it had not, the text was unintelligible-scientific terms, symbols, and equations. Not until I had perused the journal almost to its end did I find any entries written in plain English.
The words “Mary Chandler” leapt off the page at me. That was the name of one of the women murdered in Whitechapel! My heart began to pound as I saw two other familiar names. The entries read: Mary Chandler. Age 28, streetwalker. Height 5 feet 1 inch. Weight 120 lbs. 21 October 1849, initial contact, St. George’s Yard. 23 October 1849, 1st examination; exposed. 25 November 1849, 2nd examination; sacrificed.
Catherine Meadows. Age 19, streetwalker. Height 4 feet 11 inches. Weight 100 lbs. 2 January 1850, initial contact, Old Montague Street. 3 February 1850, 1st examination; exposed. 7 April 1850, 2nd examination; sacrificed.
Jane Anderson. Age 29, streetwalker. Height 5 feet 4 inches. Weight 131 lbs. 13 April 1850, initial contact, Commercial Road. 17 May 1850, 1st examination; exposed. 20 June 1850, 2nd examination; sacrificed.
I puzzled over these cryptic notations. It appeared that Niall Kavanagh had known all three murder victims. His notes suggested a scientific rather than a sexual interest in them. I remembered Dr. Forbes telling me about the students who’d claimed they’d been poisoned by Kavanagh. They thought he’d made them unwitting subjects in his experiments. Had he done the same with Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson?
The three women had belonged to the most impoverished, desperate class of humanity; their kind was at the mercy of the men they solicited. A nauseous chill crept into my stomach as I envisioned the scene that must have taken place on the dates when Niall Kavanagh had his “initial contact” with each woman: On a dark, lonely street in Whitechapel, she stands under a gas lamp. His shadowy figure approaches her through the fog. She calls an invitation to him; he stops; they bargain. She takes his arm and walks off with him, never imagining what evil designs he has in mind.
I gazed upon the last word of each entry: sacrificed. One didn’t need to be a scientist to deduce what that meant. A parson’s daughter understood the word in all its permutations. To sacrifice was to destroy or surrender something for the sake of something else, as Jesus had sacrificed his life on the cross. To sacrifice meant to make an offering of a human, animal, food, drink, or other valuable thing, to a deity, as Abraham had been willing to slay his son Isaac at God’s bidding. Sacrifice had age-old associations with violence and murder. As my lips silently formed the word, I could almost taste blood. A thunderous shock reverberated through me.
Niall Kavanagh had killed those women. I’d come looking for a scientist who’d invented a gun that could change the world, and I’d discovered the identity of the Whitechapel Ripper.
27
John Slade was innocent of theWhitechapel murders, I now knew beyond doubt.
Even as my spirits soared with elation, the weight of reason hauled them down to earth. The entries in the journal were not a confession of Niall Kavanagh’s guilt. I reread them, hoping to find evidence I’d missed. What exactly had happened between Kavanagh and the women? Had he poisoned them as he’d done his students? Was that what “exposed” meant? I surmised that he’d examined the women in the manner that a physician examines his patients; but what had Kavanagh been looking to find?
Nothing in the entries answered my questions. I turned to the next page. It bore a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman, simple but skillfully done. She was naked, her fleshy body and her breasts and genitals accurately depicted; yet the drawing didn’t look erotic. It reminded me of the illustrations in a medical text I’d once seen. Under the drawing was written “C. Meadows.” Her curly hair and facial features were lightly sketched. The detail rendered in the heaviest line was a Y-shaped mark, its fork on her chest, its vertical line running down her stomach. A sense of dread gripped me. As I turned the page, my hand trembled.
Another drawing of the same woman appeared, but here her torso was depicted as if the skin, underlying muscles, and ribs had been cut away. I knew that scientists performed dissections in front of public audiences, but I’d never witnessed one, and I’d never seen the inside of a human body. A tube ran down the woman’s throat and branched into two lobes that appeared to be her lungs. Blood vessels fed into a fist-shaped heart. Another tube extended from her throat to a curved pouch that I took for her stomach, which was connected to a mass of coiled, sausage-like bowels. I felt as fascinated and ashamed as if I were poring over indecent pictures. I remembered that the Whitechapel Ripper had mutilated his victims, and shock hit me as I comprehended what I was seeing.
Niall Kavanagh had dissected the women he’d killed, as part of his scientific experiments. Here was the evidence. The police must not have recognized what he’d done; they’d thought the murders and mutilations were sheer, meaningless carnage. A wave of nausea sloshed through me. I turned to the last page, even though I dreaded finding something worse.
It showed an enlarged view of the woman’s body from waist to groin. The bowels were parted to show a pear-shaped organ attached to two thin tubes, each ending in a clot of fibers and a little round sac. At first I couldn’t imagine what these organs might be. A lady is conditioned not to think of what is inside her body that cannot be mentioned in public. A detail at the side of the page showed the pear-shaped organ removed from the abdomen and cut open. Inside was nestled a creature like a salamander, with a black spot for an eye. Realization struck.
These were the female organs. The pear-shaped one was the womb, the creature inside an unborn baby. The Whitechapel Ripper’s victims had been found with their female organs missing. Niall Kavanagh had removed them before he’d dumped the bodies in the streets. Catherine Meadows had been with child. How would Kavanagh have known, and how could he have drawn the child unless he’d sliced her womb and looked inside?
Although my powers of imagination serve me well when I write my stories, they were my undoing now. I pictured a nude woman laid on a table, and a knife slicing through her flesh. Hands reached inside the slit, pushed aside red, glistening bowels. They cut out the female organs and held them aloft, crimson and dripping. My mental picture was so vivid that dizziness swept over me. Black dots stippled the room and coalesced. On the brink of fainting, I grasped the desk for support. I bent my head and breathed deeply until the blackness receded. As I hastily closed the journal, I became aware of voices outside.
“Kavanagh not live here anymore,” the landlord said.
Another man asked a question, too quietly for me to discern his words, but his voice was too familiar, and the last one I wanted to hear.
“I don’t know,” the landlord said impatiently.
The man spoke again. He was Wilhelm Stieber. He was still looking for Niall Kavanagh, and had somehow tracked him to this house.
“No, you can’t look around,” the landlord said.
I crouched, paralyzed by terror that Stieber wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“This private property,” the landlord said. “You trespassing.”
I crept to the stairs and looked up them. The open door framed a rectangle of daylight. In it stood four men, my view of them limited to their trousers and shoes. The landlord’s backed toward the house as those of the other men advanced on him. Stieber had brought his two henchmen. Would the landlord tell them I was here?
Looking around, I saw a door at the back of the room. I ran for it, then reversed and picked up Niall Kavanagh’s journal and papers. I fled through the door just as footsteps descended toward the cellar, and I bolted up slippery stairs to a fenced yard. Racing for the gate, I dared not look behind me: if I should see Wilhelm Stieber, I would die of fright. I burst through the gate; I ran through yards behind other houses. I didn’t stop until I reached the Whitechapel high street. There I stood, panting from exertion, amid the crowds.
A block away was an omnibus-a long carriage drawn by a team of horses. It stopped to let out passengers. I hurried to it, climbed aboard, paid the fare, and sat beside an old woman with a basket of smelly fish. I traveled a mile or so; the London scenery blurred past as I watched to make sure that no one was following me. Then I felt safe enough to let down my guard and attend to the prize I’d stolen. I examined the papers. Anticipation turned to disappointment: page after page was covered with equations and scientific language. I found reprints of articles from learned publications, and incomprehensible diagrams featuring lines, arrows, numbers, and geometric figures. The two sheets I could read were a grocery list and a bill from a tailor.
But I couldn’t believe that a clue to the whereabouts of Niall Kavanagh was not among the material that I’d risked my life to obtain. I turned over diagrams and found one whose other side bore a note penned in a clear, bold,
