It lay beside the body in the shape of a bit of muslin cloth, possibly a handkerchief, resting next to a comb and a paper case which must have come from the slashed-open pocket under her skirt. It lay beside her feet; the two brass rings torn from her fingers, a few pennies and a couple of new farthings placed there as though in mocking payment for services rendered. It lay at her head as a piece of paper wrapped around two pills, and as part of an envelope. On the back of the envelope was the seal of a Sussex regiment, and on the other side was a London postmark dated August 28th. It lay near the water-tap across the way in the form of a wet leather apron. Pieces of a puzzle, all of them; pieces that made no more sense than the pieces of bloody flesh and internal organs that Chandler would hide from sight but not from the eyes of memory.
When the stretcher arrived the body was carried away to the mortuary by two constables and after that Abberline took charge. Reading about it now, Chandler gave thanks that his role in the affair was ended. Let Dr. Phillips fit these pieces together, or take them apart in his autopsy…
Dr. George Bagster Phillips was too busy to read anything in the papers. Too busy, and too angry.
The whole affair was disgraceful, no other word for it. Twenty-three years as a divisional surgeon of police, and still no adequate provision had been made for him to carry out his duties. How did they expect him to perform a decent examination under conditions like this?
It was bad enough that the borough didn’t have a proper public mortuary; instead he was forced to conduct his autopsy in a make-do shed, with incompetent assistance.
Incompetent? What they did before his arrival was almost criminal. Two nurses had stripped and washed the corpse, just as in the Nicholls affair. He raised a devil of a row with the clerk in charge but there was no help for it now and all he could do was set to work as best he could.
And wicked work it was. The nurses had left one article of apparel untouched — the handkerchief around the neck of the cadaver. Now, when he removed it, the head nearly came clean away. Whoever used the knife had almost succeeded in cutting through the spine.
The murderer had done a more thorough job below. The abdomen had been entirely laid open and the small intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments before being placed on the corpse’s shoulder. But the greatest damage was in the pelvic area; the uterus and its appendages, along with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed.
Obviously it was the work of someone who had enough knowledge of anatomy to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.
As for the knife itself, Dr. Phillips fancied it had to be extremely sharp; not a bayonet or an ordinary butcher’s tool. His findings indicated the use of a thin, narrow blade, probably six to eight inches long. An expert’s weapon, an expert’s skill, but a madman’s deed.
Dr. Phillips made careful notes of his discoveries for future publication in The Lancet. That’s where such information belonged, in a medical journal, not the popular press. Matters were already bad enough without stirring up morbid imaginations…
But the stirring had already started.
In the smoky confines of the Coach And Four Public House, barflies buzzed over the latest news. From early morning on patrons had stopped by to contribute gossip and theory about the “ ’Anbury Street ’Orror.” Some had actually been spectators at the scene, and several already identified the victim as Annie Chapman.
“Dark Annie” they called her, or “Annie Sievey,” seeing as how her husband, the late-lamented, had been a maker of iron sieves. No better than she should be, perhaps, but what’s a poor widow-woman to do? A bit long in the tooth for going on the game, and in and out of the infirmary as well, worse luck.
Tim Donovan said he saw her in the kitchen of the Dorset Street lodging house at two in the morning; skint, she told him, but would he hold a bed for her until she went out and found some nicker for the night? A little the worse for drink, he reckoned, but still walking straight enough as she went off.
And Mrs. Long caught sight of her as late as five-thirty. On her way to Spitalfields Market she was, when the brewer’s clock struck, so no doubt about the time. And no doubt about the man and woman she saw talking on the pavement just outside 29 ’Anbury Street. She’d paid a special visit to the mortuary since, just to ’ave a look-see; the deceased was the same woman and no mistake. Too bad she didn’t give much heed to the man, but she did catch a smidge of their words as she passed by. He said, “Will you?” and she said, “Yes.” No need to be an Oxford graduate to guess what they was up to, but it was none of her affair and she went on down the street. Just to think, if Annie copped it ’arf-an-’our later like the papers said, then she was most likely the last one to set eyes on the pore thing, outside of the murderer. God knows what the dirty devil did to her in the backyard there on ’Anbury Street!
God, and Jerry the publican. He knew because he’d put together all he heard, confiding it to his eager customers.
“They say ’er ’ead was cut clean orf ’er body.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And ’er female orgerns was removed…”
The young man in the frogged morning jacket read the first accounts of the crime while seated over breakfast in the subdued silence of the drawing room. As he scanned the report the thin mouth beneath his mustache twitched and his hands trembled.
Stop it, he told himself. You’re not a child. No reason to act the fool over a newspaper story.
But he took pains to hide the paper in his lap when Watkins brought the tea tray, and he busied himself with a silver crumb-scoop until the butler left. Thank heaven the old fool hadn’t noticed the newspaper; no one must know he read such trash, not Mama or Papa, and certainly not Grandmother. They thought they were shielding him from that sort of thing. No wonder he had to keep reminding himself he wasn’t a child — they still treated him like one.
If so, then why hadn’t they protected him better? Sending him off on that bloody cruise when he was only fifteen, and little George as well, even younger. They had been responsible.
Thinking about the cruise he found himself atremble again, but this time in anger rather than fear. Couldn’t they have foreseen what would happen? The H.M.S. Bacchante—the very name of the vessel was an omen. Warm tropical nights in the West Indies, and his shipmates all tiddly, urging him on.
“Drink up,” they said. “Be a man.” And from that to the inevitable. “You’re not a man until you’ve had a woman.”
Well, he’d had his woman. It was only a lark, slipping ashore after a word with the watch; they’d made all the arrangements in advance. Just a bit of slap-and-tickle, they said, and no harm done.
But harm it was. They didn’t know how he hated it, hated the dark woman in the dark room, hated the dark eyes laughing at him as he fumbled to perform the dark deed. And they didn’t know about the rash.
Only the doctor ever learned about the rash, and he’d kept his secret well. Only the doctor understood what it was like to fall prey to such a horror, to endure the ravages of a vile disease. Sometimes he thought he might go mad, sometimes he thought he was mad, but there was no help for it, one had to keep up appearances.
And it wasn’t hypocrisy to do so. It was they who were the hypocrites, all of them, pretending such things didn’t exist. As if everyone didn’t know about Papa and his women! Not just the actresses, or even the wives of his dearest friends — he did the deed with common courtesans in Paris and all over the Continent. What a farce! How could Papa lower himself like that? The deed itself was loathsome, and the creatures one coupled with were disgusting.