The Severed Streets Read online

  ‘She left a pub in Brick Lane at half-past midnight, and, lacking four pennies for her lodging –’ again, Costain heard the familiar lilt in the way the man said it, as if this was a song he’d sung many times, an inaccurate mantra – ‘was thrown out of 18 Thrawl Street, the latest victim of merciless capitalism.’ There was his new narrative, a new geological layer, flung on top for new money, with no thought as to what was underneath. This bloke didn’t care if he contradicted himself; he had no idea, in the end, what he stood for or what he meant. That pricked Costain. These days, he had to be careful about his every action, about everything he said. He only hoped, and he glanced over at Ross again, that didn’t extend to what he thought. He put all that from his mind and went back to listening to this man who had given up all such limitations.

  ‘She said she’d go and find the money on the streets,’ Fennix continued. ‘It’d be easier that night … she’d just bought a new bonnet. We can only wonder if that was what caught the eye of the man who turned out to be the most important encounter of her life, the man who … made her famous. At 2.30 a.m. she had a conversation with one Nellie Holland at the Frying Pan pub, which is now a balti house. “Polly” told Nellie that she’d made the money she needed three times over, and then drank it all away again. This was late August, a warm, humid night, just like today, in fact. You can imagine “Polly”, a few too many buttons undone, perhaps, beads of sweat on her young flesh, a bit merry, in her new bonnet, chancing down this backstreet, the rumble of the newly built railway station in the background – a station built so the middle classes could go on their holidays, flattening the slums to do so…’ Fennix had spread his hands in the air, his leather gloves flexing like those of a mime artiste. ‘She’d sacrificed herself on the altar of booze and cheap pleasure, turned herself into the perfect brazen victim. Or perhaps she’d been that from birth. And then out he stepped.’ He took a sudden stride towards the crowd, and with a flourish drew a knife. The Italians and the Koreans obligingly gasped and leaped back. The students gave him the gift of their ironic laughter.

  Ross was left looking calmly at the end of the weapon pointed at her face. She cocked her head to one side, examining it professionally, as if for traces of blood. Or silver. None was present.

  ‘I call this my twanger,’ said Fennix, and plunked the end of the rubber blade with his finger to make it vibrate. ‘“Polly” didn’t meet with anything so harmless. She had her throat slit with one blow.’ He turned away from Ross and took two steps forwards, going straight past Mary, who looked towards him with a sudden interest, as if he might be the one to give her money. He slashed across the air nowhere near her, and she looked sadly at him. Costain had half expected her to flinch. ‘Then he lifted up her skirts, cut down her abdomen, and disembowelled her.’ The young woman continued to watch him, oblivious to her own fate. ‘Which shows that perhaps he was a medical man, that perhaps his instincts in this matter were not entirely … natural.’

  With that hanging in the air, he led them off. Costain and Ross looked over their shoulders to see Mary continuing to stand there, gazing after them.

  * * *

  Fennix took them to the next murder site. ‘The canonical five, they call them,’ he said, ‘their names writ in blood in the book of history.’ They arrived in an indoor market, stall owners to either side managing clipped smiles or just avoiding eye contact. There had obviously been no financial arrangement to bring the tour through here, thought Costain, even with Fennix’s increased cash flow. The butcher and pie-maker must feel their business suffering several times a day, with a discussion of human meat nearby, but what could they do about it?

  He saw her from a distance this time: what he initially took to be an almost Madonna-like figure, some sort of shawl over one shoulder, her hands spread out. The shape of the Ripper was again a shadow cast all around her. ‘Annie Chapman, slashed across the throat, then had her intestines hauled out and laid across her shoulder like the fur she could never afford.’ Now they were close, Costain could see that she was indeed open, showing off her wounds in silent complaint. Again, there was no silver. ‘Excuse the gynaecological detail, gents, but Jack cut out her uterus and part of her bladder, and took those with him, as well as the brass rings off her fingers.’ Costain watched Ross’ expression grow tremendously calm as she made eye contact with the revenant or recording or whatever you wanted to call it. ‘This place was a yard behind a house then – lots of windows overlooking – brave of Jack to do his business here. Next to her was found a leather apron. Typical attire, as you’ll know, sir,’ Fennix said, looking to Costain, ‘for Jewish tradesmen.’

  Also for many other sorts of tradesman, surely? Were all blacksmiths or tanners Jewish? But Costain didn’t give voice to his thoughts. He wasn’t sure if this man would have answers that went any deeper than his script.

  They left Annie and the butcher and pie-maker in their aprons behind them.

  * * *

  They walked to a pair of wooden gates in front of what seemed to be a schoolyard. Against the gates stood a tall washed-out woman with blood spilling down her dress. Her eyes were angry, insistent. ‘“Long Liz” Stride, only slashed across the throat, perhaps because Jack was disturbed.’ There he was, a fleeting glimpse, running. ‘One Israel Schwartz – note that name, sir – saw her having a row earlier with someone he described as “a gentleman”. That is how we know that Jack was, or was pretending to be, a member of the ruling classes, perhaps even royalty. Now, days had separated the previous murders, but this time, perhaps frustrated at not having got what he was after, just forty-five minutes later…’ Fennix let that sentence trail off as he led the party down the street to Mitre Square, where modern offices looked down on a group of benches, across which was sprawled the emaciated remains of a woman, her skirts and legs open, endlessly jerking and juddering, her arms windmilling as if she was in the act of falling, her head just a red lump. Costain wasn’t sure he wanted to move closer, but found himself doing just that.

  ‘Catherine Eddowes, again a drunk and a whore, again cut with a mighty blow across her throat, then systematically butchered, her intestines pulled out and laid over her shoulder, again her uterus and this time her left kidney taken by Jack. But this time he went further, which is odd, considering that these were all houses around here, and he could have been watched – perhaps was watched – from any one of these windows. He went further in what to us now looks almost like a demonstration, like a work of cruel performance art, like a protest at the conditions that had given birth to him. Her right ear lobe was sliced, a V shape was incised into each of her cheeks, and cuts made into her eyelids. Jack also snipped off the tip of her nose.’ Costain looked into what remained of the woman’s face, a mess of blood, and saw that her eyes, faint as they were, were again pleading. He wondered, not for the first time, what the connection was between what seemed to be people, preserved in time like this, and the Hell he’d glimpsed. Were these just images of people, as all the copies of Losley had been? Or were these somehow still the people themselves? Were they suffering? Was the history of London their Hell? Did they know that what had happened to them had started to happen again? Was this how he might end up, unless he played his cards exactly right?

  There was the Ripper, standing all around, hands holding vague trophies.

  ‘And he took her apron. With two groups of coppers after him, the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police – because that was the case in those days, each police force having its own territory – Jack cannily hopped back and forth over the border between them, hue and cry all around!’ Fennix led them off again, and this time Costain, following on his phone, knew where they were going.

  Ross walked calmly beside him.

  * * *

  ‘Here is Goulston Street, ladies and gentlemen, these days, ironically, the location of Petticoat Lane Market, and –’ he winked at Costain – ‘yes, sir, there’s a synagogue just round the corner.’

  ‘S
torks on roofs,’ Ross whispered.

  It took a moment for Costain to remember that that was a metaphor she’d used during the Losley case. There had been an exact correlation, he remembered, between the size of families in Holland and the number of storks that nested on the roofs of their houses. It wasn’t because storks brought babies, but because rich people back then had both bigger roofs and more children.

  She’d obviously seen that momentary look of consternation on his face. ‘I mean, Jews were poor, so the slum landscape of the killings of course includes lots of Jewish references.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all there is to it? Spatley was Jewish.’

  Ross shook her head, as if now annoyed that she’d shared her thoughts. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Here’s where Jack dropped that apron, and then perhaps wrote, on this wall here, his famous message. Depending on whether you believe that any of the letters the police received were really from him, depending on if you believe he even wrote this – perhaps this is all we ever hear in the man’s own voice. The message that calls out to us even now, which was written in blood in the house of a rich man only this week. Here it was written in chalk, and originally the message read…’ Fennix held up a slate, on which was written:

  The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

  ‘One of the versions, anyway,’ said Costain to Ross. They’d all been reading up on the history of this shit. She just nodded absently. She was looking up at the wall. Costain followed her gaze to where the original message still shone, for just the two of them, in all its different versions, frustratingly, with crossings out and some words faded and some reinforced, as if the memory of London was trying to accommodate all the possibilities, everything remembered, imagined or written about these words. This was merely testimony, Costain thought, as Ross took a photo of it. Not as solid as evidence. Not as reliable. The city continued to be their key witness. But what it told them was subjective.

  If enough tour guides kept getting the precise positions of the bodies wrong, as Fennix did, the Ripper’s victims would finally end up there.

  * * *

  The last murder turned out to have happened forty days after the previous one, in what was now a loading bay beside a multi-storey car park. This time Costain was prepared for his senses to find something terrible, but it took a while. When they finally did, as Fennix gestured wildly around the space, he initially had trouble recognizing what he saw at the foot of the bay as a person. He only got there when Ross stepped over to stare at it.

  She was just a pile of meat, swaying like a mirage, her hands still flailing in the air, nothing else left of her able to communicate anything to the few who could see her. She looked like a ragged plant, fronds of blood and gore shifting at the bottom of an ocean of time. Not all of her was flesh. Some of what made up this knot was bedstead and blankets. This woman, Mary Kelly, had been killed at home, in her own bed. Costain slowly walked around her and saw her as an anatomy display, organs orbiting her, entrails endlessly wrapping around her. She was an explosion that continued: silent, hard to see. As with all the others, there was no sign of silver. Costain let himself look round, and nearly stepped back in shock when he found a solid cylinder of sheer Jack right in front of him, a knot of hatred and self-hatred and vomited sanity in the air.

  ‘Her neighbours heard the cry of “Murder!”, but they heard that every night! A lot of other cries too. Cries of stark passion. Cries of release. Because this was a notorious rookery, the bleak face of poverty and oppression. This time Jack had privacy, and he could take his time. She must have let him in. She must have teased him, tempted him, provoked him. He hacked away her entire face. He attacked her thighs. He opened up her abdomen. He cut out her uterus, her spleen, her liver and kidneys and her breasts and he left them here. But he also managed to do what no other man had done before, for he stole her heart away!’ Fennix spread his arms wide for a theatrical finish. ‘So who was Jack the Ripper? Someone special, that’s for sure. Perhaps the artist, Walter Sickert, who used the case as a subject for his art, including a painting suggestively titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Perhaps Sir John Williams, obstetrician to Queen Victoria’s daughter, looking into the causes of infertility in all the wrong places. Or, the most shocking possibility of all … perhaps it was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Queen Victoria’s grandson, driven mad by syphilis, with an establishment around him willing to indulge in this rich man’s … sport.’

  Costain looked over to Ross. Now he could see, and perhaps it was only because he knew her, that she was shaking.

  * * *

  After the tour was over and Fennix had passed his top hat around to collect tips, and had signed some of the Toff masks, Costain and Ross got away and found a modern pub and a quiet table. The modernity of the establishment wasn’t at all a guarantee that there’d be nothing horrible inside – as they’d just had re-emphasized to them, London was built on horror – but it was a gesture towards control that they both needed right now.

  Costain waited silently as Ross updated her notebooks, stopping, flipping back, making tiny notes on different pages as if landing a stack of mental aircraft that had been circling in her head. He knew that feeling, but she did it on a much higher level than he did. It would be so hard to put on a front to her, to fool her. He also knew the comfort that came from translating the chaos of the world into the familiar patterns used by coppers. They shared that. Finally she put her palms on the table and took a last look at the page in front of her. Then she closed the book, picked up the pint so far unattended beside her and took a long drink. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Angry.’

  He lowered his voice, indicating that he understood. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Because that tour guide made so many baseless assumptions about connections between the killings. The Illuminati conspiracy, my arse. I actually don’t think we can rule out a Jewish or anti-Semite angle, because the differences between the old message and the new are indicative of something. I don’t know of what. But that twat had no idea. I don’t think the message can have been left by the killer at the time. I mean, what, he’s trying to blame the murder on the Jews while actually maintaining that he’s the murderer? Maybe that’s why the grammar got so awkward and there are crossings out. He’s standing there going, “Wait a sec, haven’t thought this through…” But in our case, like you said at the crime scene, it probably is the murderer who wrote it, so what does that mean?’

  Costain laughed. ‘When I said it, it was assumption.’

  ‘It was. But we’ve labelled it as such now. So that’s okay.’

  ‘But what I meant was … you know, I started to feel pretty shitty about what that tour guide was saying—’

  She was shaking her head, angry with him still. ‘You want me to be all touchy feely? Sorry, I thought we were in law enforcement.’

  ‘I’m just saying—’

  ‘Right. Four points here, I think.’ Now she was talking at high speed. ‘Firstly, the Jack the Ripper case is a trap for analysts. It feels like there’s a signal there that’s right on the edge of being heard through all the noise. Suspect doesn’t rape them when he has the chance. His interest doesn’t seem sexual. He’s clearly a misogynist, or wants us to think he’s one, but he kills quickly; he doesn’t want to torture them. He likes the thing with the intestines over the shoulder, and what does that mean? It’s completely non-archetypal. Like he’s just following his own ideas, not anything he’s read. He takes organs sometimes, and which ones he takes varies, but, given all the time in the world, he leaves loads of them behind. There are genuine suggestions of medical ability, but also random violence. And all that bollocks is what’s sucked in so many people over so many years. To no end. And it threatens to draw us in even more because, having the Sight, we think we have an advantage. But we haven’t seen a single piece of new evidence today. If we are called upon to solve the Whitec
hapel murders in order to get traction in these new killings, we will be doing that forever. And I’m thus going to recommend that we concentrate on our new victims and the fresh trail and keep this squarely in the background, while of course being alert to the possibility of connections. Secondly –’ she raised a finger before Costain could interrupt – ‘my decision there is because I’m not sure there is a signal to be found. I researched the Whitechapel murders before we came here, but I didn’t keep my parameters to anything “canonical” or “written in the book of history” and, you know what? This sort of shit was just business as usual for this neighbourhood. A tourist trail of “Whitechapel violence against women” would tend towards infinity. You get killings and assaults showing many of the “Ripper” aspects, both unsolved and stone-cold solved, culprits put away or hung, for decades before, even during and for quite a few years after. So maybe “Jack the Ripper” is just … a whole culture: blokes and a desperation for money. Maybe that means what we’re dealing with in the modern version really is like those ghost ships I saw, something London thinks should be out there, not specifically created by the will of the protestors or by anyone else. Maybe our Ripper kills all the time, and people only notice when it has – and this is thirdly – changed its MO from killing poor helpless women to killing rich and powerful men. Having seen this end of the background, I’m sure that change is the single biggest data point. If we figure out what that’s about, we can nick him. And the reason I’m sure that is a change, and that we haven’t lost a few lords and dukes over the years without making the connection, is because, fourthly –’ Ross took a breath and slowed down, and Costain now finally thought he saw, somewhere in the depths of her expression, the emotion – ‘this whole process whereby the horrible deaths of five women get turned into a narrative, where they get pinned to a map of London and displayed … it’s what I do, when I turn violence into evidence and stop feeling anything about it. And I have to do it – we all do. That tour made me start thinking about that process, and, yeah, okay, so I had a bit of a wobble and lost my objectivity for about a minute—’