A Rip Through Time(77)

Gray only nods abruptly. Then he continues walking.

We turn another corner. It’s a quieter area, residential, with buildings that would have been upper-middle-class town houses at one time converted to overflowing tenements when the wealthier residents fled across the old medieval wall to the New Town.

Voices sound ahead. A whistle blows. Someone shouts, and a male voice barks a command. Before I can ask where we’re going—again—we round yet another corner of these maze-like streets, and I see the crowd ahead. The narrow road has been blocked off, a constable with a whistle warning carts to turn back. It’s a wasted effort. The crowd is so thick that no cart could pass, and the constable is left arguing with cart drivers who have no intention of turning back; they want to see what’s going on, only adding to the tumult.

Gray strides forward. He reaches back to take my elbow and seems surprised that I’m right beside him, shouldering men out of my way. He still grasps my elbow, so we don’t become separated by the crowd. It’s at least twenty men deep. Oh, there are a few women, but most of them have been relegated to the edges, the men forgetting their chivalry when they want to see what’s going on themselves.

I’m soon glad of Gray’s guiding grip. He’s tall enough that his head clears the crowd, and he has no compunction about using his size to barrel through. He carries himself like a man of his class, expecting to be obeyed. It works far better than my pokes and squeezes and elbows, and soon we are through, leaving a trail of muttered epithets in our way. When we reach the edge, a constable tries to stop us.

“He’s with me,” a voice calls.

I recognize it as McCreadie, though I still can’t see him. Even this inner circle is a mob of police officers and witnesses and others who seem to have just broken through to the middle. The class or status of the trespassers means the constables don’t dare expel them.

Dear God, don’t tell me this is a crime scene.

My left eyelid starts twitching as I watch people tramping about. It takes all my strength not to order them aside myself.

Has no one heard of crime-scene containment? No, Mallory, they have not, because they’ve barely begun using police to solve crimes. Proper protocol is decades away, after they discover the importance of fingerprints and other evidence.

The constable lets us through. As he does, another leans in to whisper something. I catch the words “that Gray ghoul.”

The first officer mutters, “He doesn’t look gray to me,” and they both chuckle.

“Enough of that,” a young voice says.

I glance over to see Constable Findlay glowering at the two older officers. Gray waves for him to ignore the insult, and Findlay nods and then leads us to the center, where I stop short, blinking.

There is a woman lying dead beside the steps of a house, with a gate behind her, presumably leading to a yard beyond. That is not what makes me blink. Nor does the fact that she’s just lying there, people milling about, some leaning in for a better look, as if she’s a display in a wax museum.

A display in a wax museum.

A chill runs through me, because it is exactly the right description. That is why I stop short. I have seen this tableau before, and it takes only a moment to identify the source. Yet another of those macabre museum exhibits Nan had taken me to. I can’t quite recall whether this was a special exhibition in a proper museum or more of a tourist wax museum. I remember this scene, though.

A woman lying at the gate leading to a stable. A row of what looked like once-decent residential town houses now decayed into tenement housing. The museum exhibit said she’d been there all night, with people later admitting they’d passed and presumed she was drunk or sleeping rough. It was that sort of neighborhood, after all.

The street was called Buck’s Row, somehow shortened from Ducking Pond Row because there was a nearby pond used for ducking punishments. That is the detail from the exhibit that pops out now, one my young brain had tucked away because I wanted to know what a “ducking punishment” was.

Finally, someone had investigated. They discovered a dead woman, still warm, lying on her back. Her throat had been slashed. Later, a medical examiner would discover more. Bruises on her face, as if she’d been struck. Stab wounds to her groin and abdomen. No organs missing. That would come later with other victims.

This is what I see here, in 1869 Edinburgh. It’s one of those memories seemingly long vanished, shooting forth in perfect detail, like a stored snapshot awaiting a trigger.

I have seen this before.

Everything is perfectly reproduced, from the victim—a graying brunette in her early forties—to the petticoats in disarray around her.

There is a split second where I think what I saw in the twenty-first century was a re-creation of this very murder. No. This isn’t the same murder. It just looks like it. Rendered in as much detail as the killer could manage. Re-creating a murder that will not occur for another twenty years.

That museum exhibit had been on Jack the Ripper. The woman lying dead in Buck’s Row?

The first of the canonical five victims.





TWENTY-SEVEN


Polly Nichols. That’s the name that comes to mind, and I wouldn’t bet my life savings on it, but I’d shout it out at a trivia night.

I’d gone on a Ripper kick in high school. It was right around the time I was solidifying my plan to become a detective, making sure it was more than a childhood dream. Jack the Ripper is the most famous unsolved case in history, so I threw myself into it as a would-be detective. What I eventually realized is that it was a fun little exercise, but ultimately a futile pursuit. It’d been so early in the history of forensics and detective work that one could only blindly speculate on the killer, based on one’s favored theory.