Read Chapter 25: Aftermath and the Letter

The cellar beneath the pie shop smelled of damp coal and boiled cabbage, but it was the first place Edward had been able to stand upright without glancing over his shoulder in three days. Sarah had negotiated its use through a cousin of a cousin—a woman who asked no questions and accepted silver without counting it. A single guttering candle sat on an overturned crate between them, and the shadows it cast made their faces look like strangers’.

Edward had the glove spread across his knee, the blue-black stain still crisp at the fingertips. He had stared at it so long the colour was burned into his vision. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it.

“He wanted you to find it,” Sarah said quietly. She sat with her back against the brick wall, knees drawn up, watching him. “You said that yourself. He left it deliberately. So why does it prove anything?”

Edward turned the glove over. The leather was fine—calfskin, not the cheap stuff a government clerk could afford on salary. But there was a wear pattern at the thumb and forefinger, the kind that came from hours of gripping a pen. And there, on the inner cuff, the faint residue of a stamp he recognised: the supply office at the Home Office used a particular blue ink for their internal requisitions.

“It doesn’t prove anything to a jury,” he admitted. “Not without a comparison sample. But it proves something to me.” He set the glove aside. “He’s not careful, Sarah. He’s precise. There’s a difference. A precise man checks his work twice. He doesn’t leave gloves behind unless he wants to be found.”

“Then why run?”

“Because the running was part of it. He wanted to see how far I’d chase him. How desperate I was.” Edward rubbed his face with both hands. His beard was coming in rough, untrimmed. He hadn’t looked in a mirror since the night he fled Scotland Yard, and he suspected he didn’t want to. “He’s been one step ahead because I keep confirming his picture of me. The letters, the chase, the way I panic and improvise.”

“So stop improvising.”

He looked at her. She had a smudge of coal dust on her cheekbone and her hair had come loose from its pins, and in the guttering light she looked less like the composed widow he had first met and more like someone who had chosen a side and meant to stay on it.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s time I wrote to Abberline.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. “You’re wanted. He’s the one who signed the warrant.”

“No,” Edward said. “Abberline doesn’t sign warrants. He catches killers. The warrant came from above him—from the commissioner’s office, which means it came from pressure, which means someone with a desk and a title decided I was a convenient target.” He reached into his coat and drew out the stub of a pencil and a folded square of paper he had been saving for this. “Abberline is a bloodhound. Point him at the right scent and he’ll follow it regardless of what the kennel master says.”

He flattened the paper against the crate and began to write. The pencil lead was soft, and his hand was steady for the first time in days.

*Inspector Abberline,*

*You will not need to find me. I am coming to you. But before I do, you must read this, and you must believe it, because if you do not, Mary Kelly will die and her blood will be on your hands as much as on mine.*

*I am Edward Graves of the London Chronicle. You know my byline. You have also been reading my letters—the ones posted to the Yard over the past months, purporting to come from a correspondent who signed himself “C.H.” I confess: those letters were mine. I fabricated them. The Ripper had stopped writing, and I was desperate, and I thought perhaps I could provoke him into contact by pretending to be his voice. It was a sin of ambition and it has cost me everything.*

*But I am not the man who has been killing. And you know it.*

*You have seen the bodies. You have read the coroner’s reports. The later murders bear the marks of my letters—they are imitations, staged by someone who wanted the world to believe I was the author of the crimes as well as the correspondence. The first victim he took, Martha Tabram, was his own. The second, Annie Chapman, was his own. The rest were theatre.*

*The man who has been staging this theatre is named Edmund Graves. He is a clerk in the Home Office. He has access to criminal files, to police reports, to the details only the Yard and the newspapers and the killer himself could know. He has been reading my letters and copying them to you before I send them. He has been one step ahead because he watched me compose them.*

*He is no relation to me. The shared name is a coincidence—one he has exploited mercilessly, because it lets him blur the line between us. When the world looks for a Graves, it will find two. He means for you to take either.*

*Mary Kelly is in your custody. She has seen his face. Ask her about the scar. Ask her about the gentleman who mentioned the Chronicle and my name. Ask her to describe the shape of the scar on his cheek and the way he holds his left hand when he speaks. Then check the Home Office records for a clerk named Edmund Graves who has a scar on his left cheek and a habit of requisitioning blue-black ink.*

*I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to verify me. You are a better detective than this city deserves, and you know the difference between a forger and a butcher.*

*I will be at the St. Katharine Docks warehouse, the one off East Smithfield with the broken chimney, at midnight on Thursday. Bring as many men as you wish. Bring your warrant. But if I am not there, it will mean the butcher found me first—and if that happens, you will have your answer, won’t you?*

*Your obedient servant,* *Edward Graves*

He signed the name and stared at it. The letters looked small and ordinary, but he felt as though he had just handed a stranger a knife with his own address on it.

“Thursday,” Sarah said, reading over his shoulder. “That gives us two days.”

“It gives him time to take the bait. And time for Abberline to do what he does.”

“And if Abberline decides to simply arrest you on sight?”

“Then I’ll have the pleasure of explaining myself to him while the real killer walks free and Mary Kelly bleeds out in a room she thought was safe. But I don’t think he will.” Edward folded the letter and sealed it with a scrap of candle wax. “He’s a bloodhound. He wants the truth more than he wants a conviction.”

Sarah was silent for a moment, and then she said, “You’re going to use Mary as bait.”

The words hung between them. Edward did not look at her.

“I’m going to ask her,” he said. “I’m not going to do it without her consent. I owe her that much.”

“You owe her her life.”

“Which is exactly why I have to ask. If I go to Graves without her, he’ll kill her to draw me out anyway. If I hide her, he’ll find her—he found her once already, through a seamstress shop and a name she barely whispered. The only way I can protect her is to make him come to me, and the only way to make him come to me is to make him believe he has a chance to finish what he started.” Edward’s jaw tightened. “I don’t like it. I would give anything not to put that burden on her. But I’m out of other options.”

---

They found Mary Kelly in a safe house in Spitalfields—a borrowed room above a chandler’s shop, provided by a contact of Sarah’s with no love for the police and less for the Ripper. She was sitting by the window when they came in, her hands folded in her lap, wearing a plain grey dress that made her look smaller than she was. She had a cup of tea at her elbow that she had not touched.

“They let you go?” Edward asked, surprised.

“They didn’t have a choice,” Mary said. Her voice was flat, tired, but there was an ember in it that he recognised—the same defiance that had kept her alive this long. “I told them I saw the killer and I described him to the sketch artist, and then I refused to say another word unless they brought me here under guard. Inspector Abberline wasn’t pleased, but he’s not a stupid man. He knows a witness is worth more than a suspect.”

“He came to see you?”

“Twice.” Mary picked up the tea and took a sip. It must have been cold; she didn’t seem to notice. “He asked me about the scar. Asked me about the man’s voice, his hands, the way he moved. I told him everything I remembered.” She looked at Edward. “He asked if I believed you were the killer.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him that a man who writes letters in the dark doesn’t have the courage to twist a knife in a woman’s throat. The man who killed my friends did. He looked at me for a long time after that, and then he left.” She set the cup down. “So. You’ve found something.”

Edward told her. He told her about the glove, about the cloak of identity Graves wore, about the trap he planned to spring at the warehouse. He told her about the letter to Abberline and the note he intended to send to Graves—a challenge in the style of the old letters, a dare that would tug at the killer’s vanity.

When he was done, Mary was quiet for a long time. The light from the window shifted, casting a bar of shadow across her face. When she finally spoke, her voice was steady.

“You want me to be the bait.”

“I want to give you a choice,” Edward said. “I’m done choosing for you. You’ve paid enough for my mistakes.”

Mary looked at him, and for a moment he saw something flicker behind her eyes—something he could not name. Then she nodded.

“I’ve been running for weeks,” she said. “I’m tired of it. If that man wants to come for me, let him come. I’ll be ready.”

Edward felt something ease in his chest. He reached out and took her hand. “I won’t let him touch you.”

“You can’t promise that,” Mary said gently. “But I’ll hold you to it anyway.”

Outside, the street lamps were being lit. The shadows deepened against the walls of Spitalfields, and somewhere in the distance a church bell tolled the hour.

Edward had a letter in his pocket addressed to a policeman who wanted him in chains, a glove that proved nothing to anyone in a courtroom, and a promise he had no right to make.

He had never felt more awake.