‘You’d best get inside if you can,’ Em said, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders. ‘There’s been another murder just off Commercial Street.’
‘Poor cow.’ Cathy pulled a face. ‘Still that means the rest of us are safe tonight, doesn’t it? He’s not likely to have another go, is he?’ She laughed. ‘I dunno about you, but I reckon all this murdering must really take it out of him. I can hardly walk up the street these days without thinking I’m going to die from exhaustion so Gawd knows how he feels after he’s done all this slashing and strangling.’
Em sighed but she could stop herself smiling. ‘Even so…’
‘Besides, I know who he is,’ Cathy continued, tapping the side of her large nose. ‘I seen him.’
Emma stared at her. ‘No, you never,’ she said flatly.
Cathy looked indignant. ‘Yes, I bloody well did,’ she said. ‘I seen him on the night Poll was killed, talking to her on the High Street.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Emma said, looking around nervously. ‘Why didn’t you go to the police.’
Cathy shrugged. ‘Why do you think?’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, I’d best be off or I’ll never make enough to get some kip tonight. My head hurts something awful now. Bloody police.’ She gave my hair one last lingering and rather wistful pat, waved rather vaguely to us both then staggered off up gloomy Duke Street, tunelessly humming to herself and straightening her black straw bonnet as she went.
‘Will she be alright?’ I asked as we stood for a moment together, watching her go, giggling a little to herself as she tripped over a kerb.
Emma sighed. ‘Course she will,’ she said, turning away. ‘Cathy always lands on her feet. She was one of the first friends that I made here when I came back from France.’ We carried on walking up the street. I was feeling almost completely sober now and was beginning to think wistfully of home and my own warm bed. Emma gave me a sidelong look. ‘Still fancy that drink or should I be getting you back home?’ she said with a smile.
I sighed. ‘You won’t think me very boring if I want to go back?’ I said shyly.
Emma grinned and nudged me with her elbow. ‘Course not,’ she said. ‘We should do this again though. It was fun.’
I grinned back at her. ‘It was.’ And in it’s own way it was, it really was. Behind us we heard a woman’s high pitched gurgling laugh and I gave Em a look. ‘Sounds like Cathy’s found a customer,’ I said. ‘Didn’t take her long.’
‘No, it didn’t.’ Emma turned and looked uneasily over her shoulder to where we had last seen Cathy, drunk and singing softly to herself as she took off down the street. ‘Maybe we should just…’ She broke off and turned back the way we had come.
As usual I hurried to keep up with her. ‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong do you?’ I said as I hopped along at her side. ‘You said yourself that she knows how to look after herself.’
‘I know what I said,’ Emma said grimly. ‘It just seems odd, that’s all. Something doesn’t feel right.’ She gestured around the dark, quiet street. ‘This place is virtually deserted and yet she found someone right away?’ We’d reached the top of Duke Street and she pushed me back with her arm so that we both stayed out of sight. ‘I just want to be certain, that’s all,’ she whispered to me with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, ‘and then we can both go home and sleep it all off.’
‘The man you saw with Annie,’ I said, feeling my heart begin to pound painfully in my chest at the very thought of him, ‘you don’t really think that he is…’
Emma shook her head, still with that same uneasy look about her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ she said. ‘I just want to make sure she’s alright, that’s all.’ She took my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘But as long as we stick together he can’t touch us, can he? That’s what’s going to keep us safe. It’s just one man with a knife and there’s two of us, remember that.’
‘Cathy was on her own,’ I said quietly. ‘We should have made her come along with us.’
Emma shrugged. ‘Maybe we should but remember that she needed to make money to pay for a bed for the night,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Me and you can stay together because we don’t need to make money on the streets but what are the tarts supposed to do? They can hardly go about in pairs, can they?’ She gave me a sly look that I didn’t quite understand but guessed alluded to things that she considered me too young and innocent to comprehend. ‘Well, not most of the time anyway.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, more haughtily than I had perhaps intended.
Emma gave me a lop sided smile. ‘No, you wouldn’t, would you.’ She sighed then after peeping around the corner pulled me down the dark street, which was overlooked on both sides by tall old houses with wooden shuttered windows. ‘Just follow me and keep your voice down,’ she whispered urgently as we crept along, keeping close to the wall. ‘If she’s entertaining an actual client then she won’t thank us for interrupting.’
I decided not to answer that but instead stayed close to Emma as she sidled quietly down Duke Street until we came to the entrance to Church Passage, a narrow and very gloomy alleyway that led down to Mitre Square. ‘You don’t think she’s down there, do you?’ I whispered to Emma, praying that she wouldn’t insist that we went down the passage, which looked very dark and daunting in the gloom and reeked of urine and other filth.
‘I don’t know.’ Emma took a step forward then hesitated, clearly as unwilling as me to go down the fetid and very unpleasant alley. ‘Let’s try one of the other ways into the square. There’s another passage from the market on St James Place and, failing that, we can go in through the Mitre Street entrance.’
I stared at her, impressed by her apparently unending knowledge of the local streets and alleyways. ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked, trying to keep my astonishment out of my voice.
Emma grinned at me and tapped her head. ‘It’s all in here,’ she said. ‘I dunno, I just like to walk about, that’s all and I tend to remember stuff as well. It used to drive my sisters and brother mad when I was at home.’ She’d never mentioned her siblings before and I was about to open my mouth to ask about them when she gave a quick shake of her head and put one finger, which smelt of gin and tobacco, to my lips. ‘Later,’ she said.
We carried on up Duke Street then took a left turn on to St James Place, a small square with a few empty stalls left standing around the edges and heaps of refuse littering the cobbles where it had been swept away then forgotten after a day’s trading. ‘It stinks, doesn’t it?’ Emma said, holding her nose in a theatrical manner. ‘Still, you should come down here in the summer. There’s flies everywhere then. And worse.’ She led the way across the square, weaving in between the stalls and occasionally kicking away a festering cabbage until we reached the arched entrance to another passageway, this one shorter and less forbidding than the other.
‘After you,’ she said with a grin as we both hesitated at the edge, drawing whatever courage we had remaining to us from the flickering greenish light cast by the gas street lamp beside us. ‘No?’ She shrugged and took a step into the gloom. ‘Fair enough.’
I took a deep breath then followed her, staying as close as I could as the darkness closed in around us. In the distance I could see the pathetically meagre gleam of another street lamp standing close to the other end of the passage but it did little to relieve the fearful, dank murkiness that surrounded us as we tiptoed towards Mitre Square. Knowing that it was unwise to speak, I let my mind race with thoughts - some wild and panicky, others more rational but none the less tainted with purest fear. Mostly I just wondered what on earth we were doing as after all Cathy was no doubt already long gone and safely on her way back to Whitechapel with fourpence jingling in her pocket and a jaunty song on her lips. It seemed senseless really to be creeping about in dark alleyways when there was a murderer who knew at least one of us by sight on the loose somewhere nearby and one woman already slaughtered that night.
Emma had reached the end of the passage and turned to me to put her finger to her lips in warning. Her face looked pale and sickly in the dim green light cast by the nearby street lamp and her eyes were wide with apprehension. ‘Wait,’ she whispered before stepped out on to the square, keeping close to the wall until she reached the railings close to the passage entrance.
I hesitated for just a moment before following her, my heart pounding with fright as I hid behind her in the shadow of the railing and peered across the murk to the other far corner of the square which had no street lamp and was cast into darkness. ‘He’s there,’ she whispered, her breath warm against my cheek. ‘Can’t you see him?’
I followed the direction of her gaze, past the green glow of the street lamp in front of us to the dark corner across the way which was overlooked by a pair of wooden gates that led presumably to a yard and a large redbrick warehouse with ‘HORNER & CO’ written boldly on the wall in white paint. The entire square, possibly once elegant in times now long gone forever was overlooked on all sides by hulking smoke blackened warehouses with a few boarded up and empty houses scattered in between. It was a miserable spot - no doubt bustling with life and activity during the day but desolate and abandoned at night.
It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow which really only served to light up the immediately surrounding area and plunge everything any further away than that in even deeper gloom and at first I couldn’t hear anything that suggested that we were not alone in the square. ‘Where..?’ I began but Emma shook her head angrily.
‘Listen,’ she hissed and so I did until the distant sounds of the sleeping city: the melancholy wail of a train whistle, a couple drunkenly squabbling on the next street, dogs barking, a baby crying all faded away to be replaced by the dank and heavy nothingness of Mitre Square. ‘Just listen.’
I closed my eyes then and suddenly it came to me - first Emma’s ragged breathing beside me then the dip of a breeze as it brushed past my face and then finally the faintest scrape of metal across brick and a soft sound half way between a gasp and a moan. My eyes snapped open, a cloud moved across the moon and I saw him then just as Emma did and as she had done all those months ago in Calais: the black shape of a man, outlined like a silhouette against the velvety darkness as he leaned over the splayed out body of a woman, her hand flung out helplessly against the cobbles, her skirts pulled up almost to her waist and a silvery grey coil of intestines thrown across her shoulder. If it was Cathy then very little remained to identify her now for he had sliced off her nose, slashed at her face and was even now cutting at one of her ears as if trying to remove it.
My first instinct was to cry out in fear and disgust but Emma as always was too quick for me and before I’d even realised what I had seen, her hand was fastened firmly across my mouth and she was holding me tight against her body as her eyes pleaded with me to keep quiet. ‘Hush now, Cora,’ she whispered. ‘Hush now.’ I struggled against her but that only made her hold me tighter as if she didn’t trust me not to run across the square or scream the place down, alerting him to our presence.
It was at that moment that we heard a dull tread of feet to our left which let us know that someone was making their way steadily and without concern down Church Passage. It alerted the square’s other inhabitant as well for a second later we heard a muffled exclamation as he straightened up and looked down almost regretfully at the body spreadeagled on the ground. There was no time to hide and as the footsteps came closer, Emma and I in one accord moved back and pressed ourselves though a small gap in the railings, then turned our faces away from the lamp’s miserable glow.
The man crossed the square towards us, not exactly unhurried but not running either and I felt my blood turn to ice within my veins as his footsteps came closer then paused for a second as he stopped for a moment by the lamp to look back over his shoulder at his work. He then carried on at a quicker pace up the passageway that we had just come down, passing so close to us that I could almost feel the whisk of his coat as he went past, the heat of the blood being pumped around his body, the crackling of his energy. I could almost smell him and I was sure that he could smell us too but even though I expected him to stop, to hesitate then come towards us, he did not.
Emma leaned against me with a sigh as we listened to his footsteps hurrying up the narrow cobbled alleyway to freedom and I knew that she felt as sick and faint with trepidation as I did. I quickly took hold of her hand to reassure her but before I could say anything the mysterious interruptor had arrived in Mitre Square, mere seconds after the killer had vanished out of it. He paused for a moment beneath the lamp at the end of Church Passage and I saw with much relief that it was a City policeman, looking tired and bored after a long night on the beat as he wearily opened the shutter on his hand held lamp to cast a light around the square.
‘Let’s go,’ Emma whispered to me as he slowly circled the light towards the far corner where Cathy’s body lay sprawled on the cobbles. ‘We can’t be found here, Cora. There’d be too many questions.’
I nodded agreement and moved stealthily but as quickly as I dared, the cold sweat of purest fear trickling slowly between my shoulder blades, towards the entrance to the passageway with Emma following close behind, panting and stumbling as she went. We’d just made it to the relative safety of the alley’s darkness before all hell broke out in the square as the unfortunate bobby’s lamplight fell on the body and he gave a spluttering cry of fear then rushed in a horrified panic towards it, blowing his whistle in short shrill blasts as he went.
‘Run! Now!’ Emma whispered to me, giving me a little shove in the small of my back that sent me hurtling up the passageway as fast as my legs could carry me. ‘Don’t look back, Cora. Don’t ever look back.’
‘But what if,’ I gasped, bunching my skirts above my knees so that they wouldn’t hamper my flight, ‘what if he’s up there waiting for us?’ He’d gone up the same passage only a few moments before us after all so it was entirely plausible that he was still there, lurking in the darkness, waiting for us to appear. Waiting with his knife.
‘Never mind that,’ she said as we burst out of the passage together and found ourselves back in St James’ Place, which was mercifully empty but slowly coming to life as the policeman’s shouts and whistle blows woke up the few residents, making them turn up their gas lamps and stumble, yawning and tousle haired out of bed and to their windows to see what was happening. ‘We can’t stay here,’ Emma whispered, grabbing my hand and tugging me back the way we had come to Duke Street.
We didn’t stop running until we were back on Houndsgate, where Emma let go of my hand and doubled over, clutching her arms around her stomach and panting with exertion. I leaned against a wall and silently watched her, ignoring the painful lurch of my own stomach and the terrible trembling of my legs. ‘Well?’ I said at last, feeling suddenly utterly exhausted and longing more than ever for the safety of my own bed, for the comforting presence of my sister Cat. ‘What happens now?’ My tone was almost pleading as I expected her to reassure me, to have a plan, to put things right. After all, if anyone could solve this, it was Emma. ‘What are we going to do?’
She met my eyes and shook her head despairingly, reading my thoughts and knowing that she was going to have to let me down. ‘I haven’t got a bloody clue what we are going to do,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty Two, Alice, November 1888
The elegant Brennan house on Eaton House was already full to the rafters by the time we arrived, fashionably late as always, for Lucasta’s birthday ball. The weather had taken a distinctly chilly turn over the last couple of days and I shivered as I handed my fur edged stole over to one of the maids waiting in the marble floored hallway, which was lined with beautiful Greek statues brought back by Lord Brennan from his many extended visits to the continent.
‘My dear Edwin,’ our host greeted us himself, arms so outstretched that I caught a glimpse of dark hair on his
forearms as his wrists shot past his cuffs. ‘And the lovely Miss Alice as well.’ He gave me an approving look. ‘Looking beautiful as ever. That shade of teal green really suits you, my dear and I suppose we should all be grateful that you haven’t come dressed in trousers or whatever heinously unflattering mode the ladies of the Rational Dress Society are favouring at the moment.’
I smiled and turned away with replying. I’d known Lord Brennan all my life but had never felt quite at ease with him, mainly because of the tense atmosphere that followed he and his wife wherever they went but also because in my mind he would always be ‘Lucasta’s Father’, a distant, often moody, unapproachable man who took very little interest in our childish games and ostentatiously winced whenever we laughed or sang too loudly.
‘There you are.’ It was Lucasta, glowing and lovely in pale pink silk that shimmered with mother of pearl sequins and fine gold embroidered lace. ‘Late as usual, I see.’ She tried to pout but then grinned and laughed, catching at my hand and almost dragging me into the ballroom away from our fathers who remained in the hall to discuss Lord Brennan’s latest acquisition of several warehouses in Wapping, which he was planning to lease out to various businesses. ‘Have you arranged to dance with anyone?’ she called over her shoulder.
I shook my head. ‘Of course not,’ I said as we pushed our way through a gaggle of girls standing with their cross looking mamas at the side of the room. They were tapping their feet and swaying from side to side beneath their tightly laced sugared almond coloured gowns as they wistfully watching the more fortunate girls being swept around the dance floor in a waltz by their partners.
Lucasta stopped for a moment and looked at me with one eyebrow arched. ‘Not even Patrick?’ she said in surprise.
From Whitechapel Page 24
