"There really is a mad midwife theory?"

Shahdi nodded. "Oh, yes. Mary Kelly was three months pregnant when she died. With a child she couldn't afford to feed. Abortions were illegal, but easily obtained, particularly in the East End, and usually performed by midwives, under appalling conditions. And midwives could come and go at all hours, without having to explain blood on their clothing. Even Inspector Abberline believed they might well be looking for a woman killer. This was based on testimony of a very reliable eyewitness to the murder of Mary Kelly. Abberline couldn't reconcile the testimony any other way, you see. A woman was seen wearing Mary Kelly's clothes and leaving her rented room the morning she was killed, several hours after coroners determined that Mary Kelly had died."

Margo frowned. "That's odd."

"Yes. She was seen twice, once between eight o'clock and eight-thirty, looking quite ill, and again about an hour later outside the Britannia public house, speaking with a man. This woman was seen both times by the same witness, a very sober and reliable housewife who lived near Mary Kelly, Mrs. Caroline Maxwell. Her testimony led Inspector Abberline to wonder if the killer might perhaps be a deranged midwife who dressed in the clothing of her victim as a disguise. And there certainly were clothes burned in Mary Kelly's hearth, shortly after the poor girl was murdered."

"But she died at four A.M.," Margo protested. "What would've kept her busy in there for a whole four hours? And what about the mutilations?"

"Those," Shahdi Feroz smiled a trifle grimly, "are two of the questions we hope to solve. What the killer did between Mary Kelly's death and his or her escape from Miller's Court, and why."

Margo shivered and smoothed her dress sleeves down her arms, trying to smooth the goose chills, as well. She didn't like thinking about Mary Kelly, the youngest and prettiest of the Ripper's victims, with her glorious strawberry blond hair. Margo's memories of her mother were sharp and terrible. Long, thick strawberry blond hair, strewn across the kitchen floor in sticky puddles of blood...

The less Margo recalled about what her mother had been and how she'd died, the better. "A mad midwife sounds nutty to me," she muttered. "As nutty as the other theories about Mary Kelly. Besides, there probably was no such person, just a police inspector groping for a solution to fit the testimony."

Shahdi Feroz chuckled. "You would be wrong, my dear, for a mad midwife did, in fact exist. Midwife Mary Pearcey was arrested and hanged for slashing to death the wife and child of her married lover in 1890. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggested the police might have been searching for a killer of the wrong gender. He wrote a story based on this idea."

"That Sherlock Holmes should've been searching for Jill the Ripper, not Jack the Ripper?"

Shahdi Feroz laughed. "I agree with you, it isn't very likely."

"Not very! I mean, women killers don't do that sort of thing. Chop up their victims and eat the parts? Do they?"

The Ripper scholar's expression sobered. "Actually, a woman killer is quite capable of inflicting such mutilations. Criminologists have long interpreted such female-inflicted mutilations in a psychologically significant light. While lesbianism is a perfectly normal biological state for a fair percentage of the population and lesbians are no more or less likely than heterosexuals or gays to fit psychologically disturbed profiles, nonetheless there is a pattern which some lesbian killers do fit."

"Lesbian killers?"

"Yes, criminologists have known for decades that one particular profile of disturbed woman killer, some of whom happen to be lesbians, kill their lovers in a fit of jealousy or anger. They often mutilate the face and breasts and sexual organs. Which the Ripper most certainly did. A few such murders have been solved only after police investigators stopped looking for a male psychotically deranged sexual killer and began searching, instead, for a female version of the psychotic sexual killer."

Margo shuddered. "This is spooky. What causes it? I mean, what happens to turn an innocent little baby into something like Jack the Ripper? Or Jill the Ripper?"

Shahdi Feroz said very gently, "Psychotic serial killers are sometimes formed by deep pyschological damage, committed by the adults who have charge of them as young children. It's such a shocking tragedy, the waste of human potential, the pain inflicted... . The adults in such a person's life often combine sexual abuse with physical abuse, severe emotional abuse, and utter repression of the child's developing personality, robbery of the child's power and control over his or her life, a whole host of factors. Other times..." She shook her head. "Occasionally, we run across a serial killer who has no such abuse in his background. He simply enjoys the killing, the power. At times, I can only explain such choices as the work of evil."

"Evil?" Margo echoed.

Shahdi Feroz nodded. "I have studied cults in many different time periods, have looked at what draws disturbed people to pursue occult power, to descend into the kind of killing frenzy one sees with the psychotic killer. Some have been badly warped by abusers, yet others simply crave the power and the thrill of control over others' lives. I cannot find any other words to describe such people, besides a love of evil."

"Like Aleister Crowley," Margo murmured.

"Yes. Although he is not very likely Jack the Ripper."

Margo discovered she was shuddering inside, down in the core of herself, where her worst memories lurked. Her own father had been a monster, her mother a prostitute, trying to earn enough money to pay the bills when her father drank everything in their joint bank account. Margo's childhood environment had been pretty dehumanized. So why hadn't she turned out a psychopath? She still didn't get it, not completely. Maybe her parents, bad as they'd been, hadn't been quite monstrous enough? The very thought left her queasy.

"Are you all right?" Shahdi asked in a low voice.

Margo gave the scholar a bright smile. "Sure. Just a little weirded out, I guess. Serial killers are creepy."

"They are," Shahdi Feroz said softly, "the most terrifying creation the human race has ever produced. It is why I study them. In the probably vain hope we can avoid creating more of them."

"That," Margo said with a shiver, "is probably the most impossible quest I've ever heard of. Good luck. I mean that, too."

"What d'you mean, Miss Smith?" a British voice said in her ear. "Good luck with what?"

Margo yelped and came straight up off the floor, at least two inches airborne; then stood glaring at Guy Pendergast and berating herself for not paying better attention. Some time scout trainee you are! Stay this unfocused and some East End blagger's going to shove a knife through your ribcage... . "Mr. Pendergast. I didn't see you arrive. And Miss Nosette. You've checked in? Good. All right, everybody's here. We've got—" she craned her head to look at the overhead chronometers "—eleven minutes to departure if you want to make any last-minute purchases, exchange money, buy a cup of coffee. You've all got your timecards? Great. Any questions?" Please don't have any questions...

Guy Pendergast gave her a friendly grin. "Is it true, then?"

She blinked warily at him. "Is what true?"

"Are you really bent on suicide, trying to become a time scout?"

Margo lifted her chin a notch, a defiant cricket trying to impress a maestro musician with its musicality. "There's nothing suicidal about it! Scouting may be a dangerous profession, but so are a lot of other jobs. Police work or down-time journalism, for instance."

Pendergast chuckled easily. "Can't argue that, not with the scar I've got across me arse—oh, I beg pardon, Miss Smith."