I was feverish with fear, quivering uncontrollably. Could this mannequin be the ‘woman’ Thomas had muttered about earlier, the one who whispered to him non-stop? Was she an amalgamation of his victims, twisted into a single vengeful spirit he’d dressed up in the dark to relive the memory of each kill? Was this some depraved arrangement of his clever crimes, so he could congratulate himself daily?
I inhaled the fuggy attic air, tried to calm my thoughts, stop my mind from running away with itself. I had no proof these were the clothes of the Whitechapel women – and there weren’t that many items here anyway. Besides, the newspapers had said nothing about the murderer having taken clothes from his victims as well.
I hurried out, locked the door and stole back down to the landing. When I reached it, I saw that something had been placed at the top of the main stairs. My heart thumped as I tiptoed over. Aisling’s hairbrush! There was no mistaking it – the sterling silver, the yellowing boar bristles splayed out, the shining copper hair still wound about the handle.
Tears came to my eyes and I had just crouched down to pick it up when I felt a sudden push in the middle of my back. Next thing I knew, I was rolling headfirst down the stairs. I instinctively pulled my arms about my head and dropped the candle. The flame was snuffed out. I landed in a heap at the bottom, winded and in agony.
A dim morning light was coming through the glass either side of the front door. My eyes returned to the stairs, where I saw the amber haze of another candle as it hovered across the landing, like a fairy. I swear I caught the swish of a long plait and the white of a nightgown. It had to be Mrs Wiggs. I struggled to focus. Everything hurt, but I knew I could not be caught with the key. I managed to slide it away from me, across the floor, and it came to a halt underneath the sideboard by the front door. Then I passed out.
27
‘I want her gone,’ I said. I didn’t shout. I sat in the armchair in the front dining room while Thomas wore down the carpet in front of me like a Prussian soldier stomping across Europe. He was still wearing those piss-stained trousers he’d dragged himself home in.
I was bruised and sore from my fall down the stairs but not badly injured. No doubt Mrs Wiggs was bitterly disappointed about that. Of course, I had been fortuitously found by her resourceful self. How could we ever survive without her! I’d come round as I was being dragged by my arms along the floor into the front dining room. I saw my own white feet poking up at the heavens and couldn’t understand why the rest of the world was moving away from me. I thought I was dead. Mrs Wiggs groaned with the strain of heaving me into the armchair as I struggled against her. It must have been seven or eight o’clock, because it was as light as it was going to get on a dreary London day now we were nearly in October.
Mrs Wiggs left me there while she went to rouse Thomas, which she attempted to achieve by slapping his face and then applying smelling salts, but it was another hour before she was successful.
My only injury was a green, egg-shaped lump on my forehead that shone like a beacon and throbbed like I’d drunk a bottle of brandy. After Mrs Wiggs had dealt with Thomas, she came at me with a cold compress.
‘Get away from me,’ I hissed. ‘I saw you! It was you who pushed me. You put the hairbrush there to trick me and it was you who pushed me down the stairs.’
Still holding a wet washcloth in one hand, she had the audacity to look at me like I was the lunatic. She had only two expressions in her repertoire: the haughty owl and the startled horse. Both made me want to smack her. She wore the startled horse now; her head began to wobble and she looked as if she might cry. She said I must have either dreamed it or imagined it altogether and then walked in my sleep and fallen down the stairs. After all, I had fainted before. That was how she tried to brush the whole incident away.
I told her plainly that I knew it was her, that she had done it on purpose because of the secret I’d shared. The shock on her face enraged me. It was as if I’d taken a shit on the rug and was now asking her to eat it. She ran up the stairs clutching her nightgown like a little girl. I sat back in the chair and felt the familiar cramps. When I pulled up my nightgown and saw prints of bright red stuck on either side of my thighs, I knew the blood had started to come. Perhaps something had been alive inside me after all and been damaged by the fall, but I couldn’t be sure, for, since I’d married, my routine was not to be relied upon. Mrs Wiggs would now have the reassurance she craved: there would be no new intruders in her house.
When
