The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

by The Big Book of Jack the Ripper (retail) (epub)

  Thrust the scalpel into the short man’s belly. Briefly, just below the diaphragm. Then, in a single movement, swing the Japanese round by his shoulders, shield himself with him and push him towards Fandorin. The door was only two quick bounds away, and then they would see who could run faster. Not even the fierce wolfhounds of Kherson had been able to catch convict number 3576. He’d manage to get away from Mr. Collegiate Counsellor somehow.

  Help me, O Lord!

  His right hand flew forward as fast as an uncoiling spring, but the sharp blade cut nothing but air—the Japanese jumped backwards with unbelievable ease and struck the Decorator’s wrist with the edge of his hand; the scalpel went flying to the floor with a sad tinkling sound, and the Asiatic froze on the spot again, holding his arms out slightly from his sides.

  Instinct made the Decorator turn round. He saw the barrel of a revolver. Fandorin was holding the gun low, by his hip. If he fired from there, the bullet would take the top of the Decorator’s skull off and not touch the Japanese. That changed things.

  “And the joy I will bring you is this,” Fandorin continued in the same level voice, as if the conversation had never been interrupted. “I spare you the arrest, the investigation, the trial, and the inevitable verdict. You will be shot while being detained.”

  He has abandoned me. He truly has abandoned me, thought the Decorator, but this thought did not sadden him for long; it was displaced by a sudden joy. No, He has not abandoned me! He has decided to be merciful to me and is calling me, taking me to Himself! Release me now, O Lord.

  The front door creaked open and a desperate woman’s voice said: “Erast, you mustn’t!”

  The Decorator came back from the celestial heights that had been about to open to him, down to earth. He turned round curiously and in the doorway he saw a very beautiful, stately woman in a black mourning dress and a black hat with a veil. The woman had a lilac shawl on her shoulders; in one hand she was holding a package of pashka Easter dessert and in the other a garland of paper roses.

  “Angelina, why did you come back?” the Collegiate Counsellor said angrily. “I asked you to stay in the Hotel Metropole tonight!”

  A beautiful woman. She would hardly have been much more beautiful on the table, soaking in her own juices, with the petals of her body open. Only just a little bit.

  “I felt something in my heart,” the beautiful woman told Fandorin, wringing her hands. “Erast Petrovich, don’t kill him; don’t take the sin on your soul. Your soul will bend under the weight of it and snap.”

  This was interesting. Now what would the Collegiate Counsellor say?

  His cool composure had vanished without a trace; he was looking at the beautiful woman in angry confusion. The Japanese had been taken aback too: he was shaking his shaven head either at his master or his mistress with a very stupid expression.

  Well, this is a family matter; we won’t intrude. They can sort things out without our help.

  In two quick bounds the Decorator had rounded the Japanese, and then it was five steps to the door and freedom—and Fandorin couldn’t fire because the woman was too close. Goodbye, gentlemen!

  A shapely leg in a black felt boot struck the Decorator across the ankle, and the Decorator was sent sprawling, with his forehead flying towards the doorpost.

  A blow. Darkness.

  —

  Everything was ready for the trial to begin.

  The unconscious accused was sitting in an armchair in a woman’s dress, but without any hat. He had an impressive purple bump coming up on his forehead.

  The court bailiff, Masa, was standing beside him with his arms crossed on his chest.

  Erast Petrovich had appointed Angelina as the judge and taken the role of prosecutor on himself.

  But first there was an argument.

  “I can’t judge anyone,” said Angelina. “The Emperor has judges for that; let them decide if he is guilty or not. Let them pronounce sentence.”

  “What s-sentence?” Fandorin asked with a bitter laugh. He had started to stammer again after the criminal had been detained—in fact even more than before, as if he were trying to make up for lost time. “Who needs a scandalous t-trial like that? They’ll be only too glad to declare Sotsky insane and put him in a madhouse, from which he will quite definitely escape. No bars will hold a man like this. I was going to kill him, in the way one kills a mad dog, b-but you stopped me. Now decide his fate yourself, since you interfered. You know what this monster has done.”

  “What if it’s not him? Are you quite incapable of making a mistake?” Angelina protested passionately.

  “I’ll prove to you that he, and no one else, is the murderer. That’s why I’m the prosecutor. You judge f-fairly. I couldn’t find a more merciful judge for him in the whole wide world. And if you don’t want to be his judge, then go to the Metropole and don’t get in my way.”

  “No, I won’t go away,” she said; “let there be a trial. But in a trial there’s a counsel for the defence. Who’s going to defend him?”

  “I assure you that this gentleman will not allow anyone else to take on the role of counsel for the defence. He knows how to stand up for himself. Let’s begin.”

  Erast Petrovich nodded to Masa, and the valet stuck a bottle of smelling salts under the nose of the man in the chair.

  The man in the woman’s dress jerked his head and fluttered his eyelashes. The eyes were dull at first, then they turned a bright sky-blue colour and acquired intelligence. The soft features were illuminated by a good-natured smile.

  “Your name and title?” Fandorin said sternly, trespassing somewhat on the prerogatives of the chairman of the court.

  The seated man examined the scene around him. “Have you decided to play out a trial? Very well, why not. Name and title? Sotsky…former nobleman, former student, former convict number 3576. And now—nobody.”

  “Do you admit that you are guilty of committing a number of murders?” Erast Petrovich began reading from a notepad, pausing after each name: “The prostitute Emma Elizabeth Smith on the third of April 1888 on Osborne Street in London; the prostitute Martha Tabram on the seventh of August 1888 near George Yard in London; the prostitute Mary Ann Nichols on the thirty-first of August 1888 on Back Row in London; the prostitute Ann Chapman on the eighth of September 1888 on Hanbury Street in London; the prostitute Elizabeth Stride on the thirtieth of September 1888 in Berner Street in London; the prostitute Catherine Eddowes also on the thirtieth of September 1888 on Mitre Square in London; the prostitute Mary Jane Kelly on the ninth of November 1888 on Dorset Street in London; the prostitute Rose Millet on the twentieth of December 1888 on Poplar High Street in London; the prostitute Alexandra Zotova on the fifth of February 1889 in Svininsky Lane in Moscow; the beggar Marya Kosaya on the eleventh of February 1889 in Maly Tryokhsvyatsky Lane in Moscow; the prostitute Stepanida Andreichkina on the night of the third of April on Seleznyovsky Lane in Moscow; an unidentified beggar girl on the fifth of April 1889 near the Novotikhvinsk level crossing in Moscow; Court Counsellor Leontii Izhitsin and his maid Zinaida Matiushkina on the night of the fifth of April 1889 on Vozdvizhenskaya Street in Moscow; the spinster Sophia Tulipova and her nurse Pelageya Makarova on the seventh of April 1889 on Granatny Lane in Moscow; the Provincial Secretary Anisii Tulipov and the doctor Egor Zakharov on the night of the seventh of April at the Bozhedomka Cemetery in Moscow—in all eighteen people, eight of whom were killed by you in England and ten in Russia. And those are only the victims of which the investigation has certain knowledge. I repeat the question: do you admit that you are guilty of committing these crimes?”

  Fandorin’s voice seemed to have been strengthened by reading out the long list. It had become loud and resonant, as if the Collegiate Counsellor were speaking to a full courtroom. The stammer had also disappeared in some mysterious fashion.

  “Well, that, my dear Erast Petrovich, depends on the evidence,” the accused replied amiably, apparently delighted with the proposed game. “Well, let�
��s say that I don’t admit it. I’m really looking forward to hearing the opening address from the prosecution. Purely out of curiosity. Since you’ve decided to postpone my extermination.”

  “Well then, listen,” Fandorin replied sternly. He turned over the page of his notepad and continued speaking, addressing himself to Pakhomenko-Sotsky, but looking at Angelina most of the time.

  “First, the prehistory. In 1882 there was a scandal in Moscow that involved medical students and students from the Higher Courses for Women. You were the leader, the evil genius of this depraved circle and, because of that, you were the only member of it who was severely punished: you were sentenced to four years in a convict battalion—without any trial, in order to avoid publicity. You cruelly tormented unfortunate prostitutes who had no right of redress, and fate repaid you with equal cruelty. You were sent to the Kherson military prison, which is said to be more terrible than hard labour in Siberia. The year before last, following an investigation into a case of the abuse of power, the senior administrators of the punishment battalion were put on trial. But by then you were already far away…”

  Erast Petrovich hesitated and then continued after a brief pause: “I am the prosecutor and I am not obliged to seek excuses for you, but I cannot pass over in silence the fact that the final transformation of a wanton youth into a ravenous, bloodthirsty beast was facilitated by society itself. The contrast between student life and the hell of a military prison would drive absolutely anyone insane. During the first year there you killed a man in self-defence. The military court acknowledged the mitigating circumstances, but it increased your sentence to eight years and when you were sent to the guardhouse, they put shackles on you and subjected you to a long period of solitary confinement. No doubt it was owing to the inhuman conditions in which you were kept that you turned into an inhuman monster. No, Sotsky, you did not break, you did not lose your mind, you did not try to kill yourself. In order to survive, you became a different creature, with only an external resemblance to a human being. In 1886 your family, who had turned their backs on you long before, were informed that convict Sotsky had drowned in the Dnieper during an attempted escape. I sent an inquiry to the Department of Military Justice, asking if the fugitive’s body had been found. They replied that it had not. That was the answer I had been expecting. The prison administration had simply concealed the fact of your successful escape. A very common business.”

  The accused listened to Fandorin with lively interest, neither confirming what he said nor denying it.

  “Tell me, my dear prosecutor: what was it that made you start raking through the case of the long-forgotten Sotsky? Forgive me for interrupting you, but this is an informal court, although I presume the verdict will be binding and not subject to appeal.”

  “Two of the individuals who were included in the list of suspects had been your accomplices in the case of the Sadist Circle, and they mentioned your name. It turned out that forensic medical expert Zakharov, who was involved in the inquiry, had also belonged to the group. I realised straight away that the criminal could only be receiving news of the inquiry from Zakharov, and I was going to take a closer look at the people around him, but first I took the wrong path and suspected the factory-owner Burylin. Everything fitted very well.”

  “And why didn’t you suspect Zakharov himself?” Sotsky asked, in a voice that sounded almost offended. “After all, everything pointed to him, and I did everything I could to help things along.”

  “No, I couldn’t think that Zakharov was the murderer. He besmirched his name less than the others in the Sadist Circle case; he was only a passive observer of your cruel amusements. And in addition, Zakharov was frankly and aggressively cynical and that kind of character is not typical of maniacal killers. But these are circumstantial points; the main thing is that last year Zakharov only stayed in England for a month and a half, and he was in Moscow when most of the London murders took place. I checked that at the very beginning and immediately excluded him from the list of suspects. He could not have been Jack the Ripper.”

  “You and your Jack the Ripper,” said Sotsky, with an irritated twitch of his shoulder. “Well, let us suppose that while Zakharov was staying with relatives in England he read a lot in the newspapers about the Ripper and decided to continue his work in Moscow. I noticed just now that you count the number of victims in a strange manner. Investigator Izhitsin came to a different conclusion. He put thirteen corpses on the table, and you only accuse me of ten killings in Moscow. And that’s including those who died after the ‘investigative experiment’; otherwise there would only be four. Your numbers don’t add up somewhere, Mr. Prosecutor.”

  “On the contrary,” said Erast Petrovich, not even slightly perturbed by this unexpected outburst. “Of the thirteen bodies exhumed with signs of mutilation, four had been brought directly from the scene of the crime: Zotova, Marya Kosaya, Andreichkina, and the unidentified girl, and you had also not managed to process two of your February victims according to your special method—clearly, someone must have frightened you off. The other nine bodies, the most horribly mutilated of all, were extracted from anonymous graves. The Moscow police are, of course, far from perfect, but it is impossible to imagine that no one paid any attention to bodies that had been mutilated in such a monstrous fashion. Here in Russia many people are murdered, but more simply, without all these fantasies. When they found Andreichkina slashed to pieces, look what an uproar it caused immediately. The Governor-General was informed straight away, and His Excellency assigned his Deputy for Special Assignments to investigate. I can say without bragging that the Prince only assigns me to cases that are of exceptional importance. And here we have almost ten mutilated bodies and nobody has made any fuss? Impossible.”

  “Somehow I don’t understand,” said Angelina, speaking for the first time since the trial had begun. “Who did such things to these poor people?”

  Erast Petrovich was clearly delighted by her question—the stubborn silence of the “judge” had rendered the examination of the evidence meaningless.

  “The earliest bodies were exhumed from the November ditch. However, that does not mean that Jack the Ripper had already arrived in Moscow in November.”

  “Of course not!” said the accused, interrupting Fandorin. “As far as I recall, the latest London murder was committed on Christmas Eve. I don’t know if you will be able to prove to our charming judge that I am guilty of the Moscow murders, but you certainly won’t be able to make me into Jack the Ripper.”

  An icy, disdainful smile slid across Erast Petrovich’s face, and he became stern and sombre again. “I understand the meaning of your remark perfectly well. You cannot wriggle out of the Moscow murders. The more of them there are, the more monstrous and outrageous they are, the better for you—you are more likely to be declared insane. But for Jack’s crimes the English would be certain to demand your extradition, and Russian justice would be only too delighted to be rid of such a bothersome madman. If you go to England, where things are done openly, nothing will be hushed up in our Russian fashion. You would swing from the gallows there, my dear sir. Don’t you want to?” Fandorin’s voice shifted down an octave, as if his own throat had been caught in a noose. “Don’t even hope that you can leave your career in London behind you. The apparent mismatch of the dates is easily explained. ‘Watchman Pakhomenko’ appeared at the Bozhedomka Cemetery shortly after the New Year. I assume that Zakharov got you the job for old times’ sake. Most likely you met in London during his most recent visit. Of course, Zakharov did not know about your new amusements. He simply thought that you had escaped from prison. How could he refuse to help an old comrade whom life had treated so harshly? Well?”

  Sotsky did not reply; he merely shrugged one shoulder as if to say: I’m listening, go on.

  “Did things get too hot for you in London? Were the police getting too close? All right. You moved to your native country. I don’t know what passport you used to cross the border, but you turned
up in Moscow as a simple Ukrainian peasant, one of those godly wandering pilgrims, of whom there are so many in Russia. That’s why there is no information about your arrival from abroad in the police records. You lived at the cemetery for a while, settled in, took a look around. Zakharov obviously felt sorry for you; he gave you protection and money. You went for quite a long time without killing anybody—more than a month. Possibly you were intending to start a new life. But you weren’t strong enough. After the excitement in London, ordinary life had become impossible for you. This peculiarity of the maniacal mind is well known to criminal science. Once someone has tasted blood, he can’t stop. At first you took the opportunity offered by your job to hack up bodies from the graves; it was winter, so the bodies buried since the end of November had not begun to decompose. You tried a man’s body once, but you didn’t like it. It didn’t match your ‘idea’ somehow. By the way, what is your idea? Can you not tolerate sinful, ugly women? ‘I want to give you joy,’ ‘I will help to make you more beautiful’—do you use a scalpel to save fallen women from their ugliness? Is that the reason for the bloody kiss?”

  The accused said nothing. His face became solemn and remote, the bright blue of his eyes dimmed as he half-closed his eyelids.

  “And then lifeless bodies weren’t good enough any longer. You made several attempts which, fortunately, were unsuccessful, and committed two murders. Or was it more?” Fandorin suddenly shouted out, rushing at the accused, shaking him so hard by the shoulders that his head almost flew off.

  “Answer me?”

  “Erast!” Angelina shouted. “Stop it!”

  The Collegiate Counsellor started away from the seated man, took two hasty steps backwards and hid his hands behind his back, struggling to control his agitation. The Ripper, not frightened at all by Erast Petrovich’s outburst, sat without moving, staring at Fandorin with an expression of calm superiority.