Elizabeth hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “I think there’s something else I’d better attend to.”
“Off you go, then. I’m going back to my boat just now, but I’ll see you all at half past seven.”
Once they boarded the train for the ride back to the hotel, Elizabeth sat down next to Susan Cohen, who had fished a paperback out of her purse and was reading with an intensity that suggested she might orbit the city for hours if no one made her get off at the right stop.
“What made you decide to take this tour?” Elizabeth asked, with a certain satisfaction at interrupting Susan for a change.
“Crime. England. Sounded good,” said Susan, turning a page.
“So you didn’t know Rowan before we started?” She gave a deprecating little laugh. “You’re not his ex-wife or anything?”
When Susan looked up from her book, her face was a study in astonishment. “I’m not anybody’s ex-wife. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason.” She tried a new tack. “Isn’t it a shame that Martha was unable to continue the tour? It must have been a bad fall. I saw her when you helped her into the hotel. Were you with her when it happened?”
“Pretty close,” said Susan. “I spoke to her as we started off the curb-and she said something and went on. I didn’t see her fall, though. We were in a big crowd.”
“Hmm. Was anybody else from the tour there?”
“I didn’t see anybody. Why?”
Elizabeth smiled. “I just wondered. I was thinking about sending a get-well card to Emma Smith and telling her what we’ve been up to since she left. If she has food poisoning, it’s lucky that we all didn’t come down with it. You haven’t been feeling ill, have you?”
“I’m fine. I don’t see how it could have been food poisoning. I was sitting right next to her at the dinner in St. Ives-and we ordered the same thing.”
“Well,” said Elizabeth, “you never know.”
“Is anybody else sick?” She looked around the car for another seat to move to. “You aren’t, are you?”
“I’m fine,” Elizabeth assured her. “Except for that nasty shock I got from the light switch in my room.” Which should have been your room, she finished silently.
Susan went back to reading her book and Elizabeth left her alone. As the train clattered on in the darkness, she stared up at the map of the Underground, lost in thought.
When Elizabeth returned to her hotel, the desk clerk hailed her and informed her that she had a letter. She seized it eagerly, hoping for a message from Cameron, but the stamps were British and the address an unfamiliar one in Yorkshire. When she reached her room, she read the message, at once remembering Rowan’s promise that his friend would answer her question. It said:
Dear Madam:
An old reprobate of my acquaintance, Rowan Rover, has asked me to reply to your question on the fate of Constance Kent, not because he respects my superior skills in scholarship, but because he is too lazy to attend to it personally. However, a small matter of a burned cushion in his aquatic residence impels me to be generous, and I shall now set your mind at rest concerning the matter of the tragic young lady from Rode. I assume that if you have studied the case in enough detail to be concerned about her fate, you have surmised her innocence.
At her trial Constance Kent was condemned to death for her crime, but popular sympathy (perhaps people were not without their suspicions) persuaded Her Majesty’s Government to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. Constance served twenty years of this sentence, which would still leave her just under forty, and by all accounts she was a model prisoner, serving first in the prison laundry and later in the infirmary. Interestingly enough, her father died in 1872 while she was still in prison, but still she did not recant her confession. In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. Or perhaps she doubted that anyone would believe her. Of course, he left no deathbed confession to free her, the selfish old trout!
For news of her whereabouts after her release from Fulham Prison in 1885, I rely on Bernard Taylor’s account in his 1979 book Cruelly Murdered. He maintains that Constance changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye (Emilie was her middle name) and emigrated to Australia. She served as a nurse from 1890 until 1932, later founding a nurses’ home. When she died in 1944, she was one hundred years old. I believe she is the only convicted murderer ever to receive the congratulatory birthday telegram from the monarch.
I hope this has set your mind at rest. Please give my regards to R.R. and tell him that I am always happy to be of service in his little schemes, in return for a berth on his Love Boat. It is less painful than agreeing with his Ripper theories.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth O’Connor
At twenty minutes past seven that evening, Rowan Rover was slouched in the doorway of a news agent’s shop near the Whitechapel tube station, smoking his fifth cigarette. Any moment now the mystery tour members-what was left of them-would emerge from the tube station, jovial and ready for an evening of nostalgic mayhem.
“I am following in the footsteps of a man who killed five women and was never caught,” he muttered. “Surely I can manage one!”
It was the perfect setting: a series of dark, somewhat dangerous streets in an area that he knew perfectly well, while none of the others had ever been there. Every advantage was his. Except for the fact that his heart was pounding like a ten-shilling pocket watch and his skin crawled with cold sweat. For the first time he wondered what it had felt like to be Jack the Ripper. He had always imagined the mad killer bristling with excitement, breathing heavily at the prospect of his evening’s sport, sliding through the dark streets of Whitechapel with a song in his throat. Somehow Rowan had neglected to think of the victims in any way at all except as costumed clay pigeons, necessary to the game. Suddenly he was forced to picture them as real people, with personalities and families, and with a pathetic innocence of the evil that stalked them, denying their humanity. Perhaps the Ripper’s indifference toward his victims came from the fact that they were strangers. Susan Cohen, as irritating as she was, had become all too real to her intended assassin. He even knew the names of her cats, for God’s sake! He should have killed her early on, he thought, when she was just a face in the crowd. He fingered the metal cosh in his pocket, a gift from an old burglar acquaintance. Now he would probably need months of counseling or gallons of good Scotch to recover from the horrors of this evening’s ordeal. Fortunately, he reflected, he would be able to afford them.
When the first members of the group emerged from the tube station, chattering and laughing, as unaware as lambs to the slaughter, he went to meet them with a heavy heart and a plaster smile.
“Good evening, ladies and Charles. Welcome to the Jack the Ripper tour. Shall we proceed?”
Alice MacKenzie was wearing her new wool shawl from Wales. Frances Coles was sticking to her side as if Alice could protect her from any spectral Ripper who might descend on them. Maud Marsh and Kate Conway looked brightly inquisitive about the evening walk, not quite belying their boredom with historical crime. The Warrens were fiddling with camera attachments and Elizabeth MacPherson was looking about her with narrowed eyes as if she thought there was a chance of catching the killer this evening. Susan Cohen, in her blasted navy coat, made her way to the front of the group, nattering about some bookshop she’d found in Bloomsbury. No one was listening. He wondered whether to keep her near him at the front of the group or let her fall back in order to divert suspicion when the accident occurred.