Ripping Time

Chapter Twelve

The smell of tension was thick in Kit's nostrils as he threaded his way through Edo Castletown, answering a call from Robert Li to meet him for the antics at Primary and to ask his expert opinion on a recent aquisition he'd made. So Kit abandoned several stacks of bills and government forms in his office at the Neo Edo Hotel and set out, curious about what the antiquities dealer might have stumbled across this time and wondering what new horror Primary's cycle might bring onto the station.

Kit had never seen a bigger crowd for a gate opening and that was saying a lot, after being caught in the jam-packed mass of humanity which had come to see the last cycling of the Britannia. Kiosks that hadn't existed just a week previously cluttered the once-wide thoroughfares of Commons, overflowing into Edo Castletown from its border with Victoria Station. Their owners hawked crimson-spattered t-shirts and tote bags, Ripper-suspect profiles, biographies and recent photos of the victims, anything and everything enterprising vendors thought might sell.

Humanity, he thought darkly—watching a giggling woman in her fifties plunking down a wad of twenties for a set of commemorative china plates with hand-painted portraits of victims, suspects, police investigators, and crime scenes—humanity is a sick species.

"Is she honestly going to display those hideous things in her house?"

Kit glanced around at the sound of a familiar voice at his elbow. Ann Vinh Mulhaney was gazing in disgust at the woman buying the plates.

"Hello, Ann. And I think the answer's yes. I'm betting she'll not only display them, she'll put them right out in the middle of her china hutch."

Ann gave a mock shudder. "God, Ripperoons... You wouldn't believe the last class of them I had to cope with." She glanced up at Kit, who gave her a sardonic smile. Kit had seen it all—and then some. "On second thought, you probably would believe it. Have you seen Sven yet? He came up before I did."

"No, I just got here. Robert said something about finding a spot to watch Primary go and said he wanted my opinion on something."

"Really?" Ann's eyes glinted with sudden interest. "That something wouldn't have anything to do with Peg Ames, would it?"

Kit blinked. "Good God. Have I missed something?"

Ann laughed, pulling loose the elastic band holding her long dark hair, and shrugged the gleaming tresses over one shoulder. She'd clearly just come from class, since she still wore a twin-holster rig with a beautiful pair of Royal Irish Constabulary Webley revolvers. Unlike the big military Webleys, which came open on a top-break hinge for reloading and were massive in size, the little RIC Webley was a solid-frame double-action that loaded like the American single-action Army revolver through a gate in the side, and came in a short-barrelled, concealable version popular with many time tourists heading to London. At .442 caliber, they packed a decent punch and were easier to hide than the much larger standard Webleys. Kit had shot them several times during his down-time escapades—and had cut his finger more than once on the second trigger, a needle-type spur projecting down behind the main trigger.

As she pocketed her hair band, Ann glanced side-long at Kit. "You really have been moping with Margo gone, haven't you? Honestly, Kit, they've been thick as mosquitoes in a swamp for days. Rumor has it," and she winked, "that Peg had a line on a Greek bronze that was going up for auction in London and Robert was just about nuts, trying to find somebody to snitch it quietly for him the night the auction warehouse goes up in smoke. Or rather, went up in smoke. It burned the night of Polly Nichols' murder, in a Shadwell dry-dock fire."

Kit grinned as he escorted Ann through the crowds. Robert Li was engaged in an ongoing, passionate love affair with any and all Greek bronzes. "I hope he gets it. Peg Ames will make him the happiest man in La-La Land if he can lay hands on another one for his collection."

The IFARTS agent and resident antiquarian had personally rescued from destruction a collection of ancient bronzes that most up-time museum directors would've gnashed their teeth over, had they known about them. Rescuing artwork from destruction was perfectly legal, of course, and constituted one of the major exceptions to the first law of time travel. Collectors who salvaged such art could even sell it on the open market, if they were willing to pay the astronomical taxes levied by the Bureau of Access Time Functions. Many an antiquarian and art dealer made a good living doing just that.

But Robert Li would sooner have sold his own teeth than part with an original Greek bronze, even one acquired through perfectly legitimate means. Of course, snitching one from a down-time auction warehouse before it burned did not qualify as a "legitimate" method of acquisition. To rescue a doomed piece of art, one had to rescue it during the very disaster destined to destroy it. Li was a very honest and honorable man. But when it came to any man's abiding passion, honesty occasionally went straight out the nearest available window. Certainly, many another antiquarian had tried smuggling out artwork that was not destined for down-time destruction. Hence the existence of the International Federation for Art Temporally Stolen, which tried to rescue such purloined work and return it to its proper time and place of origin. Robert Li was the station's designated IFARTS agent, a very good one. But if he had a line on a Greek bronze that was scheduled to be destroyed by some method it couldn't easily be rescued from, or one that had just disappeared mysteriously, he wouldn't be above trying to acquire it for his personal collection, whatever the means.

"Wonder which bronze?" Kit mused as they threaded their way toward Primary.

"Proserpina, actually," Robert Li's voice said from behind him.

Kit turned, startled, then grinned. "Proserpina, huh?"

"Yeah, beautiful little thing, about three feet high. Holding a pomegranate."

"Is that what you wanted to ask me about?"

The antiquities dealer chuckled and fell into step beside them. "Actually, no." He held up a cloth sack. "I wondered if you might know more about these than I do. A customer came into the shop, asked me to verify whether or not they were genuine or reproduction. He'd bought ‘em from a Templar who came through with a suitcase full of ‘em and is selling them down in Little Agora to anyone who'll pony up the bucks."

Curious, Kit opened the sack and found a pair of late twentieth-century, Desert Storm-era Israeli gas masks, capable of filtering out a variety of chemical and nerve agents.

"Somebody," Kit muttered, "has a sick sense of humor."

"Or maybe just a psychic premonition," Ann put in, eyeing the masks curiously. "It's illegal to discharge chemical agents inside a time terminal, but nothing would surprise me around here, these days."

As Kit studied the gas masks, looking for telltale signs of recent manufacture, he could hear, in the distance, the sound of live music and chanting. Startled, Kit glanced up at the chronometers. "What's going on, over toward Urbs Romae?"

"Oh, that's the Festival of Mars," Ann answered, just as Kit located the section of the overhead chronometers reserved for displaying the religious festivals scheduled in the station's timeline.

Kit smacked his forehead, belatedly recalling his promise to Ianira that he'd participate in the festival. "Damn! I was supposed to be there!"

"All the down-timers on station are participating," Robert said with a curious glance at Kit.

Ann's voice wobbled a little as she added, "Ianira was supposed to officiate, you know. They're holding the festival anyway. The way I hear it, they plan on asking the gods of war to strike down whoever's responsible for kidnapping Ianira and her family."

A chill touched Kit's spine. "With all the crazies we've got on station, that could get ugly, fast." Before he'd even finished voicing the thought, shouts and the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle broke out close by. Startled tourists in front of them scrambled in every direction. A corridor of uninhabited space opened up. Two angry groups abruptly faced one another down. Kit recognized trouble when he saw it—and this was Trouble.

Capital "T" that rhymed with "C" and that stood for Crazies.

Ann gasped. A group of women in black uniforms and honest-to-God jackboots formed an impenetrable wall along one flank, blocking any escape in that direction. Angels of Grace Militia... And opposing the Angels ranged a line of burly construction workers, the very same construction workers who'd been involved in the last station riot.

"Unchaste whores!"

"Medieval monsters!"

"Feminazis!"

"Get out of our station, bitches!"

"You're not my goddamned brothers!"

"Go back to the desert and beat up your own women, you rag-headed bastards! Leave ours alone!"

Kit had just enough time to say, "Oh, my God..."

Then the riot exploded around them.

To Margo's relief, they found the Working Lads' Institute without further incident. When the doors were finally opened for the inquest into Polly Nichols' brutal demise, the Ripper scholars and up-time reporters in her charge surged inside with the rest of the crowd. The room was so jam-packed with human bodies, not even a church mouse could have forced its way into the meeting hall. The coroner was a dandified and stylish man named Wynne Edwin Baxter, who arrived with typical flair, straight from a tour of Scandinavia, dressed to the nines in black-and-white checked trousers, a fancy white waistcoat, and a blood-red scarf. Baxter presided over the inquest with a theatrical mien, asking the police surgeon, Dr. Llewellyn, to report on his findings. The Welsh doctor, who had been dragged from his Whitechapel surgery to examine the remains at the police mortuary, cleared his throat with a nervous glance at the crowded hall, where reporters hung expectantly on every word spoken.

"Yes. Well. Five teeth were missing from the victim's jaw and I found a slight, ah, laceration on the tongue. A bruise ran along the lower part of the lady's jaw, down the right side of her face. This might have been caused by a fist striking her face or, ah, perhaps a thumb digging into the face. I found another bruise, circular in nature, on the left side of her face, perhaps caused by fingers pressing into her skin. On the left side of her neck, about an inch below the jaw, there was an, ah, incision." The surgeon paused and cleared his throat, a trifle pale. "An, ah, an incision, yes, below the jaw, about four inches in length, which ran from a point immediately below the ear. Another incision on this same side was, ah, circular in design, severing tissues right down to the vertebrae."

A concerted gasp rose from the eager spectators. Reporters scribbled furiously with pencils, those being far more practical for field work than the cumbersome dip pens which required an inkwell to resupply them every few lines.

Dr. Llewellyn cleared his throat. "The large vessels of the neck, both sides, were all severed by this incision, at a length of eight inches. These cuts most certainly were inflicted by a large knife, a long-bladed weapon, moderately sharp. It was used with considerable violence..." The doctor shuddered slightly. "Yes. Well. Ah, there was no blood on the breast, either her own or the clothes, and I found no further injuries until I reached the lower portion of the poor lady's abdomen." A shocked buzz ran through the room. Victorian gentlemen did not speak about ladies' abdomens, not in public places, not anywhere else, for that matter. Dr. Llewellyn shifted uncomfortably. "Some two to three inches from the left side of the belly, I discovered a jagged wound, very deep, the tissues of the abdomen completely cut through. Several other, ah, incisions ran across the abdomen as well, and three or four more which ran vertically down the right side. These were inflicted, as I said, by a knife used violently and thrust downward. The injuries were from left to right and may possibly have been done by an, ah, left-handed person, yes, and all were without doubt committed with the same instrument."

A reporter near the front of the packed room shouted, "Dr. Llewellyn! Then you believe the killer must have stood in front of his victim, held her by the jaw with his right hand, struck with the knife in his left?"

"Ah, yes, that would seem to be indicated."

Having watched the brutal attack in Buck's Row via video camera, Margo knew that was wrong. James Maybrick had strangled his victim, then shoved her to the ground and ripped her open with the knife gripped in his right hand. Criminologists had long suspected that would be the case, just from the coroners' descriptions of wound placement and surviving crime scene and mortuary photos. But in London of 1888, the entire science of forensics was in its infancy and criminal psychology hadn't even been invented yet, never mind profiling of serial killers.

"Dr. Llewellyn..."

The inquest erupted into a fury of shouted questions and demands for further information, witness names, descriptions, anything. It came out that a coffee-stall keeper named John Morgan had actually seen Polly Nichols shortly before her death, a mere three minutes' walk from Buck's Row where she'd died. Morgan said, "She were in the company of a man she called Jim, sir."

Whether or not this "Jim" had been James Maybrick, Margo didn't know and neither did anybody else, since they hadn't rigged a camera at Morgan's coffee stall. But the description Morgan gave didn't match Maybrick's features, so it might well have been another "Jim" who'd bought what poor Polly had been selling, as well as her final cup of bitter, early-morning coffee. If, in fact, Morgan wasn't making up the whole story, just to gain the momentary glory of police and reporters fawning over him for details.

Margo sighed. People don't change much, do they?

Once the inquest meeting broke up, Margo and Doug Tanglewood parted company. Tanglewood and the reporters, accompanied by Pavel Kostenka and Conroy Melvyn, set out in pursuit of the mysterious doctor they'd captured on video working with James Maybrick. Margo and her remaining charge, Shahdi Feroz, plunged into the shadowy world inhabited by London's twelve-hundred prostitutes.

"I want to walk the entire murder area," Shahdi said quietly as they set out alone. Most of this lay in the heart of Whitechapel, straying only once into the district of London known as The City. Margo glanced at the older woman, curious.

"Why the whole area now? We'll be rigging surveillance on each site."

Shahdi Feroz gave Margo a wan smile. "It will be important to my work to get a feel for the spatial relationships, the geography of the killing zone. What stands where, how the pattern of traffic flows through or past the murder sites. Where Maybrick and his unknown accomplice might meet their victims. Where the prostitutes troll for their customers."

When Margo gave her a puzzled stare, she said, "I want to learn as much as I can about the world the prostitutes live in. To me, that is the important question, the conditions and geography of their social setting, how they lived and worked as well as where and why they died. This is more important than the forensics of the evidence. The basic forensics were known then; what is not known is how these women were treated by the police sent undercover to protect them, or how these women coped with the terror and the stress of having to continue working with such a monstrous killer loose among them. We have studied such things in the modern world, of course; but never in Victorian England. The social rules were so very different, here, where even the chair legs are covered with draperies and referred to as limbs, even by women who sell their bodies for money. It is this world I need to understand. I have worked in middle class London and in areas of wealth, but never in the East End."

Margo nodded. That made sense. "All right. Buck's Row, we've seen already. You want to do the murder sites in numerical order, by the pattern of the actual attacks? Or take them as we come to them, geographically? And what about the murder sites on the question list? The ones we're not sure whether they were Jack's or not? Like the Whitehall torso," she added with a shudder. The armless, legless, headless woman's body, hacked to pieces and left in the cellar of the partially constructed New Scotland Yard building on Whitehall, would be discovered in October, during the month-long lull between confirmed Ripper strikes.

"Yes," Shahdi Feroz said slowly, narrowing her eyes slightly as she considered the question. "With two men working in tandem, it would be good, I think, to check all the murder sites, not just the five traditionally ascribed to the Ripper. And I believe we should take the sites in order of the murders, as well. We will follow the killer's movements through the territory he staked out for himself. Perhaps we might come to understand more of his mind, doing this, as well as how he might have met his victims. Or rather, how they met their victims, since there are two of them working together." Her smile was rueful. "I did not expect to have the chance to study such a dynamic in this particular case. It complicates matters immensely."

Even Margo, with no training in psychology or criminal social dynamics, could understand that. "Okay, next stop, Hanbury Street." Margo intended to get a good look at the yard behind number twenty-nine Hanbury. Seven days from now, she'd be slipping into that yard under cover of darkness, to set up the Ripper Watch team's surveillance equipment.

Number twenty-nine Hanbury proved to be a broken-down tenement in sooty brick. It housed seventeen souls, several of whom were employed in a nearby cigar factory. It was a working-man's tenement, not a doss house where the homeless flopped for the night. Two doors led in from the street. One took residents into the house proper and another led directly to the yard behind the squat brick structure. Margo and Shahdi Feroz chose this second door, opening it with a creaking groan of rusting hinges. The noise startled Margo.

And brought instant attention from an older woman who leaned out a second-story window. "Where d'you think you're going, eh?" the irate resident shouted down. "I know your kind, missies! How many times I got to tell your kind o' girls, keep out me yard! Don't want nuffink to do wiv the likes o' you round me very own ‘ouse! Go on wiv you, now, get on!"

Caught red-handed trying to sneak into the yard, Margo did the only thing she could do, the one thing any East End hussy would've been expected to do. She let the door close with a bang and shouted back up, "It's me gormless father I'm after, nuffink else! Lager lout's said ‘e ‘ad a job, workin' down to Lime'ouse docks, an' where do I see ‘im, but coming out the Blue Boy public ‘ouse, ‘at's where! Followed ‘im I did, wiv me ma, ‘ere. Sore ‘im climb over the fence into this ‘ere yard. You seen ‘im, lady? You do, an' you shout for a bottle an' stopper, y'hear?"

"Don't you go tellin' an old woman any of your bloody Jackanories! Off wiv you, or I'll call for that copper me own self!"

"Ah, come on, ma," Margo said loudly to Shahdi Feroz, taking her arm, "senile owd git ain't no use. We'll catch ‘im, ‘e gots to come ‘ome sometime, ain't ‘e?"

As soon as they had gained enough distance, Shahdi Feroz cast a curious glance over her shoulder. "How in the world will Annie Chapman slip through that door with seventeen people asleep in the house and nobody hear a thing?"

Margo shot the scholar an intent glance. "Good question. Maybe one of the working girls got tired of having that busybody interfere with using a perfectly suitable business location? One of them could've poured lamp oil on the hinges?"

"It's entirely possible," Dr. Feroz said thoughtfully. "Pity we haven't the resources to put twenty-four hour surveillance on that door for the next week. That was quick thinking, by the way," she added with a brief smile. "When she shouted like that, I very nearly lost my footing. I had no idea what to say. All I could imagine was being placed in jail." She shivered, leaving Margo to wonder if she'd ever seen the inside of a down-time gaol, or if she just had a vivid imagination. Margo, for one, had no intention of discovering what a Victorian jail cell looked like, certainly not from the inside. She had far too vivid a memory of sixteenth-century Portuguese ones.

"Huh," she muttered. "When you're caught stealing the cookies, the only defense is a counterattack with a healthy dose of misdirection."

Shahdi Feroz smiled. "And were you caught stealing the cookies often, my dear Miss Smith?"

Margo thrust away memory of too many beatings and didn't answer.

"Miss Smith?"

Margo knew that tone. That was the Something's wrong, can I help? tone people used when they'd inadvertently bumped too close to something Margo didn't want bumped. So she said briskly, "Let's see, next stop is Dorset Street, where Elizabeth Stride was killed in Dutfield's Yard. We shouldn't have any trouble getting in there, at least. Mr. Dutfield has moved his construction yard, so the whole place has been deserted for months." She very carefully did not look at Shahdi Feroz.

The older woman studied her for a long, dangerous moment more, then sighed.

Margo relaxed. She'd let it go, thank God. Margo didn't want to share those particular memories with anyone, not even Malcolm or Kit. Especially Malcolm or Kit. She realized that Shahdi Feroz, like so many others since it had happened, meant well; but raking it all up again wouldn't help anyone or solve anything. So she kept up a steady stream of chatter about nothing whatsoever as her most useful barrier to well-intentioned prying. She talked all the way down Brick Lane and Osborn Street, across Whitechapel Road, down Plumber Street, past jammed wagon traffic on Commercial Road, clear down to Berner Street, which left her badly out of breath, since Berner Street was all the way across the depth of Whitechapel parish from number twenty-nine Hanbury.

Dutfield's Yard was a deserted, open square which could be reached only by an eighteen-foot alleyway leading in from Berner Street. A double gate between wooden posts boasted a wooden gate to the right and a wicker gate to the left, to be used when the main gate was closed. White lettering on the wooden gate proclaimed the yard as the property of W. Hindley, Sack Manufacturer and A. Dutfield, Van and Cart Builder. The wicker gate creaked when Margo pushed it open and stepped through. She held it for Shahdi Feroz, who lifted her skirts clear of the rubbish blown against the base by wind from the previous night's storm.

The alleyway, a dreary, dim passage even in daylight, was bordered on the north by the International Workers' Educational Club and to the south by three artisans' houses, remodeled from older, existing structures. Once into the yard proper, Margo found herself surrounded by decaying old buildings. To the west lay the sack factory, where men and teenaged boys could be seen at work through dull, soot-grimed windows. Beside the abandoned cart factory stood a dusty, dilapidated stable which clearly hadn't been used since Arthur Dutfield had moved his business to Pinchin Street. Terraced cottages to the south closed in the yard completely. The odor of tobacco wafted into the yard from these cottages, where cigarettes were being assembled by hand, using sweatshop labor. The whir of sewing machines, operated by foot treadles, floated through a couple of open windows in one of the cottages; a small sign announced that this establishment was home to two separate tailors. The rear windows of the two-story, barn-like International Workers' Educational Club overlooked the yard, looming above it as the major feature closing in this tiny, isolated bit of real estate. The club, a hotbed of radical political activity and renowned for its Jewish ownership, also served as a major community center for educational and cultural events.

Standing in the center of the empty construction yard, Margo gazed thoughtfully at the rear windows of the popular hall. "Bold as brass, wasn't he?" she muttered.

Shahdi Feroz was studying the yard's only access, the eighteen-foot blind alley. She glanced up, first at Margo, then at the windows Margo was gazing at. "Yes," the scholar agreed. "The hall was—will be—filled with people that night."

It would be the Association's secretary, in fact, jeweler Louis Diemshutz, who would discover Elizabeth Stride's body some four weeks hence. Margo frowned slowly as she gazed, narrow-eyed, at the ranks of windows in the popular meeting hall. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that he chose this particular spot to kill Long Liz Stride?"

Shahdi frowned. "Odd? But it is a perfectly natural spot for him to choose. It is completely isolated from the street. And it will be utterly dark, that night. What more natural place for a prostitute to take her customer than a deserted stable in an abandoned yard?"

"Yes..." Margo was trying to put a more concrete reason to the niggling feeling that this was still an odd place for Jack to have killed his victim. "But she didn't want to come back here. She was struggling to escape when Israel Schwartz saw her. Given the descriptions he gave of the two men, I'm betting it's our mystery doctor who knocked her to the ground and Maybrick who ran Schwartz off."

Shahdi turned her full attention to Margo. "You know, that has always puzzled me about Elizabeth Stride," the Ripper scholar mused. "Why she struggled. As a working prostitute, this is not in character. And she had turned down a customer earlier that evening."

Margo stared. "She had?"

Shahdi nodded. "One of the witnesses who remembered seeing her said this. That a man had approached her and she said, ‘No, not tonight.' And yet we know she needed money. She had quarreled with the man she lived with, had been seen in a doss house, admitted to a friend that she needed money. Why would she have refused one customer, then struggled when a second propositioned her? What did they discuss, that he attacked her?"

"Maybe," Margo said slowly, narrowing her eyes slightly, "she didn't need the money as much as we thought she did."

Shahdi's eyes widened. "The letters," she whispered, abruptly excited. Her eyes gleamed with quick speculation. "Perhaps these mysterious letters are worth a great deal of money, yes? Clearly, our friend the doctor is most anxious to retrieve them. And he recovered several gold sovereigns from Polly Nichols' pockets, which she must have been given by him earlier in the evening, as payment for these letters."

"Blackmail?" Margo breathed. "But blackmail against who? Whom, I mean. And if all these penniless women are being systematically hunted down because they've got somebody's valuable letters, why didn't they cash in on them? Every one of Jack's victims was drunk and soliciting just to get enough money for a four penny bed for the night."

Shahdi Feroz shook her, visibly frustrated. "I do not know. But I intend to find out!"

Margo grinned. "Me, too. Come on, let's go. My feet are freezing and it's a long walk to Mitre Square and Goulston Street."

To reach Mitre Square, they traced one of the possible routes the Ripper might have taken from Berner Street where his bloody work with Elizabeth Stride had been—would be—interrupted by Louis Diemshutz. "One thing I find interesting," Margo said as they followed Back Church Lane up to Commercial Road and from there hiked down to Aldgate High Street and Aldgate proper, further west. "He knew the area. Knew it well enough to pull a stunt like switching police jurisdictions after getting away from Dutfield's Yard. He knew he was going to kill again. So he deliberately left Whitechapel and Metropolitan Police jurisdiction and hunted his second victim over in The City proper, where The City police didn't get on with Scotland Yard at all."

The "City of London" was a tiny district of government buildings in the very heart of London. Fiercely independent, The City maintained its own Lord Mayor and its own police force, its own laws and jurisdictions, separate from the rest of London proper, and was exceedingly jealous about maintaining its autonomy. It was confusing from the get-go, particularly to up-time visitors. In the case of Jack the Ripper's murder spree on the night of September 30^th, it would confuse the devil out of London's two rival constabularies, as well. And it would lead to destruction of vital evidence by bickering police officials trying to keep the East End from exploding into anti-Semitic riots.

"That," Shahdi mused, "or he simply didn't meet Catharine Eddowes until he'd reached The City's jurisdiction. She had just been released from jail and was heading east, while Jack was presumably heading west."

"Well, even if he did just happen to meet her in The City, he doubled back into Whitechapel again, so it'd be the Metropolitan Police who found the apron he left for them under his chalked message, not constables from The City police. Somehow, Maybrick doesn't strike me as quite that clever."

"Perhaps, perhaps not," Shahdi said thoughtfully. "But one thing is quite clear. Our doctor is very clever. How has he managed, I wonder, to work so closely with Mr. Maybrick, yet keep all mention of himself out of Maybrick's incriminating diary?"

"Yeah. And why did Maybrick write a diary like that at all? I mean, that's tempting fate just a little too much, isn't it? His wife knew he was married to another woman, that he was a bigamist and having other affairs, probably with his own maidservants. At Florie's trial, everybody commented on how gorgeous all the Maybrick maids were. Florie might have gone looking for clues to who the other women were and found the diary. Or one of those nosy maids might have. They certainly helped themselves to Mrs. Maybrick's clothes and jewelry."

Shahdi Feroz was shaking her head in disagreement. "Yes, they did, but you may not realize that Maybrick kept his study locked at all times with a padlock. He kept the only key and straightened the room himself. Very peculiar for a businessman of the time. And he threatened to kill a clerk who nearly discovered something incriminating. Presumably the diary, itself. As to why he wrote the diary, many serial killers have a profound need to confess their crimes. A compulsion to be caught. It is why they play taunting games with the police, with letters and clues. A serial killer is under terrible pressure to murder his victims. By writing down his deeds, he can relieve some of this pressure, as well as relive the terrible thrill and excitement of the crime. Maybrick is not alone, in this. The risk of being caught, either through the diary or at the crime scene, is as addictive to the serial killer as the murder itself, is."

"God, that's really sick!" Margo gulped back nausea.

Shahdi nodded, eyes grim. "Maybrick's diary has always rung with authenticity on many levels. To forge such a thing, a person would have needed to comprehend a vast array of information, technical and scientific skills ranging from psychopathic serial killer psychology to the forensics of ink and handwriting and linguistic styles. No, I never believed the diary to be a forgery, even before we taped Mr. Maybrick killing Polly Nichols, although many of my colleagues have believed it to be, ever since it was discovered in the twentieth century. The thing I find most intriguing, however, is his silence in the diary about this doctor who works with him. Through the whole diary, he names people quite freely, including doctors he has consulted, both in Liverpool and London. Why, then, no mention of this doctor?"

"He mentions a doctor in London?" Margo said eagerly. "That's the guy, then!"

"No," Shahdi shook her head. "There are records of this doctor. He does not fit the age or physical description profile of the man on our video. I had already thought of this, of course, but we brought with us downloaded copies of everything known on this case. It is not the same man."

"Oh." Margo couldn't hide the disappointment in her voice.

Shahdi smiled. "It was a good thought, my dear. Ah, this is where we turn for Mitre Square."

They had to dodge heavy freight wagon traffic across Aldgate to reach Mitre Street, from which they could take one of the two access routes into the Square. This was a rectangle of buildings almost entirely closed in on four sides by tall warehouses, private residences, and a Jewish Synagogue. The only ways in and out lay along a narrow inlet off Mitre Street and through a covered alleyway called Church Passage, which ran from Duke Street directly beneath a building, as so many odd little streets and narrow lanes in London did. Empty working men's cottages rose several stories along one side of the square. School children's voices could be heard in one corner, reciting lessons through the open windows of a small boarding school for working families with enough income to give their children a chance at a better future.

As they studied the layout of the narrow square, a door to one of the private houses opened. A policeman in uniform paused to kiss a woman in a plain morning dress. "Good day, m'dearie, an' keep the doors locked up, what with that maniac running about loose, cutting ladies' throats. I'll be back in time for supper."

"Do take care, won't you?"

"Ah, Mrs. Pearse, I always take care on a beat, you know that."

"Mr. Pearse," his wife touched his face, "I worry about you out there, say what you will. I'll have supper waiting."

Margo stared, not so much because Mr. and Mrs. Pearse had addressed one another so formally. That was standard Victorian practice, using the formal address rather than first names in public. The reason Margo stared was because Mr. Pearse was a police constable. "My God," Margo whispered. "Right across the street from a constable's house!"

Shahdi Feroz was also studying the policeman's house with great interest. "Yes. Most interesting, isn't it? Playing cat and mouse with the constables on the very night he was nearly caught at Dutfield's Yard. Giving the police a calculated insult. I am willing to bet on this. Maybrick hated Inspector Abberline already, by the night of the double murder."

"And one of them had already started sending those taunting letters to the press, too," Margo muttered. "No wonder the handwriting on the Dear Boss letters and note didn't match Maybrick's. This mysterious doctor of ours must have written them."

Shahdi Feroz gave Margo a startled stare. "Yes, of course! Which raises very intriguing questions, Miss Smith, most intriguing questions. Such letters are almost always sent by the killer to taunt police with his power. Yet the letters do not match Maybrick's handwriting, even though they use the American phrases Maybrick certainly would have known."

"Like the word boss," Margo nodded. "Or the term ‘red stuff' which isn't any kind of Britishism. But Maybrick didn't need to disguise his handwriting, because Maybrick didn't send them, the doctor did. But why?" Margo wondered. "I mean, why would he write letters taunting the police using language deliberately couched to sound like an American had written them? Or somebody who'd been to America?"

Shahdi's eyes widened. "Because," she said in an excited whisper, "he meant to betray James Maybrick!"

Margo's mouth came open. "My God! He sent them to frame his partner? To make sure Maybrick was hanged? But... surely Maybrick would've turned him in, if he'd been arrested? Which he wasn't, of course. Maybrick dies of arsenic poisoning next spring." Margo blinked, thoughts racing. "Does this mean something happens to the partner? To stop him from turning Maybrick over to the police?"

Shahdi Feroz was staring at Margo. "A very good question, my dear. We must find out who this mysterious doctor is!"

"You're telling me! The sooner the better. We've only got a week before he kills Annie Chapman." Margo was staring absently at the building across the square, while something niggled the back of her mind, some little detail she was missing. "If he knew the East End as well as I'm guessing—" She broke off as it hit her, what she was seeing. "Oh, my God! Look at that! The Great Synagogue! Another Jewish connection! First the Jewish Workingmen's Educational Club, then he kills Catharine Eddowes practically on the doorstep of a synagogue. And then he chalks anti-Semitic graffiti on a tenement wall on Goulston Street!"

Shahdi stared at the synagogue across Mitre Square. "Do you realize, this has never been noticed before? That a synagogue stood in Mitre Square? I am impressed, Miss Smith. Very much impressed. A double message, with one killing, leaving her between a policeman's home and a Jewish holy place of worship. A triple message, if one considers the taunt to police represented in his crossing police jurisdictions to chalk his message of hatred."

Margo shivered. "Yeah. All this gives me the screaming willies. He's smart. And that's scary as hell."

"My dear," Shahdi said very softly, "all psychopathic serial murderers are terrifying. If only we could only eliminate the abuse and poverty and social sickness that create such creatures..." She shook her head. "But that would leave the ones we cannot explain, except through biology or a willful choice to pursue evil pleasure at the expense of others' lives."

"No matter how you look at it," Margo muttered, "when you get down to it, human beings aren't really much better than killer plains apes, are they? Just a thin sugar-coating of civilization to make ‘em look prettier." Margo couldn't disguise the bitterness in her voice. She'd had enough experience with human savagery to last a lifetime. And she wasn't even eighteen years old yet.

Shahdi's eyes had gone round. "Whatever has happened to you, my dear, to make you say such things at so young an age?"

Margo opened her mouth to bite out a sharp reply; then managed to bite her tongue at the last instant. "I've been to New York," she said, instead, voice rough. "It stinks. Almost worse than this." She waved a hand at the poorly dressed, hard-working people bustling past, at the women loitering in Church Passage, women eyeing the men who passed, at the ragged children playing in the gutter outside the Sir John Cass School, children whose parents couldn't afford to send them for an education, children who couldn't even manage to be accepted as charity pupils, as Catharine Eddowes had been many years previously, whose parents kept them out of compulsory public-sector schools in defiance of the new laws, to earn a little extra cash. How many of those dirty-faced little girls tossing a ball to one another would be walking the streets in just a few years, selling themselves for enough money to buy a loaf of bread and a cupful of gin?

They left Mitre Square and headed east once more, crossing back into Metropolitan Police jurisdiction, and made their way up Middlesex Street, jammed with the clothing stalls which had given the street its nickname of Petticoat Lane. Margo and Shahdi pushed their way through the crowd, recording the whole scene on their scout logs. Women bargained prices lower on used petticoats, mended bodices and skirts, on dresses and shawls and woolen undergarments called combinations, while men poked through piles of trousers, work shirts, and sturdy boots. Children shouted and begged for cheap tin toys their mothers usually couldn't afford. And men loitered in clusters, muttering in angry tones that "somefink ought to be done, is wot I says. We got no gas lamps in the streets, it's dark as pitch, so's anybody might be murdered by a cutthroat. And them constables, now, over to H Division, wot they care about us, eh? Me own shop was robbed three times last week in broad daylight by them little bastards from the Nichol, and where was a constable, I ask you? Don't care a fig for us, they don't. Ain't nobody gives a fig for us, down ‘ere in the East End..."

And further along, "Goin' to be riots in the streets again, that's wot, mate, goin' to be riots in the streets again, an' they don't give us a decent livin' wage down to docks. I got a brother in a factory, puts in twelve hours a day, six days a week, an' don't bring ‘ome but hog an' sixpence a week, t' feed a wife an' five children. God ‘elp if ‘e comes down ill, God ‘elp, I say. Me own sister-in-law might ‘ave to walk the streets like that poor Polly Nichols, corse I can't feed ‘er, neither, nor ‘er starvin' dustpan lids, I got seven o' me own an' the shipyard don't pay me much over a groat more'n me brother brings ‘ome..."

Margo cut across to Bell Lane, just to get away from the press of unwashed bodies and the miasma of sweat and dirt and despair rising from them, then led the way north along Crispin to Dorset Street, one of London's most infamous thoroughfares, lined with shabby, unheated doss houses. It was even money that every second or third woman they saw on the street was up for sale at the right price. "Dosset Street," as it was nicknamed by the locals, was still half asleep despite the fact that the sun had been high over London's rooftops for hours. Many of the women who used these doss houses worked their trade until the early hours of the morning, five and six A.M., then collapsed into the first available bed and slept as late as the caretakers would let them.

Miller's Court, site of the fifth known Ripper murder, lay just off Dorset Street, through an archway just shy of Commercial Road. Directly across the street from the entrance to Miller's Court lay Crossingham's Lodging House, where Annie Chapman stayed by preference when she possessed the means. The killer had chosen his victims from a very small neighborhood, indeed.

Margo and Shahdi Feroz ducked beneath the archway, passing the chandler shop at number twenty-seven Dorset Street. This shop was owned by Mary Kelly's landlord, John McCarthy. Six little houses, each whitewashed in a vain attempt to make them look respectable, stood in the enclosed court where the final Ripper murder would take place, some three months from now. McCarthy's shop on the corner did a brisk business, it being a Friday. The younger McCarthys' voices were audible through the open windows, squabbling in a boisterous fashion.

At one of the cottage windows, a strikingly beautiful young woman with glorious strawberry blond hair leaned out the window to number thirteen. "Joseph! Come in for breakfast, love!"

Margo started violently. Then stared as a thickset man hurried across the narrow court to open the door to number thirteen. He gave the beautiful blonde girl a hearty kiss. My God! It's Mary Kelly! And her unemployed lover, the fish-porter, Joseph Barnett! Mary Kelly's laughter floated out through the open window, followed by her light, sweet voice singing a popular tune. "Only a Violet I Plucked From My Mother's Grave..." Margo shuddered. It was the same song she'd be heard singing the night of her brutal murder.

"Let's get out of here!" Margo choked out roughly. She headed for the narrow doorway that led back to Dorset Street. She had barely reached the chandler's shop when Shahdi Feroz caught up to her.

"Margo, what is it?"

Margo found dark eyes peering intently into her own. Shadows of worry darkened their depths even further. "Nothing," Margo said brusquely. "Just a little shook up, that's all. Thinking about what's going to happen to that poor girl..."

Mary Kelly had been the most savagely mutilated of all, pieces of her strewn all over the room. And nothing Margo could do, no warning Margo could give, would save her from that. She understood, in a terrible flash of understanding, how that ancient prophetess of myth, Cassandra of Troy, for whom Ianira Cassondra was named, must have felt, looking into the future and glimpsing nothing but death—with no way to change any of it. The feeling was far worse than during Margo's other down-time trips, worse, even, than she'd expected, knowing it was bound to strike at some point, during her Ripper Watch duties.

Margo met Shahdi Feroz's gaze again and forced a shrug. "It just hit me a lot harder than I expected, seeing her like that. She's so pretty and everything..."

The look Shahdi Feroz gave her left Margo's face flaming. You're young, that look said. Young and inexperienced, for all the down-time work you've done...

Well, it was true enough. She might be young, but she wasn't a shrinking violet and she wasn't a quitter, either. Memory of her parents had not and would not screw up the rest of her life! She shoved herself away from the sooty bricks of McCarthy's chandler shop. "Where did you want to go, now? Whitehall? That's where the torso will be found in October." The decapitated woman's torso, discovered between the double-event murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes and the final murder of Mary Kelly, generally wasn't thought to be a Ripper victim. The modus operandi simply wasn't the same. But with two killers working together, who knew? And of course, the rest of London would firmly believe it to be Jack's work, which would complicate their task enormously as hysteria and terror deepened throughout the city.

Shahdi Feroz, however, was shaking her head. "No, not just yet. To reach Whitehall, we must leave the East End. I have other work to do, first. I believe we should go to the doss houses along Dorset Street, listen to what the women are saying."

Margo winced at the idea of sitting in a room full of street walkers who would remind her of what she'd fought so hard to escape. "Sure," she said gamely, having to force it out through clenched teeth. "There's only about a million of ‘em to choose from."

They set out in mutual silence, walking quickly to keep warm. Margo would've faced the prospect of viewing piles of people left dead by the Black Death with less distaste than the coming interview with doss-house prostitutes. But there literally wasn't a thing she could do to get out of it. Chalk it up to the price of your training, she told herself grimly. After all, it wasn't nearly as awful as being raped by those filthy Portuguese traders and soldiers had been. She'd survived Africa. She'd survive this. Her life—and Shahdi Feroz's—might well depend on it. So she clenched her jaw and did her best to stay prepared for whatever might come next.