Margo was, in fact, gripping a lead-filled leather sap of her own, so hard her knuckles stood out white. The shabbily dressed man following them had halted, mouth dropping open as he stared. Then he let out a bark of laughter past blackened teeth.
“Grotty-mouthed bit, ain’t yer? Don’t want no bovver, not ‘at bad, I don’t. Sooner go back to me cat an’ face me ruddy knife, so I would, after she’s copped an elephant.”
The man faded back into the darkness, his harsh laughter still floating back to them. Margo relaxed her grip on the lead-filled sap one finger joint at a time, then glanced up to discover Douglas Tanglewood hovering at her side, pistol concealed behind one hip. “Well done,” he said quietly, “if a bit theatrical. Ladies, gentlemen, we have a schedule to keep. Move along, please.”
It was only then, as Margo herded the Ripper Watch team members down the street, casting uneasy glances over her shoulder, that she noticed the open-mouthed stares from Guy Pendergast, Dominica Nosette, and—of all people—Shahdi Feroz, who broke the stunned silence first. “I am amazed! Whatever did you say to that man? It wasn’t even in English! Was it?” she added uncertainly.
Margo cleared her throat self-consciously. “Well, no, it wasn’t. That was Cockney dialect. Which isn’t exactly English, no.”
“But what did you say?” the Ripper scholar insisted. “And what did he say?”
“Well . . .” Margo tried to recall, exactly, what it was she’d actually said. “I asked him if he’d had a good look, hadn’t he ever laid eyes on a missionary doctor, and I was taking you to London Hospital. So if he laid a hand on you, I’d hit him across the ear with a sap. Told him to go away, or I’d smack him in the teeth, and told him to hurry it up. Then he said I had a dirty mouth and told me he didn’t want any trouble. Said he’d rather go home and face his wife after she’d been drinking than mix it up with me.” Margo smiled a little lamely. “Actually, he was right about the dirty mouth. Some of what I said was really awful. Bad enough, a proper lady would’ve fainted from the shock, if she’d understood half of it.”
Dominica Nosette laughed in open delight. “My dear, you are a treasure! Really, you’ve a splendid career ahead. What made you want to scout? Following in your grandfather’s footsteps, no doubt?”
Margo didn’t really want to talk about her family. Too much of it was painful. So she said, “We really shouldn’t discuss anything from up time while we’re here, Miss Nosette. That jerk started following us because he overheard what we were saying. You called Madame Feroz, there, by her professional title, which left him dangerously curious about us and the contents of her bag. There are very few women doctors in 1888 and it caught his attention. If you want to talk about scouting later, at the gatehouse, we can talk about it then, but not now. And please don’t ask so many questions about the suspects while we’re out on the streets. You-know-who hasn’t even struck yet, despite the deaths on Easter Monday and August Bank Holiday, both of which will be attributed to him by morning. And since the nickname isn’t made public in the newspapers until after September 30th, with the Dear Boss letter that’s published after the double murders, conversation on that subject should be confined strictly to the gatehouse.”
Dominica gave her one rebellious glance, then smiled sweetly. “Oh, all right. I’m sure you’re only trying to watch out for our safety, after all. But I will get that interview, Miss Smith!”
Margo didn’t know whether to feel flattered or alarmed.
Then they reached the turn-off for Buck’s Row and all conversation came to a halt as the Ripper Watch team went to work. They set up their surveillance equipment efficiently, putting in place miniature cameras, low-light systems, tiny but powerful microphones, miniaturized transmitters that would relay video and audio signals up to the rooftops and across London. They worked in silent haste, as the factory cottages terraced along the road were occupied by families who slept in the shadow of the factories where they worked such long and gruelling shifts. Conroy Melvyn had just finished putting the last connection in place when the constable assigned to this beat appeared at the narrow street’s end, sauntering their way with a suspicious glance.
“Wot’s this, then?” the policeman demanded.
“Don’t want no barney, guv,” Doug Tanglewood said quickly, “just ‘aving a bit of a bobble, ain’t we? C’mon, mates, let’s ‘ave a pint down to boozer, eh?”
“Oh, aye,” Margo grumbled, “an’ you’ll end pissed as a newt again, like as not!”
“Shut yer gob, eh? Bottle’s goin’ t’think you ain’t got no manners!”
The constable watched narrowly as Douglas Tanglewood and Margo herded the others out of Buck’s Row and back toward Whitechapel Road. But he didn’t follow, just continued along his assigned beat. Margo breathed a sigh of relief. “Whew . . .”
And did her dead-level best to keep the scholars and journalists out of trouble the whole way back to Spaldergate House, where Margo grew massively absorbed in the unfolding drama in the East End. They did a test recording, which captured a disturbance underway in one of the terraced cottages. The screaming fight which erupted on the heels of a drunken man’s return home was not in English. Or Cockney, either. Bulgarian, maybe . . . Lots of immigrants lived in the East End, so many it was hard to distinguish languages, sometimes. The fight flared to violence and breaking crockery, then subsided with a woman sobbing in despair.
The street and the houses lining it grew quiet again. The constable walked his beat past the cameras several times during the next three hours, virtually alone on the dark stretch of road where no public gas lights burned anywhere within reach of the camera pickups. The silence in the street was mirrored by a thick silence in the vault, as they waited, downing cupfuls of coffee, fidgeting with the equipment, occasionally muttering and adjusting connections. As the clock ticked steadily toward Zero-Hour, the excitement, the electric tension in the vault beneath Spaldergate House was thick enough to cut with the Ripper’s knife. Ten minutes before the earliest estimated time of death, they switched on the recording equipment, videotaping the empty stretch of cobbled street.
“Check those backup recordings,” Conroy Melvyn muttered. “Be bloody sure we’re getting multiple copies of this.”
“Number two recording.”
“Number three’s a go.”
“Four’s copying just fine.”
“Got a sound-feed problem on number five. I’m on it.”
Margo, who had nothing to do but watch the others huddle tensely over consoles, fiddling with computer controls and adjusting sound mixers, wondered with a lonely pang what Malcolm was doing and why he hadn’t returned, yet. Hours, it’d been, since he’d left on the search of London’s hospitals. How many were there in London? She didn’t know. After all the work he’d put in during the past weeks, setting up the base camp and helping the scholars learn their way around the East End, he was missing the historical moment when they would finally discover who Jack the Ripper really was. Lousy idiot of a tourist! Why Benny Catlin had chosen tonight, of all nights, to get himself into a gunfight at the Piccadilly Hotel . . .
“Oh, my God!” Pavel Koskenka’s voice sliced through the tense silence. “There they are!”
Margo’s breath caught involuntarily.
Then Jack the Ripper walked calmly into view, escorting Polly Nichols, all unknowing, to her death.
* * *
The night resembled the entire, waning summer: wet and cold. Rain slashed down frequently in sharp gusting showers which would end abruptly, leaving the streets puddled and chilly, only to pour again without warning. Thunder rumbled through the narrow cobbled streets like heavy wagon wheels laboring under a vast tonnage of transport goods. Savage flares of lightning pulsed through low-lying clouds above the wet slate rooftops of London. For the second time that night, a hellish red glow bathed the underbellies of those clouds as another dock fire raged through the East End. It was nearly two-thirty in the morning of a wet, soggy Friday, the last da
y of August.
James Maybrick paused in the puddled shadows along Whitechapel Road, where he watched the exceedingly erratic progress of the woman he had been following all evening, now. His hands, thrust deep into the pockets of his dark overcoat against the chill of the wet night, ached for the coming pleasure. His right hand curled gently around the hard wooden handle of the knife concealed in his coat’s deep pocket. He smiled and tugged down his dark felt cap, one of many caps and hats he had purchased recently in differing parts of the city, preparing for this work.
The woman he followed at a discreet distance staggered frequently against the wall as she made her way east down Whitechapel Road ahead of him. She was a small woman, barely five feet two inches in height, with small and delicate features gone blowzy and red from the alcohol she had consumed tonight. High cheekbones, dark skin, and grey eyes, framed by brown hair beginning to show the signs of age . . . She might have been anywhere from thirty to thirty-five, to look at her, but Maybrick knew her history, knew everything it was possible to discover about this small, alcoholic woman he stalked so patiently. John Lachley had told Maybrick all about Polly Nichols. About her years of living as a common whore on the streets of Whitechapel.
She was forty-four years old, this “Hooker” as the Americans in Norfolk would have called her, after the general who had supplied such women in the camps during the Civil War. Not a handsome woman, either. She must have a dreadful time luring customers to pay for the goods she offered up for sale. Polly’s teeth were slightly discolored when she smiled and just above her eyes, Polly’s dark complexion was marred by a scar on her brow. She was married, was “Polly” Nichols, married and a mother of five miserable children, God help them, to have such a mother. Mary Ann Walker, as Lachley had told him was her maiden name, had married William Nichols, subsequently left him five or six times (by William Nichols’ own disgusted admission), and had finally left him for good, abandoning her children to take up a life of itinerant work “in service” between stints in workhouses and prostitution. William, poor sod, had convinced the courts to discontinue her maintenance money by proving that she was, in fact, living as a common whore.
Not even her father, Edward Walker, a respectable blacksmith in Camberwell, had been able to live with her during her slide into the miserable creature James Maybrick stalked through this rainy and unseasonably chilly August night. Her own father had quarreled violently with her over her drunkenness, precipitating her departure from his doorstep. Her most recent home—and Maybrick curled his lip at the thought of calling such lodgings home—had been the cold, unheated rooms she’d paid for in various “doss” houses along the infamous Flower and Dean Street and the equally notorious Thrawl Street, establishments which catered primarily to destitute whores. Hundreds of such lodging houses existed in Whitechapel, some of them even permitting men and women to share a bed for the night, as scandalous a notion as that was. The “evil quarter mile” as the stretch of Commercial Road from Thrawl Street to Flower and Dean was known, had for years been vilified as the most dangerous, foul street in London.
James Maybrick knew this only too well, for he had lived, briefly, in Whitechapel during the earliest years of his career as a cotton merchant’s clerk, had met and married a pretty working girl named Sarah here, where she had still lived, unknown to the wealthy and faithless bitch he’d married many years later and settled in a fine mansion in Liverpool. Florie, the whore, had discovered Sarah’s existence not so many weeks ago, had dared demand a divorce, after what she, herself, had done with Brierly! James had laughed at her, told her to consider her own future carefully before taking such a step, to consider the massive debts she’d run up at dressmakers’ shops, debts she could not pay. If she hoped to avoid disgrace, to avoid bringing shame upon herself and her innocent children, she would jolly well indulge his appetites, leave poor Sarah in peace, and keep her mouth shut.
James had visited Sarah tonight, before arriving at Dr. Lachley’s. He had enjoyed the conjugal visit with his precious first wife, who bore his need for Florie’s money and social position stoically and lived frugally on the money Maybrick provided for her. Sarah was a good, God-fearing girl who had refused to leave Whitechapel and her only living relatives and ruin his social chances. Sarah, at least, would never have to walk these streets. Even the local Spitalfields clergy despaired of the region and its violent, criminal-minded denizens.
James Maybrick smiled into the wet night. They would not despair over one particular denizen much longer. Three and a half hours previously, he had quietly followed Polly Nichols down Whitechapel Road as she set out searching for her evening’s doss money, the four-pence needed to secure a place to sleep, and had watched from the shadows as his guide, his mentor, Dr. John Lachley, had accosted her. The disguise his marvelous teacher wore had changed his appearance remarkably, delighting James to no end, as much as the secret retreat beneath the streets had delighted him. The false theatrical beard Maybrick had obtained for him from a cheap shop in SoHo and the dye used to color it left Lachley as anonymous as the thousands of other shabbily dressed working men wandering Whitechapel, wending their way from one gin palace to the next on a drunken pub crawl.
Lachley, stepping out into Polly Nichols’ path, had smiled into her eyes. “Hello, my dear. It’s a raw evening, isn’t it?”
The doctor, whose medical treatments had left Maybrick feeling more powerful, more vigorous and invincible than he’d felt in years, glanced briefly past the whore’s shoulder to where Maybrick stood in concealment, nodding slightly to indicate that this was Polly Nichols, herself, the woman he had brought James here to help murder. Dressed in a brown linsey frock, Polly Nichols had smiled up at John Lachley with a whore’s calculating smile of greeting.
“Evening. Is a bit wet, innit?”
“A bit,” Lachley allowed. “A lady such as yourself shouldn’t be out with a bare head in such weather.”
“Ooh, now aren’t you the polite one!” She walked her fingers coyly up his arm. “Now, if I were to ‘ave the coin, I might buy me a noice, fancy bonnet and keep the rain off.”
“It just so happens,” Lachley smiled down into her brown eyes, “that I have a few coins to spare.”
She laughed lightly. “An’ what might a lady need t’do to share that wealth, eh?”
“Consider it a gift.” The physician pressed a silver florin into her palm.
She glanced down at the coin, then stared, open-mouthed, down at her grubby hand. “A florin?” This pitiful alcoholic little trollop now held in her hand a coin worth twenty-four pence: the equivalent of six times the going rate for what she was selling tonight. Or, marketed differently, six glasses of gin. Polly stared up at Lachley in sudden suspicion. “What you want t’give me an whole, entire florin for?” Greed warred with alarm in her once delicate little face.
John Lachley gave her a warm smile. “It’s a small token of appreciation. From a mutual friend. Eddy sends his regards, madam.” He doffed his rough cloth cap. “It has come to his attention that another mutual friend, a young man by the name of Morgan, loaned you a few of his personal letters. Eddy is desirous of re-reading them, you see, and asked me if I might not do him the favor of speaking with you about obtaining them this evening.”
“Eddy?” she gasped. “Oh, my! Oh, blimey, the letters!”
Deep in his pocket, Maybrick gripped the handle of his knife and smiled.
John Lachley gave the filthy little trollop a mocking little bow. “Consider the florin a promise of greater rewards to come, in appreciation of your discretion in a certain, ah, delicate matter.”
“Oh, I’m most delicate, I am, and it’s most generous of Mr. Eddy to send a token of ‘is good faith. But you see, I don’t exactly ‘ave those letters on me person, y’see. I’d ‘ave to go an’ fetch them. From the safe place I’ve been keepin’ ‘em ‘idden, y’see, for Morgan,” she added hastily.
“Of course, madam. Shall we meet again when you have obtained them? Name
the time and place and I will bring a far better reward than that paltry florin, there.”
“Oh, yes, certainly! Give me the night, say? Maybe we could meet in the morning?”
Maybrick tightened his hand on the knife handle again, in anger this time. No! He would not wait a whole day! The bitch must be punished now! Tonight! Visions of his wife, naked in her lover’s arms, tormented James Maybrick, drove him to a frenzy of hatred, instilled in him the burning desire to kill this filthy prostitute posturing in front of them as though she were someone worthy of breathing the same air they did. Polly Nichols was nothing but a blackmailing, dirty little whore . . .
“You must understand,” John Lachley was saying to her, “Eddy is most anxious to re-read his letters. I will meet you again here, later tonight, no later than, say, three-thirty in the morning. That should give you more than adequate time to fetch the letters, buy yourself something to drink at a public house and get a little something to eat, perhaps even buy yourself a nice new bonnet to keep this miserable rain off your lovely hair.”
She bobbed her head in excitement, now. “Oh, yes, that’d be fine, three-thirty in the morning, no later. I’ll be ‘ere, I will, with them letters.”
“Very good, madam.” Lachley gave her another mocking bow. “Be sure, now, to find yourself a nice bonnet, to keep out the wet. We don’t want you catching your death on a raw night like this.” Lachley’s lips twitched at the silent joke.
The doomed whore laughed brightly. “Oh, no, that would never do, would it? Did you want to go someplace dry and comfy, then?” She was caressing Lachley’s groin vulgarly.
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