Annie and the Ripper Page 17

  He reached the top of the second story and caught a glimpse of his quarry leaping across to the next building. He'd shed his cape in the athletic club, and was now unencumbered. The man was an amazing athlete. Abberline thought of himself as fit as he'd been in twenty years, was wearing his rubber-soled canvas athletic shoes and could barely keep up with this man who was leaking out his life's blood from a .44 caliber wound in the midsection. If he hadn't seen the amount of blood by lantern light in the club, he'd have trouble believing the man was even wounded, from the way he was moving. This had to be some kind of bad dream.

  Abberline got a run, his soles gripping the edge of the roof as he sprang across a ten-foot gap to the next building. The roof had a slight pitch, but he managed to land on hands and knees, scrabbling for a hold to keep from sliding back. By the time he got to his feet, with skinned knees and hands, he heard the Ripper sliding down the other side. To keep his Adams from falling out of its holster again, he jammed it under his belt. He'd fired one shot, so still had four more. But The Ripper had no gun at all, or he would have used it by now to stop his tenacious pursuer.

  Gasping, he straddled the ridgepole of the roof, thinking it was no wonder The Ripper had managed to elude capture for so long. Abberline had read stories of the amazing endurance of Australian aborigines, African Zulus and some western American Indian tribes. Some of them could run fifty miles in a day and fight a battle at the end of it. Civilization had robbed city dwellers of this capability. Breath whistling through his teeth, he began to wonder if Jack the Ripper was one of these aborigines. It couldn't be. He'd gotten a clear view of the man in the lantern light at the club.

  He slid down the roof, gained momentum and leapt across to the next roof, barely missing a chimney in the fog.

  Below in the streets, he heard the clattering of heavy, shod horses and a hand claxon ripping through the fog as the fire wagons headed toward the athletic club. Another police whistle shrieked and Abberline hoped the constables were signaling each other, their warnings leaping ahead of this madman with superhuman powers. But they couldn't see him in the fog. Abberline knew this would be his one and only chance of catching this killer. If he lost him now, the man might crawl off somewhere and die, or disappear and be hidden by friends, so, if he died, no one would know.

  He leapt across to another roof. But he'd lost some of his spring and nearly didn't make the ten-foot jump. He slipped back, clawing at the wooden shakes that came loose under his weight, and managed to catch a foot in the rain gutter to prevent going over the edge. His heart pounding in his chest, he struggled back up to the roof, got to his hands and feet and cat walked up the slope, grabbing a chimney. Coal smoke was billowing out the top into his face and nearly choked him before he could get past it to the windward side.

  The Ripper was making no attempt at silence, apparently depending on the fog to hide him. But, this time of the morning, the neighborhood was quiet as the noise of the fire wagons faded behind them. He could still hear the fleeing man scrambling over the rooftops ahead.

  Abberline paused at the edge of the roof, wheezing, his lungs trying to process what oxygen there was in the thick atmosphere. Only then did he realize he could no longer hear his quarry. Had he stopped, or gone down to street level? Was he waiting in ambush behind one of the many chimneys that thrust up on the row of brick houses ahead?

  Most of the roofs had been nearly level with one another, but through a slight rift in the fog, he sensed the next house was only a single story. Staring off into a fog-filled canyon of space, he knew he'd have to descend to street level. How had Jack crossed this gap? Then he heard his quarry still moving on the rooftops; the sound was receding ahead of him. The gable's pitch on the one-story building was steep. But his blood was up and the chase was on. He'd try it, even if he broke a leg or crashed through into somebody's attic. Getting a running start, he launched himself across to try for the highest point of the opposite roof.

  As soon as he struck, he knew he'd made a mistake. The roof was covered with slate, and the tiles were damp. Even his rubber-soled shoes couldn't grip on the steep, wet surface. He began to slide toward the edge, clawing for purchase with hands, elbows, fingers, knees, feet. Nothing helped. There were no gutters to snag, and off he went, but the drop was only about ten feet to the hard pavement. He flexed his knees and rolled, taking up most of the shock. Bouncing to his feet, he started running, hoping to get ahead of The Ripper.

  But the man had changed course and was down off the rooftops, running toward the waterfront, a half-mile distant.

  "He'll never make it. He's hit too bad," Abberline grunted aloud as he sprinted along the narrow street. But, amazingly, The Ripper didn't slow down. He'd descended to street level once more and Abberline caught a glimpse of him more than a block ahead running past a street light.

  It was like chasing someone in a dream. This wounded man was no phantom. He had a body, and that body was leaking badly. Even if the man was on some kind of drug, he couldn't keep going. This must be a last ditch effort to reach the river where he had a boat waiting for his escape. Was he a butcher from one of the cattle boats after all? Did he have an accomplice in a steam launch?

  In spite of the cool fog, Abberline was soaked with sweat and condensation. His lungs were on fire, but he had to make a supreme effort to stop this man before he reached the river. Yet no amount of extra exertion could close the gap. Where were all the constables? He pulled his Adams and fired twice in the general direction of his unseen quarry. With little hope of hitting him, he thought at least to attract the notice of some nearby constable on the beat.

  The damp smell of the river smote his nostrils through the fog. Jack wasn't human. He had to be made of India rubber and piano wire.

  Yet, unaccountably, the distance between them finally began to lessen. Abberline closed to within eighty yards, then sixty, then thirty. As the slowing man passed a gaslight near a stone pier, he glanced back over his shoulder, his face ghastly pale in the lamplight.

  Now I've got him, Abberline thought. "Halt!" he gasped, too winded to shout.

  But The Ripper dashed straight down the length of the stone pier. With a chilling shriek, he threw himself head first into the Thames.

  CHAPTER 18

  Abberline staggered to a spraddle-legged halt, totally spent. He could hardly stand. A cold hand seemed to clutch his heart.

  "What's going on here?" A uniformed constable yelled, running up, nightstick in hand.

  "Inspector Abberline, Scotland Yard," Abberline just managed to gasp, leaning over, hands on knees.

  A night watchman appeared from behind a stack of freight on the wharf.

  "A man…I was chasing…went in…the river." Abberline was still laboring mightily for breath.

  The watchman and the constable ran to the end of the pier, the watchman swinging his lantern.

  Abberline walked up to join them. The swirling black water below showed no sign of anyone. He'd either gone down to death, or was swimming underwater beyond the light and making for the other side of the river and safety.

  Logic told him the man was dead. But, given what he'd witnessed this night, anything was possible.

  "Hal!" the watchman yelled. "Free up that yawl by the stern there!"

  "Who's in the water?" The constable looked at Abberline, who was bent over, chest heaving.

  "Jack the Ripper."

  "Really?" The constable cut his eyes toward the river again.

  "He's been shot in the abdomen," Abberline said, straightening up and wiping the moisture from his face with a sleeve. The gray sweater came away streaked with black coal soot.

  "He won't be coming up from that current," the constable said.

  "Don't underestimate him," Abberline said, beginning to catch his breath. "He just led me on one hell of a chase."

  "Maybe the wound wasn't as bad as you thought."

  "Worse. Massive bleeding. His strength…nearly inhuman."

  "If he comes up, we'll
find him, inspector." The night watchman leapt nimbly into the yawl. "Pull around to the sides of the big boats," the watchman said, holding up his light.

  The constable aided by shining his bullseye lantern on the muddy surface until the yawl was out of range. The boatmen worked their way back and forth among the larger moored vessels, flashing the light over the water. Then Hal rowed out into the current and they began drifting downstream.

  Abberline and the policeman paced along the waterfront around stacks of boxes and barrels of freight, watching the lantern growing dimmer in the fog as the yawl moved away.

  With each passing minute, Abberline began to think this was a hopeless quest. The world had seen the last of the man who called himself Jack the Ripper. Yet…that wild scream as the man leapt off the pier—a last burst of dying energy? Or…a defiant shout of unfailing strength?

  Whatever, or whoever, this man was, he seemed to operate well beyond human limits.

  "Unless he's hanging onto something in all this mass of boats, there's only a slim chance he's alive, Inspector," the constable finally said. "I'm a strong swimmer m'self. That current is cold and running faster than a man can jog. A severely wounded man wouldn't last more than five or ten minutes."

  "Yes." As Abberline cooled down, he shivered in his damp clothes. To give himself something to do while he waited, he drew his Adams, punched out the three empty shells and reloaded.

  Twenty minutes later, the yawl pulled back to the pier. "No sign of him, inspector. Went down and didn't come up. The water's cold. Likely the current will sweep him right out to sea."

  Abberline knew the watchman spoke from experience. "Thanks for your help."

  "Sorry we didn't get him."

  "Constable, can you find a cab? I don't relish walking back to the Three Bells."

  "Right away, sir, if there's one anywhere around at this hour." His whistle shrieked in the murky night.

  4:55 a.m.

  Three Bells Public House

  "Inspector!" Annie jumped from her chair and threw her arms around a disheveled, wet Abberline. "Thank God you're safe. Did you catch him?"

  "No." Abberline slumped wearily into a chair.

  "He got away?" She looked up with alarm.

  "You did your part by luring him in and shooting him, but then I couldn't run him down." This last fact still bewildered him. "He jumped into the Thames. I think he's dead, but I can't be sure."

  Annie sat back down at the same table. Constable Carrington and the bartender were working on her. For the first time Abberline noticed she was injured.

  The bartender soaked a cloth with raw whiskey. She grimaced as he resumed swabbing the cuts and abrasions on her neck.

  Abberline picked up the splintered wooden collar that lay on the table. "The Ripper did this?"

  "Must've had a grip like a gorilla," Constable Carrington said. "But this collar saved her windpipe from being crushed."

  "How do you feel?" Abberline asked, with a twinge of guilt for allowing her to be hurt.

  "When I swallow, it feels like something's caught in my throat. Just bruised, I suppose. I'll be okay." She pushed her chair back to show the wide slash in the padded corset. "This kept me in one piece, too."

  Abberline shivered at the sight, seeing her bare skin show through in three places. It'd been a very near thing. "You kept your head and did what you set out to do."

  "You look like you had a hard time," she said.

  He glanced at his streaked image in the back bar mirror. "Oh, just coal soot from a chimney. Jack was running across rooftops a good bit of the way. The closest I got to him was when he jumped off a roof and hit me in the chest with his feet." He rubbed a hand across his bruised sternum. His ankle was also swollen and stiff, but he didn't mention that or his various contusions. His aches and pains were being smothered by the satisfaction that he and Annie Oakley had rid London of Jack the Ripper. "Thank you," he said, breaking into a smile for the first time in a long time.

  "You're welcome. I felt I owed it to the women of this city."

  "I'm willing to take whatever verbal abuse your husband or Colonel Cody will heap on me," Abberline said. And he meant it.

  Beth Hampton returned to the pub at 5:30 and she and Annie fell on each other's necks with exclamations of excitement and relief.

  Before Abberline escorted Annie back to the Metropole Hotel, he ordered the bartender to lock the door and cook up a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast for Constable Carrington, Annie, Beth and himself. While the rising sun was making a valiant effort at burning off the fog, he enjoyed himself as he hadn't in years, by saying nothing, eating, and contemplating the successful outcome of this long nightmare.

  The women talked, and Annie filled in her friend with the lurid, horrifying details of her encounter. Beth was wide-eyed. "Then he didn't look anything like that vision I had of him when I was drinking absinthe," she said.

  "No. In fact, he was rather average looking. He would never stand out in a crowd," Annie said. "Except for one thing—his eyes. I will never forget those eyes. When I fired the second time, I saw his eyes in the muzzle flash, less than two feet from my face. I can't describe what they were like." She gave a shudder, and set down her teacup with a trembling hand. "It was like getting a glimpse into the depths of hell."

  After breakfast, Abberline called the barman and Beth Hampton aside and bought their silence with twenty pounds each. "You can tell your grandchildren the truth of what happened," Abberline said.

  "Thank you, inspector," Beth managed to gasp, clutching the crisp notes in disbelief, her fair cheeks flushing. "With this I can rent a decent place to live and maybe find a regular job."

  A combination of the rising sun and a slight westerly breeze had eliminated most of the fog by the time Abberline and Annie caught a Hansom back to the Metropole.

  "Let me break the news to them," Annie said when they were rolling toward her hotel.

  "All right. I'll back you up."

  "Are you serious about keeping my name out of this, once the news hits the papers?"

  "If you wish, I'll do all I can to make sure you are only the anonymous heroine who helped Scotland Yard rid Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper."

  "Then we might have a leak right here." She reached inside her blouse and extracted a big knife.

  "Where did you get that?"

  "Constable Carrington found it where I was attacked." She turned over the heavy blade. "It's an American Bowie knife, named for the inventor, Jim Bowie, the frontiersman who was killed at the Alamo, over fifty years ago."

  "I've seen pictures of them," Abberline said, testing the edge with his thumb.

  "That's' a common enough knife in America," she said, but that's not the original handle. Appears to be a piece of elkhorn. It's an Indian knife. Don't know what tribe, but see those tiny arrows and the stick figure of a deer incised into the handle?"

  "Good heft and balance," Abberline said.

  "I've gone over that attack in my mind constantly since it happened a few hours ago," she continued. "Just as he was trying to rip open my stomach, something whistled past my ear and I heard him gasp. Then it clattered to the pavement. Carrington even showed me traces of blood on the blade." She pointed to the groove in the heavy blade. "Somebody threw that knife and hit The Ripper, but it didn't stick. Must have been a glancing blow."

  Abberline looked at her expectantly. "You know whose this is?"

  She nodded. "I think so."

  "An Indian with the show?"

  "Yes. A young Sioux who's a friend of Matt Vickers, my 'gun boy'."

  "Then someone besides me and Constable Carrington were there keeping an eye on you."

  "Apparently."

  "Did you tell anyone else about our arrangement? Besides your husband and Colonel Cody?"

  "No. But Matt is in and out of our tent constantly. He could have overheard something."

  Abberline nodded. "Very difficult to keep a secret like this from leaking out."

/>   She looked at the knife again. "But I thought both those boys left on the train a few days ago when the show packed up and started for Southampton."

  "If Cody can find them, tell him I'll have a little reward for them if they keep quiet about this and their part in it." With the threat of exposure, Abberline's sense of satisfaction was beginning to ebb. Annie was an overwhelming favorite of the British public, but would Scotland Yard be ridiculed for having to recruit an American female marksman to do their most important job for them? He cringed at the thought of what the newspapers would say. Yet, his idea, sparked by Sir Charles Warren, had rid society of Jack the Ripper. Or had it? There was no hard evidence he was dead, and a strong doubt lingered in Abberline's mind. With a man this hard to kill, he wanted proof.

  Whatever misgivings Abberline had about Frank Butler's and William Cody's reaction to Annie's minor injuries were swept away when Annie broke the news to them. Frank hugged his wife and shook Abberline's hand, expressing great relief it was over.

  Cody broke out a bottle of his best aged bourbon and insisted they all have a drink to celebrate, even though it was only 8:15 in the morning.

  "Frank, someone threw this knife out of the fog when I was being attacked. I think it wounded The Ripper. Do you recognize it?"

  "That belongs to Crowfoot, Matt's friend," Frank said, without hesitation. "I tried to trade him out of it a time or two, but he wouldn't give it up."

  "That Indian boy stayed behind?" Cody sipped his drink and smoothed his mustache.

  "I'd guess both he and Matt are somewhere in London," Frank said. "Those two are inseparable. Somehow they found out about this."

  "They likely thought it was some great adventure to get in on the plot and the action," Cody said. "Can't say as I blame them. I would've done the same when I was their age."

  "Well, if they don't miss the ship back to America, I'll have a few words with them when I return this knife," Frank Butler said.