The Business of Blood by Byrne Kerrigan

Author:Byrne, Kerrigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ardent Publishing
Published: 2019-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

12

Nothing interrupts a good confession like a murder.

At half-past nine in the morning, I’d been at H Division on Leman Street, marking the rise of Croft’s temper across his desk as I divulged the details of my encounter in Crossland Alley.

Now, at quarter past ten, I held a handkerchief dabbed with lavender and rose water to my nose, wishing Katherine Riley hadn’t been slaughtered quite so close to a roaring fire in yet another poorly ventilated room in Whitechapel.

It shouldn’t have caused me a vague sense of relief that her throat had been twice slashed on a carpet—a rather expensive one I noted. But after the tedious hours and sheer amount of chemicals it had taken to scour Frank Sawyer’s blood from untreated wood, I couldn’t help but appreciate that her cleanup should be a snap by comparison.

Unlike the Sawyers’, Katherine Riley’s rooms were in a proper tenement, dissected into a parlor, a great room, a kitchen complete with cookstove, and a separate bedroom with the toilet facilities inside the house.

In Whitechapel, this was luxury.

Croft and Aberline had sufficiently recovered from their initial astonishment at the horrific familiarity of the victim’s placement and were now surveying her domicile for clues. There was a certain frenetic quality to their investigation. Something borne, I gathered, of a traumatic catastrophe revisited. The sense of security that the Ripper had become a failure of their past had been torn away from them. With the murder of Katherine Riley, he’d become a closed book reopened. The case file had long since been taken from their hands and given to someone closer to the top.

To become another man’s failure.

Even for men with whom the dreadful had become routine, I didn’t think they expected to see the likes of him again.

Yet, here she was. A woman of a certain age. A particular class.

Met with a specific, remarkable demise that, this time, had no apparent variances from the canonical Ripper murders.

What had been her profession? She’d been too old to make such a nice living as a prostitute, even I knew that.

Her throat was opened by two very deliberate, efficient slices. Her legs lifted and parted at the knees. Her middle skillfully cut from thorax to pubis. This time, the organs had been left inside the cavity. At least, several of them appeared to be visible through the narrow gash.

As Dr. Phillips began his crime scene examination and report, I stood unobtrusively in the corner by a faded velvet chair that might have been expensive during the Regency. I occupied myself by counting the stab wounds on her chest and torso. Most of which were marked by vibrant red against the cream of her linen apron still tied behind her body yet sliced down the front along with her dress.

I’d reached forty before conversation interrupted the tally.

“How long has she been dead, you wager?” Aberline asked Dr. Phillips, who currently checked her rigidity by testing the flexibility of her elbows and wrists.

Phillips was much more himself today than he’d been two mornings prior at the Sawyer autopsy.

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