City of Darkness

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

October 17

10:20 PM





The most idiotic idiom of history, Trevor thought, must be “All’s fair in love in war,” for these two activities above all others seemed to be the constricted by custom. It had been over three hours since they had left Geraldine’s home and he was still not certain how Leanna viewed their relationship or the evening. Emma was along too – as a chaperone? Companion? A more suitable partner for Trevor? Impossible to tell. Emma had made steady and intelligent conversation since they’d left the theater but Leanna sat in silence, her profile as cool and composed as that of a cameo, offering Trevor no clue to her thoughts.

He had come home early that evening, around six, and the post had been waiting for him. Geraldine had three tickets to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and wondered if he might like to escort Leanna and Emma. Trevor had rushed into the streets like a schoolboy, dashing about until he was able to locate an urchin willing to deliver his acceptance for a shilling. Then he had run upstairs, shaved so quickly that he gave his chin two nasty nicks in the process, and squeezed himself into his one tuxedo, a simple suit he had purchased several years and at least a stone ago. The cummerbund trussed him so tightly that he feared any sudden exhalation would cause it to fly off with the force of a lethal weapon.

When he’d arrived at Mayfair, Geraldine had met him at the door and confided that the tickets, nearly impossible to come by, had been furnished by John Harrowman who had been forced to cancel yet another theatre engagement with Leanna. “She was dashed, poor dear,” Geraldine confided in her usual tactless way, “and when John sent the tickets anyway, in a manner of apology, I thought she and Emma would have more fun with you along. I get to the theatre often enough…” Trevor did not particularly relish the thought of being a last minute replacement for Saint John, and it also bothered him that since they were taking the doctor’s tickets and Geraldine’s coach, he was contributing nothing to the evening. But his hesitancy evaporated at the sight of Leanna on the stairs in a brilliant blue silk gown which fell off her shoulders like water. If she were indeed dashed, she hid her disappointment well, for her smile was bright and her step almost sprightly as she reached out to take his arm.

Emma looked lovely as well in a pale green gown which, in another manifestation, obviously had belonged to Geraldine. Trevor was both touched and amused at the way her slender neck bore the unaccustomed weight of an enormous plumed hat – undoubtedly also courtesy of Geraldine’s bureau - and the nervous way she fiddled with her gloves. So now he was seated between two attractive women, riding through the well-manicured West End in an opulent carriage, Gerry’s one concession to society, and if he d had any doubts about being John’s understudy, they were fading fast. Trevor had enjoyed little social intercourse at all since taking the Ripper case, and this stroke of fortune was almost too much to fathom.

“You’re certainly silent, Leanna,” Emma said. “What did you think of the play?”

“It was everything John said it would be,” Leanna said. “Utterly riveting.”

“I know what you mean,” Trevor said, a little deflated that she felt the need to quote John in every sentence but determined to draw her into the conversation nonetheless. “I’ll confess an appalling truth to you ladies. This is only the second time I’ve been to the theater and the first was a frothy little comedy of manners, the kind of thing one laughs at and promptly forgets. I spent much of that evening trying to calculate the cost of the chandeliers that hung overhead. But the drama tonight was certainly more…. dramatic. I’m a bit drained.”

“Stevenson is a genius,” Leanna said.

“He can tell a story,” Emma conceded. “But do you accept his premise, that under certain circumstances a supposedly normal man could become a monster?”

“The psychology is certainly correct,” Leanna said. “My grandfather used to say that we all have a dark side, a more violent nature which is always bursting to get out.”

“One can only hope that the typical transition is not quite so abrupt as Jekyll to Hyde,” Emma said, with a light laugh. “Richard Mansfield has certainly earned his notoriety, has he not?”

Trevor laughed too. The actor’s astounding on-stage transformation from the morally upright Dr. Jekyll to the sinister Mr. Hyde had been the talk of London for months, a performance so persuasive that some audience members had literally fainted in their seats, a man had suffered a coronary, and a woman had gone into premature labor. The Yard had received more than one letter claiming that Mansfield must indeed be the Ripper, since no man could portray evil that convincingly, night after night, without it gradually infecting his soul.

“If a Jekyll were to really become a Hyde,” Emma continued, “I would imagine it would be a slower transformation, perhaps over the course of a lifetime. A series of disappointments builds up, a series of disillusionments or humiliations….”

“No, no, the harder a man tried to suppress this dark side, the more suddenly it is bound to erupt,” Leanna said, equally persistent in her view. She snapped her fingers. “Like so. Wouldn’t you say, Trevor?”

“Possibly,” he said mildly, thinking of all the prostitutes he had interviewed in the last weeks. They had, to a woman, claimed that the gentlemen who patronized them were the roughest customers, demanding unnatural acts and often with a yen for brutality. “Give me a Limey o’er a Lord any day,” one girl had claimed, “For the boys who been at sea just want a quick ‘un, while it’s the gentry that tells ye get to on all fours and howl.”

“The trouble is, Mr. Stevenson came very close to saying all humans have this dark side,” Emma said, “and I can’t agree with that. The play was all but asserting that everyone in the audience was a potential Mr. Hyde.”

“Or potential Ripper,” Trevor added quietly.

“Oh, Trevor, I am sorry,” Leanna said. “Here you try desperately to get one evening away from work and what do we do but take you to a play which professes to analyze the criminal mind.”

“Don’t apologize. I found it fascinating, and you know I’ve believed from the start that the Ripper was a gentleman. We’ve explored a hundred avenues and they all lead back to that.”

“You’re no closer to a solution?” Emma asked.

“No,” Trevor sighed. “We run in hundreds of poor souls, each more crazed than the last. They all have the proximity and perhaps the temperament, but I know in my heart that none of them is our man. The real Ripper is a person who can walk any street of London without calling attention to himself. What makes him frightening is precisely the fact that he blends in so well.”

“So you see, the play was quite right,” Leanna said firmly. “We, all of us, have this darkness inside which struggles to get out and if it does not get out at first, it becomes even more twisted and horrid…”

“I must disagree,” Emma said. “My mother, for example, was the most gentle soul. I believe she was gentle within as well as without. You can’t take an evening’s entertainment at the theater as any universal truth. It’s more…” Emma suddenly stopped herself, surprised at her own words, for she never spoke of her mother or any of her family. Fortunately, Leanna and Trevor were too intent upon the discussion to notice her discomfiture. “The play is more of an analysis of the criminal mind than the normal one,” she finished lamely, glancing at Trevor.

“But healthy people remain healthy precisely because they’ve found a way to get it out,” Leanna went on. “Through music or sporting or letters to the editor like Aunt Gerry writes or through drinking …”

Trevor felt a twinge of discomfort as well. The girl was perceptive for her years. He had stopped patrolling the streets on foot but had still been going to the East End nearly every night, for reasons that had nothing to do with research. It was as if the night he’d taken up with the young prostitute at the Pony Pub had opened some sort of floodgate.

“…or sex,” Leanna went on.

At this, both Emma and Trevor erupted in a wild gale of laughter, Trevor’s being so explosive that his cummerbund finally gave way to its fate and collapsed in his lap like a deflated balloon. Sweeping it aside in the darkness, he said, “I say, Leanna, you get more like Geraldine every day.”

“Thank you,” Leanna said archly.

“You’re quite right to thank me, for that’s the greatest tribute I’m capable of bestowing. And I do agree with you. We must find a way to get it out.”

“What is this ‘it’ that we all must get out?” Emma asked, wiping tears from her eyes with one of her enormous plumes, “Are we speaking of evil? The hidden self? The evil hidden self? And, pray tell, why must we get it out? We’ll have streets full of Rippers.”

“There are times” said Leanna, slightly miffed by the giggles, “when I don’t think either of you take me seriously at all. The ‘it’ is our darker nature, the animal part of our psyche, and if we manage to find a way to vent these emotions - however that may be, and I’m not saying I know - we do not become Rippers. That’s quite my whole point. Trevor knows what I mean.”

“She means that when a gentleman blows, he blows harder than anyone,” Trevor said, still chuckling. “And I have the corpses to back up her theories. Unfortunately, my superiors are loath to admit she could be right. Now, if only Robert Louis Stevenson was a member of Scotland Yard…”

“But truly, what news of the investigation?” Emma asked. “No deaths and no new suspects doesn’t mean no news. You’ve been holding out on us.”

“I agree,” Leanna said. “And the only reason we associate with you at all is for news of the Ripper case. So come, Detective Welles. Spill your grisly secrets.”

Normally Trevor would have been tempted to tell them of the events of two days ago, but he, Phillips, Davy, and Lusk had decided not to publicize the arrival of a human kidney. Almost certainly a human kidney that had once resided inside the body of Catherine Eddowes. Public panic appeared to be abating, but news like this would stir it up fresh. Nor, he suspected, would the girls enjoy details of his visit to Mad Maudy. His new pursuit seemed the safest topic for discussion.

“I spent the day in my forensics lab,” Trevor said. “Which sounds terribly important, but which is actually a mortuary table that Doctor Phillips has been kind enough to turn over to my use. I’ll spare you ladies of the details of my experiments, all of which failed. But apparently the French police have come up with a method whereby they pour wax into a wound and the resulting imprint tells them what kind of weapon was used. Not just something vague like ‘a knife with a five-inch blade,’ but they come away with a complete impression of the murder weapon. Which would be marvelous to know because Phillips makes statements such as ‘like a surgeon’s scalpel,’ which is just enough information to drive a detective mad. Was it a scalpel or not? Is the man a surgeon or isn’t he? But the French must be using a certain kind of wax because I was practicing on a leg of mutton and it wasn’t working at all. Not that women are mutton,” he hastily added, but Leanna and Emma were hardly offended.

“It seems you would need to study the methodology first hand,” Emma said. “Reading something like that from a paper –“

“I know,” Trevor sighed. “Not to mention it had probably been badly translated from the original French.”

“Perhaps I could – “

“My grandfather did something similar,” Leanna said abruptly, cutting Emma off and twisting completely toward Trevor in her seat. “He was interested in identifying animals by the bite marks they made and he used….it wasn’t clay but I don’t think it was wax either. Something that he heated and poured, I do remember that much.”

“Really?” Trevor said, surprised. “What was he hoping to learn?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Maybe Tom could tell you. But I know that he gathered the method from a local taxidermist.”

“A taxidermist?” Trevor sat back, mulling this over.

“Well it fits, does it not? They’re always reconstructing animals, even in cases where parts are missing. If they can concoct an entire jaw from a fossilized bite mark, couldn’t you reconstruct a knife blade from the imprint of a wound?”

“Possibly. That’s certainly the idea. But the problem seems to be finding material subtle enough to fill the wound but strong enough to be extricated without breaking or crumbling. I need to figure what this material is, precisely what temperature is most conductive to a clean imprint, and I need to do it quickly.”

“There haven’t been any killings for a while,” Emma pointed out.

“No, there haven’t.”

“So, perhaps your Jack has stopped.”

“I rather doubt it. We’re still getting the letters.”

“But if he stops,” Emma went on, “that is a victory, in a way. It means you’ve frightened him off and forced him to move on to a new location.”

“It’s a victory in the sense there are no more dead bodies,” Trevor conceded, gazing out into the nimbus of a streetlight. He had often told Davy he did not care who captured the Ripper or how he was caught, but did he really mean it? “However, having the Ripper simply move along would not be a victory for justice.”

“But justice is sometimes an impossible goal, is it not?” Emma persisted. “An absence of injustice may the best you can hope for.”

“Quite right,” Trevor admitted, for she was.

“I don’t understand that line of thinking at all,” Leanna said. “Trevor wants a resolution, not a mere ending. He wants to hold the Ripper in the palm of his hand, to know he’s the one who has stopped him.”

“I’m sure that’s what he wants,” Emma said. “But what Trevor wants and what ends up occurring may not be the same thing.”

“Oh Emma, for once just stop and hear yourself,” Leanna said, twisting her gloves in agitation. “I don’t know why you always must be so, so….”

“Realistic?” Emma said. Her voice was so level that it translated into the deepest level of sarcasm. The carriage was going through a darkened part of the street and for a moment Trevor could see neither woman’s face.

“Pragmatic,” Leanna finally said. “Trevor would never be satisfied with knowing that he’d merely moved the Ripper on, that this killer was out there in the night wreaking his havoc in another district or another country. That wouldn’t be enough, Trevor, would it? Tell her.”

Trevor looked from Emma’s shadowy form to that of Leanna, and then back again. He could hear both women breathing, waiting, and he sat between them in the silence. He no longer knew what was enough.