City of Shadows

Chapter 60

14 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

‘Jesus, Liam! How did you not notice all this… unrest… was going on?’ A copy of the London Packet rustled in Maddy’s hands. She’d picked up a discarded copy lying on the doorstep of a haberdasher’s on the way back to their cosy little subterranean dungeon.

She unlaced her bonnet and hung it carefully on the arm of a coat stand. ‘There’ve been riots and stuff going off all over the country!’

Liam unbuttoned his waistcoat. ‘I’ve been busy in here in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He slumped down on a creaking, spoon-backed armchair that was spilling stuffing from a popped seam on one arm. ‘Making this place a little more like a home, so I have.’

‘There’s more important things than — ’ she struggled not to curse — ‘making us comfy!’

He looked hurt. ‘I just wanted it to be nice for you two.’

Maddy’s stern gaze turned to Rashim.

‘And, uh… I’ve been making money, and of course wiring this place up.’

Maddy looked down at the paper and picked bits to read out loud. ‘… rioting in the East End: Whitechapel, Spitalfields. Riots also beginning to occur in Liverpool, Manchester.’ She skimmed the columns of small newsprint. ‘ Groups of anarchists, libertarians, troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells gathering in every city, every town, every village to protest about…’ She fell silent, skimming the words ahead, her lips moving.

‘What? Protesting about what?’

She raised a finger. ‘Just a sec… lemme finish.’

‘I have to say, I always thought Victorian Britain was supposed to be an ordered place,’ said Rashim. ‘ Disciplined, you know? The famous British stiff upper lip? That’s the right expression, isn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘Those men outside? All that anger? That naked aggression? It reminded me very much of my time. Always the riots. Every day news-streams showing a war or a food riot somewhere. Militia with guns stripping possessions from refugees.’ He shook his head. ‘That is what the end days of a failing civilization look like. It’s an ugly, sad thing.’

‘It was beginning to go that way in my time too,’ added Sal. She snorted humourlessly at something that occurred to her. ‘I should say our time.’ She looked at Liam. ‘After all, the three of us come from the same time, right? Same time, same place, same test tube?’

Liam sighed. ‘Best forget about that, Sal.’

She ignored him. ‘When exactly is our time, huh? I mean… when exactly was our particular batch of meatbots cooked up? Hmm? 2030? 2040? 2050? 20-’

‘Just let it go, Sal!’ snapped Liam irritably. ‘Why don’t you just forget about — ’

‘Because I can’t! I’m a product. So’s Maddy. So are you! I can’t forget that!’

‘No!’ He shook his head. ‘Jayzus-n-Holy-Mary, no, I’m not acting the maggot! No! I’m still who I thought I was. I’m still Liam and I’m still from Cork, Sal! And I’ll tell you something else for nothing; I’m bleedin’ well remaining that same person! Do you understand? And so you should!’ He looked self-consciously back at the others. They were staring at him, taken aback by his angry outburst.

‘Well…’ he huffed dismissively. ‘That’s all I’ve got to say about this foolish nonsense!’ He slapped the arm of the chair. ‘There! Look, I’m all angry now!’

They sat in a long and awkward silence, an old clock ticking far too noisily in the corner of the dungeon; the deep rumble of Holborn Viaduct’s generator could be heard through several brick walls, doing its clanking, rumbling best to keep the immediate surrounding street lights glowing.

‘You think what you want, Liam,’ Sal sighed. ‘It’s all lies in the end. It’s all — ’

‘Will the pair of you knock it off?’ snapped Maddy. ‘This is far more important!’ She shook the paper in her hand for emphasis. ‘This is a contamination. Right here! In this paper — a contamination!’

Sal shrugged. ‘So? It’s not like we have to fix them any more.’

‘Don’t you see, Sal? It means we’re not alone!’

Liam suddenly looked up. ‘Ah Jay-zus! Becks?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Or someone else.’ She carried on reading parts aloud. ‘… continuing riots in response to the recent shocking revelation of the Ripper’s true identity.’

‘Whitechapel! The Ripper. Jack the Ripper! You mentioned him earlier,’ said Rashim.

Liam nodded. ‘Aye, and the big mystery was they never found out who the fella was.’

‘But now it seems they have,’ replied Maddy.

‘Who is it?’ Sal said, suddenly a lot more interested in what was in the paper than she was brooding by herself.

‘A man called Lord Cathcart — Hyde. A knight of the realm,’ Maddy added, skim-reading the paper, ‘a Freemason, a member of the House of Lords, and until recently a senior member of the government.’

‘Jahulla!’ Sal sat up. ‘Seriously?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Maddy raised a finger to shush her and continued reading in silence for another couple of minutes as the others waited impatiently. Then finally she looked up at them.

‘This story’s been rumbling on for just over a month! This posh guy, Cathcart, was attempting to murder another woman.’ She consulted the article. ‘Mary Kelly.’

‘Aye! That’s it, she was the last woman to be killed by Jack the Ripper!’ said Liam.

‘In correct history, yes! But apparently she managed to fight back. Fought back and killed the man!’

‘Blimey,’ said Liam. ‘What a woman.’

‘Good for her,’ said Sal. ‘It’s not very often the good guy wins. Not in real life anyway.’

Maddy looked over the top of her glasses at them. ‘Point is, folks, she’s become a national hero over the last four weeks. That’s a big goddamn contamination! That shouldn’t have happened. And these riots that are springing up all over England are part of that contamination.’

‘Maddy is correct,’ said Bob. His deep voice rumbled with admonishment. ‘This is a major contamination and must be corrected.’

‘Thank you, Bob.’ She looked down at the paper: headlines screaming out anger and rage on behalf of the common man. Friend of Queen Hunted East End Women For Sport! Cathcart-Hyde — Evil Resides Among the Rich.

‘Those people out there are enraged. They’re out in the streets because this is, like, the final straw. One thing too many. I guess they’re seeing this as an example of the rich considering themselves above the law. That this lord guy was carving up common street women just for fun! Treating it like a… like some sort of a fox hunt!’

‘Yes.’ Rashim nodded. ‘It has escalated into a class issue.’

‘Exactly! And you heard that coffee-store guy — this is going to get worse.’ Maddy looked down at the paper. ‘It’s been a slowly escalating news story and — ’ she shook her head — ‘we’ve only just noticed it.’

Through the thick brick walls they could hear the faint roar of voices in the street outside. The barista was right, tonight trouble had spilled west towards central London. They heard a chorus of hooves on cobblestones passing by outside — mounted police called in to disperse the gathered protesters.

‘Liam? Rashim?’ Maddy sounded exasperated. ‘Jesus, didn’t either of you guys notice anything at all brewing up in the background while you were fixing things up in here? I mean, this story has been running in all the papers for the last month!’

Liam shook his head. ‘No… uh, not really, no. I didn’t read any of them papers.’

‘This last week we’ve been inside, in here,’ added Rashim, ‘mostly.’

She sighed. Faintly they heard the shrill tone of a police whistle, the neighing and stamping of uneasy horses, a chorus of male voices united in chanting some slogan. The first tinkle of breaking glass.

‘Bob, we need some more background data. Do a search on your on-board database. Use the search term “Whitechapel Murders”.’

‘Affirmative.’

Back in Harcourt Maddy had loaded him up with a dump of data pulled off the Internet about Victorian times, London in particular. It wasn’t targeted particularly cleverly: basically a ‘copy and paste’ of everything she could find online that she casually dumped into his head. Once they got round to networking the computers and had the system up and running again, she intended to have him Bluetooth the whole lot across. But right now his hard drive made him the historical expert.

‘Whitechapel,’ said Bob. His eyelids flickered as he consulted his database. ‘Information: 1888, Whitechapel murders. Also commonly referred to as the Jack the Ripper murders, and the Leather Apron murders.’

Liam nodded. ‘Aye, I remember Delbert said something about that. Said the killer’s other nickname was the Leather — ’

‘Shhhh!’ Maddy flapped a hand at Liam. She nodded at Bob to go on.

‘I will extrapolate and summarize facts from what I have.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Through the late summer and winter of 1888, a series of gruesome murders of women. Mostly prostitutes. In the terminology of this time — tarts, street ladies. There were five murders attributed to the same murderer because their methodology was strikingly similar.’

‘Methodology?’ asked Sal. ‘You mean how they were killed?’

‘Affirmative. The method of their murder. How they died,’ he replied. ‘In all five cases their throats were severed to the vertebrae; they were almost completely beheaded. Their abdomens were — ’

‘Save that for later, Bob,’ said Maddy. ‘We don’t need that detail right now.’

‘Of course.’ He resumed. ‘The post-mortem mutilations were immediately distinct, bearing a striking resemblance to Freemason rituals. After the third murder the national press was making veiled accusations that the killer might not be some commoner with basic knife-craft skills — a butcher or a fishmonger for instance — but instead some high-born figure with Masonic associations, possibly medical knowledge. The last murder attributed to the killer was a woman called Mary Kelly. Her body was discovered in Miller’s Court in the early hours of the ninth of November. The killer was never caught or identified, and no further murders were deemed similar enough in method to be attributed to the same man.

‘At the end of the twentieth century several historians considered there might be a royal connection to the murders.’ Bob paged his mind for further details. ‘Context: London in the 1880s was as close as it was ever going to come to a workers’ revolution similar in nature to the one that occurred in Russia.’

‘Well, that certainly seems true enough,’ said Rashim. He cocked an ear at the faint noises of rioting coming from Farringdon Street.

Maddy nodded. ‘Jack the Ripper should never have been identified. The ninth of November should have been the last Ripper victim and then it all stops, and becomes a mystery forevermore. Only… a month ago, ninth of November, something very different happened. The last victim killed him instead… and has now become the figurehead for a revolution.’

‘Oh boy,’ squealed SpongeBubba, ‘someone’s been naught-eee!’

Maddy could see that Bob was eager to say something. ‘You think we should intervene?’

‘This is a significant contamination. The point of contamination origin in terms of time and space is very close to us.’

‘You think we should intervene, Bob?’

‘I am not programmed to define agency policy, Maddy.’

‘Oh, cut the crud, Bob. Just speak your mind!’

‘Give him a rest, Maddy,’ said Liam. ‘He can’t do opinions. He’s not really made that way.’ He got up, wandered across the dungeon and patted Bob affectionately. ‘But we are made that way.’

She nodded at that. ‘OK… then this seems to be the first test case for our new mission parameters. That’s a pretty big change going on outside. So… I guess the way we deal with this is we check the outcome. We take a look forward in time to see where this is going to take us. And depending on what we see, we’ll have to decide whether this Mary Kelly gets to live or… you know, die.’

‘That’s kind of brutal,’ said Sal. ‘That’s a lot of judgement in our hands.’

‘Yeah… I sort of didn’t think about that bit.’ Maddy chewed her lip. ‘That kinda makes us judge, jury and executioner in this kind of situation. That’s a lot of… of power. Sheesh, I’m not sure how I feel about that. It was sort of easier when we were just following orders.’

‘There’s a quote I can think of,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t know if it helps us or not.’

‘Go on, let’s have it.’

‘With great power comes great responsibility.’

‘What is that… Shakespeare or something?’

‘Uh… no. Spider-Man.’