1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

“ W atch! Watch!” came the cry in the night, echoing over the damp cobblestones, nearly lost in the mist that clung to the air like so much scum to a riverbank. It was not an unfamiliar shout on the streets, but every time he heard it, Constable Hugh Danbury’s stomach twisted inside of him. Violence was prodigious in London at night.

He hurried along, lifting his police lantern to try to throw some light into the darkness that seemed stuck to the stone walls and alley entrances. If one were to imagine a haunted moor or a deserted ruin, neither would ever equal the spookiness that was London’s streets at night. Shadows leaped away from the light like scattering roaches, crawling up the side of the darkened buildings to disappear over the rooftops, waiting for the light to pass before descending once more.

“Watch! Watch!” came the cry again, closer now, and Constable Danbury lifted his whistle to his lips, blowing a long, tinny blast in response. The sound seemed to be swallowed by the edifices of stone and glass surrounding him. He sensed more than saw two figures in the vaporous fog as he came closer. One was a man standing, his head turned toward where the muffled footsteps approached. The other figure was slumped against the wall at the mouth of an alleyway, though Constable Danbury did not get a good look at him until he was nearly upon them both.

The feeble light from his lantern played over the man who was standing, who had a big silver mustache and heavy lines that creased the corners of his eyes. “Constable Hugh Danbury,” he said as he came to a halt. “What is going on here?”

“I only jus’ found ‘im, sir,” the mustached man said, motioning to the prostrate individual.

The figure lay on the ground, slumped face-first against the wall in a way that would have been impossibly painful for a living person. A quick glance told the constable that the limp body was male. His breeches were around his ankles, his long shirt tails falling slightly over the curve of his bare backside. The back of his shirt and waistcoat were unblemished, but there was a widening pool of blood under him that was slowly seeping outward and also up the fabric of his clothing. Hugh’s stomach dropped as he surveyed the limp form. With that much blood, there was no way the man was still alive. He set down his lantern and grasped the man’s shoulders to pull him away from the wall and lay him down flat on the pavement.

The man’s head lolled back at an unnatural angle, both without life to support it and a massive gash across his throat that had nearly severed head from body, only the intact spine keeping the head attached. Across the chest of the corpse were several long lacerations, starting at the left shoulder and dragging down to the right side, the skin ripped apart like bread under a dull knife. The pool of blood beneath him was so large, he might not have had any blood left in his body at all.

“Was he alive when you found him?” Hugh asked the man standing nearby.

The man with the bushy mustache shook his head. “No, sir, not’n that I could tell.”

“What is your name?”

“Kingston, sir. I own the butcher shop just down the way, work overnights gettin’ the meat prepared for the morning.”

“Thank you, I will need your formal statement shortly, but for now, let me see to this man.”

Mr. Kingston nodded and backed away. He looked a little pale but resolved, and Hugh wondered if the man was used to seeing gore as a butcher. He opened up the tattered remains of the dead man’s shirt. The marks on his skin were ragged and ripped, the flesh hanging in ribbons where it still clung to the body. He was a young man, Hugh noted, probably not much older than his own twenty-two years. And his face, while covered in blood, was a nice one. Soft, one might even say pretty. His green eyes stared vacantly at the sky, unseeing, and Hugh hoped that his final moments had been quick ones. There was blood everywhere, so it was hard to see if the man had fought or been tossed around. But judging by his trousers around his ankles and his prick between his legs, still stiff despite the corpse’s lack of life, he wondered if the man had been in the middle of a rut with someone else. Was it consensual? Was his partner a woman? He examined the man’s genitals carefully, but there did not seem to be anything on them that would indicate he had been penetrating someone else.

Two silhouettes materialized out of the gloom, and Hugh recognized his fellow officers. One was a younger constable like him, the other a middle-aged man with dark eyes and a sour expression. The younger constable looked pale despite the tawny brown of his Indian skin. “Constable Danbury,” the Indian man said, nodding at him.

“Constable Depesh,” Hugh replied. “And Constable Michaels.”

Constable Robert Michaels let out a huff. “Well, what do we have here, Danbury? Crime of passion?”

“If the passionate person was a tiger,” Hugh said, moving aside for the others to see the body. Constable Rezal Depesh gasped and turned away, gagging. Constable Michaels frowned.

“Good lord,” he breathed. “What in the world?”

Hugh was wondering that himself. He spread his hand apart to judge the distance between the slashes. They were all going the same direction. If this had been a knife attack, the attacker would have had to cut the victim from behind very quickly to follow the same trajectory, but that just didn’t seem likely. Even if he had been surprised, Hugh was sure the young man would have at least attempted to move away from multiple slashes.

Michaels cleared his throat. “Constable Depesh, go fetch the mariah. We need to bring the body to the coroner.”

Depesh swiped at his mouth again, looking a little green under his mahogany skin as he turned and hurried away.

Michaels turned to Hugh. “Did you see anything, Constable?”

“No, sir,” Hugh said, nodding his head toward his witness. “Mr. Kingston here called for the watch, and I was the first one to arrive. The man was already dead on the ground when I got here.”

Michaels turned to Mr. Kingston. Hugh stared at the corpse at his feet again. What could have done such a thing? He rested his spread fingers just above the marks. They were wider apart than his hand, but the look was distinctly like that of a massively clawed hand coming across the body. But that wasn’t possible; even long fingernails were nowhere near strong enough to rip into skin enough to kill someone. Perhaps some sort of large creature, something escaped from the zoo or a travelling carnival. But there were no carnivals currently in London, and surely an escaped animal would have been reported. And if the young man had been in the middle of something with someone else when they were attacked, where was the other someone? If they had both been attacked, surely there would have been screaming, or the other individual would find a policeman to report the animal to.

Despite the lateness of the hour, people were starting to gather around the area to gawk. Constable Depesh returned moments later with another set of constables and their police wagon drawn by two horses. The two officers jumped down, collecting the body and its various scraps of clothing into the back of the wagon. A large puddle of blood still spread over the sidewalk, seeping in between the cobbles like mud.

Depesh stepped back into the shadows, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air. Hugh did his best to block the man from the spectators. He liked Rezal Depesh. They had come onto the Metropolitan Police at the same time just over two years ago, and while he was not good at handling blood and gore, he was kind-hearted and a competent officer of the law, especially with children, having two of his own at home. “All right?” Hugh asked as Rezal straightened up and rubbed at his black mustache.

“Yes, thank you,” Depesh said, still looking a bit green about the gills as he glanced around at the assembled crowd. “We should interview the crowd.”

They swept the surrounding streets looking for evidence, witnesses, anything that might indicate who had committed this vicious crime. But despite London being one of the most populated cities in the world, everyone seemed inclined to mind their own business. No one reported seeing a thing. There were certainly a lot of people willing to gather around the space to stare and gossip though.

“Do you think there will be an autopsy?” Depesh asked Hugh as they walked back to Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, finally looking like he was not about to vomit on his shiny, black shoes.

“I imagine there will be,” Hugh said, giving his friend a light pat on the back. Autopsies were not encouraged by the local magistrates and other government officials when the cause of death could be easily determined. But in the matter of a suspicious death, it was often a necessity.

The body was being delivered to the building behind Scotland Yard. It was run by a man Hugh had known all of his life, Doctor Nathaniel Ledbetter. Dr. Ledbetter had been a friend of his father’s when he and Patrick Danbury, Hugh’s father, had been in the military together. The older man was one of the smartest men Hugh had ever known, and he had even considered going into the medical field to follow in his father’s best friend’s footsteps. But medical school had been too expensive for his lower middle-class family, so he had contented himself with learning from Dr. Ledbetter and following him to Scotland Yard to get a job as a constable. His willingness to go into the long, low deadhouse with its ever-lingering scent of decay and rot that clung to everything also made him one of the de facto constables to get the information from the surgeons and examiners there and disseminate it to his colleagues.

“Depesh! Danbury!” came the bark from their sergeant, John Reardon, a severe-looking man with large, graying muttonchops and a balding pate. Depesh had once compared Sergeant Reardon’s face to that of a ferret, and now Hugh could not unsee it every time he looked at their beady-eyed, pointy-nosed commander.

Hugh and Depesh made their way over to where Sergeant Reardon sat at his large desk. “Do we have an identity on the body yet?”

“No, sir,” Hugh said. “It only just was sent back to The Yard, and no one in the crowd seemed to recognize him.”

Reardon sighed. “Fuck it all, some molly boy gettin’ his bell wrung for cheating a punter.”

Hugh gritted his teeth. There was no friendship lost between himself and his older sergeant, who purported to be a man of God but certainly espoused some of the most hateful rhetoric Hugh had ever heard when it came to London’s poor and working classes. He already knew that Reardon looked down on Constable Rezal Depesh simply for the color of his skin, despite the fact that Depesh had been born and grown up in Notting Hill; he was the son of a brick layer and a washer woman and had made himself into a constable with the Metropolitan Police despite great hardship and poverty growing up, and the added difficulty of his Indian-brown skin.

Hugh, on the other hand, had less of a visible slight against him than his skin tone. But he knew if Reardon ever found out the truth about him, he would likely find himself turned out from his position, perhaps even fined or imprisoned. For while he had the benefit of a fair complexion, his own queer proclivities were still considered a moral failing. The fact that he liked men, whether or not he even was caught engaging with one, was enough to end his career and more. Hugh had found that to be dismally unfair. While it was not the traditional role within society, he could see no harm in two people of the same gender caring for one another, or for a man to go about in lady’s clothing or vice-versa. What one did in the bedroom hardly seemed to be a matter of importance beyond those involved in it. But he still had much to lose, so he kept his mouth shut, gritting his teeth at Reardon’s casual cruelty toward the dead young man.

“It was quite a mess, sir,” he said with a glance at Depesh for confirmation, and Depesh nodded. “I don’t think it was something as simple as that.”

Reardon scoffed and waved his hand. “Of course. Obviously, it’s ol’ Jackie back at it again, eh?”

The Jack the Ripper murders were fresh in everyone’s minds, having occurred only two years ago, with no formal charges ever brought against any one individual. Hugh had been on the Metropolitan Police Force for less than two months before the murder of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols at the end of August 1888. Those had been a scary few months, with new murders popping up left and right. The public had been afraid, as they rightly should have been, and Hugh himself had had more than one occasion on patrol when he was worried that he might not come back alive. But since November of that same year, with the brutal slaying of Mary Jane Kelly, the Whitechapel murders had become an interesting unsolved case in the annals of the Metropolitan Police, a stain on The Yard’s reputation since no one had ever been convicted of the crimes. Occasional murders popping up between then and now sometimes spurred the fear that Jack was back, continuing his horrific spread of murder and mayhem. But the brutality was often much less than what had come to be expected from the notorious killer, and no other single murder had been attributed to Jack the Ripper since then.

“I do not believe it is the Ripper, sir,” Depesh said, and Hugh nodded in agreement.

“Well, as long as you believe that, it must be true, sahib ,” Reardon said with a sarcastic roll of his eyes. The Indian word was supposed to be respectful, but it always sounded like a slur coming from Reardon’s mouth. Hugh felt his lips press into a tight line as he forced himself to not say something he’d regret to his commanding officer. “Danbury, you were our first man on the scene?”

“Yes, sir,” Hugh said.

“Good. Then you can be the contact for the inquest and any inquiries. Find out from the backyard butchers who he is and what happened to him.”

“Yes, sir,” Hugh said again, trying not to frown at the derisive name most people called the coroners and other medical examiners in the long building behind The Yard where autopsies and other post-mortems occurred.

“Coroners won’t be in until morning anyway. Get going and finish your reports.”

“Yes, sir,” Hugh and Depesh said together. They both stood and hurried away from their commanding officer without a backward glance.