by Jill Jones
He laid his many parcels on the table, including the Sherlock Holmes teddy bear and souvenir T-shirt he’d bought for Victoria on a stop in at the Sherlock Holmes Pub. Then he went straight to the phone and dialed her number. He was on fire to talk to her. The line was busy. He emptied his pockets onto the table, then tried the number again.
Busy.
He carried the groceries to the kitchen, stashed them where they belonged, opened a beer, and tried again.
Busy.
Damn it. He was anxious to tell her about all that had transpired today, but more than anything he just wanted to hear her voice. Wanted to hear her say, “I love you, Jonathan.”
He studied the treasures that lay on the wooden table. And treasures they were indeed, although he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all.
After going to Burt Brown’s flat, where he removed the remaining Ripper memorabilia that had not been previously confiscated, he’d stopped by Roger Hammersmith’s shop, as it was on his way to his next destination.
“Jonathan, old boy,” Roger had greeted him enthusiastically. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve had a little package waiting for you for an age. Don’t you get your phone messages anymore?”
“I’ve been out of the country,” Jonathan said, his curiosity whetted. “Another package from my mysterious benefactor?”
“The same.” He brought out an envelope similar to the first one, only thicker. “She asked me again not to reveal her identity,” Hammersmith said with a devilish smile.
“She?”
“Oh, did I say she? Sorry. The person wishes to remain anonymous.”
Jonathan knew it was no slip of the tongue. So the owner of the papers, or the thief who had stolen them, was a woman. He grinned at Roger. “And I suppose, like the last time, she…I mean, this person wants them returned in three days.”
“From the time you receive them. I will notify her that the delivery has been made.”
“Very good. The last bundle was quite interesting. I can’t wait to see what’s inside this one.” His friend was waiting with an eager expression on his face, hoping Jonathan would share the secret. But he wasn’t ready to, not just yet.
“How is Janeece?” he asked, tucking the envelope under his arm and changing the subject.
Roger’s face fell, but only momentarily. Then he brightened again. “Janeece? Oh, she’s fine. We have, in fact, struck up quite a relationship. A wonderful woman, that.”
“And interesting. I seem to recall her telling me she was a distant relation of Virginia Woolf.” Jonathan was only making small talk, but he saw that he’d lit a spark somewhere inside of Roger Hammersmith.
“Now that you bring it up, we’ve had some exciting developments in her search for that connection. Have you got a minute?”
He didn’t, but Jonathan was deeply indebted to his friend. “Sure.”
Jonathan glanced around the cluttered shop and spotted the little parakeet, “Dr. Watson,” in his cage in the corner, busily talking to himself and spitting bird seed onto the floor. He looked comfortable here, sort of scruffy, like the shop itself. Victoria had chosen his new home well.
In a few moments, Roger bustled back into the main room of the shop and motioned for Jonathan to come to the table at the rear. “I found this among a shipment of books I received recently from a dealer in Cambridge.”
It was a Bible, large and old but not ancient. Roger opened the cover. “There’s nothing particularly valuable about this per se. It was printed in the twenties. But look at this.”
He retrieved a paper from inside the cover and showed it to Jonathan. It appeared older than the Bible. It was brown, creased, and the handwriting faded. “Families Venn and Stephen” was written across the top.
Following was a list of names, to the side of which were notations about each person. The birth and death dates. Marriage dates and names of spouses, followed by any progeny.
“A family tree?”
“Of sorts,” Roger said. Quickly he ran his finger down the list until he came to a name near the bottom. “Let’s see. Harry L. Stephen. Herbert Stephen. J.K. Stephen. There. Adeline Virginia Stephen. Daughter of Leslie Stephen, also a distinguished writer. Married in 1912 to the journalist Leonard Woolf. She was the niece of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen who became a famous judge until he screwed up at the James Maybrick trial.”
Jonathan remembered Maybrick for two reasons. James Maybrick had been a merchant from Liverpool in the same era as Jack the Ripper. His wife, Florence Maybrick, an American, was convicted in 1889 of poisoning her husband with arsenic, but was later pardoned and returned to America. More recently, almost one hundred years exactly after the Ripper murders, a mysterious diary surfaced, purported to be the diary of James Maybrick. The “author” claimed to be none other than Jack the Ripper. Although it made a good tale and added yet another dimension to the already convoluted theories concerning the Ripper mystery, it was considered by most serious Ripperologists to be a hoax.
“How did the judge screw up at the Maybrick trial?” Jonathan asked Roger.
“He told the jury that Mrs. Maybrick was an adulteress, and that an adulteress was by nature inclined to commit murder.”
Jonathan laughed out loud. “Was she an adulteress?”
“The good judge had not a shred of proof. He just didn’t like women in general. The upshot of it all was that his prejudice against women caused a terrible public outcry, and the judge was forced to resign from the bench.”
“There’s a theory that Maybrick was an arsenic eater,” Jonathan said, recalling part of the diary. “His wife may have killed him inadvertently by not giving him his daily dose. Once you are addicted to arsenic, you literally can’t live without it.”
“Could have happened. Nobody knew much about the side effects in those days. And arsenic was commonly used to treat certain diseases, such as syphilis and impotence. Me, I’ll take Viagra.” He squelched a self-conscious little laugh. “Or Janeece.”
“I’m happy for you, Roger.”
“Thanks,” his friend replied, red in the face. “Now, to get to the meat of the matter we were looking at…” He turned to the next page in the Bible. “This appears to be a continuation of the old list,” he said, pointing to the first entry that was actually inscribed into the book, which duplicated the last entry on the inserted sheet. “We think someone in the family copied out records from an older Bible to keep with the new one when it was started. Now, following down from here, we get to Janeece’s family, the Fairchilds. See?” He pointed proudly to the entry.
But Jonathan’s eye caught on another name further down the list.
Delaney.
“That’s interesting,” he murmured.
“What?”
“This entry here toward the end. The youngest Swanson daughter, Marilyn, married an American named James Winston Delaney II. Victoria’s friend who was with her at the conference was named James Winston Delaney III. Wonder if he could be their son?”
“Serendipity,” Roger said. “If he is, he’s distantly related to Janeece. Wouldn’t that be a jolly coincidence?”
Jonathan didn’t find anything jolly about it. He didn’t like Trey Delaney, if for no other reason than that Trey had been Victoria’s long-time and intimate friend. Jonathan didn’t like to think he was jealous, but he recognized the emotion when he saw it, even in himself.
Bringing his thoughts back to the moment, Jonathan drew on his beer and dialed Victoria’s number again, and his heart leapt when he heard it ring.
“Jonathan, oh, it’s so good to hear your voice.” Victoria took the portable telephone and nestled into the cushions on the sofa where only days before she had nestled with Jonathan. “How was your trip?”
“Long. I miss you, sweetheart.”
Her heart tripped over itself much like it had the first day she’d laid eyes on his sexy grin. She could see it now in her mind’s eye. “I miss you, too.”
“Anything excitin
g happened since I left?”
“Nothing. I’ve just about finished my report on the Traveling Jack case. And tomorrow I’ve promised to go to dinner at my parents’ house. I dread it, but Mother is giving a surprise birthday party for Trey, and I don’t know how to get out of it. I’m supposed to hijack him and bring him to the party. That’s about the extent of the excitement here. What’s happening on your side of the pond?”
“A lot. Some of it you won’t believe. I wish you were here.” He sounded both tired and excited.
“Well, tell me. Hurry! These calls aren’t cheap. My nickel next time.”
“For starters, I stopped in to see Roger this afternoon. He had another package for me from our mysterious donor. He hinted that they’re coming from a woman, although he didn’t say who. This one was far more interesting than the last.”
Victoria’s interest sharpened at the eagerness in his voice. “What was in it?”
“More of the missing police files. But these held some major new material. It seems a hat was found at the scene of the Berner Street murder, the first of the double event the Ripper pulled off that night.”
“A hat?”
“Not just any hat. The Prince’s hat. It was identified by the hatmaker as being made specifically for Prince Albert Victor Edward.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. So it was the Prince. What became of the hat?”
“Whoever is sending these materials claims she has it.”
Victoria was astounded. “Oh, my God, Jonathan. There’s your hard evidence.”
“If I can lay my hands on it. If there is a hair or other testable material on it. If we can find something to match it with. If these files are authentic. There are a lot of ‘ifs’ here.”
“The last files checked out. Is there any reason to believe these won’t?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow. But there’s more. I have no doubt the Prince was in on the killings. But he may not have been working alone.”
“He had an accomplice? Was it Dr. Gull?”
“Dr. Gull was an accomplice of sorts, in that he covered up the Prince’s involvement. But he didn’t participate in the killings like some people previously believed.”
“How do you know all this? Was it in the police files?”
She heard him let out a breath.
“You remember the key you found in the bird cage? Well, it fits a storage locker at Charing Cross station. My guys located it, but didn’t open it. They were waiting on me. So when I left Roger’s shop, I went there, and you’ll never guess what was in that box.”
Victoria was now sitting on the edge of her seat. “No, I never will. So tell me, damn it!”
“It’s Dr. Gull’s diary. Victoria, I have it right in front of me. It’s a small black ledger with notes dating from the day after the double event. The notes are exclusively about his treatment of Prince Eddy during the last couple of years of his life.
“My God! Is it for real?”
“If it isn’t, whoever wrote it knew a lot about the royals in those days. This is how it starts: ‘Letter from V.R. today informing that my previous speculation concerning the heir has been confirmed and directing me to take immediate action as we had discussed.’”
“Jonathan, those are almost the same words as were written on that old note FitzSimmons sent with the warning.”
“Dr. Gull may have just received that same note when he wrote this.”
“Or a forger wrote them both.”
“Could be. But I don’t think so. I just feel like this is authentic.”
Victoria laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re using your intuition these days.”
Jonathan cleared his throat and said, “You can learn a lot from your gut feelings.”
The warmth of his words and the love behind them flowed through her, and she whispered, “I love you, Jonathan.” She swallowed the emotion that tightened her throat, and said, “Go on with what you were telling me.”
“The doctor was ordered not to keep any official record of his treatment of the Prince. He notes here: ‘H.R.H. has forbidden me to keep medical records of my work henceforth in regards to Prince Albert Victor Edward, but as a conscientious physician I must make note of my treatment program for my own use.’”
“That explains the missing medical records. They were never missing. They never existed. The Prince’s complicity was covered up from the start.”
“According to this, Prince Eddy returned to Windsor the night of the double murder, covered in blood and shrieking at the top of his lungs. Dr. Gull was summoned, and he sedated the Prince and removed him to an asylum, but he escaped again on November 9, the day of the last brutal killing. Listen to this: ‘H.R.H. is furious that the Prince escaped my care, and I fear that the demon that lives inside his syphilitic mind will cause him to kill again. Accompanied by a discreet guard of muscular fellows, I went directly to the quarters of the Prince’s known preferred consort, J.K. Stephen, for in his madness, he had raved about that gentleman of dubious repute. Stephen was an ill choice for the Prince’s tutor, and I fear his perversions have swayed the Prince’s already fragile psyche. The Prince was not where I had expected him to be, however. In fact, no one was in residence. I returned home, nearly sick with apprehension, and rightly so, for only hours later, I was summoned by the Prince of Wales to make haste once again for Windsor Castle.
“‘This night, it was even more terrible than before. The Prince was wearing bloodstained women’s clothing and crying inconsolably, sobbing that he had killed his Mother Dear. Since Princess Alexandra was in residence, hale and hearty, I can only presume the Prince had murdered another in her place. His is a sickness of mind that I cannot comprehend. Once again, I sequestered him in the asylum, this time with double the guard, for the Prince of Wales threatened my ruin should his son escape again. I must not fail in my duty, for God and the Queen both look to me to prevent his madness not only from taking more lives, but also from bringing down the monarchy should his complicity be discovered by the social democrats. These are uneasy times, and the royal family is under considerable criticism by those who would topple our way of life as we know it.’”
“Dr. Gull knew and covered it up.” Victoria inhaled deeply. “And the Prince got away with murder.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
After saying a reluctant good-night to Victoria, Jonathan sat up into the small hours, reading the words written by Dr. William Gull more than a hundred years before and trying to imagine the ambivalence he must have felt about the orders he’d been given by his Queen. He did not dare disobey, and yet he knew the Prince had brutally killed those women.
Most of the notebook was filled with shorthand notations of medications and dates, but some of it was recorded diary style. One such passage caught his eye:
The Prince is experiencing spells of delusion that are becoming more frequent as his syphilitic madness progresses, and it is difficult at times to discern if he is lucid when speaking of certain things. Tonight, for instance, before I sedated him at bedtime, he began to cry. He told me he was sorry for what he had done to those women, and promised he would never do such a thing again. At first I thought this was a ploy to persuade me to release him, but it turned into something else altogether. He pleaded with me to stop the killer!
I thought he was referring to himself, for I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was behind the Whitechapel murders. But he kept crying and begging me to stop his erstwhile tutor, J.K. Stephen, from killing again. ‘It would not be fair for him to continue to hunt without me,’ he sobbed at one point. I asked him to which hunt he was referring, and he told me the most ghastly tale, I know not whether to believe it. According to his story, Stephen, with whom I believe the Prince has had a long-standing homosexual relationship, lured the Prince into the East End where they engaged in a ‘hunt,’ with the prey being the prostitutes who walked the darkened streets. Once these adventures began, they were unable to give them up. He vacillates between remorse an
d a desire to kill again, for he does not want Stephen to hunt without him, and he said Stephen had vowed to ‘kill into infinity.’
Jonathan laid the book in his lap and rubbed his eyes. J.K. Stephen. He’d heard the name before. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, that name had appeared on the family tree in the old Bible Roger had shown him. Virginia Woolf’s maiden name had been Stephen. Had she been related to Prince Eddy’s tutor? Small world.
Of course he’d heard about the tutor before, although he had forgotten his name. Indeed, some Ripperologists held that it was the tutor, not the Prince, who had been Jack the Ripper. But from what he’d read in these documents, he now believed the Ripper was the two men working together, much like the famous duo Leopold and Loeb did in the twenties.
He went to his briefcase and shuffled through it until he found photocopies of the note the copycat murderer had sent to the London Times and the two he’d sent to the U.S. media. He laid them side-by-side on the table and studied the messages carefully.
I will never finish my work. I will kill into infinity.
Infinity. Did the killer believe he was invincible? Or did this refer to something altogether different?
I will kill into infinity if I must, to play out the game.
What game?
I wasn’t codding when I said I will kill into infinity. Haven’t you figured it out yet?
Figured out what? His game?
His game was pretty clear. Ripping is my destiny. It is my heritage, it is in my blood.
Jonathan was troubled by something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but it was late and he was too tired to think about it anymore tonight. He laid the book aside and went to bed.
His was a fitful sleep, filled with dreams of someone being chased by a madman with a bloody knife. Someone, he couldn’t tell who, was in deadly danger, and he was running, running, trying to pursue the killer, but his feet were not carrying him anywhere. Then a woman screamed and his blood ran cold. Victoria. The madman was after Victoria.
