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Chapter Three
Scotland Yard
August 18
2:14 PM
The next afternoon Trevor was back in his office in the basement of Scotland Yard,
frowning at a telegram. He was so preoccupied that he scarcely looked up when Rayley entered.
“She’s not Ripper,” Rayley said briefly.
“Never thought she was,” Trevor murmured, his eyes flitting across the paper in his hand
a final time. The fact that Jack the Ripper remained at large was a black eye that the whole of
Scotland Yard wore, and some might guess that Trevor himself, as principal detective on the case, felt
a special level of guilt at the fact the crimes had never been solved.
But nothing could have been further from the truth. Trevor knew in his heart he had done
all he could do to capture Jack, and there was a certain peace in that knowledge. Failure, Trevor had
sometimes reflected, often seemed to bring more peace of mind than success, for success had to be
constantly maintained while only failure allowed a man to close a door and truly leave the past
behind.
The rest of the Yard did not share in this philosophy. They were still looking over their
collective shoulder for Jack, and thus calling in the forensics team each time a female had the
misfortune to be knifed in the East End. That was, in fact, why Rayley and Tom had been fetched an
hour earlier to examine the remains of a woman who had, almost without question, been killed by her
own husband. And there was no telling when the paranoia would finally end. They had put Mary
Kelly in the ground nine months ago. She was not only the Ripper’s last known victim but also
Emma’s sister, and thus every detail of that investigation was burned into Trevor’s memory as if it
had been branded there by a hot iron. No, he would never forget the case, never fully be over it, and
yet – nine months was the length of a human gestation. The amount of time it took to bring new life
into the world and so, it seemed to Trevor, a proper amount of time for a man to likewise reinvent
himself. To find a new incentive for his work. The Ripper had slowly melted in his mind to an
amorphous, uncatchable figure of evil. The enemy Trevor knew he would never vanquish, for the
instant the neck of one killer snaps with the rope, another victim is crying out from another street.
In short, Trevor felt about criminals much the same way Jesus had spoken of the poor.
He knew they would always be with him.
And so he had dispatched Tom and Rayley to make study of this latest victim’s knife
wounds and to record the statements of her doubtlessly raving husband. He had spent the resultant
privacy of the last hour composing a telegram to the military police of the Bombay Presidency. His
questions had been answered with stunning promptness, almost as if someone in that dusty little field
office had been waiting anxiously for an inquiry from Scotland Yard and had all the particulars at the
ready.
“See here,” Trevor said, sliding the paper across the table toward Rayley.
“Heavens,” Rayley said, pulling up a chair with a scrape. “This may be the longest
telegram I’ve ever seen.” He scanned it quickly, a pucker appearing between his thin eyebrows.
“Miss Bainbridge said India is where the ambitious men used to go. It would seem that is still the
case.”