Page 56 of The Business of Blood
“Yes, well…” Aberline checked his watch, and I tried to contain an aching fondness for him. “I’m going to assemble some constables to span the neighborhood and gather what information we can about Ms. Riley, here.” He regarded me as one would a particularly troublesome puzzle. Or a volatile one. “Best you stay with the good doctor, Miss Mahoney. At least until the press clears out. It wouldn’t do to have you photographed where you ought not to be, I’m sorry to say.”
“If you think that’s best, Inspector.” I feigned contrite obedience. I’d positioned myself inside the house in hopes of that precise outcome.
Sighing, he glanced into the bedroom and then back out to the street. “I’ll talk to the landlord about your services and fees and send an errand boy to fetch your Chinaman, shall I?”
I bit back a sly smirk. “I’d be obliged if you would.”
“You’d just insist on cleaning it up, regardless,” he muttered on his way into the humid afternoon. “Better to keep it aboveboard.”
“Nelson,” Dr. Phillips addressed his assistant by his given name. “Be a good lad and check the kitchen, the bedroom, and the facilities for any objects which might be responsible for these puncture wounds, would you?”
The young man balked. “Isn’t that the inspectors’ job? We already have the kitchen knives.”
“Do the inspectors have the proper training and precise medical knowledge to identify this very specific style of instrument and how it might penetrate flesh?” Phillips impatiently gestured to the copious wounds.
Nelson appeared unsure. “Likely not.”
“Likely. Not.”
Scurrying to the bedroom, Nelson seemed as reticent as I would be to share an enclosed space with a surly Inspector Croft.
“This is why I prefer to work alone.” I sensed more than saw Dr. Phillip’s invitation to join him as he dug into his medical bag and crouched over the corpse.
Using two instruments, he eased Katherine Riley’s middle open. “I suppose I only need six livers now,” he remarked in a register meant only for me.
“You’re going to use Ms. Riley’s?”
He nudged at it, the generally pink organ slightly dark and discolored in some places. In others, a whitish film clung to the outside and seemed to be eating away at it. “It is a bit necrotic. She was a heavy drinker at one time, I can tell you that much. And there’s some obvious hepatic damage I’m certain was caused by a venereal disease. Though, I’ll not know which until I get her on the table. Hepatitis, maybe.”
“You could consult Dr. Bond,” I suggested wickedly. “I hear he specializes somewhat in venereal diseases.”
“He most certainly does.” Sarcasm oozed from him as thick and toxic as blood. “In more ways than you know.”
“Look at her face,” I whispered. “How ghastly.” The Ripper had left it alone, and still, the memory of it would raise chill bumps on my flesh for a long time to come.
Katherine Riley hadn’t been a young woman, and her loose skin had pulled the thin, wrinkled lips away from a pair of false teeth. Ivory, it seemed. Another luxury. Her lids were likewise unnaturally wide, though her eyeballs had begun to dry and shrivel.
Phillips paused in his perusal of her insides. “She looks as though she’s seen a ghost, doesn’t she?”
“Do you believe in ghosts, Dr. Phillips?” I’d credited him with more sense, but one never knew the spectrum of another’s relationship with the hereafter.
His instruments made wet sounds as he worked, stirring smells that sent me in search of my scented handkerchief. “I believe that people are haunted by many things. But not the dead.”
“Do you think her soul is in a better place? Heaven maybe, or Hell?”
“What nonsense is this?” He threw an impatient look at me over his shoulder.
“I’m just curious as to your views regarding such things. A man in the company of so much death must have a great deal of time to ponder it.”
He returned to his work, sliding his instruments down the open seam of Ms. Riley’s body as he spoke. “I think Heaven and Hell are aspects of one’s self. They are both very limiting if you think about it. Both places from which there is no escape. That being said, I am possessed of an open and scientific mind. Should someone provide me irrefutable proof of the hereafter, I’ll take myself to confession and prostrate my soul before God. Until then, I’ll retain the opinion that people turn to the occult when they have not the intellectual nor the emotional fortitude for the scientific method.”
“You’re saying you think religious people are either lazy or willfully ignorant?”
“I’m saying I think it is a great deal easier to believe in a benevolent father figure than to consider that we are all supplicants to the chaotic and rather ruthless whims of both nature and time.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He wasn’t wrong. Hadn’t I bestowed that very assignation upon him only moments ago when he sheltered me from Croft’s ire? A benevolent father figure. Someone upon whose mercy I could rely.
“On the other side of benevolence, I suppose it’s hard for us to imagine that there’s no justice to be found for people like Katherine Riley,” I postulated.
