Sergeant Thick was minding the shop. A come-down for the detective, but a responsible position. Apparently, Lestrade was at the murder site and Abberline off duty. Kate dashed out to find Dutfield’s Yard, but Beauregard decided to stay.
‘Nothing we can do yet, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘I’ve put a dozen men out, but they’re just blundering in the fog.’
‘Surely the murderer will be covered in blood?’
Thick shrugged. ‘Not if he’s careful. Or if he wears a reversible.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Thick opened his grey tweed coat and showed a tartan interior. ‘Turns inside out. You can wear it both ways.’
‘Clever.’
‘This is a bloody messy job, Mr Beauregard.’
A couple of uniformed constables dragged in the window-smasher. Thick hauled off the struggling man’s flour-sack hood and recognised one of John Jago’s fearless Knights of Christendom. The sergeant cringed away from the Crusader’s whisky breath.
‘The unholy leeches shall be...’
Thick balled the hood and shoved it in the vandal’s mouth.
‘Lock him up and let him sleep it off,’ he ordered the constables. ‘We’ll talk about charges when the shopkeepers get up tomorrow and see what damage he’s done.’
For the first time Beauregard was at hand when the murderer was about his business, but he might as well be safe in bed in Chelsea for all he could do.
‘Headless chickens, we are, sir,’ Thick said. ‘Running around in bloody circles.’
Beauregard hefted his sword-cane, and wished the Ripper would come out and fight.
‘Cup of tea, sir?’ Thick asked.
Before Beauregard could thank the sergeant, a warm constable, out of breath, shoved through the doors. He took off his helmet, gasping.
‘What is it now, Collins? Some fresh calamity?’
‘He’s gone and done it again, sarge,’ Collins blurted. ‘Two for a penny. Two in one night.’
‘What!’
‘Liz Stride by Berner Street, now a bint called Eddowes in Mitre Square.’
‘Mitre Square. That’s off our patch. One for the City boys.’
The boundary between the jurisdictions of the Metropolitan and City Police ran through the parish. The murderer, between crimes, had crossed the border.
‘It’s almost as though he’s trying to make us look complete bollock-heads. He’ll be ripping them outside Scotland Yard next, with a note for the Commissioner written in scarlet.’
Beauregard shook his head. Another life wasted. This was no longer just a commission from the Diogenes Club. Innocent people were being killed. He felt an urgent need to do something.
‘I had the news from PC Holland, one of the City blokes. He said this Eddowes...’
‘Name of Catharine, I reckon. A familiar face around these parts. Spent more time sleeping it off in our cells than wherever she was lodging.’
‘Yeah, I reckoned it’d be Cathy,’ said Collins, pausing to look upset. ‘Any rate, Holland says the bastard finished his job this time. Not like with Liz Stride, just a slash at the throat and a scarper in the dark. He was back to his usual, and gutted her proper.’
Thick swore.
‘Poor bloody Cathy,’ Collins said. ‘She was a dreadful old tart, but she never did anyone no harm. Not real harm.’
‘Poor bloody us, more like,’ Thick said. ‘After this, unless we get him sharp-ish, it’s not going to be the easy life being a copper in this parish.’
Beauregard knew Thick was right. Ruthven would have someone important’s resignation, maybe Warren’s; and the Prince Consort would probably have to be restrained from impaling a few lower-ranking policemen, pour encourager les autres.
Another messenger appeared. It was Ned, the fleet-foot from the Café de Paris. Beauregard had given him a shilling earlier, pressing him into the service of the Diogenes Club.
Thick glowered like an ogre and the child skidded to a halt well away from him. He had been so eager to bring Beauregard a message that he had dared venture into a police station. Now, his nervousness was reasserting itself; he trod as gingerly as a mouse in a cattery.
‘Miss Reed says you’re to come to Toynbee ’All, sir. Urgent.’
24
A PREMATURE POST-MORTEM
Her eyes dry, she wrapped Lily in a sheet. The corpse was already rotting, face withering on to the skull like an orange left too long in the bowl. The girl would have to be removed to quicklime and a pauper’s grave before the smell became too bad to bear. The job of winding done, Geneviève would have to fill out a certificate of death for Jack Seward to sign and draft an account for the Hall’s files. Whenever anyone died about her, another grain of ice clung to her heart. It would be easy to become a monster of callousness. A few more centuries and she could be a match for Vlad Tepes: caring for nothing but power and hot blood in her throat.
An hour before dawn, the news came. One of the ponces, arm carved up by someone’s razor, was brought in; the crowd with him had five different versions of the story. Jack the Ripper was caught, and being held at the police station, identity concealed because he was one of the Royal Family. Jack had gutted a dozen in full view and eluded pursuers by leaping over a twenty-foot wall, springs on his boots. Jack’s face was a silver skull, his arms bloodied scythes, his breath purging fire. A constable told her the bare facts. Jack had killed. Again. First, Elizabeth Stride. And now Catharine Eddowes. Cathy! That shocked her. The other woman, she said she didn’t think she knew.
‘She was in here last month, though,’ Morrison said. ‘Liz Stride. She was turning and wanted blood to keep her going. You’d remember her if you’d met her. She was tall, and kind of foreign, Swedish. Handsome woman, once.’
‘He’s takin’ them two at a time,’ the constable said, ‘you almost have to admire him, the Devil.’
Everybody left again, for the second or third time, the crowd melting away from the Hall. Geneviève was alone in the quiet of the dawn. After a while, each fresh atrocity just added to an awful monotony. Lily had bled her dry. She had nothing more to feel. No grief left for Liz Stride or Cathy Eddowes.
As the sun rose, she fell into a doze in her chair. She was tired of keeping things together. She knew what would happen later. It had been getting worse with each murder. A troupe of whores would call, mainly in hysterical tears, begging for money to escape from the death-trap of Whitechapel. In truth, the district had been a deathtrap long before the Ripper silvered his knives.
In her half-dream, Geneviève was warm again, heart afire with anger and pain, eyes hot with righteous tears. A year before the Dark Kiss, she had cried herself empty at the news from Rouen. The English had burned Jeanne d’Arc, slandering her as a witch. At fourteen, Geneviève swore herself to the cause of the dauphin. It was a war of children, carried to bloody extremes by their guardians. Jeanne never saw her nineteenth birthday, Dauphin Charles was in his teens; even Henry of England was a child. Their quarrels should have been settled with spinning tops, not armies and sieges. Not only were the boy-kings now dead, so were their houses. Today’s France, a country as strange to her as Mongolia, did not even have a monarch. If some of the English blood of Henry IV still flowed in Victoria’s German veins, then it was also liable to have filtered down to most of the world, to Lily Mylett and Cathy Eddowes and John Jago and Arthur Morrison.
There was a commotion – another commotion – in the receiving rooms. Geneviève was expecting more injuries during the day. After the murders, there would be street brawls, vigilante victims, maybe even a lynching in the American style...