If enough tour guides kept getting the precise positions of the bodies wrong, as Fennix did, the Ripper’s victims would finally end up there.
* * *
The last murder turned out to have happened forty days after the previous one, in what was now a loading bay beside a multi-storey car park. This time Costain was prepared for his senses to find something terrible, but it took a while. When they finally did, as Fennix gestured wildly around the space, he initially had trouble recognizing what he saw at the foot of the bay as a person. He only got there when Ross stepped over to stare at it.
She was just a pile of meat, swaying like a mirage, her hands still flailing in the air, nothing else left of her able to communicate anything to the few who could see her. She looked like a ragged plant, fronds of blood and gore shifting at the bottom of an ocean of time. Not all of her was flesh. Some of what made up this knot was bedstead and blankets. This woman, Mary Kelly, had been killed at home, in her own bed. Costain slowly walked around her and saw her as an anatomy display, organs orbiting her, entrails endlessly wrapping around her. She was an explosion that continued: silent, hard to see. As with all the others, there was no sign of silver. Costain let himself look round, and nearly stepped back in shock when he found a solid cylinder of sheer Jack right in front of him, a knot of hatred and self-hatred and vomited sanity in the air.
‘Her neighbours heard the cry of “Murder!”, but they heard that every night! A lot of other cries too. Cries of stark passion. Cries of release. Because this was a notorious rookery, the bleak face of poverty and oppression. This time Jack had privacy, and he could take his time. She must have let him in. She must have teased him, tempted him, provoked him. He hacked away her entire face. He attacked her thighs. He opened up her abdomen. He cut out her uterus, her spleen, her liver and kidneys and her breasts and he left them here. But he also managed to do what no other man had done before, for he stole her heart away!’ Fennix spread his arms wide for a theatrical finish. ‘So who was Jack the Ripper? Someone special, that’s for sure. Perhaps the artist, Walter Sickert, who used the case as a subject for his art, including a painting suggestively titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Perhaps Sir John Williams, obstetrician to Queen Victoria’s daughter, looking into the causes of infertility in all the wrong places. Or, the most shocking possibility of all … perhaps it was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Queen Victoria’s grandson, driven mad by syphilis, with an establishment around him willing to indulge in this rich man’s … sport.’
Costain looked over to Ross. Now he could see, and perhaps it was only because he knew her, that she was shaking.
* * *
After the tour was over and Fennix had passed his top hat around to collect tips, and had signed some of the Toff masks, Costain and Ross got away and found a modern pub and a quiet table. The modernity of the establishment wasn’t at all a guarantee that there’d be nothing horrible inside — as they’d just had re-emphasized to them, London was built on horror — but it was a gesture towards control that they both needed right now.
Costain waited silently as Ross updated her notebooks, stopping, flipping back, making tiny notes on different pages as if landing a stack of mental aircraft that had been circling in her head. He knew that feeling, but she did it on a much higher level than he did. It would be so hard to put on a front to her, to fool her. He also knew the comfort that came from translating the chaos of the world into the familiar patterns used by coppers. They shared that. Finally she put her palms on the table and took a last look at the page in front of her. Then she closed the book, picked up the pint so far unattended beside her and took a long drink. ‘Fuck,’ she said.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Angry.’
He lowered his voice, indicating that he understood. ‘Yeah.’
‘Because that tour guide made so many baseless assumptions about connections between the killings. The Illuminati conspiracy, my arse. I actually don’t think we can rule out a Jewish or anti-Semite angle, because the differences between the old message and the new are indicative of something. I don’t know of what. But that twat had no idea. I don’t think the message can have been left by the killer at the time. I mean, what, he’s trying to blame the murder on the Jews while actually maintaining that he’s the murderer? Maybe that’s why the grammar got so awkward and there are crossings out. He’s standing there going, “Wait a sec, haven’t thought this through…” But in our case, like you said at the crime scene, it probably is the murderer who wrote it, so what does that mean?’
Costain laughed. ‘When I said it, it was assumption.’
‘It was. But we’ve labelled it as such now. So that’s okay.’
‘But what I meant was … you know, I started to feel pretty shitty about what that tour guide was saying-’
She was shaking her head, angry with him still. ‘You want me to be all touchy feely? Sorry, I thought we were in law enforcement.’
‘I’m just saying-’
‘Right. Four points here, I think.’ Now she was talking at high speed. ‘Firstly, the Jack the Ripper case is a trap for analysts. It feels like there’s a signal there that’s right on the edge of being heard through all the noise. Suspect doesn’t rape them when he has the chance. His interest doesn’t seem sexual. He’s clearly a misogynist, or wants us to think he’s one, but he kills quickly; he doesn’t want to torture them. He likes the thing with the intestines over the shoulder, and what does that mean? It’s completely non-archetypal. Like he’s just following his own ideas, not anything he’s read. He takes organs sometimes, and which ones he takes varies, but, given all the time in the world, he leaves loads of them behind. There are genuine suggestions of medical ability, but also random violence. And all that bollocks is what’s sucked in so many people over so many years. To no end. And it threatens to draw us in even more because, having the Sight, we think we have an advantage. But we haven’t seen a single piece of new evidence today. If we are called upon to solve the Whitechapel murders in order to get traction in these new killings, we will be doing that forever. And I’m thus going to recommend that we concentrate on our new victims and the fresh trail and keep this squarely in the background, while of course being alert to the possibility of connections. Secondly — ’ she raised a finger before Costain could interrupt — ‘my decision there is because I’m not sure there is a signal to be found. I researched the Whitechapel murders before we came here, but I didn’t keep my parameters to anything “canonical” or “written in the book of history” and, you know what? This sort of shit was just business as usual for this neighbourhood. A tourist trail of “Whitechapel violence against women” would tend towards infinity. You get killings and assaults showing many of the “Ripper” aspects, both unsolved and stone-cold solved, culprits put away or hung, for decades before, even during and for quite a few years after. So maybe “Jack the Ripper” is just … a whole culture: blokes and a desperation for money. Maybe that means what we’re dealing with in the modern version really is like those ghost ships I saw, something London thinks should be out there, not specifically created by the will of the protestors or by anyone else. Maybe our Ripper kills all the time, and people only notice when it has — and this is thirdly — changed its MO from killing poor helpless women to killing rich and powerful men. Having seen this end of the background, I’m sure that change is the single biggest data point. If we figure out what that’s about, we can nick him. And the reason I’m sure that is a change, and that we haven’t lost a few lords and dukes over the years without making the connection, is because, fourthly — ’ Ross took a breath and slowed down, and Costain now finally thought he saw, somewhere in the depths of her expression, the emotion — ‘this whole process whereby the horrible deaths of five women get turned into a narrative, where they get pinned to a map of London and displayed … it’s what I do, when I turn violence into evidence and stop feeling anything about it. And I have to do it — we all do. That tour made me start thinking about that process, and, yeah, okay, so I had a bit of a wobble and lost my objectivity for about a minute-’