Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller

by Shelly Dickson Carr

  Katie called after him, “Collin! How’s your mum?”

  Collin swiveled back around, one red eyebrow feathering upward like the arch in a robin’s wing. “She’s working on a new photo album of . . . me.” He had the good sense to look sheepish about this.

  Outside the museum, the air was crisp and clean. Marylebone Road was a whirlwind of honking cars, hooting taxis, clanking trucks, and rumbling buses. On the sidewalk all around them came the shuffling, laughing, breathing, happy sounds of pedestrians enjoying the sunny afternoon.

  Katie smiled.

  Toby smiled back. “Shall we take the tube, luv? Or walk?”

  “Walk,” Katie answered. But as they were about to step off the curb, her cell phone rang out with the lyrics to “Dangerous Love,” Courtney’s first hit single.

  “I love that song,” Tody said, hearing the ringtone. I’m in lust with the lead singer Courtney from the Metro Chicks. Cut off m’left arm just to meet her.”

  Katie whipped her backpack off her shoulder and tugged out her phone.

  “Courtney!” She all but shouted into her iPhone.

  “Hey, baby girl,” came Courtney’s throaty, sing-songy voice. “How goes it, baby sis?”

  “Courtney!” Katie squealed.

  “Listen, Kit-Kat. I’ve got some smokin’ hot news for you. I’m coming home.”

  “Home? To London? When?”

  “Next flight. And hold on to your friggin’ blue-painted toenails, I just bought a condo—”

  “Where? In LA?” Katie took a deep breath. Courtney already owned a house in Beverly Hills and a condo in Malibu.

  “London, baby sister! How cool is that? But here’s the totally rockin’ news: I bought a flat in Twyford Manor House—”

  “Grandma Cleaves’s building? You’re joking . . . ?”

  “Nope. It’s weird. I’ve been having these, like, goofy vibes lately. Like Dad’s voice is in my head or something. Hey, look. I’ll explain it all when I get there. I’ve missed you . . . and . . . well . . . when Mom and Dad died, I guess I was so caught up in my own grief I just sort of threw myself into my career . . . and, well, I’m sorry, Katie. I haven’t exactly been there for you. You’ll be going off to college in a year or two. So I thought we might hang together until then. Like a real family. I know Grandma Cleaves hates my guts—”

  “That’s not true, Courtney! She loves you.”

  “Puh-leeze. The old bat doesn’t approve of my music or my lifestyle. She can take a flying leap, for all I care. I just want you and me to be together.”

  “Courtney . . . I love you . . . I mean it. There isn’t a day goes by . . . I don’t miss you.”

  “Are you crying, Kit-Kat? Come on, baby girl, don’t go all boo-hoo-hoo on me. Jeez. Talk about guilt-tripping me. Between your bawling and Dad’s friggin’ voice in my head . . . cripes! And before you go all mush-gush on me, I’ve gotta be in London for another reason. I got this new gig—”

  “I don’t care why you’re coming, Courtney. Just get here!”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about this new gig?”

  Katie laughed through her tears. “OK. What’s the new gig?”

  “I got a commission to write the score of a new movie being filmed in London. It’s one of those gothic, steampunk flicks.”

  “Well, that should be easy for you, Court. Gothic and steampunk are right up your alley.”

  “Yeah. That’s why they’re paying me the big bucks. And since you’re the family bookworm, Katie, I was hoping you’d help me do some research. Know anything about the Victorian era?”

  “Yes!” Katie shouted. “It’s kind of . . . my . . . er . . . specialty. I mean, I’ve read a lot about the nineteenth century. I’ve actually lived there . . . in my head, I mean.”

  “That’s cool, then. I need you to research what was being sung in the music halls and bawdy houses, that kinda thing.”

  Katie thought about Catherine Eddowes and her lusty lyrics. “I can definitely help you with that.”

  “The melodies need to be historically accurate.”

  “I can sing tunes with lyrics that are totally from that era.” Katie felt a tingle of joy. The whole world seemed full of sunshine and roses. A happy, safe place, Katie thought.

  “So you’ll do it, then? You’ll help me? The movie’s about some dude named Jack the Ripper.”

  The End

  Notes to the Curious

  This novel attempts to portray, through the medium of a time-travel mystery, an accurate picture of life at varying levels of society in the year 1888, during Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror. The story may vary from accounts of Jack the Ripper with which the reader is familiar because of the nature of a back-in-time/forward-in-time narrative, where a character’s actions in the past can and do alter the future. Rest assured, however, that the women who fall prey to Jack the Ripper by novel’s end are the actual true-to-life victims. The order in which they were murdered, the precise locations of the murders, and the actual dates are all historically accurate. Their ages and circumstances have been changed slightly in deference to the plot. As my writing teacher and best-selling author Bill Martin taught me: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” For this bit of factual tinkering, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

  With the obvious exception of Twyford Manor and one other place, every street, every location, every scene is an actual one the reader might have encountered had she or he lived in London at the time of the murders. And though the manners, customs, clothing, modes of transportation, speech patterns, and Cockney rhyming slang have changed almost as much as the London skyline, I have tried to convey a true sense of the time period, filtered through the eyes of Katie Lennox, with her twenty-first–century sensibilities and perceptions.

  The historic figures of the day who tread lightly (or, perhaps, with heavier footfalls) through the pages of this novel—Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler among others—all resided in or around London in the year 1888. Bram Stoker (before he wrote Dracula) was the theater manager of the Lyceum Theatre, and would in all probability have been there at the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson’s highly anticipated new play—the same night Mary Ann Nichols’s body was discovered in Buck’s Row. Oscar Wilde may have been at the Lyceum as well, given that he was an aspiring playwright and theater critic.

  And as Katie witnesses firsthand, on the very night that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde opened at the Lyceum Theatre, newspaper boys were running up and down the gaslit Strand waving newsprint and shouting: “Murder! Murder! Read all about it!” The fiendish Jack the Ripper, like the shape-shifting Mr. Hyde, was about to enter the annals of famous Victorian murderers. In his case, life truly mimicked fiction.

  The London Stone

  The London Stone—the portal through which Katie travels back in time—does exist and is purported to have supernatural properties. For 900 years the stone has resided in the heart of London. Often called the Stone of Brutus, it looks like an ordinary boulder. You can see it today wedged in a wall alcove outside 111 Cannon Street. But it is no ordinary lump of rock. Ancient legend has it that if the stone leaves London, the city will cease to exist. “So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, long will London flourish.”

  Historians differ as to the stone’s original purpose, believing it was either an ancient Druid altar or part of a religious stone circle, like Stonehenge. For centuries it was believed to be the stone from which King Arthur withdrew his mythic sword, Excalibur.

  What we do know is this: The earliest written mention of the London Stone hails from the tenth century. Maps dating back to the eleventh century depict it as a landmark in the heart of London; ancient manuscripts tell us that it was used as a place where deals were forged, proclamations made, and oaths sworn to King and Queen. The pitted indentations referred to as raven claw fissures, on the surface of the stone (that Katie plunges her finger into) were forged by repeated sword blows during medieval pageants.

  Shakespea
re, Dickens, and many others have written about the famous stone. In Tudor times, Queen Elizabeth I (arguably the greatest English monarch) believed the stone had mystical powers.

  What appeals to me most about the London Stone is the fact that for 900 years, through bouts of war, turbulence, fires, cannon blasts, and air-raid bombings, the London Stone has remained intact and unscathed.

  In 1888, when our story takes place, the London Stone was encased behind an iron grille set into the south wall of St. Swithin’s church, where it remained until the Second World War. In 1941 (on the very day my own mother, a very young girl, was evacuated from London) a bomb was dropped during the Blitz, hitting its target: St. Swithin’s. The church was totally demolished and reduced to rubble. Yet, miraculously, the London Stone sat amid the burning ruins unscathed. Three centuries earlier, in 1666, the iconic lump of rock survived the Great Fire of London. Then, as in 1944, the stone lay unharmed amongst smoldering devastation.

  Uniformed guards kept vigil over the stone in earlier times, lest it be chipped away at by people who believe it had mysterious powers and might bring them luck. Sadly, the boulder has been neglected in modern times, relegated to the status of “quaint relic from the past.” And though visitors from far reaches of the globe still make pilgrimages to see and touch the stone, few Londoners today give it so much as a passing glance as they hurry along the busy thoroughfare of Cannon Street where the stone resides in the shadow of a towering office building, half hidden behind a decrepit iron grate.

  The gas-lit, swirling fog that once engulfed the London Stone in 1888, when Jack the Ripper struck fear in the hearts of millions, has been replaced by modern exhaust fumes billowing from the heavy traffic roaring past; its only illumination now, the yellowish sweeping glare of motorized headlights.

  The True Identity of Jack the Ripper

  In the year 1888, Queen Victoria had been England’s reigning monarch for fifty-one years, and would continue to sit on the throne for another thirteen. Hence the name given to an era that spanned a good portion of the nineteenth century: The Victorian Age.

  In the autumn of 1888, fear gripped every corner of Great Britain because of a series of gruesome murders perpetuated in London by an unknown assailant, dubbed Jack the Ripper. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic chronicled the horrific mutilations with a fervor boarding on obsessive. The shocking nature of the murders was unparalleled in the history of crime and criminals. Jack the Ripper attacked his female victims without warning, slitting their throats and eviscerating their bodies, and then was able to slip away undetected, even though police officers were close at hand.

  Hailed as “a reprobate, half beast, half man, with an insatiable thirst for blood,” Jack the Ripper invoked terror, as did the mere mention of his name. People throughout England, Europe, and America talked of little else save the fiendish monster who sliced up women in such a gruesome manner.

  Women in London at this time dared not venture out after dark unless they had no other choice. Those who plied their trades or earned their living at night—such as factory girls, actresses, music hall performers, midwives, or ladies of the night—lived in fear of being attacked.

  Queen Victoria beseeched her female subjects to stay indoors after sundown, but should they have to venture out in the evening, to always walk in pairs. Scotland Yard instructed women to hail a police officer to escort them safely to their destination. The Metropolitan Police were doing double and triple shifts, manning every corner on every street in the Whitechapel District of the East End. But to no avail. Jack the Ripper eluded the authorities at every turn.

  Outraged at the ineptitude of the police, members of the community—including ministers, priests, clergymen, students, news reporters, and members of “vigilance societies”— began roaming the streets at night in order to apprehend the fiendish killer, but with equally poor results.

  How many murders did Jack the Ripper commit? There is no agreement on this subject. Some believe eight; others, eleven; and still others, fourteen. Scotland Yard pronounced the official toll to be five, listing the first victim as Mary Ann Nichols, followed by Annie Chapman, the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, and then the last and most gruesome murder of all, of Mary Jane Kelly.

  These five victims died within earshot of a police officer or someone passing by. All but one of the murders was committed on the street. Many women at this time carried whistles for sounding an alert. Scotland Yard implored girls and women to scream or blow a whistle at the merest hint of provocation. And yet none of the victims called out. Why didn’t they cry out for help when help was so readily available?

  What we know is this: Because of the vicious nature of the wounds, the perpetrator would have been covered with blood. Therefore, Jack the Ripper either had a reason for walking the streets at night wearing blood-soaked clothing—such as a doctor, midwife, or butcher lad whose leather apron would be smeared with blood—or he was wearing a large cape or cloak to disguise his bloody clothing.

  After the third murder, Scotland Yard, the newspapers, and the queen stepped up efforts to warn women to walk in pairs at night and not to trust any man whatsoever, not even their own kinsmen.

  The last three victims were terrified of Jack the Ripper. They knew the risks they were taking walking after dark. Mary Jane Kelly told friends that she couldn’t sleep at night, believing she might be murdered in her sleep by the Ripper. A neighbor heard Mary Jane singing in her room late at night, the very room where she was found dead, brutally chopped up, several hours later—all while a police officer walked up and down the street outside her window.

  Surely the Ripper’s victims, if they believed themselves in danger, would have screamed bloody murder. Did these women know and trust their assailant? Could Jack the Ripper have been a minister, a priest, a clergyman? Another woman? A man dressed as a woman? Perhaps a trusted member of the community? A police officer? Someone above reproach, whom they least suspected?

  We shall never know for sure because Jack the Ripper was never caught. After the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper seemed to vanish into thin air. His or her identity will remain forever a mystery. Unless, of course, we are lucky enough to come upon a time portal, such as the London Stone, that might transport us back to London in the year 1888. . . .

  About the Author

  Shelly Dickson Carr was just ten years old when she read He Wouldn’t Kill Patience, the classic mystery by her grandfather, John Dickson Carr. Since then she’s been hooked on the genre and thinking about the mystery she’d one day write. Ripped is her first novel.

  The idea for Ripped came while on a scouting trip. As a board member for the Huntington Theatre in Boston Shelly has traveled frequently to London with theatre members in search of interesting new plays. While in London, the author began researching the mystery surrounding Jack the Ripper, one of the greatest unsolved murder cases in history.

  Shelly’s fascination with the nineteenth century started when she was a young girl, in a rambling Victorian house in Mamaroneck, New York. Her British mother, an author and bibliophile, filled every room in the house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Leather-bound classics abounded. Her friends called it the library house. In third grade Shelly read all the Just So Stories by Kipling—because she could reach them on the lower shelves.

  A founding member of The Masterpiece Trust that enabled Downton Abbey to be aired on PBS, and a supporter of Masterpiece Mystery’s Sherlock, the author has a deep love of all things British.

  She has three daughters and lives with her husband, their youngest daughter, and their bulldog, Becket, on Beacon Hill in Boston. Shelly has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College, and an undergraduate degree in education.

  When not reading or writing or busy with community arts projects, Shelly, aka Michelle Karol, likes to spend time with her horse, Tucker. She also loves to ski and travel with her husband.

  Acknowledgments

&nb
sp; First and foremost, to my parents, Julia and Richard McNiven, who read, commented, and encouraged me throughout early drafts of RIPPED. To my British grandmother, Clarice Cleaves Carr, whose wit and charm and stories about England made me fall in love with all things British, particularly four o’clock tea and Golden Age detective fiction. To my grandfather, Daddy John, for introducing me at an early age to the mystery surrounding Jack the Ripper and to the possible Ripper suspects who might have “dunit.”

  To Julia Dickson for her unwavering support, for reading the manuscript countless times, and for her belief in her ink-slinging old Mum.

  To Coco Karol for editing the penultimate draft and making extensive notes, all the while producing and dancing in the Red Soles promo video for RIPPED.

  To Chelsea Lennox who, with her teenage insights and joie de vivre, insisted I change the ending to a happily-ever-after version, and hounded me until I tweaked it.

  To Kerry and Wooda McNiven, Lynn Centa, and Russell Grossman, my eagle-eyed readers and supportive sibs, many thanks.

  To Ned Berman, freshman at Dartmouth and first official young adult reader, who skipped classes because he couldn’t put the manuscript down (music to a writer’s ears).

  To my writers’ group—you know who you are—thank you, one and all.

  To my salon sisters at the Vermont College MFA writing program—hats off.

  To my near-and-dear buddies at the Huntington Theatre Company—you rock.

  To my WGBH and Masterpiece Trust colleagues, especially those involved with Sherlock and Downton Abbey—your love of romance, intrigue, and historical drama inspires me.

  A shout out to Bill Martin, who taught me “everything I know about writing” in his master class at Harvard Extension.

  To Gregory Maguire, who, over lunch at Papa Razzi, encouraged me to “defy gravity” on a broomstick of my very own; and to Dotty Frank for her wicked writing wit and wisdom.