Read Chapter 9: The Missing Seamstress

The body lay beneath a torn canvas tarpaulin in a drainage ditch behind Chicksand Street. Edward had shoved aside two constables to get there, had ignored their shouts, and now he stood transfixed by the pale shape half-visible in the gaslight. A woman. Small frame. Dark hair fanned out against the mud.

*Mary.*

But then the constable turned the body over with the toe of his boot, and Edward exhaled so sharply he nearly groaned. Not Mary. The face belonged to another woman entirely—younger than Mary, with a delicate bone structure and a bruise flowering across her left cheekbone like a storm cloud.

"Know her?" the constable asked.

Edward shook his head. "I thought... I thought it might be someone else."

"Who?"

"You wouldn't know her name."

The constable narrowed his eyes but said nothing more. The other officer had already gone to fetch Inspector Abberline.

But the terror did not leave Edward. It merely rearranged itself. The body wasn't Mary Kelly—but she was still gone, and the night was deepening, and the gentleman she had gone to meet had her.

---

Mary's lodgings sat above a chandler's shop off Commercial Street. Edward knew the route from memory now; he'd walked it, at different hours, nearly every day for the past week. He hammered on the door until a widow on the ground floor opened a crack and glared out at him through a chain.

"Miss Kelly?" the woman said, mouth twitching with disdain. "Gone. Packed her things last night. Said she had business."

"What kind of business?"

"Didn't say. But she took her best dress—the green one—and her Sunday boots. Said she might be away a few days."

Edward pressed a coin through the chain gap. The widow took it, and her expression softened just enough to be useful.

"Where does she go when she stays with friends?"

"I shouldn't know anything about that."

Another coin. The woman's hand darted out and back. "She's got a cousin over in Spitalfields—Lizzie Fitch, works the rag market most mornings. And there was a boy she mentioned once, a costermonger over by Petticoat Lane. Tommy? Timmy? I don't recall. She never brought them here."

"Anyone else? A gentleman friend?"

The widow snorted. "She's got a hundred gentlemen friends who think she's their special secret. But there was one who came asking after her a fortnight ago. Scarred man. Quiet voice. Paid me a shilling to tell him her habits."

Edward's blood went cold. "What did you tell him?"

"The usual. When she rose, when she left, who came calling. He asked about you too."

"What did he ask?"

"If she'd ever mentioned a reporter. If you'd been by. If you paid her for anything."

Edward's throat constricted. "What did you say?"

"I said I didn't watch my lodgers that close." She shrugged. "But he knew your name. Said you were trouble."

The door closed. Edward stood in the street, the gaslight stuttering overhead, and tried to think.

---

He walked fast through the winding alleys toward his own rooms, checking behind him every few steps. The city had become a maze of watching eyes. Every shadow seemed to lean toward him. Every flicker in a window held the shape of a scarred face.

He nearly ran up the stairs to his garret. The desk waited for him, buried beneath yesterday's papers and a cold cup of tea. He dropped to his knees and pulled open the bottom drawer—unlocked, yes, still unlocked—and lifted out the bundle of letters.

His forgeries. All of them. The first, second, third, each one in his hand, each one sealed now with plain wax since the signet ring was still in the pawnshop. He shuffled through them like a gambler checking his cards.

All present. All accounted for.

*So how?*

How did the killer know what Edward had written before the letters were even delivered? The third letter had described a method—a particular way of binding the victim's hands before the throat was cut. The body in the ditch had been posed exactly that way. Abberline had noticed. Had nearly arrested Edward on the spot.

But these letters had never left this room except to be posted. Edward had written them here, alone, had folded and posted them himself at the same red pillar box near Aldgate Pump. No one else had touched them.

No one.

He sat back on his heels and stared at the letters in his lap. The ink on the pages was still sharp, the handwriting unmistakably his. His own invention. His own monstrous imagination made flesh.

But then a worse thought crept in like river fog through a broken window.

*What if I'm not the only one?*

What if someone else had been writing letters, separate letters, to the police or the papers? Letters Edward knew nothing about because he'd been too busy forging his own? The killer would need a source to imitate, after all. Edward's letters gave the murders their signature—but a second correspondent could be feeding the killer their own ideas in parallel, and Edward would never know.

He checked the drawer again. A false bottom, empty. The space where he kept the blue-black ink was clean, the bottle still there. Slippery Sam had sold him that bottle. And the scarred gentleman had bought the same ink from Sam, asking after Edward's habits.

The same ink.

The same killer who carved his victims the way Edward's letters described.

The same man who asked about Mary Kelly.

*No. Not Mary.*

Edward shoved the letters back into the drawer and slammed it shut. His hands were shaking. He tried to count the hours since he'd last seen her—at her lodgings, when she'd told him about the scarred man loitering near Berner Street. She'd been afraid but playing at bravado. He'd paid her hush money, told her to keep quiet, seen her smile and pocket the coins.

He should have kept her closer. He'd known she was a liability. But he'd thought she was a liability to his *reputation*, not his *conscience*.

He grabbed his coat. The widow's words rang in his ears: *Said you were trouble.* The scarred man knew Edward's name. Knew he'd paid Mary. Knew the ink he used.

Whoever this man was, he wasn't just reading Edward's letters.

He was studying Edward himself.

---

Edward had walked three blocks before he realized he was heading toward the police station. He stopped at the corner of Goulston Street, breathing hard, mind racing.

He couldn't go to Abberline. Not now. Not with the inspector already suspicious, already noting Edward's impossible knowledge of unprinted details. Walking in to say *I think there's another letter-writer* would only push Abberline further toward the truth—that Edward's letters were forged from whole cloth, invented, the blueprint for a killer's work.

But if he didn't go, and Mary turned up like the woman in the ditch—

He pressed his palm against the brick wall, steadying himself. The cold bit through his glove.

He had to find Mary before the killer did. But he also had to find the killer before the killer found him. And somewhere in the dark between those two needs, a third option surfaced like a blade:

*The letters are the only advantage I have.*

Every murder matched what he wrote. Which meant the killer was reading him—or someone was reading the killer and feeding Edward ideas Edward didn't know he was stealing.

Either way, the next letter had to tell a story that would force the killer's hand. Had to lure him into revealing himself.

Edward looked down at his shaking hands and smiled grimly.

*I'll write him a trap.*

He turned and headed back toward his garret, the city's gaslights flickering behind him like a row of accusatory eyes.