Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller

by Shelly Dickson Carr

  Katie didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Gideon Brown, a victim of class prejudice, or wary of him. He was an assassin, and in Katie’s book that made him a suspect. Though how or why he could be Jack the Ripper wasn’t clear to her. The Ripper might, after all, be just some homicidal lunatic having nothing whatsoever to do with the Twyford family. On the other hand, Lady Beatrix was to be his last victim, so the odds were high that there was a connection.

  Just before the final curtain fell, wheezing and out of breath, the bulge of his Adam’s apple moving rapidly up and down above his clerical collar, Reverend Pinker had slumped down into the empty seat next to Katie. He’d missed most of the play, as had Oscar Wilde, who gave his excuses to Lady Beatrix that it was far easier to gauge the audience’s reaction to the play while trolling the back of the theater.

  Now, standing in the sparkling Byzantine Room all aglitter with mirrored ceiling tiles and plush sofas, Katie shook Major Brown’s extended hand. Shaking hands was different in this century. You kept your gloves on and held your hand aloft, and the gentleman either bent and gave the air above your hand a slight peck, or he shook it and quickly stepped back. Major Brown took Katie’s hand but held it a moment too long. “A pleasure, once again, Miss Katherine,” he said, his eyes never leaving her face.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Katie said agreeably, though her pulse was racing and the high lace collar of her dress was itching her badly. She didn’t trust Major Brown, and not because he had a powerful, almost pompous air about him, or because he had killed an enemy of the crown on some secret mission. It was something else . . . something about the penetrating way he looked at her with those cat-green eyes.

  Major Brown was speaking to Lady Beatrix now, and the hard set of his mouth, Katie noted, had softened considerably until his eyes fastened on something across the room. Katie followed his gaze. The white cuff of Reverend Pinker’s sleeve, where it fell just below his black waistcoat, was dappled with something red, like splatters of paint.

  Swaying slightly from the cumbersome weight of her gown, Katie moved in for a closer look and stopped dead in her tracks. Reverend Pinker’s sleeve was flecked with blood.

  From the door at the far end of the room an usher in a blue velveteen uniform cried out, “The Duke of Twyford’s carriage, if you please!”

  With a swoosh of long skirts and the clack of men’s boots on the marble floor, Katie followed the others out of the Byzantine Room, into the hall, and down the grand staircase to the main lobby. Katie caught sight of Toby in a throng of people at the bottom of the stairs. He was chatting with a girl selling peanuts—in small brown bags tied with string—from a box at her waist that was attached to a cord around her neck.

  “Peanuts!” cried the girl, slanting her eyes flirtatiously at Toby. “Get ’em whilst they’s hot! Nice ’n’ hot! Here you go, luv, want some peanuts?” she thrust a bag under Katie’s nose as Katie approached. “Hot as a chimney pipe, they is!” The girl elbowed Toby playfully in the ribs, and when he gave the girl a wink back, Katie felt a pang of irritation and a strong impulse to kick him.

  Another girl, this one selling oranges, pushed through the crowd and sidled up to Reverend Pinker. “Ev’ning, Reverend. Did yer get m’message?”

  “Molly, please. Not here, not now. Talk to me at the Charity Mission tomorrow.” The red blotches in Pinker’s cheeks, which usually extended to the tip of his long nose, now suffused his entire face like crimson clouds.

  “But I don’t wants to talk to yer at the mission! What I wants to know is did you get me bleedin’ message what I gave the gentleman in your box to give to you—”

  “Trouble?” Major Brown stepped between the two.

  “No trouble a’tall, guv.” The girl smiled sweetly. “Just seeing if the gent ’ere would be wantin’ some oranges. Blood red, they is. Sweet and juicy.”

  “I think not,” Collin cut in, sweeping the orange seller aside with a none-too-gentle nudge.

  Moments later Katie found herself standing with the others outside the white-pillared entrance of the Lyceum Theatre. Reverend Pinker, she observed, was perspiring even though the night air was cool, and a crisp breeze fluttered the awning over the carriage park where the duke’s coach was drawing up.

  A group of newspaper boys swooped out of the darkness, waving sheets of newsprint and shouting, “Murder! Murder in Whitechapel! Read all about it!”

  Katie gasped. The smell of ink, not yet dry, permeated the air as the boys waved papers above their heads.

  “Murdered girl! Sliced from ear to ear! Read all about it!”

  The cries punctured the night with something evil and tragic and ugly. Katie had been expecting something like this, but even so it sent a chill up her spine. But was it the Ripper?

  “Unidentified girl murdered in Whitechapel!”

  Major Gideon Brown thrust his hand in his pocket, drew out a coin, held it out to a newsboy, and snatched up a single sheet of newsprint. He scanned it quickly and made his apologies. “Beatrix,” he said breathlessly and then changed it to the more formal “Lady Beatrix” when he caught Katie watching him. “Forgive me, but I shan’t be able to join you at the dinner party. You must go without me. I’ll fetch a cab.”

  Out of the mist a tall, hawk-faced police officer came hurrying forward. He exchanged several words with Major Brown, and fumbled in a breast pocket for his notepad. “Dunno her name, sir. We ’aven’t got much information yet.”

  Major Brown, clutching tight to the handle of his military swagger stick, said curtly, “Come with me, Constable Jarvis.”

  Toby stepped forward. “I’ll fetch you a cab, Major. What shall I tell the driver?”

  “The Bow Street Morgue. There’s a good lad.”

  “Gideon,” Lady Beatrix protested, tendrils of blond curls fluttering across the silk rosebuds fastened into her upswept hairdo. “There’s no need for a hansom. We’ll take you to Bow Street. But surely, darling, this can wait until . . .” Her voice was lost on the wind.

  “No, you go on without me. I’ll join you later.” He leaned over and settled Beatrix’s fur cloak more securely around her shoulders. “Pinker?” He turned to Reverend Pinker and in a commanding voice asked, “You’ll see Lady Beatrix safely home after the party if I’m detained?” Then he stopped, noting Pinker’s bright red face and the fact that he was sweating profusely. “You all right, man?”

  “Fine. Yes. Fine,” stammered Pinker, running a knobby finger round the inside of his clerical collar. “I’ll see everyone home. Indeed, yes. Of course, of course. My pleasure.”

  “Major,” Toby said, drawing himself up. “May I go with you?” He hastily tucked in his shirt and adjusted his frock coat, which was several sizes too small for his muscular shoulders. When Major Brown nodded, Collin told Katie in a contemptuous voice that Major Gideon Brown was mentoring Toby. “It was Beatrix’s idea,” Collin admitted grudgingly. “Toby wants to become an officer in the CID at Scotland Yard.”

  Katie’s heart pounded hard against her ribs. “Toby!” she cried, improvising. “My fan! I dropped it over there—” She pointed toward the theater door, and when he darted back to look for it, she followed close on his heels. “I-I need a favor,” she stammered, steadying herself against a white column. “I need to . . .” But how was she to ask him? “I need to know if the dead girl’s name is . . . Mary Ann Nichols.”

  Toby’s dark eyes regarded her coolly, then flashed with revulsion when she explained that she needed him to be her “eyes and ears” at the morgue. He drove a clenched fist into his palm, spun her around, and marched her back to the others waiting by the curb. The look on his face suggested that he thought she was insane.

  A minute later, Katie stood dejectedly watching as Toby, Major Brown, and Police Constable Jarvis climbed into a hansom cab and sailed away into the darkness. Listening to the receding clatter of horses’ hooves and the raucous hooting of carriage horns, Katie began to seethe with anger. How dare Toby dismiss her as if she we
re some addle-brained nitwit of a girl from the nineteenth century!

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Mortuary

  The Bow Street mortuary was situated in the basement of a narrow building three blocks away from the Bow Street Police Station. There were two corpses in the back courtyard awaiting burial.

  When Major Brown took in the sight of the cadavers in the courtyard, he wondered if it had been wise to bring Toby along after all. The two corpses, laid out on concrete slabs, had been a bluish-purple color only yesterday, but were now so covered in lime dust they looked chalk-white, like a pair of apparitions. Twin coffins, made of splintered pine, lay stacked one atop the other in a sea of stiff mud beneath the overhang of the mortuary roof.

  Major Gideon Brown had given his word to his fiancée, Lady Beatrix, that he would mentor Toby, and by God he was glad to do so. The boy was a decent, hardworking lad determined to become a police officer, and if he passed his end-year examinations with honors, Gideon would pave the way for him to become a constable, then a sergeant, and so on up the ranks. Toby reminded Gideon of himself at that age. They both had Cockney antecedents, both were from the East End, and both were considered outsiders in “good” society. And by virtue of merit—not bloody social rank—both could, as the former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli maintained, rise to the top despite humble beginnings.

  Now, as Major Brown, Toby, and Constable Jarvis moved past the ghost-white cadavers, they instinctively held their breath. Dead bodies were usually preserved in ice, but by summer’s end ice was in short supply, and lime dust had to suffice.

  Gagging from the odor of decomposing flesh and the acrid smell of lime, Major Brown took out a key attached to his gold watch chain, jiggled it in the door lock, and hurriedly swung open the rear door to the morgue. Toby and Constable Jarvis crowded in close behind. When the door slammed shut, effectively blocking out the stench, Major Brown tugged a lantern from a wooden peg set close into the wall and adjusted its flame. The oil lamp threw uncertain light into the gloom ahead, and a minute later they were hastening down a set of damp stone steps.

  Ducking through a narrow doorway, they moved into a vast, stone-block room with bars on the only two windows at street height, just above eye level. The glass panes were grimy with soot, and what little ventilation the room afforded came from a crack at the top of the right-hand window.

  In the dim light, the mortuary looked to Toby like a medieval torture chamber: cramped, spare, with sharp-looking instruments skirting the walls. In the center of the floor stood three trestle tables topped with stone slabs. Laid out on the one nearest the half-open window was the body of a dead girl, fully clothed.

  A police officer standing in the far corner scrambled to brighten the room. He lit the largest of the oil lamps hanging from the ceiling. The elongated flame sputtered and jumped, emitting grey smoke that swirled upward into the still air, making the room look larger than it was.

  Glancing from Major Brown’s rigid face to Constable Jarvis’s thin, twitching one, Toby watched Major Brown stride toward the dead girl, his black boots crunching across the gravel floor.

  “Where’s Police Surgeon Dr. Llewellyn?” Major Brown barked at the officer fiddling with a second lantern.

  The man swung around so fast, splinters of light slashed across the girl’s body. “Dunno, sir.” The officer lifted dull eyes first to the dead girl, then to Major Brown.

  “He ought to be here,” Brown fumed. “Go fetch him at once. No! I shall need you, Sergeant . . . McKenzie, is it?”

  “Yes, sir. McKenzie, sir.” The lantern light silhouetted McKenzie’s wide girth against the back wall, making it rise and shrink and rise again in zigzag patterns.

  “Right then, Sergeant McKenzie. Send Officer Webster to fetch Dr. Llewellyn. Where is Webster?”

  “Gone ’ome, sir.”

  Major Brown swung around to Jarvis. “Police Constable, bring Llewellyn here at once. I don’t care if you have to drag him out of bed in his nightshirt. Do it now!”

  Jarvis, a tall, thin man whose angular shoulders stuck up from his navy-blue uniform, scrambled across the room and ducked back out through the narrow doorway.

  Toby watched as the veins in Major Brown’s temples began to bulge. Major Brown had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. He was known for giving his all to every endeavor and expecting the same from subordinates. So it was not by luck, Toby knew, that Major Gideon Brown had risen quickly in the ranks to become the youngest assistant deputy CID of Scotland Yard.

  “All right, Sergeant McKenzie.” Major Brown’s voice was deceptively neutral. “Who is she? What do we know about her?”

  “Don’t know nuffin’,” admitted McKenzie, a heavy-jowled, broad-nosed man, whose skin was faintly plum-colored.

  Major Brown drew in a sharp breath. “Read me your report, Sergeant.”

  “Report, sir?”

  “Surely Dr. Llewellyn didn’t release the body without giving you a detailed report?”

  “Ahhh . . . no, sir. He’s got a good memory, sir. He’ll be here in the morning. I’m sure he’ll make out his report then. Or dictate it to me.”

  “There are rules, protocols, and procedures, Sergeant McKenzie.” Major Brown’s face looked hard and contemptuous. “And as it appears none have been followed,” he said, stripping off his white theater gloves, “it is therefore up to us. Hand me that leather apron and put one on yourself.”

  “But, sir! I never . . . that is to say, I just take notes. I’m handy at note taking, s’why I was assigned—”

  “Well, then, you are now assigned to assist me, Sergeant McKenzie. This girl’s body has not been examined and we can’t wait for that mongrel dog, Llewellyn, to grace us with his presence. If rigor mortis sets in we won’t learn anything this poor girl has to tell us, will we?”

  “Tell us? What do you mean? It won’t tell us nuffin’, sir. It’s dead as a doornail. Beggin’ yer pardon, sir.”

  “Toby.” Major Brown turned. “Grab that notepad over there and take down exactly what I tell you.”

  Toby scooped up a pad and pencil from a copper-lined shelf next to a coal stove in the corner.

  “ ’oo’s he?” McKenzie pointed a plump finger at Toby.

  “He’s the lad who will assist us with note taking until Dr. Llewellyn arrives. In the meantime, look lively, Sergeant. What exactly do we know about this girl?”

  McKenzie fumbled through a bundle of papers. “We knows the corpse was lying on its back with its legs straight out, near the gutter in Buck’s Row.”

  “Sergeant McKenzie, forthwith you will call the deceased either by her name, which we don’t know, or by her gender, which we do.”

  “Sir?”

  “She. This is a female cadaver, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. I thinks so, sir. Wait a bit! Could be one of them pretty boys what dresses up as—but, no, says here, it’s a girl ’bout twenty years of age.”

  “The girl, whom we shall call Polly Jones, as we do not know her name, was found lying on her back with her legs straight out near a gutter in Buck’s Row. Was the location of the body closer to Bakers Row or Brady Street? Northeast corner or northwest?”

  “Don’t rightly know, sir. I wasn’t there, now, was I? Sergeant Folly and Police Constable Merriman was there.”

  “And where are Sergeant Folly and Constable Merriman?”

  “Gone ’ome, sir.”

  “Why is that, Sergeant McKenzie?” Major Brown’s voice was low and even, but Toby could hear an undercurrent of simmering rage.

  “On account of Dr. Llewellyn says that the remains of the chi . . . er, the deceased, was not worth bothering over, seeing as she was probably just some Whitechapel whore. Can’t say’s I disagree, sir. No cause for keeping good men from their warm beds just because a worthless strumpet decides to go an ’ave herself chived. She’ll still be ’ere in the morning, sir. Little Miss Polly ain’t going nowhere.”

  “I see. Thank you, Sergeant McKenzie.” Aga
in, Toby noted that Major Brown’s voice was deceptively calm, but if Toby had to wager, he’d guess that Sergeant McKenzie, along with Police Surgeon Dr. Llewellyn, would both be out of a job in the morning.

  “So? We have no accounting of where in the street the body lay, only that her legs were straight and she was found lying on her back? Do we know who found her, Sergeant?”

  “H’m. T’is here somewhere, sir,” McKenzie wheezed, leafing through his papers. “A market porter lad . . . by the name of . . .”

  Toby glanced over McKenzie’s shoulder, scanning the pages. “Would that be Georgie Cross?” Toby asked, reading an underlined name. Toby knew Georgie Cross. They’d attended Charity Grammar School together.

  “That’s ’im! The very one! Georgie Cross.”

  “Did anyone get Mr. Cross’s address, Sergeant?”

  “Don’t need his address, sir. We knows where ’e works as a market porter.”

  “I see. Yes. That is helpful,” Brown said, but the irony in his voice seemed lost on McKenzie, who continued.

  “Remember, sir, what I told you? It’s only a Whitechapel whore. Hundreds same as her. We can’t be runnin’ round bothering ourselves with the likes of whores, now can we? It would be—”

  “What, Sergeant McKenzie?”

  “Beneaff our dignity, sir. That’s what Dr. Llewellyn tells us. We take extra special care wiff them what matters, and not wiff them what don’t.”

  “I see. I do indeed.” It was the first time Major Brown did not address Sergeant McKenzie by his name or rank. Toby wondered if the poor man would even last until tomorrow. He had an idea Major Brown would dismiss him before the night was through. Luckily, Sergeant McKenzie seemed blissfully unaware he was tottering on the brink.

  “Toby? Ready, lad? Let’s begin.” Major Brown reached for a measuring rod dangling from a metal hook. “Please take note: Polly Jones is five feet two, dark-brown hair, unblemished complexion. There are two teeth missing from her lower left jaw. Her throat has been cut from ear to ear. She is wearing a brownish—or is that a reddish?—colored ulster with seven large brass buttons, and underneath the ulster is a yellow linsey-woolsey dress, two flannel petticoats, one of which has the embroidered initials “M. N.” She has on black woolen stockings and brown leather boots. There is a comb and a looking glass in Miss Jones’s pocket. I’m going to lift the petticoats to determine . . . Good Lord!” Major Brown dropped the girl’s skirts and took a step backward, almost stumbling.