Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller

by Shelly Dickson Carr

  Closer to the water’s edge, Katie could hear boats moored along the riverbank creak and crack, their ropes groaning. But with the fence barring her way, Katie had to scramble back up the grassy slope to the embankment, where just ahead stood a hansom cab.

  Katie hastened toward the black cab for no other reason than that the horse tethered to it was the only living, breathing creature in this lonely stretch of deserted river bank. When she was almost abreast of the carriage, she noted that the coachman was not sitting on his perch, and that the horse, a tired old nag, was tied to a post next to a stone hut.

  Katie moved cautiously forward.

  The hut—shaped like a rectangular shoebox and resting on concrete slabs—had a flat tin roof with wavy ridges dipping low. Bales of wire and planks of wood lay strewn around the ground in front. Katie was reminded of a construction trailer she had visited with her father when she was twelve. Her dad had insisted that she wear a hard hat. When they entered, there had been a drafting table in the center of the room, charts on the walls, and a coffeepot percolating in the corner. Was this structure the equivalent of a construction trailer? Would there be a drafting table inside, but no coffee maker? Katie wondered. Then she heard something that made her heart race.

  A feeling of dread surged through her.

  It was Catherine Eddowes singing “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay!”

  But it couldn’t be. Catherine Eddowes was dead.

  Katie listened with shaking nerves. Someone was singing. Someone who sounded exactly like Catherine Eddowes! If Katie closed her eyes, she could almost imagine it was Eddowes with her lusty, throaty bravado.

  But a moment later, from out of the carriage window, popped Dora Fowler’s laughing face and bouncing brown curls. “ ’S’at you, Katie? Whatcha doing ’ere? Cor! The whole bloomin’ city of London is ’ere!”

  The whole city of London? The street was totally deserted.

  Katie hurried to the carriage. “Dora? What are you doing here?”

  “I came wiff Collin! Not ten minutes ago. Then, sure as you please, Major Brown comes waltzing on past, followed by that hollow-faced, eagle-nosed reverend!”

  “Pinker?” Katie gasped. “Reverend Pinker?”

  “The very same!” Dora hooked her elbows out of the cab’s window and giggled.

  She doesn’t know that Catherine Eddowes is dead, Katie thought and moistened her lips in order to break the news. But Dora leaned further out the window.

  “Whatcha doing here all alone?” she demanded. “You best come in here wiff me. ’Tis nice ’n’ warm inside this cab. Collin gave the Westminster Abbey a few quid to get a pint o’ beer at the pub round the corner, so I’m all by me lonesome.”

  “Collin went to Westminster Abbey? But—”

  Dora giggled. “Not a bit of it. Collin gave the Westminster Abbey a few quid to make hisself scarce.”

  “Dora, I don’t understand—”

  “Westminster Abbey—the cabbie! Collin gave the cabbie bread ’n’ honey to—”

  “Okay. Okay. I get it.” Katie was in no mood to wrap her mind around Cockney rhyming slang. “Collin gave the coachman money to get a drink at the pub.”

  “Tha’s right! So it’s joost you ’n’ me. Gives me the fair shivers to be out here alone at night, so I’d be ever so grateful for your company. Leastways till Collin returns.”

  “I can’t stay, Dora. I’ve got to find Toby.”

  “He’s hiding up there on the upper pier. That’s where Collin went. Said he had somfink important to tell Toby.” Dora pointed to the double set of pilings covered in scaffolding jutting out into the water, the top structure rising high above the lower like unfinished highway roads leading to nowhere.

  “Did you tell Major Brown?” Katie gasped.

  “ ’Course not! Blimey. I ain’t no itchy snitch. Didn’t tell the vicar neither.”

  With a sigh of relief Katie continued. “Dora. I’ve got to get up there. How do I do it? Do I climb the scaffolding? And how do I get over the fence?”

  “You can’t do neither. That fence will cut you to shreds sure as I’m a bird seller. T’aint safe, Katie. It’s what we calls French fencing. It’s got barbed wire woven into it. Sharp steel points to keep people and animals out.”

  Katie bit down on her lip. “I don’t have a choice. Toby’s in trouble.”

  “Toby can fend for hisself, better ’n most. Don’t you go worrying ’bout him. He’s as slippery as the devil and just as strong.”

  “How did Collin get through the fence?”

  “There’s a hidey-hole. But I ain’t showing you where. T’aint safe, I tells you.”

  Katie blinked at Dora and realized that Dora was in danger as well. If Madame Tussauds’ waxwork plaques were correct, Dora would die near the construction pilings of Tower Bridge at the hands of Jack the Ripper in exactly two weeks. But everything was so upside down in terms of history’s rewriting itself, maybe the Ripper would strike again tonight. Maybe Dora was next . . .

  “Dora!” Katie reached up and tugged on the carriage handle. “You’ve got to come with me.”

  “I ain’t getting out of this ’ere warm cab.”

  “Dora. Please. Let’s stay together.”

  “Thank you, no,” Dora said primly, shrinking back inside the carriage when Katie swung open the black lacquer door.

  “Dora. We need to stick together. Did Collin tell you anything about me?” Katie improvised. “Like that I have second sight?”

  “Every Cockney and his Great Aunt Fanny claims to have the seeing eye. If I had a farthing for every time a fortune-teller claimed to know me future, I’d be rich as Croesus.”

  “But I’m different,” Katie bluffed. “I am clairvoyant.”

  “T’aint no one clairvoyant save old Mrs. Tray at Traitors’ Gate.”

  “Precisely, Dora. And I’ve just come from Mrs. Tray’s house. She agrees with me. Someone . . . I don’t know who . . . is going to be murdered by Jack the Ripper at this exact spot any minute now . . . in a . . . Westminster Abbe—” Katie said, still improvising. “In a cab. I see it as clearly as I see you now.”

  “Are you saying the cabbie is Jack the Ripper? I don’t believes you!”

  “Ask Mrs. Tray. Some poor innocent girl—who shall remain nameless—is going to die in a . . . in a . . . er, right here. Any minute now. I don’t know about you, Dora, but I’m not chancing it. You can . . . well, suit yourself. It’s been nice knowing you.”

  “Eeeeek! I ain’t staying here by me lonesome!” Dora shrieked. In a flash she had scrambled out of the cab. “Like you said, Katie, we oughts to stick together.” Dora glanced around nervously. “You don’t really suppose that fellow . . . the cabbie . . . is Jack the Ripper?”

  Katie gave an I-don’t-know shrug. “Let’s not wait to find out.”

  Dora clutched the ring hanging down from her neck on a gold chain that glinted in the moonlight. “Collin wouldn’t take kindly to nobody trying to murder me afore we dot and carry.”

  “Dot and . . . ?”

  “Marry,” Dora explained as they hurried down the slope of lawn toward the water’s edge.

  “We needs to stay close. It’s slippery,” Dora said. “When we’re on the other side”—she pointed to the spiky fence—“and we gets to the pier, if you fall into the river, the current will carry you away and you’ll die quick as a wink swallowing the filthy muck floating in it.”

  Katie nodded. Dora was telling the truth. The River Thames was a sewage funnel for most of the city. Marine life couldn’t live in it. The polluted water carried typhoid and cholera. And although there was a new underground sewer system in London, most factories and open drains still emptied human waste directly into the river.

  Dora pointed to a gaping hole in the fence. She told Katie it was where Collin and, later, Major Brown and the vicar, had ducked through.

  “Careful, now,” Dora warned. “We don’t wants to get tangled up in that barbershop wire—sharp as a blade on a straight-edg
e razor. Falling into the river would be a far pleasanter way to die than getting cut and slashed to ribbons.” Dora pointed to what looked like twisted jagged points of metal protruding from the fence.

  Katie blinked at Dora. If Jack the Ripper wasn’t stopped, it would be exactly how Dora would die: cut and slashed to ribbons.

  It took several long minutes to wriggle through the opening in the fence because of their long, billowing skirts. After hiking them up around their waists and each helping the other step gingerly through the hole, they shook out the folds in their skirts and headed for the double set of pilings at the water’s edge.

  Dora began to chatter nervously, “You wouldn’t thinks to look at us, but Collin and me gots true . . . heavens above.”

  “Heavens above . . . love?”

  Dora nodded. “Collin’s a right decent bloke, even if he does wear them funny swallows and sighs.”

  Katie stopped in her tracks. “Swallows and sighs . . . ”

  “Collars and ties!” Dora chuckled. “Blimey, Katie, you’re as la-di-da as Collin. Let me gives you a lump of ice—”

  “No, Dora.” Katie sighed. “Let me give you a lump of advice. You and Collin will need a bag full of fruits and nuts—guts—to get past Collin’s grandfather. The Duke of Twyford has his mind set on Collin’s marrying the daughter of an earl.”

  Dora made a face. “Collin told me all about horse-face Prudence. Makes no never-mind if she’s the daughter of Gawd Almighty. Collin says she’s a petticoat lane in his bottle of rum.”

  Katie raised an eyebrow. “A petticoat lane—pain—in his . . . bottle of rum? What’s that?”

  “You know! His kingdom come. His fife and drum. His queen mum.”

  Katie shook her head. “You lost me.”

  “His bum!”

  “Ah . . . of course.” Katie bit back a smile.

  Dora giggled. “I tells you, Collin hasn’t even had a decent muddle wiff horse-face Prudence.”

  “Muddle?”

  “Kiss and a cuddle!” Dora tittered gaily. “And he’s had plenty wiff me, I can assures you!” She nudged Katie playfully in the ribs. “So? Is that what you Americans say—fruits and nuts?”

  Katie shook her head. “I just made it up.”

  Dora raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Why would you do that? Make something up? Why not just say Collin and me will need enormous orchestra stalls to marry wiffout the Duke’s blessing?”

  “Orchestra stalls?” Katie blinked at Dora.

  Dora sing-songed, “Balls.”

  Minutes later neither girl was smiling or laughing. They were both breathing heavily. They climbed over piles of rubble, moving slowly toward the scaffolded piers, one rising high above the other. Red mud held fast to their boots and clung in waxy clumps to the bottoms of their long skirts. A stinking odor of rotten eggs and excrement rose off the water.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  No Words Profane say the Bells near Mark Lane

  A swath of foamy muck ran parallel for some thirty feet along the muddy shoreline to the truncated wharf.

  Katie and Dora staggered forward, skirts hiked high, as they threaded their way around construction rubble to the bottom of the pier. The wooden pilings, Katie could see, were studded with clumps of barnacles.

  All around them, seaweed clung to the wet pier. Above their heads, wind pummeled the planks of the pier like fists of rage.

  A feeling of dread swept through Katie as an image of Catherine Eddowes’s eviscerated body flashed into her mind. The prickle of fear tingled along Katie’s scalp, down her arms, and right into the tips of her gloved fingers. She took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to stay calm, even as the sense of something terribly wrong—or something about to go terribly wrong—invaded her thoughts.

  Dora began to shiver as if she felt a sudden foreboding as well. She shot Katie an anxious glance. As if with one thought, they craned their necks to stare up at the double set of piers, with risers holding up a timbered construction platform high above the water and looking as insurmountable as Mount Everest.

  Taking another deep breath, Katie strode under the pier toward a slimy set of stone stairs.

  “Not that way, Katie. ’Tisn’t safe. Too slippery by far. Me dad’s an oarsman for the river ferry. I’ve been down here afore. Likely as not, them rails over there are a better way to climb up.” Dora pointed to a pebble-strewn area beneath the pier that gave way to an iron ladder, bolted between a set of pontoons, which cut right up through the middle of the jetty. The ladder reminded Katie of the kind that ran up the sides of giant water tanks.

  “Onward and upward,” Katie muttered, leading the way. She remembered her grandmother repeating a similar sentiment when faced with an obstacle in her path. But this wasn’t just any ordinary obstacle, this was a perpendicular iron ladder rearing straight up the inside of a slimy, barnacle-crusted jetty!

  Katie bunched up her skirts again and stuffed them into the waistband of her bodice, and moved in the direction of the iron ladder.

  Hoisting herself up the first few rungs, Katie took a deep breath and continued to climb until the ladder stopped at the top ridge of a metal platform that opened onto a sort of wooden catwalk. Katie turned and helped Dora up onto the platform, and they both scurried down the catwalk toward a second platform that led to another set of risers. When they reached the top structure, they were a full three stories over the water. They could hear the sound of waves slapping against the pilings far below—a rhythmic, repetitive, whooshing sound like a dishwasher.

  Dora cupped her mouth with both hands in order to be heard above the roar of the wind and said, “Now, remember. When we gets to the end of this platform, mind your step. If you fall into the river and the current doesn’t drag you down and kill you, the foul sewage will, as sure as if you had the pox. No one falls in what lives to tell the tale. So mind your step.”

  “Gotcha,” Katie said under her breath as she squinted downward, listening to the waves below. The odor of creosote wafted off the tar-smeared pilings, and the stench of dead fish was overwhelming. Ahead of them loomed rough-hewn planks extending farther out over the water.

  Katie’s insides went queasy. She took several deep breaths, but the rancid odor assailing her nostrils made her feel as if she were seasick.

  “Let’s keep going,” she shouted as they moved toward the second open platform farther along the catwalk. Another bolted ladder reared straight up the side of the jetty. To access this next ladder, they had to maneuver along a slippery set of cross-planks. Metal rings had been woven into the rope-handled banister on either side of the catwalk. Katie held tight to these stirrup-shaped handles, which gave off a sharp rattle and clash when she let go of one set to grab onto the next.

  “Gawd’s truth, Katie!” Dora wailed behind Katie’s shoulder. “I can’t take another step!”

  With water crashing against the pilings far below, and the wind whistling in a harmonica chorus above their heads, Katie’s bravado — as well as her heart—began to sink. Toby and Collin could be anywhere on this crazy structure. What if she and Dora were headed in the wrong direction?

  “Can you swim?” Katie asked, more to distract Dora than anything else. Katie knew that swimming was not an option. They were much too high up.

  “I ain’t no bleedin’ porpoise!” Dora cried incredulously. She was panting from exertion and trying hard, like Katie, not to slip on the wet, cross-hatch slabs beneath their feet. “What sort o’ girl do you take me for? And where would I swim, if’n I could? Not in the bloody Thames! Swallow one drop of that bilge water, and me own birds would be peckin’ the skin from me gangrenous bones!”

  Approaching the next ladder, Dora folded her arms over her chest. “I ain’t movin’ another step. I can’t swim, nor climb like a monkey neither. I ain’t movin’ another step, not for nothink.” She plunked herself down on an upside-down wheelbarrow, anchored with chains to the catwalk. Having sunk down on top of the inverted barrow, Dora refused to budge.<
br />
  “I’m staying right here till you gets back.”

  Katie tried to reason with Dora, but it was no use. Dora pointed to a lantern light glimmering on the upper platform. Katie promised to return as quickly as she could and began to climb the ladder, determined to head in the direction of the flickering light. She hated to leave Dora alone, but forged ahead, hoping to find Collin and Toby.

  Minutes later, Katie had climbed twenty-five feet straight up the ladder when she heard movement coming from below. She clung tightly to the wet rungs of the ladder and listened.

  Nothing.

  Had Dora had a change of heart? But the sound was too far away. And what was that clunking, dragging noise?

  With a fresh surge of adrenaline, Katie hoisted herself up the last rungs until she came to a crosspiece with a steel hook shaped like a U, which, when she skirted around it, gave way to a ramp that opened onto another catwalk. But this one was made of iron mesh, not wood.

  Movement ahead!

  A gas torch flickered in the distance, faint yet distinct. That’s got to be Toby and Collin! Katie thought, relief surging through her. She inched cautiously forward toward the lantern. As she approached the flickering, firefly light, she saw a flash of red. The wooden handrail to her right, braided with nautical rope, was wrapped in red flannel. The damp flannel was easier to grasp, less slippery. As she clung to it and pulled herself along, Katie could hear voices. Collin’s voice? Her spirits soared. She was close! But when she stopped in her tracks, the figure behind and below her stopped as well.

  She took several quick steps forward and stopped, several more steps and stopped again. The repeated echo of footfalls stopping and starting beneath her on the lower catwalk sent a shiver up Katie’s spine.