City of Darkness

Chapter NINETEEN

October 4

3:20 AM





After their largely uneventful rounds had been completed, Trevor and Davy had stopped off at the Pony Pub, the place Micha Barasik had claimed to be the night of the double murders. Trevor’s choice of a place to drink was not accidental. Barasik’s alibi had been confirmed earlier in the day, so the giant had been released, but something about the situation still niggled at Trevor’s mind. He had offered to buy Davy a beer but the young officer had, quite sensibly, opted instead to go home for a few hours sleep.

“Not likely much will happen on a Tuesday anyway, Sir,” he’d said. “The Ripper strikes on weekends, doesn’t he, Sir? If we rule Martha Tabram out, the other four were on a Friday or Saturday. Maybe a working man, turns in early through the week but cats around on the weekend.”

“Quite right, Davy,” Trevor had said, ashamed he hadn’t thought of that himself. “Get some rest and I’ll see you at the Yard tomorrow.”

The boy had a profound gift for the obvious, Trevor reflected, idly wondering if the barmaid sliding him his pint was the same girl who had provided an alibi for Micha. That bit about the murders occurring on weekends was so basic that everyone else on the case had somehow managed to miss it. For the hundredth time in the last two days Trevor blessed he series of coincidences that had brought Davy Mabrey to his attention.

Eatwell had said he could take more men and Trevor had initially been tempted to do so. But perhaps, he reflected as he gazed at the exhausted girl struggling to lift a tray laden with glasses, it was better if just he and Davy did the interrogations and let the other men handle the patrols. It was hard for him to remember, in the dawning light of this new day, what he had hoped to accomplish by walking the streets of Whitechapel. There were plenty of bobbies to do that, nearly twice the number assigned to an area on a typical Tuesday night. Davy had not questioned his judgment directly, but he was right. They needed to spend their time following up leads, not mindlessly roaming the serpentine streets of the East End. Perhaps on the weekend, but not through the week.

Trevor drained his pint in three long gulps and looked around. Despite the fact it was nearly four in the morning there were still a surprising number of people clustered around the Pony Pub. It’s not just me, Trevor thought. No one in London can sleep. We have become a city of insomniacs. The barmaid turned an inquiring face and he nodded. Yes, another. Why not?

“I wish you would listen,” the girl said, sliding a beer toward Trevor, but talking to a man several seats down the bar. “We should go to my sister’s house, that’s what I think. London’s not a fit place for the decent, but she said she’d take us in…”

“Excuse me,” Trevor said. “Miss –“

“Name’s Lucy,” the girl said, turning her attention promptly back to Trevor.

“Pleased to meet you. I was going to ask about a man named Micha –“

“Oh yes, Micha, right as rain,” the girl said. “A copper bloke came in asking if he could be the Ripper, can you picture? But I told him he’d been here the whole night. His usual charming gentleman of a self, right as rain.” She laughed, showing a row of teeth that were surprisingly white and even considering this was the East End, and Trevor found himself laughing back. Perhaps it was his disheveled appearance or perhaps the fact he was drinking at four in the morning, but for some reason the girl taken him as a friend of the brute.

“Not likely to forget a face like that, are you?” Trevor asked and the girl shook her head vigorously, glancing down the bar as she did so. Trevor couldn’t see the man sitting at the end, but he was likely the jealous sort from the nervous little titters that erupted from the girl whenever she looked in his direction. He had undoubtedly seduced Lucy at some point and didn’t like it when she showed another man attention. We’re all of us beasts in a way, Trevor thought. The man at the end of the bar probably had her easy enough, cares for her not a whit, and even without looking him in the face I’d bet the crown jewels he hasn’t the slightest notion of taking this poor little simpleton to her sister.

“Not likely to forget that ugly devil” the girl agreed with a giggle. “He pays for it, or he has it not at all, that’s our Micha.”

She had picked up English phrases and diction well enough, but but her accent, especially on certain words like “ugly,” revealed that she was Polish. Like Micha, and probably half of the people in the Pony Pub. The bar catered to the squadrons of people escaping Eastern Europe for what they imagined to be a more humane and civilized life in London and the tightness of these communities was one reason that Trevor conducted his interviews with skepticism. The Poles vouched for the Poles, the Jews for the Jews, the sailors for the sailors, and, farther to the west, the Royals vouched for the Royals. Trevor had often argued that the natural human impulse to protect your own kind rendered most alibis useless, but the Yard continued to put a great deal of faith in them, still behaved as if investigating even the most heinous crimes was a gentleman’s game. Yes, guv, I’d slit a woman’s throat ear to ear but I certainly wouldn’t lie about it.

The girl continued to chatter as she wiped the bar, saying that she was frightened, which was undoubtedly true. Saying she wanted to go to her sister, who was in Jersey, somewhere rural and green and safe, at least to this girl’s mind. Half the men in this bar have mustaches, Trevor drily noted, and most of them dark hair. The physical descriptions provided by the witnesses, he was rapidly beginning to see, were as pointless as alibis. The witnesses were giving him impressions, not true descriptions, and impressions were as individual as breasts…

God. Where had that come from? Trevor pulled himself upright, took another swig of his beer. How long had it been? Weeks coming up on months, months coming up on more like a year?

He found himself envying the man who sat at the end of the bar, a man who had clearly taken advantage of a lonely, frightened girl who he had no intention of marrying, no intention of saving. The rules of Mayfair didn’t apply in this part of town. Of course the impressions of the people he and Davy had interviewed were just that, impressions. The poverty and the filth of the East End acted as drugs, transporting the citizens of Whitechapel into a sort of collective stupor. A sense of timelessness, drunkenness, women walking aimlessly back and forth in search of something that did not exist in this mean part of the city, men who worked and ate and slept at odd hours. The people here wore no watches. They read no papers, kept no appointments, accepted no invitations to dine. If you stopped the average person in the street and asked the wretch the date or the month would they even be able to answer? Would there be any reason why they should? And yet these are the people, Trevor thought, draining his second beer, whose recollections are the foundation of our case.

Trevor shut his eyes. The stories buzzed around him. Was the bar usually this crowded on a Tuesday? But no, it was Wednesday now, wasn’t it? Tuesday had slid into Wednesday just as Tuesday always does, and Trevor listened to Lucy chattering on. A pretty girl, a normal girl, a girl who had committed no greater sin than believing the man who bedded her, a girl who with a single stroke of bad luck might find herself on the streets someday, as desperate as Dark Annie. Trevor let the alcohol settle over him like a blanket and listened to their voices. Not just the girl and her useless lover, but the man in the back, roaring that it must be Victoria’s grandson. “’e’s sick in the ‘ead, you, know? Why they only let ‘im out at night, so ‘e won’t be seen in public.”

“I think ‘e’s that doctor from Russia,” said another. ”The Jew. Said in the papers these women were cut on like in surgery. Clean cuts and all.”

“You know ‘e’s had some dealings with Old Maudy,” a third voice, female, ventured. “Maybe they’re working together. She ‘ates all of us. Wears men’s clothing, too.”

Trevor pulled out his journal and made another note on Maud Minford. He kept hearing her name, but he hadn’t visited her yet. John had seemed so certain she couldn’t have the skills to do the deed, yet everyone had been unanimous in their condemnation of her cruelty. He closed his journal and replaced it in his breast pocket.

“Evening, Sir.” A young girl – fifteen? sixteen? – slid onto the stool beside him. “Or should I say morning?”

“Morning it is,” he said. “Don’t you have some place you should be? Someone who’s expecting you home?”

“No, Sir” she said, with a simplicity that reminded him, oddly, of Davy. “Nowhere to be. No one at home. And you, Sir?”

“Nowhere to be” Trevor confirmed, draining the last of his beer. “And no one waiting for me either. So you guessed right, love.” It had been ten months, four days, and twenty hours. Afterwards, perhaps he would be able to sleep.