Murder by Sarah Pinborough Read Free Book Online Page B

dens. I had been a regular poppy smoker myself at that time, and I was sure if Charles had been thesame, then I would have discovered it – or at the very least, I would have seen the signs.
    Why did my heart beat so fast? Surely it could have been as Waring himself had suggested: Charles was simply scouring the streets to find some clue as to who might be perpetrating the terrible crimes. But I knew Charles – he was curious, but he was no policeman, and nor was he like me, a man with an interest in analysing the behaviours of others. He was a surgeon, and involved only in the meat of the matter.
    As the shadows gathered in my mind, I cursed Jasper Waring for calling after me, for throwing more of the past at my feet: a heavy slab of darkness I wished so badly to forget.
    By the time I reached home, Mrs Parks had my dinner ready, a fine roast pork, but I pushed it around my plate, barely picking at it, until eventually I declared I had work to do in my study and left the table. I could not breathe under her scrutiny. She was a good, honest woman but she remembered well how I had behaved those few years ago when my sleep failed me and madness came calling. My appetite had vanished first, and I was sure she kept one eye on me for signs of the malady’s return.
    ‘I ate a large lunch, I’m afraid,’ I said as I passed her in the doorway, all too aware of her disapproving eye falling on my full plate, ‘but the meat will serve for a cold supper later.’
    ‘As you wish,’ she said, and I thought I could hear her disapprobation as I ducked away from her and climbed the stairs, making a mental note to come down before bed and throw the meat out for the cats. I told myself this was so as not to hurt her feelings, but in my heart I knew it was because Mrs Parks could – with one withering stare – turn me in an instant back into an awkward, ashamed boy.
    I sat in my study and gazed out at the gathering night. The glare of my desk-lamp on the glass of the window trapped a ghostly, intangible world of reflection, where everything was not quite as it should be.
    Charles Hebbert had been walking the streets of Whitechapel during the Jack murders. I did not doubt Waring’s words, for he had no reason to lie. Charles had been different then, I recalled that much: he had been drinking and despondent – and what was it he had said to me one night? I glanced over at the window again. He had used a particular phrase,
Wickedness through the windows
, or something like that, and talked of bad dreams of terrible bloody things. I thought too of Harrington, as much as I wished not to. Many of the police – Henry Moore and Andrews included – had believed a surgeon could have been responsible for the deaths, even though we had firmly believed that it was unlikely. Could Charles have had suspicions that his son-in-law was Jack the Ripper? Harrington
was
killing women at that time, so perhaps Charles had come to believe he might be responsible for the Ripper deaths? Maybe that was why he had not been forthcoming with information when it was discovered that Elizabeth Jackson had lived in the same street as Harrington’s family home when it would have been more natural to mention such a thing?
    I poured myself a brandy and calmed a little. That must have been it: he was simply suspicious. There was nothing strange about that, after all.
    *
    It was later, in the depth of the night, that I woke sweating and gasping from my sleep. My bedclothes had tangled around me and I fought free of them as if they were a live thing trying to drag me down into some unknown hell. Perhaps they did. Thedream that had woken me had already evaporated, but my dry mouth was bitter with its echo and my heart pounded.
    Two things emerged in my mind from that subconscious wandering in my sleep. The first was that on the night that Alice McKenzie, the last of Jack’s victims, had died, I had dined with James Harrington. It was not a night I would ever forget,