Three, two, one, and we were out the rear door. Still almost carrying her—she was not light, but the intensity of the struggle released strange fluxes of strength through my limbs—I took her down three steps, pivoted to the left, and braced her hard against the wooden fence there, well constructed, as I have said, and able to sustain the force of my thrusting her body against it.

In a flash, I let go of her arm and reached back to withdraw the Sheffield from my belt, aware the whole time that the episode had completely veered south from perfection and become a graceless, cruel thing. Whether she was dead or not—her tongue seemed to protrude from her lips, and her eyes were shut—I could not tell, but if so, just so, and if not, almost so. I struck her neck hard with the knife, blade belly sinking into the softness, and drew it strong around, letting my left hand slip off her throat at last.

That was a moment. She was propped against the fence, unsupported by me, her throat ripped but not yet producing blood, utterly still, quite vulnerable. I struck her again, again felt bite of knife’s belly, again drew down and, pivoting myself, around until my natural length of arm ran out and the blade broke free of its cutting stroke. Now came the blood. As before, a progression, first the droplet, then a few crooked tracks tracing the geography of her neck where it merged into shoulder, an area as full of subtle hollows and ridges as a landscape, then a black stream, then a torrent, then a deluge. She slid to the left as the blood continued to gush, and came to rest with her head next to the three steps down which we had come, parallel to the fence.

Again, there was no death rattle; no sound marked her passing from this world to the next. I controlled my breathing—exertions so intense always stir the heart, it is a natural rule of the body, found universally in biology among all mammalian creatures—and reacquired the focus I needed. First the rings. I pulled her dead hand up, laid the knife upon her chest, and yanked the two brass circles off her pudgy digit. I may have done some harm, not that she noticed, for the finger fought me and I had to yank and twist quite aggressively. I deposited them in my pocket. Next up was her pitiful estate, as looted from her pocketbook. I took some care in arranging its meager contents neatly next to her feet: two small hair combs, one in a paper sheath of some sort, and a piece of coarse muslin whose function was utter mystery to me. An envelope didn’t fit into the line by her feet, so I placed it daintily next to her head. That neatness stood in contrast to what came next, and I was not unaware of the effect.

I reacquired the knife, pulled her petticoats up, saw—oh, comic detail, too pretty to be true but true nonetheless—striped bloomers. I pulled them down until I’d exposed her slack gut, a large dish of pudding, creased and gelid and wrinkly, with a kind of substrata that looked, even in the quarter-moon, like curdled milk.

I cut a deep stroke, left to right, across her lower belly, but unlike with Polly, did not stop there. More work was to be done. My cut was longer, deeper, more workmanlike. I opened a flap into her bowels, pulling it back as one would pull back a canvas, and they lay before me, almost an abstraction. In the moon’s faint blush, they were like a sausage stew, all interconnected in twisty, labyrinthine ways. Perhaps I hesitated, perhaps I didn’t. There was blood, but, the heart that drove it being quieted, no pressure, and so it simply ran downhill to disappear in her swaddles of clothing.

I had seen beasts gutted and felt no remorse, for I was applying myself merely to a sack that now had no spiritual dimension, no sentience, memory, individuality, hope, or fear. I slipped the knife behind the tubes to find the way out—that is, the large one leading to the anus—and cut through it, finding it slippery to penetrate but yielding once the knife edge had found purchase and made its argument persuasively. The whole bloody pile was open for play. I grabbed, my gloves turning black in the moonlight where they would have been scarlet in the sun, and extracted one slippery clottage and tossed it over her shoulder, where it did not quite fly away but rather unraveled, as the flight through air took out its kinks.

That foray into the cavity took most of her from her stomach, but at least a quarter of the tubing remained, and so I repeated the act, removing all but remnants of what remained, and flung them over the same shoulder. Again the phenomenon of unraveling, as the yards of curled loop became, under the process of being flung, a long and stringy ribbon.

Thus was she excavated. Now, pièce de résistance. Dr. Gray was my guide, Sheffield’s legendary sharpness my facilitator, but will to complete the task was the true coal that made my furnace rage. I dipped into the crater I had created, searched downward through wreckage and liquifaction, and even though my gloves cut off the subtle sensations to my fingers, found what I desired. I thought of them as the woman’s biscuits. Once found, I quickly removed, by suppleness of hand, the two trophies I will leave to the reporters to identify, if they dare.

I stood, after cleaning my blade on her dress, and restored it to its place. I deposited my trophies in an inner pocket, where, after wiping and wringing them, I was certain they would not be moist enough to stain through the heavy wool. I peeled the gloves from my hand and put each in a different pocket, gave my suit a quick examination so that I was confident its darkness and the darkness of the quarter-moon night would camouflage it well. I clutched the two rings in my pocket to make sure I had them both, and departed through the same door by which I had come.

On Hanbury I took a right but didn’t bother with either Brick Lane or Commercial Street, as both, I feared, would be too well lit to conceal the moisture from the dear lady’s insides if it sneaked through the wool. Instead I turned down Wilkes Street and continued to more or less track my way helter-skelter through the dark warren of Whitechapel. I saw only the occasional ghost and once or twice heard a gentle call—“Sir, is the gentleman seeking something?”—but shook my head firmly and continued on my way at a medium, somewhat relaxed pace. I looked at my watch in the farthest light of a gaslamp I encountered, and saw that it was not yet four-thirty A.M.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jeb’s Memoir

It was about six-twenty A.M.—I could tell by the clock on the spire of the Black Eagle Brewery just down the street—when I arrived, in pale, moist dawn, a ha’penny’s worth of moon above the western horizon. At 29 Hanbury, there was no cordon of coppers, no wagons drawn up, no sense of municipal officialdom. Rather, I saw something between a group and a crowd of citizens already formed; it lacked the crowd’s anger and purpose, being not packed, angry, clamoring to all get somewhere at once. Too, it was more than a group, for it had purpose and focus, not random togetherness, as its organizational principle. I suppose it was something oxymoronic, like a “crowd of individuals,” that is to say, each of the men—mostly workers—was there but not bonded with any other particular person. They were there because of the fascination of death, fate, slaughter, crime, murder, all those Big Things that have an eternal pull on heart and mind. I was the same, except that I had a mission, not just a fascination.

Thus I slid through them easily, and no one felt pressured to block the way or forbid me passage. It turned out they were clustered at an open door, and I could see that it revealed a passage through past No. 29 to what was presumably a yard in back. I entered the tunnel, again found no resistance, and moved along the shabby walls, the peeling paint, the unvarnished wood, all of it screaming its message of messy squalor, Whitechapel style.