Jack Knife by Virginia Baker

Excerpts from Jack Knife

(I)

December 23, 1887
Jack * Fairclough Street, Whitechapel * 10:42 pm

            The knife in its cradle of leather slept just under his heart, warm and dreaming: deep needs; the sweetest nightmares.
            Overhead, the sky was clear. Filaments of snow covered the tilting eaves: Quick gusts of it floated to the ground, a visitation of ghosts that swirled along the filthy cobblestone street. On the corner, children in rags shivered and sang of Christ, each clear note fluting the alleys, ribboning through the sodden fog: That sweet, unearthly melody.
            He loved the fog. It dampened the ugliness of the place. Vast warrens of brick. The high slum stink of piss and cabbage and beer. Gaslight stuttering, coal smoke stinging his eyes. But the fog, it made the women beautiful. Angel’s wings swirling around their bodies. The cotton-ball glow of the gaslight, and their faces, always smiling.
            Those begging, whining smiles.
            There was always a woman.
            Like this one, slinking around the mouth of the alley. She would be naked beneath her grubby dress, stinking of other men but so easy, so ready for him.
            Knowing the gleam in his eyes as he watched her.
            Oh but not knowing.
            He returned her smile with his own and wondered where he would put her body when he had finished with her, filled with the music of angels singing, with the heat of his seed and the cold blade and the frost of the sickled Christmas moon flying silent overhead.

(II)

April 6, 1888
Inspector Jonas Robb * Prosper Alley, Westminster * 7:35 am

            They never found the knife. They found the blood--so little of it, but enough: One sliver, like a necklace laid along the woman’s bruised throat.
            Prosper Alley sat in a cranny of mews along the river. Inspector Jonas Robb heard men and women banter as factory shifts from the lumberyards and glass manufacturers passed one another in the street outside the alley. Ferries from the river bellowed low notes of greeting, and the smell of the Thames (salt and the low pong of rotting fish) was a presence unto itself.
            “No one seen nothin,” PC Tompson told him. “Cut her throat to the bone. Can’t find no one as hated her snough to do that.” Tompson hesitated, shifting his weight. “Yer don’t think it’s like--I mean, them whores in Whitechapel...the last one were just yesterday.”
            Robb looked again at the body: Her throat was cut, but there were no other wounds, no mutilation. Whitechapel was miles away, the worst of London’s slums; but even Westminster had its poor quarters, like this alley, just off the Charing Cross thoroughfares. Now it had its dead whores, as well.
            “There are no mutilations,” he said quietly. “But when the mortuary van comes, tell the coroner we need to know whether her killer was right-handed or left.”
            Tompson nodded, sickened by the thought.
            Alone with the body, Robb knelt on one knee and took off his hat. Her eyes were still open. Cold rainwater dripping from the roof had pooled in them, magnifying color and expression to a startling clarity: a drowning woman looking up out of the water.
            Robb closed her eyelids gently. Her lashes were long and brushed against his fingers, still soft, and Robb felt disgust roll through his belly with a heavy sense of loss.

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