A pretty, silly-ish girl, not unlike a young Florence. All the men mooned around her. Pamela had not liked her, but Penelope, a child then, doted on the girl. He realised that his former fiancée styled her hair like Lucy’s. It made her look less like her cousin.
‘Jack loved her,’ Geneviève said. ‘That was what drew him in with the Van Helsing circle. What happened must have driven him out of his wits. I should have realised. He calls her Lucy.’
‘Her?’
‘His vampire mistress. It’s not her real name, but it’s what he calls her.’
Geneviève was sorting through the extended drawer of a stout filing cabinet, flicking past individual files with a nimble finger.
‘As for Kelly,’ she said, ‘we have lots of Kellys on our books. But only one who fits Jack’s requirements.’
She handed him a sheet of paper, the details of a patient’s treatment. Kelly, Mary Jane. 13 Miller’s Court.
Geneviève’s face was ash-grey.
‘That’s the name,’ she said. ‘Mary Jane Kelly.’
54
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
On November the 9th, 1888, Geneviève Dieudonné and Charles Beauregard left Toynbee Hall at almost precisely four ante meridiem. Dawn was still hours off, the moon clouded over. The fog, although slightly thinned, was sufficient to impair even a vampire’s night-sight. Nevertheless, their journey was accomplished swiftly.
Geneviève and Beauregard proceeded along Commercial Street, turned west into Dorset Street by the Britannia, a public house, and sought out the address they had for Mary Jane Kelly. Miller’s Court was accessible through a narrow brick archway on the north side of Dorset Street, between Number 26 and a chandler’s shop.
Neither took much note of a rag-wrapped personage huddled just inside the court, assuming him to be a tramp. Dorset Street was referred to locally as ‘Dosset Street’, because of the number of vagrants attracted to the temporary lodgings, or ‘doss houses’, offered there. It was common for those who lacked the fourpence for a bed to sleep rough. In actuality, the personage was Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and he was not sleeping.
Geneviève and Beauregard expended a few moments on determining which doorway gave entrance to Number 13, a single-room dwelling at the ground-floor back of 26 Dorset Street. They were drawn by a line of thin red firelight spilling on to the doorstep.
The quarter-hour had not yet sounded. By the time of their arrival, Dr John Seward had been at his work for more than two hours. The door of 13 Miller’s Court was not locked.
55
FUCKING HELL!
Charles swore, fighting to keep his breath. Geneviève, no shock to spare for his surprising vocabulary, had to agree with him.
The greasy smell of dead blood hit her like a bullet in the belly. She had to hold the doorframe to keep from fainting. She had seen the leavings of murderers before; and blood-muddied battlefields, and plague holes, and torture chambers, and execution sites. 13 Miller’s Court was the worst of all.
Jack Seward knelt in the middle of a ruin barely recognisable as a human being. He was still working, apron and shirtsleeves dyed red. His silver scalpel flickered in the firelight.
Mary Kelly’s room was cramped: a bed, a chair, a fireplace, and barely enough floor to walk around them. Jack’s operation had spread the girl across the bed and the floor, and up the walls to the height of three feet. The cheap muslin curtains were speckled with halfpenny-sized dots. There was a mirror, its dusty glass marked with bloody splashes. In the grate, a bundle of clothes burned, casting a red light that seared into Geneviève’s night-sensitive eyes.
Jack was not overly concerned with their intrusion.
‘Nearly done,’ he said, easing out something from a pie-shaped expanse that had been a face. ‘I have to be sure Lucy is dead. Van Helsing says her soul will not rest until she is truly dead.’
He was calm, not ranting. He performed his butchery with a surgeon’s precision. In his mind, there was purpose.
‘There,’ Jack said. ‘She is delivered. God is merciful.’
Charles had his pistol out and aimed. His hand was trembling. ‘Put down the knife and step away from her,’ he said.
Jack placed the knife on the bedspread and stood up, wiping his hands on an already-bloody patch of apron.
‘See, she is at peace,’ Jack said. ‘Sleep well, Lucy my love.’
Mary Jane Kelly was truly dead. Geneviève had no doubt about that.
‘It’s over,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve beaten him. We’ve defeated the Count. The contagion cannot spread.’
Geneviève had nothing to say. Her stomach was still a tight fist. Jack seemed to notice her for the first time.
‘Lucy,’ he said, alarmed. He was seeing someone else, somewhere else. ‘Lucy, it was all for you...’
He bent to pick up his silver scalpel and Charles shot him in the shoulder. He spun around, fingers grasping air, and slammed against the mantel. He pressed his gloved hand to the wall and sank downwards, knees protruding as he tried to make his body shrink. Jack was huddled, holding his wound. The shot had gone completely through and torn the murder out of him.
Geneviève snatched the scalpel away from the bed. Its silver blade made her itch, so she shifted to hold it by the enamelled grip. It was such a small thing to have done so much hurt.
‘We have to get him out of here,’ Charles said. ‘A mob would tear him apart.’
Geneviève hauled Jack upright and between them they managed him into the courtyard. His clothes were tacky from the drying gore.
It was nearing morning, and Geneviève was suddenly tired. The cold air did not dispel the throbbing in her head. The image of 13 Miller’s Court was imprinted in her mind like a photograph upon paper. She would never, she thought, lose it.
Jack was easy to manipulate. He would walk with them to a police station, or to Hell.
56
LORD JACK
It had been dizzyingly hot inside Mary Jane Kelly’s room; the chill of the court was sobering. Once out of the charnel house, Beauregard realised that though the mystery was solved, he was faced with a quandary. The women were dead, Seward hopelessly mad. What justice would be served by turning him over to Lestrade? In whose interests was he to act now? Sir Charles Warren’s, by letting the police take credit for an arrest? The Prince Consort’s, by turning over another vanquished foe to the spikes outside the Palace?
‘He bit me,’ the Ripper said, remembering some trivial incident, ‘the madman bit me.’ Seward held out his gloved, swollen hand. Blood was pooled in the palm.
‘Vlad Tepes will make him immortal, just so he can torture him forever,’ Geneviève said.
Someone came out of the chandler’s shop and stood in the archway. Beauregard saw red eyes in the dark and made out the silhouette of a big man in a check ulster and a billycock hat. How much had this vampire witnessed? He stepped into the court.
‘Well done, sir. You’ve put an end to Jack the Ripper.’
It was Sergeant Dravot from the Diogenes Club.
‘All along, sir, there were two murderers, working together,’ said Dravot. ‘It should have been obvious.’
The world was spinning again, the cobbles beneath him falling away. Beauregard did not know where it would stop.
Dravot bent down and whipped a ragged blanket away from a human bundle that had been shoved into a corner. A dead white face stared up, lips drawn back in a last snarl.