in at one time or another.’
He remembered Moran’s reasoning.
‘It all comes back to Toynbee Hall by so many routes,’ he said. ‘Druitt and you work here, Stride was brought here, the killings are in a ring about the address. You say all the dead women were here...’
‘Yes, and in the last year or so. Could Moran have been right? Could it have been Druitt? There have been no more murders.’
Beauregard shook his head. ‘It’s not over yet.’
‘If only Jack were here.’
He made a fist. ‘We’d have the murderer then.’
‘No, I mean Jack Seward. He treated all the women. He might know if they had something in common.’
Genevieve’s words sank into his brain and lightning swarmed behind his eyes. Suddenly, he
‘They had Seward in common.’
‘But...’
‘
She shook her head but he could tell she was seeing what he saw, coming quickly to a realisation. Together, their minds raced. He knew her thoughts and she knew his. They both remembered Elizabeth Stride grasping Seward’s ankle. She
‘A doctor,’ she said. ‘They’d trust a doctor. That’s how he got close enough to them, even when the scare was in full flood...’
She was thinking back, a thousand tiny details leaping at her. Many small mysteries were solved. Things Seward had said, had done. Absences, attitudes. All were explained.
‘“Something is wrong with Dr Seward”, I was told,’ she said. ‘Damn me for a fool, damn me for not listening, damn me, damn me...’ She made fists against her forehead. ‘I’m supposed to see into men’s minds and hearts, and I even ignored Arthur Morrison. I’m the worst fool that ever lived.’
‘Are there diaries around here?’ Beauregard asked, trying to draw her out of her fit of self-recrimination. ‘Private records, notes, anything? These maniacs are often compelled to keep memorabilia.’
‘I’ve been through his files. They contain only the usual material.’
‘Locked drawers?’
‘Only the phonograph cabinet. The wax cylinders are delicate and have to be protected from dust.’
Beauregard took a good hold and wrenched the cover off the contraption. He pulled open the drawer of the stand. Its fragile lock splintered. The cylinders were ranked in tubes, with neatly inked labels.
‘
Genevieve was by him, delving deeper into the drawer. ‘And these...
Everyone remembered Van Helsing; Beauregard even knew Renfield was the Prince Consort’s first disciple in London. But...
‘Kelly and Lucy. Who are they? Unknown victims?’
Genevieve was going again through the papers on the desk. She talked as she sorted. ‘Lucy, at a guess, was Lucy Westenra, Vlad Tepes’ first English get. Dr Van Helsing destroyed her, and Jack Seward was in with Van Helsing. He was always expecting the Carpathian Guards to come for him. It is almost as if he has been in hiding.’
Beauregard snapped his fingers. ‘Art was in that group, too. Lord Godalming. He’ll be able to fill in details. It comes to me now. Lucy Westenra. I met her once, when she was warm, at the Stokers’. She was part of that set.’
A pretty, silly-ish girl, not unlike a young Florence. All the men mooned around her. Pamela had not liked her, but Penelope, a child then, doted on the girl. He realised that his former fiancee styled her hair like Lucy’s. It made her look less like her cousin.
‘Jack loved her,’ Genevieve said. ‘That was what drew him in with the Van Helsing circle. What happened must have driven him out of his wits. I should have realised. He calls
‘Her?’
‘His vampire mistress. It’s not her real name, but it’s what he calls her.’
Genevieve was sorting through the extended drawer of a stout filing cabinet, flicking past individual files with a nimble finger.
‘As for Kelly,’ she said, ‘we have lots of Kellys on our books. But only one who fits Jack’s requirements.’
She handed him a sheet of paper, the details of a patient’s treatment. Kelly, Mary Jane. 13 Miller’s Court.
Genevieve’s face was ash-grey.
‘That’s the name,’ she said. ‘Mary Jane Kelly.’
54
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
On November the 9th, 1888, Genevieve Dieudonne and Charles Beauregard left Toynbee Hall at almost precisely four
Genevieve and Beauregard proceeded along Commercial Street, turned west into Dorset Street by the Britannia, a public house, and sought out the address they had for Mary Jane Kelly. Miller’s Court was accessible through a narrow brick archway on the north side of Dorset Street, between Number 26 and a chandler’s shop.
Neither took much note of a rag-wrapped personage huddled just inside the court, assuming him to be a tramp. Dorset Street was referred to locally as ‘Dosset Street’, because of the number of vagrants attracted to the temporary lodgings, or ‘doss houses’, offered there. It was common for those who lacked the fourpence for a bed to sleep rough. In actuality, the personage was Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and he was not sleeping.
Genevieve and Beauregard expended a few moments on determining which doorway gave entrance to Number 13, a single-room dwelling at the ground-floor back of 26 Dorset Street. They were drawn by a line of thin red firelight spilling on to the doorstep.
The quarter-hour had not yet sounded. By the time of their arrival, Dr John Seward had been at his work for more than two hours. The door of 13 Miller’s Court was not locked.
55
FUCKING HELL!
Charles swore, fighting to keep his breath. Genevieve, no shock to spare for his surprising vocabulary, had to agree with him.
The greasy smell of dead blood hit her like a bullet in the belly. She had to hold the doorframe to keep from fainting. She had seen the leavings of murderers before; and blood-muddied battlefields, and plague holes, and torture chambers, and execution sites. 13 Miller’s Court was the worst of all.
Jack Seward knelt in the middle of a ruin barely recognisable as a human being. He was still working, apron and shirtsleeves dyed red. His silver scalpel flickered in the firelight.
Mary Kelly’s room was cramped: a bed, a chair, a fireplace, and barely enough floor to walk around them. Jack’s operation had spread the girl across the bed and the floor, and up the walls to the height of three feet. The cheap muslin curtains were speckled with halfpenny-sized dots. There was a mirror, its dusty glass marked with
