Page 53 of The Business of Blood
His grip on me tightened, moved, his fingers threading into the hair behind my ears. “There’s still a dread that lurks in my heart,” he confessed through his teeth. “A fear that I’d sit down with the devil if you asked it of me.”
I didn’t know if I lifted my mouth to his, or if he lowered his lips to mine. All I knew, was that the kiss was both an invocation and a benediction. It contained all desires both conceivable and impossible. Sacred and profane. It awakened a hope inside me that was instantly crushed when he ripped his mouth away as though fighting a powerful adhesive.
“I can’t,” he panted, surging to his feet and shoving his fingers through his tidy hair. “We can’t.”
Every part of me felt bruised. My lips. My heart. “I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, gaining my feet. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, was distraught. I didn’t mean—”
He shrank from my outstretched hand as though I carried the plague. “It’s best if I…I don’t see you for a while.”
“Don’t say that,” I begged.
Giving me his back, he said over his shoulder, “Take those beads to Croft or Aberline, Fiona. Unburden your conscience. Confess. Repent. Atone. AsImust now.” He left me then, alone with the savior looking down upon me.
I knew the tilt of his head was supposed to appear merciful and compassionate. But all I saw was vicious pity on the shiny, lacquered features of the Lord. A sort of gloating wistfulness. As if he really,trulyregretted that things had turned out the way they had and would do something if only he could get down from that deuced inconvenient cross.
I escaped the chapel as fast as I could, conceding the day’s battle for Aidan’s heart to the one being who could offer him what I could not.
Forgiveness.
12
Nothing interrupts a good confession like a murder.
At half-past nine in the morning, I’d been at H Division on Leman Street, marking the rise of Croft’s temper across his desk as I divulged the details of my encounter in Crossland Alley.
Now, at quarter past ten, I held a handkerchief dabbed with lavender and rose water to my nose, wishing Katherine Riley hadn’t been slaughtered quite so close to a roaring fire in yet another poorly ventilated room in Whitechapel.
It shouldn’t have caused me a vague sense of relief that her throat had been twice slashed on a carpet—a rather expensive one I noted. But after the tedious hours and sheer amount of chemicals it had taken to scour Frank Sawyer’s blood from untreated wood, I couldn’t help but appreciate that her cleanup should be a snap by comparison.
Unlike the Sawyers’, Katherine Riley’s rooms were in a proper tenement, dissected into a parlor, a great room, a kitchen complete with cookstove, and a separate bedroom with the toilet facilities inside the house.
In Whitechapel, this was luxury.
Croft and Aberline had sufficiently recovered from their initial astonishment at the horrific familiarity of the victim’s placement and were now surveying her domicile for clues. There was a certain frenetic quality to their investigation. Something borne, I gathered, of a traumatic catastrophe revisited. The sense of security that the Ripper had become a failure of their past had been torn away from them. With the murder of Katherine Riley, he’d become a closed book reopened. The case file had long since been taken from their hands and given to someone closer to the top.
To become another man’s failure.
Even for men with whom the dreadful had become routine, I didn’t think they expected to see the likes ofhimagain.
Yet, here she was. A woman of a certain age. A particular class.
Met with a specific, remarkable demise that, this time, had no apparent variances from the canonical Ripper murders.
What had been her profession? She’d been too old to make such a nice living as a prostitute, even I knew that.
Her throat was opened by two very deliberate, efficient slices. Her legs lifted and parted at the knees. Her middle skillfully cut from thorax to pubis. This time, the organs had been left inside the cavity. At least, several of them appeared to be visible through the narrow gash.
As Dr. Phillips began his crime scene examination and report, I stood unobtrusively in the corner by a faded velvet chair that might have been expensive during the Regency. I occupied myself by counting the stab wounds on her chest and torso. Most of which were marked by vibrant red against the cream of her linen apron still tied behind her body yet sliced down the front along with her dress.
I’d reached forty before conversation interrupted the tally.
“How long has she been dead, you wager?” Aberline asked Dr. Phillips, who currently checked her rigidity by testing the flexibility of her elbows and wrists.
Phillips was much more himself today than he’d been two mornings prior at the Sawyer autopsy. His thick, brown hair, liberally threaded with silver, was carefully styled, his beard trimmed and neat. He wore sleeve covers similar to the ones I used as he dictated post-mortem report notes to his assistant coroner, a sprightly medical student by the name of Nelson.
“It has to be three days, doesn’t it?” I offered. “It’s my experience that it takes at least that long for rigor mortis to pass. And, unlike Mr. Sawyer, her corpse isnotfresh.” I motioned to Katherine Riley’s limp wrists and the ease with which her joints moved.
“Very good, dear,” Dr. Phillips praised. “But environmental factors are key. The stifling heat of this room could have sped up the process, and the ashes in the fireplace are not yet completely cold, though they’re safe to touch now.” He motioned to the cavernous fireplace with the syringe Nelson handed to him before he plunged the needle into her eye, testing the vitreous humors. “Her corneal fluids are quite cloudy. Lividity is not as advanced as I would expect for seventy-two hours. My estimation of her death would be a day and a half. Two, at most.”
