Page 85 of The Business of Blood

Even the tactile altered. The dirt gritting beneath my boot as I lifted it didn’t exist past the threshold. It was pristine and white in here. Silent. Empty.

Save for the blood. And the body.

My breaths were gunshots against a canvas. My footsteps cannon blasts. But an unholy, obsessive curiosity propelled me forward. I couldn’t see the details until I moved closer.

In the center of the room, Comstock sat propped up at a masculine oak desk dressed in a smart tweed suit and a silk cravat that matched his pocket square.

His throat wasn’t cut, at least as far as I could tell.

A lovely new typewriter sat perched before him, the metal parts gleaming. Two rivers of blood ran down the front of the desk like gruesome icing from a tall cake.

Comstock’s palms rested on the wooden top, bracketing the typewriter. His fingers would have been splayed. If he had them. The rivers of red drained from ten symmetrical stumps.

The dunce cap came low over his forehead. Down over empty eye sockets crying crimson tears. A river poured from his mouth, as well, lending his chin a ventriloquist cut.

His eyes. His tongue. His fingers.

All gone.

I tested my inner sensory organs. Still nothing.

A white paper full of words fluttered limply from the typewriter in a breeze I didn’t feel.

Another Ripper letter? A confession?

I had to bend down over the desk to squint at it. Two sentences repeated for the entirety of the paper in perfectly typed rows.

I will not touch Fiona. I am not the Ripper.

I both recoiled and sagged with relief.

There it was, churning my guts and chilling my skin. It throbbed in the shallow cut on my neck and stung in the stitches there. It had arrived, finally.

The horror.

19

He did this for you.

Why had the thought echoed through my mind in Croft’s grizzled baritone?

Because it hadn’t been a thought, I realized, as Croft stepped out from behind me and circled the desk, opening the drawer on the right.

Even his charcoal suit seemed lively against all the pristine white.

My heart violently rejected his words. “He did this chiefly because Comstock pretended to be him. Misrepresented the Ripper for his own gain,” I argued. “The Ripper is no magnanimous altruist. He’s a sadist. He took his own revenge, not mine.”

Croft motioned to the drawer.

I shook my head. I wanted nothing to do with whatever dreadful truth awaited me there.

“He may have murdered Comstock regardless, but he didthis…”—Croft gestured at the gruesome tableau—“foryou.”

“Easy there, Croft,” Aberline admonished. “It’s not as if she asked him to. And how do you know—?”

Croft cut Aberline off, his eyes boring into mine, electric with a barely concealed fury I didn’t understand. “You may not claim the right to see this, to be henceforth privy to what should be confidential to the police, to what your nemesis has done, if you refuse to look now.”

He was right, of course. I had to look. There was never any question of that. But I’d never wanted Croft to be wrong with more fervency than in that moment.