The Lazarus Prophecy Read Online Free Page A

Whitechapel killings and spend an hour reading that. She’d earlier scoffed at the idea of any link. But Carter had reminded her that the Scholar knew his history. Maybe history also inspired him.
    The file listed eleven possible Ripper victims, two of whom had never been identified. Jane concluded during her reading that there had actually been seven, starting with Martha Tabram in April of 1888 and concluding with Rose Mylett the following December. Some criminologists speculated that there might have been between 20 and 30 victims. She thought those sensationalist figures plucked out of thin air. Only seven suited the methodology and time-frame in which a spree killer would likely operate.
    There had been no shortage of plausible suspects. The man in overall charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, had favoured the Pole, Kosminski. But there had been no real consensus among the senior officers. Druitt, Ostrog and Tumblety were equally likely or unlikely to have been responsible for the seven murders and varying degree of mutilation involved. Time had determined that. When he had been given plenty of it, he had turned Mary Jane Kelly into something that looked barely human. He had savaged her beyond recognition and taken away her uterus.
    He had sent letters to the men investigating him. Or somebody had. The overall opinion was that these were genuine and Jane thought that more likely than not. Apart from one message hastily obliterated, he had not left anything written at the crime scenes in the manner of the Scholar. Or had he?
    The paradox of the Whitechapel killings was that the murder of women considered worthless by Victorian standards had so shocked Victorian London. It had caused moral outrage and triggered an epidemic of terror by no means confined to the East End. It had undermined the confidence of the public in the police. It had threatened public order. It was asthough a capering demon had been unleashed on those cobbled streets and its gruesome devilment had shaken belief and destroyed the faith people had in their society.
    Perhaps the Whitechapel killer had left messages behind. Maybe the police had kept that from the public and the press. Possibly they had been ordered to do so. Some of the files pertaining to the investigation were still classified. But the Scholar would have to have known that to be copying it now and there was absolutely no way that he could.
    She thought they’d done very well with their investigation. They’d been exhaustively thorough in interviewing and compiling copious detail. It had all been after the fact and they had been hampered by what they hadn’t had. There’d been no witnesses, so there was no description of a suspect. There were no forensics, so they had no fingerprints. Their scene of crime photography was haphazard and pitifully limited by the available technology. They hadn’t even had telephones.
    They’d been working in the dark, Jane thought, because it was in darkness that the crimes were committed against women probably made helpless to retaliate to the attacks on them by drink. You had actually to hope they’d been drunk. The violations sober would have been truly hellish to endure. You had to hope the victims had been senseless with gin when they were singled out and their throats were slashed and their lifeblood leaked copiously away.
    She thought London in the period probably quite a nightmarish place, for the most part. There had been pockets of affluence. There’d been Wilde plays performed in theatres on the Strand where Escoffier created his culinary masterpieces at the Savoy. There’d been energy and invention and private acts of altruism and political reform.
    For the most part, though, there’d been smog-slicked cobbles and the heaving stink of the river and poverty so abject it beggared belief in modern times. It was not a period through which she would have liked to live. Only aristocrats