Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [144]
Their names had been kept out of it. Charles insisted public credit be taken by the police. It was generally believed that Constable Collins had come upon Godalming and Seward as they left the room where they had together mutilated Mary Jane Kelly. Hastily-summoned reinforcements trapped them in Miller’s Court and both were killed in the confusion. Either the murderers did for each other to escape the stake, or the police, enraged and appalled, destroyed them on the spot. Influenced by the recent habits of justice in London, most favoured the latter explanation, although Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors offered a vivid recreation, complete with actual clothes, of the two Rippers gutting each other.
At Scotland Yard, Sir Charles Warren had resigned in exchange for an overseas posting, and Caleb Croft, an elder with a reputation as a hatchet man, was his replacement. Lestrade and Abberline were on fresh cases. The city hunted a new maniac, a warm murderer of brutish disposition and appearance named Edward Hyde. He had trampled a small child, then raised his ambitions by shoving a broken walking-stick through the heart of a new-born Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew. Once Hyde was apprehended, another murderer would come along, and another, and another...
Red light rippled in the carriage as they passed Trafalgar Square. Although the police kept dousing the bonfires, insurrectionists always rekindled them. Scraps of wood were smuggled in, and even items of clothing used for fuel. New-borns, superstitiously afraid of fire, didn’t care to get too near. Crowds scuffled with policemen by the fires, while an engine crew, perhaps half-heartedly, tried to train hoses. Captain Eyre Massey Shaw, the popular superintendant of the London Fire Brigade, had recently been removed from office, allegedly because of a refusal to deal with the Trafalgar Square conflagration; Dr Callistratus, a sullen Transylvanian with no appreciable experience of or interest in fire-fighting, was installed in Shaw’s stead and was reportedly unable to occupy his office due to the pile of resignations heaped against the door. Geneviève looked out at the blazes heaped around the stone lions, flames leaping up a third of the height of Nelson’s Column. Originally a memorial to the victims of Bloody Sunday, the fires now had fresh meaning. Word of a new mutiny had come from India. Sir Francis Varney had been dragged by sepoys from the Red Fort in Delhi and bound over the muzzle of one of his own guns to be blown away. A jumble of old scrap-iron and silver salts shot through his chest, Varney was cast into a fire and burned down to ash and bones. Many warm British troops and officials had thrown in with the native rebels. According to the broad-sheets, who plainly had highly-positioned sources, India was in open revolt, and there were further stirrings in Africa and points east.
Placards were waved and slogans shouted. JACK STILL RIPS, a graffito read. The letters still came, red-inked scrawls signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. They had been received by the press, by the police, by prominent individuals. Now they called for the warm to rally against their vampire masters or for British new-borns to resist foreign elders. Whenever a vampire was killed, ‘Jack the Ripper’ took credit. Charles said nothing, but Geneviève suspected many of the letters were issued from the Diogenes Club. A dangerous game was played out in the halls of secret government. Even if a madman became a hero, a purpose was served. To those for whom Jack the Ripper was a martyr, there was Jack Seward taking his silver knife to the vampire oppressors. To those for whom Jack the Ripper was a monster, there was Lord Godalming, the arrogant un-dead disposing of common women he regarded as trash. The story had a different meaning for each retelling, the Ripper a different face. For Geneviève, that face would always be Danny Dravot, fingers bloody with ink, standing by while Mary Jane Kelly was ripped apart.
Public order in the city was at the point of breaking down. Not just in Whitechapel and Limehouse,