He'd known instinctively that his Uncle Robert Cavendish must have felt the same things and that had been confirmed by Robert's own notes, inserted at various intervals between the pages. He'd suffered from the same terrible dreams that his uncle described, haunted by images of the tortured souls of the Ripper's victims and of the Ripper himself, an amorphous, wraith like entity that swirled around his mind, encroaching upon his innermost thoughts and feelings. So disturbed had Jack become after reading the journal that he'd soon realised that he needed to leave home, to be alone as he sought the truth, as his mind began to feel the extraordinary pull of the ethereal force that virtually oozed from the aged pages. He had to find a reason for what was happening to him. He'd quickly recognised the evil that lived within the journal, as though the soul of the Ripper lived on in his twisted words.

He'd truly believed that Robert's brother Mark may have held the key to solving the riddle of what had truly happened to his uncle, but with the knowledge that Mark had died, or rather had taken his own life, that hope had now been dashed. What if Mark had also fallen victim to the same aura of evil that Jack felt with certainty lay within the journal? Mark was, after all, Robert's brother and as such he would also have shared the same bloodline that now appeared to have laid its curse upon the hapless Jack. As though from nowhere, he suddenly realised that the man behind the desk was speaking to him again.

"The reason for the drugs was simple. I wanted to see what would happen if you were allowed to remain conscious, but in a controlled state. I thought that you'd be pliable, easily controlled and I gave Michael instructions as to the exact dose to administer to you, after which he was to observe what you did and report back to me.

"Unfortunately, he failed to stop you from killing the first prostitute. He foolishly thought that my orders to observe also meant that he shouldn't interfere in anything you did while under the influence of the drug. In point of fact, it served to prove that the power of the journal far outweighed the power of the drug. Can you believe it, Jack? The words contained in those pages hold a stronger power than the narcotic that flowed in your bloodstream. Words more powerful than science, just incredible!"

"I don't believe a word of it. You're lying. I didn't kill anyone!"

"Oh, but you did. Do you remember waking one morning to find that Michael appeared to have undressed you and put you to bed? That was the night of the first killing. He'd taken you home after watching what you did to that poor girl, undressed you and washed every trace of blood from your clothes, placed them in the dryer and then put them on the back of the chair. He was amazed to learn from you the next morning that you'd no idea at all what you'd done the previous night. When he told me, I was surprised and delighted. Although I'd originally intended to try and control your murderous urges I now decided to see just what you'd do if allowed to continue. As a controlling part of the experiment I made sure that Michael continued to administer the drug. Sure enough, you did it again, with no recollection at all of the killing and mutilation you'd carried out in the night. You did have some residual thoughts the second time and you reported strange nightmares, remember? You also found some bloodstains on your hands. Michael had of course cleaned and dried your clothes once again, but he told you he'd fallen and cut himself on the way home from the pub late the previous night and that you'd helped clean him up. You accepted his explanation as you were too mind-befuddled to think otherwise. You were already suffering from short term memory lapses and your mind was becoming easy to control, at least some of the time."

Jack still found the man's words impossible to believe. He couldn't possibly believe that, even allowing for the influence of the journal, he could possibly kill two women without retaining a single memory of either event.

"Listen to me," said Jack. "You have Michael bring me here, tell me I'm a murderer possessed by the soul of Jack the Ripper or something like that and yet you won't even show me your face. Tell me who you are, or offer me any proof of these things I'm supposed to have done. You must think I'm stupid."

"Oh no, not stupid, Jack. Disturbed of mind perhaps, but never stupid. You ask for proof? I made sure Michael kept a record of whatever happened while you were under the influence of the Rohypnol. Please feel under your seat and you'll find an envelope. Take it out and examine the contents in the beam of the lamp. I think you'll find it contains all the proof you require."

Jack fumbled around under his chair for a second until he felt the envelope. He quickly grabbed it and opened the flap, finding two photographs within. In the glare of the high intensity lamp, he stared with disbelief at the pictures.

The first showed him on his knees beside the bloodied body of Laura Kane, the second a similar representation of him, knife in hand beside the unfortunate Marla Hayes. His face was clearly visible, peering in the direction of the photographer, who he assumed must have been Michael.

"Little Laura Kane and Marla Hayes were both clients of Michael's. You must have known that, Jack, which made it easy for you to target and murder them. The police announced that they have a photograph of Laura with a man. Was it you, Jack? Did you wine and dine her, romance her first? Or did you just lure her with false promises and then take her to that place where you gutted the little whore?"

Jack Reid slumped in the chair as belief and grief in equal measure washed over him in a tidal wave of fear and confusion, the shaft of light from behind the man burning a path into his soul, and within seconds, his mind and his world crumbled to dust around him.

More Facts, No Clues

"Come on, Carl," said Holland to his sergeant. "We need to re-create the next Ripper killing on paper. If we can do that we may be able to figure out how our own killer's mind is working. We need an 'edge,' something that can give us an insight into his mind. If he's going to be on the prowl for his next victim tomorrow night, I want to have at least an even money chance of bringing the bastard to heel."

Carl Wright nodded and rose from his chair on the opposite side of Holland's desk. He quickly picked up the chair and carried it around to Holland's side of the desk, where he placed it down on the floor and sat next to the inspector. Together, they began painstakingly going through everything they had on the murder in 1888 of Jack the Ripper's victim, Annie Chapman.

Annie, born Eliza Anne Smith, had been born not too far from the scene of her eventual demise, in Paddington, London, in 1841. She had married a domestic coachman, John Chapman in 1869 and later gave birth to two daughters and a son, the family living at first in Bayswater and later for some time in Windsor where Chapman worked again as a coachman. Surely, of all the victims she had the greatest opportunity to enjoy a normal happy married life? Unfortunately, for reasons we are unaware of Annie abandoned her family and returned to London in 1882, shortly before the death of her daughter Emily. It is easy to assume that she'd acquired a drinking habit and that this unfortunate circumstance led to the breakdown of her marriage to the man who to all intents and purposes appeared to be as respectable a choice of husband as she could have made. Allegations of her infidelity have also been put forward as reasons for the marriage split, but no true evidence of this has been produced to date.

Certainly, it is known that John Chapman continued to support his wife until his own death from cirrhosis of the liver and dropsy in 1886, after which she appeared to have scraped a living by selling her own crochet work, selling matches or flowers and eventually, when unable to obtain money from a number of men friends who occasionally provided for her, Annie descended into prostituting herself on the streets of Whitechapel.

Her lifeless, mutilated corpse was discovered at around six a.m. on the morning of September 8th in the back yard of number twenty nine Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Her dress had been pulled up around her waist and as could be clearly seen by John Davis, the man who made the grisly find, her intestines had been draped across her left shoulder. Police surgeon Dr. George Bagster Phillips who carried out the post-mortem examination of her remains reported that the woman had been "terribly mutilated." As in the previous killings, the throat had been cut and in this case a number of the abdominal organs had been removed. The uterus, the upper portion of the vagina and part of the bladder were missing and no trace of these organs was ever found. This was, to date, by far the worst example of the Ripper's mutilations and it would have been little comfort to the relatives of the deceased to be told that she probably had little time left to live in any case due to the presence of lung disease and lesions on the brain.

Unusually in the case of a Ripper murder it was ascertained that Annie Chapman had been relieved of two brass rings which she'd been known to be wearing on the evening prior to her death. Jack the Ripper had taken trophies, so it was assumed. The rings, like her murderer were never traced. She was buried in the cemetery at Manor Park in London on Friday 14th September, her funeral being attended by members of her family.

Unfortunately, as far as Holland and Wright were concerned, the facts of the case ended there. Apart from an in-depth post-mortem report and details of the police force's failed attempts to secure the apprehension of the killer, a few witness reports which detailed the known movements of Annie Chapman in the hours leading up to her death, no further helpful information was available to the latter day detectives. Holland and Wright simultaneously leaned back in their seats, stretched almost in unison and looked at each other.

"It doesn't help us a lot, does it?" Holland volunteered to his sergeant.

"Not really, sir, no. It's typical of the whole scenario surrounding Jack the Ripper. Apart from the names of the victims and the people who were involved with them prior to their deaths and those who found the bodies, it's the same in every case. No-one saw anything, heard anything or remembered anything that might have given the police a real clue to the killer's identity. Jack the Ripper was like a phantom, a wraith who appeared out of nowhere in the dead of night and returned whence he came without leaving an evidence of his presence."

"But we know that he wasn't a bloody phantom, was he? He was a man, a blood and guts evil son of a bitch who was simply too clever for the forces of law and order as they existed at the time. I'll lay odds on the fact that someone back then did know who he was and either kept quiet out of fear or because they actually wanted to protect the bastard."

"Who the hell would have wanted to protect someone like that?"

"Who, indeed? A wife, a lover, a doting indulgent father? Who knows? But someone would have known him, Wright. They had to have done. As the police conjectured at the time, he must have been covered in blood after carrying out his mutilations. If he had a family one of his relatives must have seen the state of him after the murders, surely."

"But if he was single, sir?"

"Even then, he must have had friends, parents or siblings perhaps. There had to have been one person at least in 1888 that had a bloody good idea who the Ripper was and who, for their own reasons, kept silent about it. Either way, it doesn't help us much at all in tracking down the evil sod that's ready to go out and kill again tomorrow night, presumably in honour of the original Ripper."

"You think that's what this all about, sir? Some sort of twisted hero worship?"

"I don't really know what to think," Holland replied. "So far, our killer is proving as elusive as the original Whitechapel version. The fact that he's trying to recreate the crimes down to the exact dates is a bit of a giveaway though, don't you think, sergeant?"

"Maybe, sir, though there could be something in his motives that we haven't caught on to yet."

"You're right of course, but we have so little to go on. I suppose we're clutching at straws and they're all damn well slipping through our fingers before we can get a grip. We've got one day left before we expect him to strike again and we have no idea what he looks like, why he's really doing it, or who he's likely to target apart from the reasonable certainty that it will be another prostitute."