‘I want to knock you into tomorrow and kiss you all at once, son.’
‘Sorry Ma,’ said Jake, hanging his head.
‘Don’t you sorry me, you tricky little bastard.’
‘I won’t do it again.’
‘I expect you’ll do as you please.’ She wrapped her arms around him. Jake looked confused. ‘What else are you up to that I don’t know about. Eh?’
The family settled back as though they had never been away, but they talked of the country often and wrote letters to Maidie Robertson. If one of them came over quiet and gazed out of the window Grace knew they were dreaming of the riverside. One day soon they might move to the country for good, not so far, perhaps, from Mrs Robertson. She wouldn’t tell them that for a while.
Charlie took his handsome face straight round to Elsie Brown’s, his hands a little sweaty in his pockets, and they took up where they had left off. Daisy was happy to see her friends, though she wept for three miles after leaving her country home. When she asked where Sally Ann was, Grace said she’d gone home, back up north. Where was north? Far, she said–when she’d be back she couldn’t say. It was hand-me-down Emily who told her, the very next day.
Daisy ran home with her little face tied in knots. ‘Ma, Em said Sally had her head cut off. Did she, Ma?’
‘No, my sweetheart, she didn’t.’
‘Is she dead, though?’
‘Yes, she is, darlin’.’
It was back to business as usual in the district. Whitechapel had turned up no butchered women on its streets for three whole weeks, and started to breathe again, as easy as it ever did. Talk returned to hard luck and money trouble–even the papers had run out of things to say about the horrors. And then, at the end of September, just as the boys at the newsstands were shuffling their listless feet, two more were found, on the very same night.
The first was Busy Liz Stride, still warm, in a yard off Berners Street, outside the Jewish club, stirring Gentile outrage to fever pitch. It seemed the fiend has been disturbed at work; he hadn’t done the full job on her. The second was slit from belly to throat, sewn together at the mortuary with thick black stitches like Frankenstein’s monster. She had been gutted, her nose slashed, her eyelids cut–in your ears at every newsstand, shouted loud in the street. Every man, woman and child of the rotten East End talked of nothing else. Every stranger was suspect, each shadow hid a fiend, and terror lurked in every doorway, especially now night came early. The women went about in pairs, which made business tricky for the brasses. None had thought too much about the uselessness of their patrol companion in the event of trouble, being dependent on the meagre spoils of their only commodity, and for the most part having a heavy drink habit to drown. Some chose not to care.
Grace went to see Busy Liz Stride into the ground, holding Nelly Holland to keep her upright as she convulsed in loud, drunken sobs over the chaplain’s voice and then stared numbly past the headstones, as if lost, most likely thinking about her next tipple. Grace thought about Sally Ann, and Polly, whose meagre funeral seemed so long ago now. The Whitechapel girls were disappearing one by one.
Grace was haunted sometimes by dark moments when she wondered if she knew the devil. Sometimes she dreamed of him coming, a dark shape at the end of a tunnel with the river behind him, and she tried to run, waking with a start. Not for the first time in her long life she counted the blessing that she did not turn tricks.