“Oh.” Moore stroked his beard. “Well, then. That’s very different.” His furry brows knit together. “You understand I am not liable for the answers I provide. My projections are only admissible in certain courts.”
“But you’re an expert, right?” Joel gestured at the cobblestones and fog and the great black carriage with its open doors. “You know this whole story better than anybody.”
“Yes. I represent the sum total of expert knowledge on the subject. I know more about it than any individual can know, and am constantly updating that knowledge from reputable sources on the subject. But I am still a secondary source, not a primary one. Do you understand the difference between primary and secondary historical sources?”
A little question mark icon appeared next to Mr. Moore’s top hat. Hwa waved it away. “Aye, we get it. Just walk us through all the reasons somebody would have for doing this.”
“The motives?”
“Aye. The motives.”
“Ah.” Moore tapped his walking stick against the cobbles and gestured at the open carriage door. “For that, we will need to take a ride.”
Joel made a big show of helping Hwa into the carriage—it was hard not to trip on her dress, even if it was a simulation—and soon they were off. Just like Hwa’s previous tour through Whitechapel, Moore showed them the canonical five murders from 1888. Joel couldn’t see all the details the same way Hwa could, but Hwa thought that was probably for the best. He’d seen enough already. And this way, instead of cringing, he hopped out of the carriage at each site and asked the questions Hwa didn’t think of, like Why did no one suspect a doctor and What about a midwife and Is there any truth to the Freemason connection?
So he didn’t see, really, how the murders got worse each time. How much more vicious they became. How the Ripper took more and more, each time, until the faceless, sexless body of Mary Kelly lay before them shrouded in censoring mosaic. Her lips gone. Her breasts gone. Her uterus and clitoris removed.
“They do seem like ritual killings, yes,” Moore was saying. “But it’s very rare for cults to kill people outside of their own membership.”
“What about the Santa Muerte cults?” Joel asked. “I saw a whole exhibit about them at the Museum of Behavior.”
“There was no Santa Muerte cult,” Moore answered. “There was only a ritualistic response to the chaos of narcocultura in Mexico. That’s all any ritual is. An attempt to pilot a rudderless world.” Moore used the ball of his walking stick to point out the street around them and the people walking it. “In fact, I think that’s the only reason anyone does anything at all. The cult that raised your father, for example. And the one he belongs to, now.”
Hwa caught Joel’s eye. “Excuse me?”
“This is Joel Lynch. His father is Zachariah Lynch.” Again, Moore pointed with his walking stick. “Zachariah Lynch was born into an anti-science commune led by Gaia Opal Abramson. At first it was all basket-weaving and free love—”
“Until kids got the measles,” Joel said. “And polio. But my dad isn’t a member of that group, anymore. Or any other group, much less a cult.”
“Is the Lynch company not a cult?” Moore asked. “Is it not a novel organization fanatically devoted to making possible the wishes and dreams of a single figure, based on his view of reality?”
“That’s not a cult, it’s just a family business,” Joel said. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with murders like these. Murders that people attribute to organizations like the Freemasons.”
Moore smirked. “The Gull theory—Stephen Knight’s theory about the killings as a Masonic coverup of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child—is implausible for a number of reasons. Not least because the threat posed by an illegitimate child of Albert’s would have been negligible, especially if the child were Catholic, as Knight claims the child would have been. The Settlement Act of 1701 excludes Catholics from succession. And even if Albert Victor had married, his marriage would have been invalid without consent from the sovereign under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.”
“So what you’re saying is, there was no real reason for these women to die.” Hwa watched police officers mill around the body making notes and lighting pipes. One ran away to be sick down an alley.
“No,” Moore said. “Someone killed these women for a reason. But that reason was entirely personal. Only the killer can explain it. And even then, the explanation would be inherently limited by the killer’s own self-awareness.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Moore, but you’re leaving something out,” said a little man in a dapper blue suit from the wrong century. He was very pretty and apparently from the American South—his voice sounded like a higher, crisper version of Rivaudais’s. He melted out of the space between two police officers and held out his hand. It wasn’t until Hwa shook it that she realized he had extraordinarily long pinkies.