Page 5 of If Looks Could Kill
He pockets a pair of rings he found on her fingers—a wedding ring and a keeper ring; souvenirs—then wraps his other prizes in butcher’s paper and folds the parcel into his inside coat pocket along with the blade.
Footsteps approach. Time to be gone. He is on his feet, walking coolly through the rear door, along the corridor, and out the front door onto Hanbury Street like any other lodger or guest. Or customer. The rising sun hasn’t found the East End yet, but it will soon.
It’s so easy. Each time heightens his danger in a city now searching desperately for him. Official vigilance prowls the streets. Those terrified dopes march about with their torches and rattles while inside, they tremble in fear. He will laugh at their impotence tonight, back at his lodgings, enjoying a cigar after a decent wash.
He is not a man escaping the grisly scene of a human butchery, no. He’s just been out drinking. He’s on his way home. That’s all. He has no reason to dread the weak light cast by the sparse gas lamp up ahead.
A rag in his pocket makes quick work of the blood on his hands. He’llhave to check his trousers. He felt her pooling blood as he knelt about his quick work. Trousers can be burned.
A figure steps out from a doorway ahead, in the glow of that lamp. Female. He tugs the brim of his hat low over his eyes. All of East London is an eyewitness suddenly, and the papers are full of their stories of how they saw the killer himself, in the flesh. He delights in their ludicrous descriptions of him.
The woman accosts him. Thinking to make a quick conquest. No, not a woman. A girl. Too slender of waist to be older, as most are, and too plump of flesh to be as hungry as most are. He can’t see much of her face. She wears a wide-brimmed hat fringed with dark lace, but she places a soft hand upon his breast.
“?’Scuse me, sir,” she says. “Want the business?”
It’s how they all start in.
“No.”
“Where are you off to, then?” Playfully, like any East End streetwalker plying her trade.
He turns away and shoulders past her, but she seizes a fistful of his coat.
“You’re too young,” he tells her. “Be off with you.”
“I smell her on you.” Her voice is different now. “Blood. Entrails.”
He freezes. That’s not possible. No one saw. No one knew. She’s bluffing.
Under his jacket, he curls his fingers around the haft of his knife.
She must be silenced, now, while the constables stare at his earlier handiwork. His gaze rakes the square. That forlorn little court is dark enough. Two in one night. Two within minutes.
She takes a little promenade around him till he’s turned about with his back to the light.
“Look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”
“Let’s go where we can be alone,” he whispers. “I’ll look into your eyes a long while.”
“I hope so.”
She raises her chin and flips upward the dark lace rimming the brim of her hat.
Lamplight gleams in the wet sheen of her eyes.
And he’s falling, falling. His shinbones liquefy, his bowels turn to dust. A high wind shrieks around him, tugging at his clothes, eroding his face.
But he’s just standing there, and so is she.
A reflected flame pulses in her eyes. Inside it, a woman. His latest victim. Her, and not her. Not the pungent, pathetic drunk he’d found, but a goddess of wrath, clad in queenly silks, yet wearing his victim’s fresh-killed face. She glides toward him, propelled by rage.
His vision swims before him. Her fingers aren’t fingers, but intestines. No, snakes. No, daggers in the hand of a hideous, loathsome monster. No, tendrils of hair waving in the night wind, around the face of a young girl with a smooth young mouth and wet, luminous eyes.
He staggers backward and catches her gaze. Now she’s the one who looks unsure.
“How—” she begins. “Lookat me.”
He’s powerless to resist. He looks at her. She is standing in a different place. But where before, she seemed commanding, she now looks agitated, confused. She shakes herself as if waking from a dream. As if making up her mind, resigning herself to something.
