Throughout the testimony, Lestrade muttered about opening up Pandora’s Box. It was almost certain the only connection between the Whitechapel Murderer and his victims came at the point of their deaths, but the police investigation could not afford to overlook the possibility that these were pre-meditated killings of specific women. Back in Commercial Street, Abberline, Thick and the others were assembling and cross-referencing biographies, more exhaustively detailed than any life of a great statesman, of Nichols, Chapman and Schön. If any connection could be established between the women, beyond the fact that they were all vampire prostitutes, then that might lead to their killer.
As the inquest, commenced in the early afternoon, proceeded into the evening, Baxter had turned his attention to Schön’s doings on the night of her death. Geschwitz, face red from a recent feeding, said Lulu had left their attic some time between three and four in the morning. The body had been discovered by Constable George Neve, walking his beat shortly after six. After finishing Lulu, presumably in plain sight on Chicksand Street, the murderer had dumped her on the doorstep of a basement flat. A family of Polish Jews, of whom only the littlest child could speak anything approaching English, had been inside. They all stated, as translated by the tiny girl after a Yiddish babel of argument, not to have heard anything until Constable Neve roused them by practically battering down their door. Rebecca Kosminksi, the self-assured spokeswoman, was the only vampire in the family. Geneviève had seen her kind before; Melissa d’Acques, who had turned Chandagnac, was one. Rebecca might live to become the all-powerful matriarch of her extended clan, but she would never grow up.
Lestrade fidgeted throughout, describing it cruelly as ‘comedy relief ’. He would rather have been out combing the crime scene than sitting on a hardwood bench made for the tough bottoms and short legs of twelve-year-olds, but he could not get in Fred Abberline’s way too often. He gloomily told Geneviève that Baxter was known for the length of his inquests. The coroner’s approach was characterised by an obsessive, not to say tedious, insistence on dragging out irrelevant details and the flamboyant off-handedness of his summings-up. In his closing remarks on Anne Chapman, Baxter had invented the theory, on the basis of gossip overheard at the Middlesex Hospital, that an American doctor was either the murderer or the employer of the murderer. The unknown doctor, researching the physiognomy of the un-dead, was rumoured to have offered twenty guineas for a fresh vampire heart. There had been a brief flurry of activity as Abberline tried to locate the foreigner, but it turned out vampire hearts, mainly somewhat damaged, could be unethically purchased from mortuaries for as little as sixpence.
Baxter had adjourned before midnight, and reconvened the inquest this morning. Now evidence from the post-mortem was available, and today’s business mainly concerned a succession of medical men, all of whom had crammed themselves into Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary Mortuary to examine the mortal remains of Lulu Schön.
First came Dr George Bagster Phillips, the H Division Police Surgeon – well known at Toynbee Hall – who had done the preliminary examination of the body in Chicksand Street and performed the more detailed post-mortem. It boiled down to the simple facts that Lulu Schön had been heart-stabbed, disembowelled and decapitated. It took much desk-banging to quieten the outrage that followed these not unexpected revelations.
By law, inquests had to be held in public places and be open to the press. From the several appearances Geneviève had made as a witness in connection with the deaths of paupers in Toynbee Hall beds, she knew the only audience was usually a bored stringer from the Central News Agency, with the occasional friend or relation of the deceased. But the lecture hall was even more thickly populated today than it had been yesterday, the benches as heavily burdened as if Con Donovan were on the stage, rematching with Monk for the Featherweight Title. Aside from the reporters hogging the front row, Geneviève noticed a gaggle of haggard mainly un-dead women in colourful dresses, a scattering of well-dressed men, some of Lestrade’s uniformed juniors, and a sprinkling of sensation-seekers, clergymen and social reformers.
In the centre of the room, spaces all around unoccupied despite the surplus of attendees, sat a long-haired vampire warrior. Not a new-born, he wore the uniform, including a steel breastplate, of the Prince Consort’s Own Carpathian Guard, augmented by a tasselled fez. His face was withered white parchment but his eyes, blood-red marbles set in the dead waste of skin, constantly twitched.
‘Do you know who that is?’ Lestrade asked.
Geneviève did. ‘Kostaki, one of Vlad Tepes’s hangers-on.’
‘That sort gives me the creeps,’ commented the new-born detective. ‘The elders.’
Geneviève almost laughed. Kostaki was younger than she. His presence was almost certainly not due to mere curiosity. The Palace was taking an interest in Silver Knife.
‘People die every night in Whitechapel, in ways Vlad Tepes couldn’t devise, or live lives worse than any death,’ Geneviève said, ‘yet from one year’s end to the next, London pretends we’re as remote as Borneo. But give them a handful of gory murders and you can’t move for sightseers and prurient philanthropists.’
‘Maybe some good will come of it,’ Lestrade commented.
Dr Bagster Phillips was thanked and dismissed, and Baxter called for Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.CL., LL.D., F.R.S., etc. A dignified, smooth-faced man of fifty, obviously once handsome, approached the lectern and took the oath.
‘Whenever a vampire’s killed,’ Lestrade explained, ‘Jekyll comes creeping round. Something rum about him, if you get my drift...’
The scientific researcher, who first gave a detailed and anatomically precise description of the atrocities, was warm only in the sense that he was not a vampire. Dr Jekyll was self-controlled to a point that suggested a disturbing lack of empathy with the human subject of the inquest, but Geneviève listened with interest – certainly more than that expressed by the yawning reporters in the front row – to the comments Baxter solicited from him.
‘We have not learned enough about the precise changes in the human metabolism that accompany the so-called “turn” from normal life to the un-dead state. Precise information is hard to come by, and superstition hangs like a London fog over the subject. My studies have been checked by official indifference, even hostility. We could all benefit from research. Perhaps the divisions which lead to tragic incidents like the death of this girl could then be erased from our society.’
The anarchists were grumbling again. Without divisions, their cause would have no purpose.
‘Too much of what we believe about vampirism is sheer folklore,’ Dr Jekyll continued. ‘The stake through the heart, the silver scythe. The vampire corpus is remarkably resilient, but any major breach of the vital organs seems to produce true death, as here.’