I stuffed Mrs Wiggs and her lead-heavy limbs and big skirts into a cupboard. I was in a complete panic; any lucid thoughts I’d clung to were crumbling away. I was filled with anger at her. If she’d let me leave, she wouldn’t be dead. I refused to feel guilty. It was her own fault. It was self-defence. If she’d only let me leave, she’d be alive now; cursing me, yes, but alive and with her precious monster of a son.
Her skirts kept billowing back in my face as if they were laughing at me, too voluminous to fit in the cupboard. Her old-fashioned habits still fought me, even in death. My thinking became haphazard, desperate and littered with unrealistic peaks of optimism. If I could get to my solicitor, if I could get some money, he would help me. I would go abroad, run to France, walk to Spain if necessary. I would keep running until I fell off the edge of the Earth.
I’d pulled out pudding bowls and crockery, shoved them onto other shelves and heaved her bleeding body, hips first and folded over, into the bottom cupboard. I had no idea when Thomas would return with Dr Shivershev, but if the two of them walked in and found her dead on the floor, they would call the police. By doing this, I might still escape, if I were clever.
I saw myself in court, in a prison cell, trying to explain how I’d been imprisoned against my will, raging from the dock that my husband was Jack the Ripper, the typical hysterical shrew. There would be rows of pale and pompous bewigged men, grey faces puckered in disapproval, and when they heard I was the daughter of a prostitute and had lied my way to becoming the wife of a gentleman, I would be done for. I had wandered across London dressed as a man and mourned a dead woman lover. I would not stay to see how any trial played out. It would end with me imprisoned, or with my feet swinging clear of the ground, or in the asylum, though without any perambulating around a Surrey lake.
A steady flow of blood dripped from between the cupboard doors. Without proper soap and water, I was smearing it everywhere and covering clean linens in blood. I was creating more evidence out of thin air. I couldn’t breathe, my chest snatched shallow gasps. I had to wipe up what I could and hope Thomas would not enter the kitchen, at least not immediately. He would think I had escaped and that Mrs Wiggs had pursued me. He would wait for her to return and would not find her body until much later; that was my hope. My dress had blood on it, my hands were red with it. I pushed my hair out of my face and smeared blood across my cheeks. It was hopeless.
A knock at the front door cracked through the house like thunder. I thought my bones would crumble into dust. I tried to open the back door, but it was locked and there was no key. If I’d had any sense, I’d have realised the key must be on Mrs Wiggs, but I didn’t think of it. I crept back up the stairs towards the hallway, towards the knock at the door. I heard men’s voices and saw dark shadows shuffled through the mottled glass. It was Thomas, and he’d brought Dr Shivershev to diagnose the lunatic. As I neared the door, they knocked again, so loud it made me tremble.
They were waiting for Mrs Wiggs to come to the door. I remembered now that I had thrown the attic key under the sideboard when I fell down the stairs. Thomas had commandeered Mrs Wiggs’ key, and she had then had another cut to make up for the missing one, routine had returned and I had forgotten all about that missing key. I knelt down and found it in the same place, covered in dust. I raced up the main stairs and had got as far as the attic staircase when they gave up waiting. I could only be grateful for Thomas’s dependency on Mrs Wiggs: he was so pampered by his mother that it took three knocks before he could be bothered to reach all the way into his pocket for his front door key and open it himself.
I locked the attic door behind me as they clattered into the hallway downstairs. Inside the attic, I was in darkness. There were no windows, but streaks of light beamed like torches across the roof where the pigeons came and went in holes in the side of the roof. I was sure there had been a candle on the desk, but I didn’t dare try to find it for fear of knocking it over and making a noise. I moved across the floor on my hands and knees to the roar of my rapid heartbeat. It was freezing, but I didn’t feel it because of the terror that kept my blood surging. The floor reeked of mouse piss and mothballs. I dragged thick dust along with me and it flew up in my face. The pigeons were roosting and the scurrying and creeping of all the little creatures hiding in the dark with me was as loud as an orchestra. Then I heard Thomas shout for Mrs Wiggs and I shuddered.
I found the edge of the skirts on the tailor’s dummy and crawled underneath. A broken crinoline cage had been tied onto it, and I was able to fit underneath it in a ball and pull the skirts over me. I buried my face into my knees and realised I’d left the knife in Mrs Wiggs. I thought of the keys she’d have had on her waistband. Such an idiot. I was trapped in the attic with two men blocking my escape and the dead body of my housekeeper stuffed in a cupboard in the kitchen.
My heart thumped as their voices got ever louder. The attic stairs creaked under their weight. Then came silence, followed by the metallic clank of a key in a lock and everything – heartbeat, breathing, sweating – stopped. My hand gripped the key so tight, I could have made another from the mould it left in my palm. I twisted my lips together with my other hand and tried to breathe steadily and silently.
‘What? No gaslight?’ said Dr Shivershev. He sounded agitated; I was glad to have inconvenienced him.
‘Wait here,’ said Thomas.
When he came back with a candle, I realised the skirt I was hiding under had a tear in it. There was a sheer petticoat beneath it. I could see vague outlines through it, but I was pretty sure the petticoat would mask my eyes from the other side. Thomas came towards the dummy. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was him. He held the candle high and swept it from left to right. Dr Shivershev trudged behind him in his black coat and billycock; he was carrying his medical bag.
‘Robert, if she’s escaped, we’re all going to be done for. I’m telling you now,’ said Thomas.
‘What exactly did you tell her?’ said Dr Shivershev.
‘Nothing, specifically, but believe it or not, she’s not stupid.’
‘Why say anything at all? You’ve put everyone in this house in danger.’
‘You try living with her! I had to tell her something – she was on my back constantly.’
‘One might have acquired an imagination – or simply come home on occasion,’ said Dr Shivershev drily. ‘Who else lives here?’
‘No one. The servants are all gone, there is only Mrs Wiggs, and I don’t know where she is either. Oh God, it’s such a mess. What shall we do? What shall we do, Robert? She’s a nightmare.’
‘First things first, Thomas, why don’t you put that candle down on that desk. We must remain calm. The most important thing is, of course, not to panic.’ Dr Shivershev sounded the same as he did when he examined my tongue.
He set down his bag, opened it with black-gloved hands, pulled out what looked like a length of rope or thick cord, then lunged forward. It was an explosion of energy. I heard a frantic struggle, the scrape of boot heels against the floor, energy spending itself to the point of exhaustion. I tried to look through the tear, but the fight came too close and the dummy wobbled. I had to hold it steady. At one point, Thomas’s feet reached under the skirts and he nearly kicked me.
There was a hissing sound, and then choking. After an age of this came complete silence, then Dr Shivershev let Thomas drop to the floor with a dull thud. Just like that, my troublesome monster of a husband was dead. I was shaking so violently, I was sure the whole dummy must be quivering.
Dr Shivershev fumbled in his bag. Next thing I saw was Thomas being hoisted up like a flag in clumsy jerks, until his feet were dangling in the air. His polished black shoes swung side to side mere feet from my face. Dr Shivershev was panting like an old dog. He dragged one of the attic chairs to a spot on the floor in front of Thomas, sat down on it, leaned forward over his knees, let out a huge sigh and wiped his forehead. He stayed like that for a few minutes until his breathing had calmed.
‘It would be best if you were to come out now, Mrs Lancaster.’
*
‘You left footprints,’ he said, as if I should remember my mistake for next time. ‘Like deer prints, leading all the way up here. Are you hurt?’
He glanced around the attic. The pigeons cooed, unperturbed by their new housemate swinging from the rafters. One of them dropped faeces on a redundant chest of drawers and we both watched them land with an undignified splat.
‘Charming place you have,’ said Dr Shivershev.
His breathing had steadied, and he leaned forward and reached into his bag again. There was no one else in the house, so whatever came out of the bag was going to be for me. He pulled out a long silver knife and cleaned it, although it already gleamed in the candlelight.
I sat on the floor with my knees up to my chest and my arms wrapped around them. Dr Shivershev remained on the chair, his eyes shining like Vauxhall glass. I knew I had the time it took for him to compose himself to bargain for my life. I had to maintain this focus. Meanwhile, my dead husband’s feet swung between us like a metronome, a useful reminder that my time was finite.
‘Are you here to kill me?’ I asked.
He nodded, and said in a sympathetic voice, as if he were informing me of the death of a beloved pet, ‘I can do it quickly. It won’t hurt.’
I fell apart. I shook and trembled. I couldn’t breathe. I cried without pride or dignity. I begged him not to do it as he looked over my head and into the distance. I had never professed to be brave.
‘You could let me go. You know I can keep secrets. I never informed a soul about Mabel, though you told Thomas about my mother.’ I surprised myself at how quickly I moved to anger when it appeared my crying had no effect.
‘I never said a word to him about you.’ His voice echoed across the attic. It was a little strange that the man who had just murdered my husband should be offended at an accusation that he was a gossip. ‘I kept my word,’ he said. ‘I always do…’
Now that his knife was clean to his satisfaction, he pointed it at me as he spoke. ‘Your husband – badly chosen, I might add – knew everything. He had that housekeeper of his track down a woman from the Nichol and the woman told the housekeeper all about the little brown-eyed girl who had to be dragged out screaming, by her feet, from under a bed in a puddle of her own piss. As I said before, your Dr Lancaster and I weren’t drinking partners until recently, and even then it was business.’
He glanced up at Thomas, who was still swaying between us. I’d been trying not to look, but when I did, I saw that his eyes bulged like a frog’s and his tongue protruded from his mouth. How humiliating Thomas would have found this; a man so precious of his appearance was now so ugly in death.
‘What of the specimen then, the baby in the jar? I saw that here, in this attic, the night I was pushed down the stairs, and yet when I came to see you, it was in your office, on the shelf in your collection.’
‘Is that why you missed the appointment?’
‘I had no one left to trust.’
‘I rescheduled other patients for that. Who else have you told about your theories?’
‘Who else have I to tell?’ I said, shaking my head at the bizarre situation I now found myself in. ‘I thought the specimen had been cut from Mabel and that was why she hadn’t written, because she’d died and that’s how you came by it, and I had sent her to you.’
‘She was treated by a friend of mine, a Romanian, as qualified as myself – more so, in the practice of such procedures. You’ve met her: my housekeeper, Irina. She informed me that your friend left that place alive, and that there were no problems.’
‘And yet she hasn’t written,’ I said.
‘The girl got what she wanted, why would she write? You have been causing me headaches, Susannah, with your wild theories and indiscreet husband. You aren’t mad – a little off the mark, but not mad. I was sent here to deal with the issue at hand and dispatch whoever I found in the house with him. You know, I haven’t been sleeping, Susannah.’
Thomas’s body had finally stopped moving. I had a fear that Dr Shivershev was only telling me all this, explaining things to me, to alleviate whatever guilt he would suffer by killing me, as if I would skip to my death so long as I had an understanding of his motive, so long as it had been explained to me. I was still thinking on what I could do to change the inevitable outcome, so I let him speak and didn’t interrupt.
Dr Shivershev and Thomas worked for the same organisation, unbeknownst to each other at first. Dr Shivershev had been recruited many years ago, but Thomas had only recently been invited to join the secret brotherhood of scientists; he was very much on probation, a foot soldier in a hierarchical organisation. The brotherhood operated as a selective band of brothers; they helped each other in all things and swore loyalty to one another and their cause. At its core, their cause was about true freedom. A man could be who he wanted: the rules that applied to ordinary people were not for them, and no religious or moralising theories were assumed. But this camaraderie was not to be abused. Rules may not have applied in the normal sense, but a man was expected to keep his own house in order and remain discreet. Both edicts Thomas would come to find impossible to uphold.
The foetus specimen, found by Thomas, was an attempt to ingratiate himself with Dr Shivershev. He wanted a favour.
Thomas had complained to anyone who would listen of the difficulties he was having with his ‘common’ wife. He’d been seduced by a temptress, so he told his colleagues, who had her sights set on bettering herself. He needed to be free, and so he foolishly complained to his fraternity of brothers long before he had earned the currency to do so, establishing himself as a whining pain. He asked that they order Dr Shivershev, as his wife’s physician, to help him have her certified a lunatic, so she could be interned in an asylum.
The brotherhood did indeed assign Dr Shivershev to assist, but his real task was to deal with Thomas. Thomas had become a liability: unpredictable, unreliable, and most of all a risk. A squawking parrot of a man-child. He had been overheard speaking about the brotherhood socially, and his work was sloppy and lacking in the professionalism and rigour expected of a loyal brother. It was therefore agreed that he would have to be dispatched, and his troublesome wife along with him. The removal of the servants in his household was an absolute requirement to ensure that the evidence matched the motive. It must be clear that Thomas had gone on a murderous spree before hanging himself due to humiliating financial and professional difficulties.
Dr Shivershev said that this was to be his last assignment for the brotherhood in London. He would be removing himself to America. He wished to create a distance and had obtained special permission to leave. As a Jew, he had never felt truly accepted into the heart of the circle. His work was commended, admired, and he was respected, but he could never truly become one of them. In a way this worked to his advantage, and he obtained permission to leave as a reward for his loyalty and discreet service.
What Dr Shivershev had kept to himself was that he could no longer align himself with the direction the brotherhood had taken. It had become far removed from its original purpose; the brotherhood had lost its way. It had turned into a perverted enterprise whose main function was the harvesting and selling of organs for private sale to rich old men. Their principal customers, Dr Shivershev said, were a certain breed of English gent with a fetish for collecting things, the more novel and outlandish the better. The sort of man who had everything already but who would always want more, especially when it came at the expense of another.
I thought of Thomas and his own mania for collecting things; of that shrunken head from South America that he obtained just for the pleasure of hearing me shriek, how he acquired me and clothes and the cigars he didn’t smoke.
‘What was the purpose of this brotherhood in the beginning?’ I asked.
‘It was about knowledge! We wanted to understand how the body worked, so we could fix it when it went wrong. Why leave it to God, when he was doing such a shoddy job of it,’ Dr Shivershev said, his eyes glistening, his voice rich with passion. ‘Nearly fifty years ago, the first collective was a group of outcast scientists, enlightened scholars and astronomers, supported by free-thinking members of the aristocracy who invested money in secret. They all wanted to see what could be achieved with medicine, how far it could go. They wanted to explore the human body without interference from the Church, without religious or cultural morality defining what could or could not be done.’
My mind flitted back to my grandmother’s church in Reading, to the stultifying hours I’d spent there, and to my grandmother herself. She loathed the idea of humans ‘playing God’ with a person’s body. One of the many reasons she took against my ever becoming a nurse.
‘Medical experimentation is not something everyone approves of,’ continued Dr Shivershev, as if he could read my thoughts. He was all but lost in his enthusiasm for his topic. ‘We understood that. Innocent people died and we made some difficult decisions, but we believed it was for the progression of humanity.’
What did he mean by ‘innocent people’, I wondered. Did the brotherhood really go about committing murder and digging around inside people under the guise that it would save lives in the future? It seemed it might not have been so wild a theory that my husband the surgeon was the Whitechapel killer. If not Thomas, what of Dr Shivershev himself? My pulse began to race again. It was imperative that I try to find a way out. I could never physically overpower Dr Shivershev, I must talk my way to freedom. But how?
‘Hospitals are wonderful places, Susannah, but they are administrative nightmares run by meddling bureaucrats who want nothing more than to push paper around their desks and feather their nests and who don’t give a damn about real science. They go home and sleep in their beds without imagining what could be possible. There were things we achieved in those early years that would never have been permitted in a hospital, and now they are common practice.’
He sighed now, and glared disparagingly at the dangling corpse of my husband. His neck had begun to stretch, the tongue swollen. I had to look away.
‘The problem, as so often, was money. Once certain members of our brotherhood realised the obscene profit that could be made from private collectors, nothing else mattered. There was a sudden mania among the rich for everything from shrivelled hearts to kidneys in wine and virgins’ breasts, and medical science was forgotten. This suited your husband very well. He wasn’t faring too happily at the hospital, and barely had any private patients, but he did at least know the rudiments of surgery. He had quite serious money concerns, I believe?’
I nodded, thought of Abbingdale Hall and the inheritance Thomas was no longer eligible for, being dead. Mrs Wiggs had counselled me about that. After all my efforts to remain in his house, to remain married for my own security, it didn’t seem as if I would achieve this after all.
‘The problem was that he would go to his clubs and houses and boast, tell people, in that obsessive need he had to talk of himself. But he didn’t realise who was listening, which is why he had to be silenced. The man at the Café Royale you mentioned, with the medals, I knew who he was instantly, and I’m afraid he is rather high up in the brotherhood. So when you told me about their conversation, I knew you were in danger. Why do you think I told you to find a safe place to go?’
‘Then, as it’s not about me at all, but my husband, why not let me go? I will keep my mouth shut – you know I can.’
‘The missing wife of a gentleman who has killed himself… The brotherhood can influence the investigation, they have links to the Home Office and there will be no problem with the police, but a missing wife from Chelsea is a story worthy of the news, and these journalists, you see, they have not been… adequately penetrated, as of yet, shall we say. The brotherhood will be left feeling exposed and they will blame me for attracting attention. There would be the potential for scrutiny, and scientists do not like scrutiny…’
The beginning of his explanation gave me some hope; my grandfather used to tell me it never mattered how desperate a man’s situation was, he will always cling to the faintest sliver of hope, as I did now, though I made sure to keep my face expressionless. Dr Shivershev was taking the time to make me understand, so I would sit and listen.
‘I also have another problem,’ he continued. ‘Namely my friends you saw me with in the Ten Bells. The man, Walter, a common man, my driver, will leave the country with me, but the woman, Mary, they will never let her go. Her role is to procure the live specimens. She started as a whore – she has a varied past, as we all do – but she deserves better and I want her to come with me. Once the brotherhood realises that she is gone, they will know she’s with me. They will not be happy, though I suspect they will not be surprised. I will need to use all the currency I have earned during my service if we are to survive. They will never let a common prostitute leave. There is hypocrisy there, of course. The brotherhood prides itself on being free of cultural tyranny, but when it comes to women, I’m afraid you are still very much considered to be men’s property. There is theory, and then there is practice…’
He inhaled and came to a stop.
I didn’t need a lecture on hypocrisy but I let him give it. I was livid now, furious at myself for having got into this mess, worse than the one I had found myself in before, but how simple that seemed now. ‘I courted him in hospital and I simpered over him as he lay like the martyr in his bed…’
Dr Shivershev started and glanced at me with interest. ‘Ah, so that’s how you grew close, was it?’ He gave a little laugh. ‘You know Thomas was suspected of starting that fire at the hospital?’
‘What? Why would he do that? That doesn’t sound like Thomas at all, why would he want to burn himself?’
‘There was another doctor, a man called Dr Lovett.’
‘Yes, I know him. I mean rather I met him, Richard Lovett was best man at our wedding. Thomas carried him out from that fire.’
‘Well… he was Thomas’s best man in a variety of ways, for a while at least. You understand, of course?’
I coloured at this; I couldn’t help it. It made sense as I’d seen Lovett at the mollies’ house.
‘The night of the fire, Thomas and Lovett had argued – a lovers’ quarrel, I assume. Later, Lovett came to believe that Thomas had hit him over the head before the fire started. One minute he was awake and the next…’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Lovett is the nephew of the man with the medals you and Thomas bumped into at the Café Royale. After their affair had ended, the spurned Lovett didn’t waste any time reporting back to his uncle on Thomas’s indiscretions. The final straw was when an article appeared in the newspapers about a man who’d been making enquiries about the purchase of a fresh uterus on behalf of a client. The information came from Thomas, who’d apparently been talking while under the influence at a mollies’ house. And the person who witnessed this—’
‘—was Dr Richard Lovett.’
‘Exactly.’
It was time to change direction, I had had enough of being done to. As Dr Shivershev had been talking, I had been thinking and I had an idea, that sliver of hope had made me somewhat creative. ‘I know you don’t want to kill me—’ I said.
‘You deserve better.’
‘—and, besides, there is a way I think I can help.’ I looked him straight in the eye, made sure I had his attention.
‘What if the newspapers had a bigger distraction than that of a missing Chelsea housewife? What if Mary were believed to have been murdered? And if there was a body, no one would know she’d run away with you.’
My obsession with the Whitechapel murders might be put to practical use. I knew all the gory details, every last one of them. ‘You say Mary was a… well, that makes her ripe for being murdered by Jack the Ripper, does it not?’
I saw Dr Shivershev’s eye shift towards me and I knew immediately that he got it, understood there could be value in this.
‘What if we were to swap Mary’s body for another’s?’
His mouth twitched. ‘I take it you aren’t offering yourself as the substitute body, Susannah? Are you suggesting I wait for Mrs Wiggs and kill her instead?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘because she is dead already.’
‘Ah,’ he said, shifting in his chair. His face broadened into a smile. ‘I see.’