26

‘Susannah, let me in.’

Pale light lined the gaps around the curtains.

‘Susannah!’

It was early morning. A yellow flash bounced off the brass door handle and came into focus. Someone was trying to turn it from the other side.

I sat up in bed and stared at the glinting metal, wondering if I’d imagined the voice. A child appeared to be whimpering outside the door.

‘Susannah! I’m sorry…’

It was Thomas.

My stomach sank. He hadn’t fallen in the Thames and drowned, nor had he been murdered in a fight. He had in fact come back safe and sound and was now scratching at my bedroom door like a mangy old cat. Was he trying to trick me with his sobbing? If he thought I would feel sympathy for him, he was very much mistaken.

I crept over and put my ear to the door. The sound came from low down; he was sitting on the floor on the landing. I crouched down so only inches of wood separated us. He was talking to himself, muttering. He sounded drunk and God knows what else. I considered ignoring him but knew that would only sustain the bad blood between us. Ultimately, he would win whatever fight I started.

He fell through the door as soon as I opened it. Tumbled through in a sweaty mess and wearing neither a jacket nor a coat. Perhaps he’d part undressed on his way up the stairs – entirely possible in his state. As I stood looking down on him, he rolled onto his back like a beetle and tried to focus his glassy eyes on me. He grabbed the hem of my nightdress, balled the fabric into a tight fist, and with his other hand flailed around as if to steady himself.

‘Chapman… will you…? You have to help me…’ he said.

I pulled him up onto his knees. I could smell as well as feel the cold sweat from his damp body. It was disgusting. I struggled to assist him onto the bed. His usually angular face was swollen and puffy, eyes red from crying. He clearly hadn’t shaved, and his whiskers looked as if they’d broken out of their meticulous borders days ago. When I asked him where he’d been for the past week and more, he wouldn’t say.

I sat next to him on the edge of the bed and sighed. I would have to suffer his stupefied presence for the night, and no doubt his pig-like snoring too. I could smell urine. I touched his trousers and he’d wet himself. I yanked my hand away and then shook him by the shoulders, but it did nothing, he only stirred a little. I was reminded of my grandmother, how she used to soil herself near the very end. I would clean up after her and change the bedclothes only for her to do it all over again. Now I’d be doing the same for my young husband. Aisling would have found the humour in this somehow.

‘The woman in the attic,’ he mumbled. ‘She won’t leave me. Help me! Tell her to stop talking! It’s the talking… All the time…’ he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

‘What woman, Thomas?’ I whispered close to his ear. I put my hand, still wet with his urine, on his bare chest and shook him. ‘Tell me about the woman. Who is she?’

For a moment I thought he might confess to the Whitechapel murders, if I could only get him to talk.

He repeated those same words – and other words, equally unintelligible.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Do you mean women, Thomas? Do you mean the women? What happened to them? What did you do?’

I gripped his head between my hands, but it still flopped about. His eyes were a sliver of white and his mouth was loose and dribbling. I tapped his cheek to stir him, but he just rolled over and started to snore.

I pulled his legs straight, took his shoes off and deliberately dropped first one then the other to the floor, noisily, from a height, to try and wake him, but he was dead to the world. I thought about smothering him. I really did. Surely God had sent him to me in this state for me to do something? I could blame it on the alcohol, or whatever else he’d taken. He could have just stopped breathing, couldn’t he? Like so many people.

But I didn’t. I simply unbuckled his damp, stinking trousers and tugged them off. As I folded them, a gold key fell out of the pocket and bounced across the floor. By the time it had settled flat, I knew what room it was for and what I was going to do with it.

I made my way up the narrow steps to the attic, clutching the key so tight it hurt my hand. At the door I turned back and held up my candle, but all I could see was a few feet behind me. Anything could have been there in the dark watching me. The only noise was the sound of my breathing. The lock made a click and turned first time. I wrapped the key in the palm of my hand again and pushed open the door.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. I imagined a knife, a stained bayonet, something incriminating and dripping with blood. I had never been in his precious attic and didn’t know where any of the furniture was. It was windowless and pitch black except for me, hovering in a yellow bubble with my candle. I could see bare floorboards beneath my blue feet – the temperature was arctic. I had no idea how Thomas could have spent so many hours holed up there without freezing to death. The air was thick and musty with dust and mouse droppings. From the little I could see, one half of the room was a huddled mass of old furniture: tables and chairs pushed together, the finials of a brass headboard, a scratched chest of drawers with missing handles, armchairs with broken backs and threadbare, moth-eaten upholstery.

I inched towards a slightly better desk and chair, which was where, I assumed, he spent his hours ‘working’. I was only a few feet inside the door when I heard a rustle above my head. Something hit the floor beside me and I froze. My heart raced as I peered down. Fresh bird droppings! I looked up and listened. Pigeons were roosting in the rafters and I could now see splatters of bird faeces all over the floor. Were there rats too? My bare feet curled at the thought and I shivered.

I searched the desk, but all I found were a few metal instruments and some medical texts lying open. One page was plastered with dried bird droppings and another showed drawings of the female anatomy. None of this was remarkable or sinister for a doctor to have in his possession. My eyes drifted up again and this time I very nearly screamed. A pair of shining eyes were staring back at me – from the face of a stuffed owl on a wooden stand. I had to laugh, because the owl wore the exact same supercilious expression as Mrs Wiggs.

I blew on it and as years of dust flew out of its feathers and back in my face I sneezed and waved the cloud away. Which was when I caught sight of the glass specimen jar on Thomas’s desk. It was clearly a recent arrival, because it was the only thing that was clean.

The specimen was cream and pink in places, and solid, as if it had been carved out of yellow limestone. It was the size of a man’s fist and looked much like a peach that had been halved and had the stone removed. In the hollow, encircled by sediment and other matter, was what looked like a tiny foetus. It had an oversized head, barely formed arms that shone white like marble, unformed hands crossed over the front of its body, the faintest shape of a nose and ear, and a dark line where the eye would have been. A human foetus in a womb. I shuddered. I’d never seen anything like it before.

There was nothing to find, no bloodied knife, no evidence. As I turned to leave, I held the candle up one last time, not expecting to see anything. But what did catch my eye scared me half to death. A woman was standing in front of me, stiff and staring. I thought it was Mrs Wiggs and let out a yelp and pinched my mouth closed. The woman didn’t flinch or move.

After a moment I realised it was only a tailor’s dummy, dressed in ratty old torn clothes. I put a hand on my heart and felt it thump. I was shaking.

The dummy was wearing dark burgundy skirts and a blue velvet jacket with a high collar and black brocade buttons. Balanced wonkily on its head was a cheap black straw bonnet adorned with paper flowers and berries – poor, sweatshop stuff, similar to the fripperies sold at Mabel’s milliner’s. There were dark, stiff patches on the skirt, as if the woman who’d worn them had spilled a drink, and the velvet jacket had lots of rips and random slashes as well as some crusty dark brown stains.

Why on earth would Thomas dress it up and have it loom over him like that?

At the foot of the dummy there was a pile of clothes. I bent down and pulled a white petticoat out, also torn and slashed. When I held it up, I saw more stains, the familiar brown-red I knew to be blood. I threw it back down and stood up, and then I saw the heart-shaped pendant. The one that Thomas had ripped from my neck, the one I knew had belonged to someone else. Now it hung around the dummy’s neck. My stomach lurched and my knees went weak. Hadn’t Little Lost Polly been wearing a fancy black bonnet when she was knifed? I wracked my brains, tried to remember other details, things about Dark Annie and the other women too. Had I mentioned Dark Annie’s clothes in my writing? Could the blue velvet belong to her?

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.