‘What are you doing, Mrs Wiggs?’
‘I should think it terribly obvious what I’m doing. I assume you would like to use the water closet? On this occasion, while I know you have opinions on this, I would ask that you use the privy.’
Her face was wet from the steam, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and even her hair was damp. Wiry tendrils had escaped her torturous bun and were making wild springs about her temples. I had never seen her so ruffled.
‘What’s the matter, Mrs Lancaster?’ she continued.
White shirts were swirling in a pink pool of scalding water and there was a bottle of kerosene to the side of the bath.
‘Why haven’t you sent the laundry out or at the very least had Sarah do it?’ I asked. ‘Come to think of it, did poor Sarah have to carry all this up the stairs? Why not wash linens in the scullery? What is that smell?’
She stood up, put both hands on the arch of her back and then wiped her forehead with her forearm. ‘They are Dr Lancaster’s shirts. He asked me to have them cleaned quickly as they had stains. I didn’t have the time to send them out.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why not have Sarah do them downstairs? And why are you using kerosene? Is that blood?’
‘It’s useful for removing stains.’
She shooed me out of the bathroom and I gave up with the questions. It had never been as bad as this at the hospital. Mrs Wiggs was worse than sharing a bathroom with thirty other nurses.
*
I retreated downstairs, to take refuge among the newspapers, my collection of clippings, and my unhealthy obsession with the Whitechapel murder.
The story about the stabbed woman had not had the good grace to die as quietly as she did. Inches and inches of newsprint were dedicated to unravelling the mystery of her identity. Several different families came forward to claim the deceased as one of theirs, but it took about a week before she was formally identified. She was called Martha Tabram, she was thirty-five and she’d been living with a hawker on Commercial Road.
The investigation floundered, leaving a gaping space for speculation about the maniac who did it. The doctors believed that three different blades may have been used on poor Martha: a penknife, a long knife and a bayonet. The popular theory was that it had been a group of drunken sailors, though in truth rusty old bayonets could be bought from any number of stalls on Whitechapel Road.
And what of the other missing persons whose families had tried to claim Martha Tabram as theirs? Were there more bodies to be found?
‘That I cannot say,’ said a detective. ‘Whitechapel is not like any other part of London.’
This was a truism that I was only too well aware of, and something the fancier newspapers – the sort Thomas preferred to take his opinions from – spent a vast quantity of words discussing. I didn’t need The Times to tell me that Whitechapel had a great many more people crammed into its shoddy tenements than most other parts of London – one hundred and ninety per acre, apparently, compared to the average of forty-five per acre in better-off neighbourhoods like Chelsea that I had managed to save myself a place in. Nor was I surprised when the police estimated there were some twelve hundred prostitutes working there. These women had to eat and pay their board, what else had they to sell?
I laughed at my strange fascination with seeing the home of my early years paraded through the papers like this. At other times I wondered why I was so drawn to it, as if I couldn’t truly believe I had escaped and I was preparing myself for when I inevitably found myself back there, trying to scrape by and stay alive.
Either way, scouring the papers for updates and new theories on the murder had become the high point of my day. And that morning’s report in the Echo did not disappoint. It made the blood drain to my feet.
THE WHITECHAPEL MYSTERY: NO TRACE OF THE MURDERER
Observations have been made of the apparent similarity between the outraged corpse of Martha Tabram and another woman, brutally murdered in April.
This woman, a widow aged 45, was also of the lowest class and was brutally assaulted along the Whitechapel Road on bank holiday night. She was taken to the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where she later died of her injuries.
The coroner said the woman had been most barbarously assaulted. Such a despicable deed he had never seen before. A verdict of wilful murder against person unknown was returned by the jury.
The police are now investigating a theory that the killer or killers of Martha Tabram are the same ones that attacked the victim in April.
A paragraph at the bottom and I nearly missed it. The other woman had been savagely raped and beaten. A stick had been forced inside her, tearing her from one end to the other, and she had died from her injuries. The paper didn’t state the victim’s name or these details, but I knew them. Her name was Emma Smith. I was at the hospital when she was brought in.
9
When I left Reading to begin a new life as a nurse at the London Hospital, I was conscious of the paradox. Returning to the place I’d been rescued from two decades earlier did seem a strange choice. Was it the inevitable pull of fate or an unwitting attempt to help others from a privileged position? I honestly didn’t know.
On seeing Whitechapel again as a naive twenty-seven-year-old, I could not believe that a prestigious hospital, famed for its matron and the skill of its
