Page 25 of If Looks Could Kill
East LondonJack After Elizabeth and Catherine(Sunday, September 30, 1888)
He’s done it now. A double murder, three weeks after the last kill. Two in one night, less than an hour apart. He already has the metropolis in the palm of his hand. By the time the corpses are found and the story gets out, he’ll be the undisputed King of Whitechapel. Duke of Spitalfields. Emperor of Aldgate. The God of the East End.
Yes, he is enjoying his fame. But what good will it do him?
Tonight’s first kill did not a particle of good. That stupid driver and his pony came along, and he had to scuttle away in the dark, empty-handed. The driver might never have noticed him, but the pony did. So he slipped away and found another woman. Within minutes, he had the ingredients he needed.
Again, he brewed his devil’s brew. A uterus, again, and a proper kidney this time. The coroner’s report on his previous victim said he’d made off with a bit of bladder. Embarrassing.
But the broth of uterus and kidney he drank tonight left his system just as the others had done, and his symptoms remain in full force. His face looks as haggard in the mirror as ever.
Perhaps a kidney was the wrong approach. It makes sense; an organ that purifies must itself be filthy, much as a mop that cleans the floor itself becomes foul.
Theheart.
Perhaps recently living flesh is not enough. That baggage’s existence could scarcely be called living. How could ill health beget renewed health?
A young and healthy heart. Harvested from an almost-living body.
He’d always said it: his gentle ways would be his undoing. It was his generosity of soul that drove him to take older lives. They were nearer their end anyway, he had thought. Such humane instincts could cost him his life. But no longer.
He will wait, and watch, and bide his time, and find a younger woman.
Not just any. That one. That girl. He will hunt until he finds that one, and silence her, take her head from off her neck, and her heart from her breast, then live forever.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—Hunting(Sunday, September 30, 1888)
Our days and nights were full with the new routines of Soup, Soap, and Salvation. Full of people, full of noise, full of small cuts to our fingers, but not much that was really new, other than the decision to add barley to our soup, a recipe change that threatened to tear the women into barley and non-barley factions. Lieutenant Dillinger, whose mother authored the original recipe, wouldn’t speak to Captain Jessop, leader of the barley party, for almost an entire day. Somehow we survived, and so did the barley.
Pearl and I had nearly reached our apartment after second Sunday services, and I was longing to take off my boots and have a quick lie-down when someone fell into step beside us.
“The trouble I’ve had tracking you down,” Freyda began. “You’re harder to locate than a nervous bridegroom.”
“Hello to you too, Freyda,” I told her. “Have you been looking for us?”
“I go to your apartment, and nobody answers when I ring the bell,” she replied. “I go to your Salvation Army church or whatever you call it, and they say you’re at the Mission School. I go to the Mission School, and you’ve gone to the Foundling Asylum. I go there, and you’re—”
“Back at the base,” I supplied.
“No,” Freyda barked. “You’re terrorizing taverns and saloons.”
“Well,” Pearl said with her nose held high, “you’ve certainly been sniffing around.”
Freyda grinned. “I warned you. That’s what I do. But you two are harder to pin down than this mysterious brothel girl you hope to find.”
Pearl stopped in her tracks, to the annoyance of those behind us. “Have you found her?”
Freyda shrugged. “Mebbe I have, and mebbe I ain’t.”
“Can you take us there?” demanded Pearl. “Can we go now? Is it far? Do we have time?”
“We’ve got two hours,” I told them, “before we need to be back at base.”
“Let’s go,” Freyda said. She hurried off, beckoning us to follow her.
“Not exactly two hours,” Pearl told me in a low voice.
“Why not?” I whispered back.
