The constable lets us through. As he does, another leans in to whisper something. I catch the words “that Gray ghoul.”
The first officer mutters, “He doesn’t look gray to me,” and they both chuckle.
“Enough of that,” a young voice says.
I glance over to see Constable Findlay glowering at the two older officers. Gray waves for him to ignore the insult, and Findlay nods and then leads us to the center, where I stop short, blinking.
There is a woman lying dead beside the steps of a house, with a gate behind her, presumably leading to a yard beyond. That is not what makes me blink. Nor does the fact that she’s just lying there, people milling about, some leaning in for a better look, as if she’s a display in a wax museum.
A display in a wax museum.
A chill runs through me, because it is exactly the right description. That is why I stop short. I have seen this tableau before, and it takes only amoment to identify the source. Yet another of those macabre museum exhibits Nan had taken me to. I can’t quite recall whether this was a special exhibition in a proper museum or more of a tourist wax museum. I remember this scene, though.
A woman lying at the gate leading to a stable. A row of what looked like once-decent residential town houses now decayed into tenement housing. The museum exhibit said she’d been there all night, with people later admitting they’d passed and presumed she was drunk or sleeping rough. It was that sort of neighborhood, after all.
The street was called Buck’s Row, somehow shortened from Ducking Pond Row because there was a nearby pond used for ducking punishments. That is the detail from the exhibit that pops out now, one my young brain had tucked away because I wanted to know what a “ducking punishment” was.
Finally, someone had investigated. They discovered a dead woman, still warm, lying on her back. Her throat had been slashed. Later, a medical examiner would discover more. Bruises on her face, as if she’d been struck. Stab wounds to her groin and abdomen. No organs missing. That would come later with other victims.
This is what I see here, in 1869 Edinburgh. It’s one of those memories seemingly long vanished, shooting forth in perfect detail, like a stored snapshot awaiting a trigger.
I have seen this before.
Everything is perfectly reproduced, from the victim—a graying brunette in her early forties—to the petticoats in disarray around her.
There is a split second where I think what I saw in the twenty-first century was a re-creation of this very murder. No. This isn’t the same murder. It just looks like it. Rendered in as much detail as the killer could manage. Re-creating a murder that will not occur for another twenty years.
That museum exhibit had been on Jack the Ripper. The woman lying dead in Buck’s Row?
The first of the canonical five victims.