Page 12 of The Business of Blood
“That I do,” Aberline said. “I agree with Dr. Phillips’ post-mortem assessment. In’nt enough tissue left on the neck to assess ligature marks, but it remains the only way to explain the cause of death. The blood was drained, the torso most precisely vivisected, organs extracted. After which, the more…sadistic sexual wounds were inflicted.”
The room fell silent for a moment, and I imagined a cold shiver of male sympathy shared amongst the inspectors at the thought of poor Mr. Sawyer’s intimate dismemberment.
“But that he’s hanging inverted by only one ankle stymies me quite.” I pictured the circumspect Aberline, his hands clasped behind him, a ponderous posture he was often wont to assume. “Posing the victims thus was something the Ripper never did, and I don’t at all know what to make of it.”
I identified a dark, speculative sound as that of Inspector Croft. He was more often than not the last to speak. “The particulars of the Ripper murders were much detailed by the press and easy to replicate,” Croft stated. “I’m not at all convinced this is his work.”
“Though neither can we rule it out, can we?” said Aberline. “However, the question remains, be the killer the Ripper or an imposter, why hangthisblighter upside down?”
“Dr. Phillips noted that hardly enough blood remained in the corpse to constitute a drip once the killer opened the body cavity to extract the organs,” Croft said. “It all drained from the neck first.”
“Do you suppose exsanguination was the murderer’s only intent?” Aberline sounded skeptical as his boots seemed to find every uneven floorboard as he paced around the circle of blood. “Perhaps someone with a penchant for Penny Dreadfuls and an inability to separate reality from evil and horror.”
“Reality is enough of a horror,” Croft muttered, and I felt the verity of his statement to the marrow of my very bones.
“How are there no footprints, other than the wife’s, leading from this mess?” Aberline redirected.
“The course of my next conjecture,” Croft said. “Have we completely cleared the wife of suspicion?”
Aberline tsked loudly. “It would be difficult for a woman of such small stature to string up a man of this size, but she could have had an accomplice.”
“She has an alibi,” Croft said. “But if she had an accomplice, it doesn’t matter where she was physically.”
“What do we know about her?”
“She works in a factory and took an extra night shift. Apparently, the couple recently found out Agnes Sawyer had conceived, and they were saving for a holiday to visit her parents in Bournemouth.”
A blade of distress slid between my ribs and hit its mark. The joy of a new child smothered by a tragedy such as this.
Poor Agnes Sawyer.
“I see.” Disappointment colored Aberline’s voice, but he didn’t dwell. “So, why dress him back up after the grisly work is done? And how did the killer manage to get the guts in the basin without making a bloody mess?”
They were quiet a moment, presumably examining the scene for any clues as to how the killer had done his deeds, and in what order.
Their silence gave me a chance to digest the information pertinent to my own motivations. Dr. Phillips, a local coroner, had done the post-mortem examination, which was excellent news for me. Since there was no sign of him about, I imagined he’d gone home. Proper autopsies were done during business hours, and one rarely found a coroner before eight o’clock.
What the good inspectors didn’t know was that the doctor and I had an understanding of a financial nature. A respectable man ofalmostunimpeachable morals, Dr. Phillips was also a scientist and tended to be swayed by logic above ethics.
I’d certainly be attending the autopsy, and because he was just as clever and cunning as he was principled, Dr. Phillips would be expecting me.
I shared the inspectors’ confusion over the obviously significant placement of Mr. Sawyer’s body.
In all the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, the violence had a very precise chronological order. First, he strangled the victims to unconsciousness if not death, after which he slashed their throats in two clean slices almost to the point of decapitation. That done, he’d commence with the mutilations. They began with thirty-nine stab wounds to the torso and genitals of Martha Tabrum and intensified in their unspeakable gruesomeness with each murder until Mary Kelly.
There was little you could do to a body that hehadn’tdone to Mary’s.
Even Mr. Sawyer’s murder was only half as gruesome as most of what the Ripper had done. And, as Scotland Yard’s finest pointed out, Jack the Ripper’s victims were women.
All prostitutes.
He’d posed them on their backs, skirts flung above their waists, and their knees drawn up and parted as though to accept a lover.
Or a customer, as was most often the case.
In my darkest moments, I fervently hoped the knife was the only thing he’d penetrated their bodies with. When stuck in those moments, I was grateful that there was no way to assess if he’d defiled their corpses with his own body… I didn’t know what I might have done with that knowledge.
“Poor blighter’s lucky he’s so lean.” Aberline’s voice broke my dark reverie. “Can’t figure why he’s strung up by only one ankle, and the bent knee of the other leg behind the body, makes for a strange triangle, don’t it?”
