Page 16 of Secrets in the Dark
“Speaking of creature comforts,” Della said. “Mason, you don’t have a jacket now. England. Remember? It can be very wet and chilly!” Della reminded him.
“Not to worry. The world is full of stores. I’ll find something.”
Edmund laughed. “For you? At your height. Sleeves long enough?”
“Hey, not to worry,” Mason repeated. “Sales make the world go around. We’ll find something somewhere.”
“Yes, and we’re putting you to bed on the plane and you are going to sleep!” Della told him, her tone light, her eyes serious.
He shook his head. “I’m honestly not tired. Della, you and Edmund should read up on our victim.”
“And what are you doing if not sleeping?” Della asked him.
“Reading up on the first victim—the original Jack the Ripper’s first victim,” he said. “And it is a different world. Edmund, of course they’re on this at Scotland Yard already, I imagine, but I’d like us to have immediate video surveillance from anywhere near the murder scene.”
“Of course. But he’s going to have his face down—” Della began.
“I’m assuming he’ll be wearing a deerstalker cap, and we’ll have our forensic people at Scotland Yard determine the man’s height and size. Not every small store and pub has surveillance cameras, but several will and we’ll get something on our suspect.”
Mason left the two of them seated across from one another at the front of the plane. He’d remembered to download a few books—searching hard to find what he thought would be the most factual among the many, many written on the killer. And it was time to predict their killer’s next move.
He might as well make Della happy and lie down in one of the cots in the back of the plane as he did so.
The women considered to be the five canonical victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. The pattern of “stalking” or “choosing” appeared to be the same—the killer sought down-and-out women, alcoholics, usually, prostitutes, in Whitechapel, an area where at the time migrants struggled with overflowing living quarters and the poor from across the British Isles congregated.
Murder was not unusual in Whitechapel then.
These murders were so heinous and brutal they would be unusual in any place at any time.
First... Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols. And her life, before the Ripper ended it so abruptly, had certainly not been all wine and roses. She’d been married and had five children. Her husband claimed she left him, her father claimed that her husband left her. Alcohol had surely fueled the couples’ constant fights and marital woes. They separated. A very strange law asserted that if a wife was making money in any illicit way, the husband did not have to pay support. So as her life drifted from workhouse to charity and prostitution, her husband ceased to pay her anything and on the night of her murder, she’d been ejected from her doss-house for not having the fourpence necessary for a bed. She was rumored to have asked them to save her one. Polly had earned the money several times during the day but spent it on alcohol. She was reputed to have said, “I’ll be back soon enough. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!”
She was last seen by friends, staggering away with her “jaunty bonnet” in the wee hours of the morning. She was next seen by two men who didn’t know if she was drunk or sleeping or dead. They went in search of policemen—afterpulling down her skirt.
At the scene, what the doctor saw was that her throat had been so brutally slashed that her head was barely connected to her body.
It was only later, during the autopsy, that it was discovered she had also been slashed from her groin on up to her breastbone. Because she was a prostitute, her murder was linked to the murders of Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram and they quickly became known as the Whitechapel murders. The moniker of Jack the Ripper was yet to come.
Mason studied the map of the area where she had been found, at the gated stable entrance in Buck’s Row.
He looked at the email they had received regarding the victim so recently discovered.
Not Buck’s Row.
But in a back alley about a block and a half away.
He felt his brow furrow. He was convinced that if the original Ripper murders would have occurred today, the Ripper would have been found. Just from the get-go, the preliminary investigation by a medical director would have been much more thorough. But today they had DNA and fingerprints, facial recognition software and so much more.
And yet here they were, in the twenty-first century, desperate to stop this killer before he struck again. The body was now at the morgue; they would visit when they landed, just as they would visit the scene and speak with the forensics team.
Scotland Yard would already be pulling any surveillance film from the area, along with any security cameras.
But this killer—heading out on his personal “reign”—had been trained by one of the best. He would know about forensics. He would wear gloves. He would avoid cameras. He would know that he might even be traced through epithelial cells. And he would be careful.
Mason saw that Della was coming down the aisle to perch at the foot of the cot.
“Sleeping, huh?” she teased.
“Resting.”
