Michael Prescott - Riptide

“You don’t buy the idea?”

“It’s a bit of a stretch, I would say. Although if Carrie Brown had been murdered in London in the right time frame, there would be little doubt she was one of the Ripper’s girls. Photos were taken of the scene. Here, I’ll show you.”

He rose, grunting with effort, and searched a crowded bookcase until he found a large hardbound volume. He flipped it open to the photo section and thrust the book at her.

There were two grainy photographs, both taken in a cheap hotel room. One glance at the pictures showed why some people pegged the New York murder as the Ripper’s work. It was the same butchery seen in Mary Kelly’s bedroom. Carrie Brown lay in a tangle of her own clothes pulled up over her hips, her limbs in disarray. She had been opened up and hollowed out.

She stared at the photos while Sirk resumed his seat. “The Devil’s Henchman mutilated his victims too,” she said finally.

Sirk lifted a silvery brow. “Why, yes.”

“Like this?”

“There are only so many ways to disembowel a woman, I’m afraid. Just as there are only so many ways to make love to her.” His face blossomed in a sickly leer. “What else do you know about old Saucy Jacky?”

“He wrote letters to the police. Taunted them.”

“Not necessarily. Yes, the police received numerous letters purportedly from the killer, but the great majority of them-quite possibly all of them-were hoaxes. The authorities had made the mistake of printing up some of the earlier letters as broadsheets and distributing them around the city. This inspired people to try their hand at the communications. It became a fad.”

“He sent Catharine Eddowes’ kidney to somebody.”

“Half a kidney was posted to the chairman of an ad hoc vigilance committee. It may have been Kate Eddowes’ kidney, or only another hoax, perhaps perpetrated by a fun-loving medical student. People had a robust sense of humor in those days.”

If the diary could be trusted, the kidney was no hoax. “But he did take some of his victims’ organs.”

“Yes, on occasion.”

“So he must have used the alleys to escape, at least. He could hardly stroll down a major thoroughfare covered in blood.”

“Jack would not have been covered in blood. He would asphyxiate the woman before he began to cut. When the heart stops beating, blood stops pumping. Spatter would have been minimal. And the organs he took were easily concealed in a watertight tobacco pouch, a common appurtenance of the period.”

“If he’d been stopped and searched-”

“Most likely he would not have been stopped, because he was not the sort of man the constabulary was on the lookout for. He may have been too respectable, too genteel. It was widely assumed that the killer was an obvious degenerate, a drooling maniac. And the upper classes maintained that men of a certain station did not patronize whores.”

“They couldn’t have really believed that.”

“Perhaps not, but they intended to be seen as believing it. Antipathy toward the ’unfortunates,’ as they were dubbed, was a common feature of Victorian thinking. Quite a few men held that women were congenitally inferior, the ebb and flow of the menstrual tide rendering them slaves to emotion. If this was true of the average middle-class female, it was doubly true of those who sold their bodies for coins.”

“Then maybe the authorities should have made some effort to get them off the streets,” Jennifer said with a touch of bitterness.

“And put them where? In the workhouses, which were no better than prisons? Or perhaps in the prisons themselves? Some ended up there. Though prostitution was not illegal, loitering for purposes of prostitution was illegal. It would take a keen legal mind indeed to draw this distinction, but the jurors of the period were apparently up to the task.”

“It wasn’t a good time to be a woman, I guess.”

“But then, it so rarely is.” Sirk heaved himself upright. “If you don’t mind, I find that all this talk has put me in need of additional refreshment. You’re sure you don’t want anything?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

She tried not to think about her father while Sirk was out of the room. Instead she got up and examined the photos on the wall. There was a street scene of speakeasies and gambling joints, captioned “Culver City, the Heart of Screenland.” A reproduction of a 1920 newspaper announcing the suicide of Olive Thomas, a silent movie star. A woman in a fur coat at the wheel of a luxury automobile. An obese man, grinning hugely.

Sirk returned with another brimming glass of scotch.

“Just admiring your collection,” she said.

“My museum of horrors?” He raised the glass to his lips. “Delightful, aren’t they?”

She pointed toward the fat man. “Who was he?”

“Dear, dear, you don’t recognize Fatty Arbuckle? One of silent cinema’s biggest stars-biggest in all respects, not least his formidable girth. When he procured a three-million-dollar contract, he took his entourage to San Francisco for an orgiastic celebration, during which he enjoyed violent coitus with a young starlet, Virginia Rappe, whose last name, minus one p, proved tragically prescient. Miss Rappe died of internal injuries. It transpired that Fatty’s prodigious girth had crushed her internal organs. There were darker rumors, however, one of them being that it was not Fatty’s weight that did her in, but his use of a Coca-Cola bottle as a makeshift dildo. Which, you know, gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘product placement.’”

He produced a mellow chortle. She tried not to show her distaste as she took her seat.

“I have a theory about Fatty,” Sirk added, still standing. “I believe he implanted in the public psyche the archetype of the jovial fat man with a sinister side. Thus paving the way for Sidney Greenstreet, Alfred Hitchcock, and, not to make invidious comparisons, myself.”

He surprised her by sitting on the sofa next to her.

“I hope you don’t mind. That armchair is far less comfortable than it looks. It seems to play havoc with my gout.”

She wasn’t thrilled to have him seated beside her. But she couldn’t object, even if the house did seem suddenly hotter than before. From up close, she could hear his stertorous breathing.

“Here are some other things you know about Jack the Ripper that are not true. He was a surgeon. He was a sadist. He was the first serial killer in history. He was the only serial killer in London at that time. He preyed on young, pretty women who had their whole lives ahead of them.”

“And the truth is?”

“He showed no particular surgical skill. His facility with the knife was no more than one might expect from a competent butcher. Did you know that an experienced slaughterman can gut a cow in under four minutes? Butchers and slaughtermen were among the authorities’ top suspects. Of course, Jack may simply have purchased a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. The book was in print by 1888.”

“You implied he wasn’t a sadist.”

“He didn’t make his victims suffer. There’s no reason to suppose he showed the slightest interest in them while they were alive. Most likely, he never engaged them in conversation, never spoke to them face-to-face. He crept up from behind, and they never even got a look at him. Quite possibly no one got a look at him. The few eyewitness descriptions are contradictory and of doubtful merit.”

“If he wasn’t a sadist, why did he kill them?”

“For the postmortem evisceration, of course. He choked the woman to death, cut her throat for good measure, and proceeded to what really interested him. He would take a woman apart, piece by piece, the way a curious child might take apart a clockwork mechanism to see what makes it tick.”