“Major . . . Brown . . . not . . . the . . . Ripper,” Collin choked out, his chest heaving from the exertion.
“Omigod!” Katie sputtered. “Reverend Pinker! It’s Reverend Pinker, isn’t it? I knew it. I just knew it! Dora’s all alone. We have to go back and find her!”
With an adrenaline rush that precedes gargantuan feats of strength, Katie hoisted Collin to his feet, then half dragged, half pulled him away from the edge of the pier, his boots raking over the wooden floorboards with a stumbling clatter. But she managed to put a distance of only six feet between them and the drop-off brink.
Still too close, Katie thought. She could easily see beyond the wet-slimed swath of the timbered edge to the black expanse of water below. She moistened her lips, and the taste of salty air was all-pervasive like beads of sweat. She raked the back of her hand across her mouth to rid herself of the moisture, but her fingers only managed to smear her face with more watery brine.
“I knew it was Pinker! I just knew it.” Katie’s heart pounded. She swallowed the salty wetness on her lips, acrid and sticky.
“No,” came Toby and Collin’s voice simultaneously.
Toby pushed himself away from the handrail and limped to the spot where Mrs. Tray’s rock lay. With his good hand he scooped up the stone, and it disappeared into his clenched fist.
“Jack the Ripper is very much alive. But he’s not Reverend Pinker.” There was a strangled, dark look in Toby’s eyes as he hobbled closer, which deepened into something more fierce: Sorrow? Anger? Pity?
“Who, then?” Katie demanded, struggling to prop Collin up as the wind whipped her hair around her face.
“In a manner of speaking—” Collin said, swaying unsteadily. “I suppose you could say it’s two people.” He glanced at Toby and smiled weakly. There was a strange sort of relief in his voice, even as his body quivered. “Two of us. Isn’t that right, Toby?”
“What are you talking about?” Katie let go of Collin’s elbow and instinctively stepped back—from disbelief or fear, she wasn’t sure. Collin, unable to stand without her help, lunged to the waist-high railing to their left. Clutching the wooden handrail, rigid in his intensity, he locked stares with Toby, ten feet away. The only thing separating the two boys was the expanse of pitted grey boards at their feet.
Katie glanced from one to the other.
To the east, a pale, buttery orb of a sun began to rise up out of the Thames. With it, the groan of the wind died down. Katie could hear buoy bells clanking in the distance and anchors being hoisted up, chain against chain, like the clatter of pots and pans.
There was a pause as if they were all standing still in awe of the sunrise. In the momentary lull, Katie peered down the long boards to where the pier dropped off into the sea. The Thames looked more like the yawning span of a misty golf course than a crashing river—bright green in patches where beams of sunlight sparkled. The image of the Thames as a golf course made Kate laugh. But it was a bitter, mirthless laugh. Before her father died on his way to pick up Collin, he had given Katie a present: a titanium driver with a graphite shaft, a Python Light Speed.
“So what do you say to that, Katie?” Collin’s voice pierced her thoughts. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“You never guessed it was us, did you, Katie?” Collin continued.
Us . . .? Katie yanked her thoughts back to the present. She felt oddly disconnected. As if she were here, but not here. Like one of those near-death experiences where you float above a hospital room watching doctors try to revive you. It’s like that, Katie thought. I just want to be left in peace and float away. I don’t want to be revived. I just want to go home!
But the two faces peering back at her, both grim and splattered with blood, no longer resembled the boys she knew so well—full of pranks and mischief, bravado and heroics. It was as if, in the space of several hours, Collin and Toby had grown into full manhood. Standing across from each other, on either side of the long pier, their expressions looked like mirror images—bleak but resolute, full of anguish and grief . . . triumph and determination.
“Who are you talking about?!” Katie shouted, scared to her very core of the answer she might receive.
Toby smiled, but it was more a grimace than a smile.
Waves sloshed against the lower pilings.
Who? Katie silently screamed.
Collin was the first to break the silence.
“I guess you could say . . . the one who set it all in motion . . . was the Duke,” Collin said, his face ashen as he leaned against the left-hand rail of the pier, the sun rising up behind his shoulders.
“The Duke?” Katie cried incredulously. “That’s not possible.” The Duke can hardly walk. He uses a cane. He’s not nimble enough to be all over the East End, slashing women and then disappearing from sight.
With a grunt of pain, Collin straightened to his full height, bracing his feet and legs against the wooden slats of the railing. He was breathing hard. “The Duke hatched a plan . . . that went wrong. Dead wrong. Isn’t that right, Toby?”
The breeze carrying up from the water below smelled chokingly of burnt toast, garlic, and dead fish. Katie clenched her stomach, trying hard not to dry heave.
Toby stared at Collin. “The Duke is not Jack the Ripper. He may have unwittingly set plans into motion. He’s not blameless in the death of Mary Ann Nichols. But he never physically touched any of those girls.”
“True enough, Toby, old sod. True enough,” Collin said in a tired voice with a sort of bitter inflection. Then, from his torn vest pocket, he tugged out the knife that had clattered to the ground when Major Brown went over the edge, and held it aloft—a parallel image of Toby’s holding up the rock in his clenched fist.
“Because Jack the Ripper is none other than”—Collin dropped the one monosyllable Katie least wanted to hear into the frozen stillness—“You.” Collin’s eyes grew wide with a sneaky look. “You did the Duke’s dirty work for him, Toby. You’re Jack the Ripper. But your luck’s run out, old sod.”
Uncomprehending, Katie blinked from one to the other. “Collin! Are you insane? Toby is no more Jack the Ripper than I am!”
“ ’Fraid not, old girl. Toby’s going to hang.”
“How in all blue hell do you figure that will happen, Collin?” Toby asked in a flat, emotionless tone, but a vein in his temple began to twitch.
Collin’s red brows shot up. He pantomimed shock that Toby could even ask such a question. “Because of Dora’s testimony. And mine. I can prove you’re the Ripper. Dora’s a witness. She’s going to give Queen’s evidence against you.”
“And when she does, you’ll plant an emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg on her wedding finger, is that it, Collin?”
“I, for one,” Collin persisted, swinging the dagger from his left hand to his right like a surgeon weighing a scalpel, “shall take great delight in your undoing.”
“And I’ll see you on a morgue slab with that knife in your heart first.”
“Not before I watch you swing from the gallows.”
“You’re a damn fool if you think so.” There was naked contempt in Toby’s voice. “Dora would no more give evidence against me than fly to the moon. There’s a code amongst Cockneys—not to rat each other out—or have you forgotten?”
“As the future Duke of Twyford, I’m prepared to sign a statement that I saw you standing over the body of two of those murdered girls, knife in hand. There’s already a great deal of evidence against you, Toby.” There was a vicious eagerness in Collin’s eyes, matched only by the look of pure hatred in Toby’s.
“And as for Dora,” Collin continued, “I think her loyalties will lie with those poor, dead Cockney girls. And with me. It won’t matter a fig if you’re her Great-Aunt Fanny’s nephew, thrice removed.”
“Are you so sure about that?” Toby grunted.
“Of course I am! Dora would play the part of a Cherokee maiden if I asked her to. But she saw what she saw. You bending over two of t
hose murdered girls. I suppose you’d like to tell Katie that it’s me. That I’m Jack the Ripper. But it won’t wash, old sod. Katie was with me at the Ten Bells Tavern. She knows I couldn’t possibly have killed Catherine Eddowes. That took someone as evil and cunning as Satan.”
“On that, we’re in total agreement. But you’ll be shaking hands with the devil long before I will. Go on, Collin. Tell Katie. Tell her what you told Major Brown. That you never meant to kill the first girl . . . how it was an accident.”
“So? You want me to babble? Spill the beans? What’s to be gained by it?” In the soft glow of the rising sun, Collin’s face appeared veiled.
His voice was icy as he said, “Why don’t you tell Katie, Toby? Tell her how it’s possible that I could be in two places at one time? How could I have killed the first girl tonight, Lizzie Stride, and then slit Catherine Eddowes’s throat? Katie was with me at the Ten Bells. Unless you think I’m a ghoulish phantom who can float through walls and be in two places at once. We kept Catherine Eddowes singing until half after midnight, in the back room at the Ten Bells. I came out and got Katie five minutes after Catherine Eddowes finished her last song. The whole evening, up to that moment, I was at the Ten Bells Tavern.”
“That’s true!” Katie interjected. “I was outside the door the whole time. I heard Catherine singing. Just minutes after her last song, when he heard Oscar Wilde fighting with Major Brown’s officer, Collin came flying out the door. Collin couldn’t have killed Catherine Eddowes. I was there. Dora was there. There wasn’t time for Collin to do anything, let alone murder two woman, cut them up, and leave their bodies blocks away from the Ten Bells. Unless . . . unless Collin had help. An accomplice.”
Fear shot through Katie like a sharp pain in her side. She blinked at Toby. Toby is either Jack the Ripper . . . or he’s Collin’s accomplice! Her throat tightened. Tears stung her eyes. The revelation struck her like a jab from the knife in Collin’s hand. They’re both Jack the Ripper! The thought rattled around in her brain like pebbles in a tin can.
She stared at Toby with revulsion and something more: a deep, desperate, wrenching feeling of betrayal. She had cared deeply for him. More deeply than she had ever imagined possible. I always lose the people I love!
Toby saw it in her eyes. The hurt, the anger.
Katie clenched and unclenched her fists. The horror that Toby was Jack the Ripper overwhelmed her. But a burst of outrage, blind and furious, overrode her repulsion. She made a step to fly at him, both fists raised.
Collin lunged toward her and grabbed her wrist. “Have a care, Katie. We can’t have him slicing you up as well.” Collin’s voice was emotional and passionate, but not altogether convincing.
Katie turned and stared at Collin. An angry flush suffused his blood-smeared face like a crimson mask. Red on red.
She knew. She knew by the sneer broadening his mouth, by the slow shake of his head, by the look in his eyes as cunning and frightening as anything Katie had ever seen there before.
“It was rawther ingenious of me, don’t you think, Katie, old girl?” Collin’s voice rose half an octave as he yanked her to his chest and jabbed the tip of the dagger into her throat. She could feel the twitching pulse of her heartbeat where the blade pressed into her flesh.
“But it can’t be you, Collin. It can’t be!” Katie wailed, droplets of blood trickling like tears down her neck, wet and warm. “I was with you at the Ten Bells! There wasn’t time for you to murder two girls.”
“Wrong again. The door was closed. You were outside, listening. Listening, mind you. Foolish, foolish girl. You didn’t hear Catherine Eddowes singing. You heard Dora Fowler. She’s a natural mimic and ventriloquist, remember? When I first met Dora, she made it appear as if one of her parrots was a veritable chatterbox—I told you all about that, Katie. She can manipulate her voice so it sounds as if its coming from her birds. Dora can imitate anything or anyone.”
Katie’s mind raced back to the Ten Bells Tavern, and Catherine Eddowes singing a lusty version of the Jack the Ripper song. Then she remembered approaching the hansom cab earlier. Dora was in the carriage singing “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay!” For a brief, agonizing moment Katie had thought it was Catherine Eddowes singing. Dora was more than adept at mimicry, she was a talented ventriloquist. That’s how she sold her parrots!
“But the others? How did you do it, Collin? And why?” Katie stopped struggling and began breathing slowly in and out. Stay calm, stay calm.
“As to the others,” Collin sputtered, loosening his grip across Katie’s collarbone, “Toby can tell you how I pulled it off. You and he will have an eternity to discuss it at hell’s gate or heaven’s door—doesn’t much matter which.”
Toby stepped forward. “I bet she’d rather hear it from you, Collin. Tell Katie how you never meant to kill the first girl, Mary Ann Nichols. Tell Katie what happened. It was ingenious of you.”
He wants to keep Collin talking, Katie thought, catching the cajoling inflection in Toby’s voice.
“So . . . ? Toby’s not the Ripper?” Katie squeaked out. “He didn’t help you?”
“Pheff,” Collin sniffed. “Toby could crush a man twice his size and not even break a sweat—everyone knows that. But he’d never lash out at anyone who hadn’t lashed out at him first. No. It took someone far less principled and far more cunning than Toby.”
Toby’s not the Ripper! Katie’s heart soared, then plummeted as the flat of the blade pressed against her throat.
Toby nodded almost imperceptibly, and Katie continued in a coaxing tone, “And . . . Mary Ann Nichols . . . ?”
“Ah . . . yes. The first girl I ever killed. I almost bungled that one.”
“But why kill her?” Katie persisted, trying not to flinch or squirm under the pressure of the knife. “What did Mary Ann ever do to you?”
Collin shifted the knife closer under Katie’s chin, and Toby quickly took up the narrative.
“She double-crossed you, didn’t she, Collin?” Toby’s voice was low, almost a whisper, but with underlying urgency. “Mary Ann Nichols went back on her word, didn’t she? The Duke hatched a plan to discredit Major Brown. He paid Mary Ann a hefty sum to claim that she and Major Brown were recently betrothed, thereby invalidating Brown’s courtship of your sister. Reverend Pinker introduced Mary Ann to you. She was a regular at his East End Charity Mission. Pinker knew Mary Ann was desperate to get away from Mad Willy. At the inquest we learned that Mad Willy had fisted her in the mouth, loosening several teeth.”
“Precisely,” Collin said, with a flash of excitement. “It was concluded at the inquest that Mary Ann knew her assailant or she would have cried out. Mrs. Green, the owner of a boarding house, stated she was sitting in her front parlor and would easily have heard Mary Ann scream for help.”
Toby nodded. “Witnesses claimed that on several occasions preceding her death they saw Mary Ann stepping out with someone who appeared to be a toff—that was you, Collin. Am I right?”
“Of course it was!” A superior smile twisted on Collin’s lips. “Even her own father testified that his girl had foolish pride, thinking she was above her class. Mad Willy had popped her a good one more than once, so she wanted a hundred quid to get out of London and start a new life.
“The plan was for Mary Ann to arrive at the theater the night we all saw Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. As we were leaving the Lyceum, Mary Ann was supposed to make a scene on the steps outside the theater, insisting that Lady Beatrix stay away from Major Brown. Mary Ann was to present Beatrix with the opera glasses and tell her that Major Brown had given them to her that very day as a token of his affection. Beatrix would recognize the man she loved as a liar, cheat, and thief, and break off all ties with him.”
“But Mary Ann Nichols never arrived at the theater. What happened?” Katie sputtered, squirming ever so slightly from the pressure of the cold steel at her throat.
“The stupid strumpet had a change of heart. She sent a note to her friend, Molly Potter, the orange sel
ler at the theater, to tell Reverend Pinker to meet her at Buck’s Row. Pinker showed me the note. I thought the silly chit was holding out for more money. So when Pinker exited the theater and hailed a cab, I took the underground railway. It’s quicker than a cab through traffic, as you discovered Katie when you rode on the underground train with Toby. You said yourself how much faster it was below ground than above. So I beat Pinker to the punch, so to speak.” Collin began to laugh maniacally. “I didn’t punch her—a gentleman doesn’t hit a lady. I slit her throat.” More echoing, crazy-sounding laughter.
Collin’s insane, Katie thought.
Collin stopped laughing, his voice a low snarl. “When I arrived in Buck’s Row, Mary Ann told me she didn’t want more money. She tried to give back the opera glasses. Claimed she couldn’t undermine Major Brown because he was a fellow Cockney and a hero in the East End, having risen so high in the ranks of Scotland Yard. I would never have killed her had she not praised Major Brown to the heavens. Ballyhooed his name as if he were a veritable god! It was too much. Too much, I tell you! I lost my temper. Who wouldn’t have?” Again the low, hissing snarl. “Ah, yes . . . my famous temper that you keep hearing about, Katie. And that you’ve seen first hand. I used my pocketknife to slit her throat—but like a fool I made a mistake. In my haste, I forgot Beatrix’s opera glasses. I knew Reverend Pinker would arrive any minute, so I raced down the street to the underground railway on Tower Hill, and arrived back in the West End at the Lyceum Theatre, where I slipped quietly into my seat and resumed watching the play. But you noticed my absence, Katie. It was almost my undoing.”
Katie shuddered. Waves sloshed and sucked against the pilings below the pier. “And Reverend Pinker?” Katie prompted, feeling the pulse in her neck quicken from the downward force of the blade.
“Hah!” Collin snorted like a horse at a starting gate. “Good old Stink-Pink arrived in Buck’s Row, but never saw me. He inspected the girl, got scared, and returned to the theater believing it was some random act of violence. Blood must have transferred to his sleeves — blood you saw, Katie, and commented on, drawing attention to the good Reverend. Stinker hasn’t an ounce of intelligence. He never thought for a moment I’d done the deed. Why would he? And later, when we left the theater, that stupid, pregnant orange seller, Molly Potter, almost brought me down low. She asked Reverend Pinker if he’d received the note from her friend, Mary Ann Nichols. I shoved her hard to shut her up. You saw that, Katie, but didn’t put two and two together. It all might have ended there. Gone no further, but for Georgie Cross who pilfered the opera glasses. My sister’s opera glasses. The only tangible thing that could link Mary Ann’s death to me and my family, and that sorry excuse of a porter lad stole them off a dead girl! The vile, despicable, thieving fool.”
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 41
