Page 88 of The Business of Blood
It didn’t seem like even half as much blood as Frank Sawyer had left on the floor, but I imagined a great deal of it still pooled in Comstock’s lower extremities.
Something I’d told Aidan at the Sawyer crime scene occurred to me.
The Ripper always takes something.
“I’ve a theory,” I announced.
“What’s that?” Aberline indulged me, while Croft didn’t bother. He studied this morning’s letter as though committing it to memory.
“When the Ripper kills, he directs his violence at what triggers his fury. With his female victims, he often damaged sex organs or took wombs. Livers. Kidneys. Intestines. Lips. The parts which could be used to ply their trade or to drink or process alcohol. He sliced their throats so they could not scream. So they could not speak. So they could not swallow. He took their voicesfirst. And then the rest.”
At this, I’d even recaptured Croft’s attention, so I pointed to the drawer. “Are all Comstock’s…bits…in there? Both eyes and all ten fingers?” I’d seen his tongue, one that would never lisp at me again.
Croft made the gruesome count. “It’s all here.”
“The Ripper was true to his form.” I rounded to the left of the desk, examining Comstock closer so I could see properly. “He relieved Comstock of the parts that offended him. The tools of his trade Comstock used to tell sensational lies. If he left everything he cut off, what did hetake?”
With grim syncopation, the inspectors blinked at me, and then looked down at the mutilated journalist.
Aberline patted Comstock’s linen suit vest and lower. “I can’t detect an open body cavity or aught in the way of sadosexual wounds.”
Croft lifted the dunce cap, and we all gasped and retreated.
The Ripper had replaced the top of Comstock’s entire skull with the dunce cap.
With surgical precision, he’d taken as his prize, the thing which had most offended him about the reporter.
His mind.
20
Igazed out of the carriage window at the Strand, brightly lit against the velvet night, avoiding Inspector Croft’s intense regard. He’d drawn the short straw, I supposed, and had been conscripted to conduct me home safely. I couldn’t rightly say how the decision was made. Too many events had transpired that day. Too many deaths to remember the trivial things.
Compared to all of London’s golden joviality, I felt like the wordstark. Pallid. Bleak. Severe. As if all my sharp edges had been blunted, and my color drained until I was a iridescent copy of myself. A shade of Fiona. A ghost who hadn’t yet died.
Who was I, that such ghastly violence painted my days? It seemed the years were now all demarcated by some massacre or another. My family. Mary. And now…this.
Was I being punished for something? Was all this blood God’s own dunce cap for me?
What had I done?
I remembered being a very little girl, my pretty mother lecturing me about my possible place in Hell.You can’t pray with your eyes open, Fiona. Bow your head. Be humble. Close your eyes. Or the devil will take you where God can no longer find you.
How can I see God if my head is pointed down?my six-year-old self had argued.I can’t close my eyes, Ma. God doesn’t live in the dark, does he? How can I find him if I’m not looking up?
She’d stared at me for so long, I’d thought she might reach for the switch. Finally, she’d knelt in front of me, Baltic blue eyes sparkling with unshed tears as she pressed my little hands between her palms.Let me tell you a secret,she’d whispered.You’ll never find God. No one does. Not really. He isn’t here, with us, like we want Him to be. But we’re supposed to kneel to Him. To bow. To supplicate. Not in hopes that we will look up and find Him, but with the faith that He’s there when you are not looking. That He’ll be there when you die. Faith is blind, Fiona. If your eyes are open, then you can’t have found it. You don’t find God in the dark.
He finds you.
I’d never found my faith. I’d never really found God. I always prayed with my eyes open.Livedwith my eyes open. Perhaps, even as a child, I’d known what kind of monsters lurked in the dark. And that God never stopped them from indulging their appetites.
The fear of standing alone and vulnerable in the darkness terrified me.
What if God didn’t find me? Only the monsters. I didn’t need to have faith in them, because they were tangible.
I never looked down. I never looked away. From anything. I never closed or averted my eyes.
I refused to be blind.
