Page 87 of The Business of Blood

He knew—even beforeIdid—that I was an inexorable link to Jack the Ripper.

He’d been good at his job, and it had caused his demise.

What a death he’d borne for it.

Before Comstock, the Ripper had never developed a taste for live mutilations. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Comstock had suffered these terrible things. Had lost his fingers, his eyes, his tongue,beforehe died.

He’d been threatened into typing out those sentences again and again before the blood was spilled. When he’d still been in possession of his fingers. Confessions that would not absolve him to anyone but me.

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

God, how he must have hated me before the end. Or, at least, my name. He’d been punished like a naughty schoolboy. Humiliated. Terrorized.

I couldn’t fathom the torment he’d suffered. I didn’t want to.

The Ripper knew me.

The comprehension struck me with the force of a rogue wave, threatening to shatter my entire life against sharp, treacherous rocks. He had to be an intimate of mine. A dreadful surge of guilt singed the last vestiges of my self-control. He wasn’t just watching me as he claimed. Heknewme. That familiarity was scrawled all over his letters.

The knowledge that I was innocent. That I didn’t tend to drink. He’d mentioned my dead father, who I rarely spoke of to anyone because his memory was sacred to me.

What could Francis “Frank” Mahoney possibly have to do with any of this madness? What did the Ripper know of him? What answers could he have provided me?

Sweet Jesus, had the Ripper been acquainted with my family? Was he an Irishman?

Not likely. He’d said I was unlike the drunkards ofmyisland, notourisland, which I took to mean Ireland.

Look elsewhere, he’d told me.Look to the victims. They are chosen because they are the same. Like mine.

Lord, maybe he’d been right in his initial letter. Perhaps I wasn’t clever enough for all this.

I stared at Comstock. And stared. And stared. Forcing myself to meet his non-existent eyes until they were all I saw set against a stark, white canvas. A blank paper I could fill with notes.

How were the Ripper victims the same?

All penniless Whitechapel prostitutes. All famously uncontrollable drunks.

The Ripper had mentioned drinking twice. Praised me for being unlike the notoriously inebriated Irish, and again unlike the drunken whores of the East End.

Was that why he held me in some sort of esteem? Was it why he assured my safety? Said I must not fear him?

Because I was a relatively sober virgin? The opposite of his previous victims.

I could not imagine any other innocence I’d maintained but for the strictly physical.

I thought of his canonical victims. Each murdered in a unique way, and yet, there were utter similarities that branded them uniquely his. He’d stabbed them in intimate places. Taken from them, the parts that made them what he hated. Women. Whores. Drunks.

“Just how did Comstock die?” I breathed the question, almost to myself.

Aberline glanced up at me as though I’d lost my mind. “I should think that’s rather obvious.”

“None of the parts he lost were vital,” I countered. “One can live without eyes, fingers, and a tongue, can they not?”

“Well…theoretically.” Croft grimaced at the body. “But a man can die in any number of ways from something like this. Often the pure terror of such brutality can stop a stout man’s heart, and you’ve already said that Comstock, here, was a nancy. He could have choked to death on his own blood, for all we know.”

That was true, enough, but something still ate at me. Something we’d not yet discovered.

“We won’t know the true cause of death until the surgeon arrives,” Aberline supplied. “But I hazard this could be enough for a lean man like Comstock to have bled out. It would have taken hours, poor sod.”