A serial killer in Victorian London receives his just desserts from a rather unusual source

Incident in Whitechapel 1888

“Ere, what you doin ere? This is my pitch! You can’t take my gen’lemen orf me! Git aht of it! Clear orf, you ‘ear me? Clear orf!”

The woman – the figure was clearly a woman, though tall – was standing just outside the circle of sickly light thrown by the gas lamp through the fog. As the angry Millie Naismith came forward, clutching a now somewhat faded shawl around her shoulders, she turned, and Millie could see for the first time that she wore fine clothes. Her coat had a thick fur collar that framed her throat, and fur muffs. Millie could not see her dress, so closely was the coat wrapped about her, but it was clear that she wore a fashionable bustle, and her hat was as fresh as if it had been bought from a West End milliner the day before.

But what made Millie stop, and even take a step backwards, was her face. The woman was mature, but her complexion was flawless, and flawless without makeup. Her skin was slightly dusky, like a gypsy – no, not a gypsy, but from somewhere in the south, Italy perhaps, but smooth as a girl’s with sensual lips that did not need the enhancement of rouge, and she had a fine, almost noble nose, and piercing brown eyes. Her hair, coiled and piled up under her hat, was jet black. She seemed to radiate not freshness, but experience, but it was as if experience had enhanced her looks, had made and would go on making her seem attractive. As if somehow she were growing younger.

All this Millie saw, even in the poor light, and knew that men would call her beautiful and find her irresistible, and felt a strange fear clutch at her.

The woman said in a clear warm accentless voice that seemed pitched at a low soprano:

“This is a public thoroughfare. I am waiting for someone. I may stand where I like, may I not?”

“Not if the filth catch yer. Constable Perkins, ‘e knows me, but you’d likely get arrested, and what’d that do to you, a lady like you? If y’are a lady.”

There was a tinge of amusement in the woman’s voice.

“That will not happen. The police will not be here tonight. It will be morning before they arrive.”

Even her voice! It did nothing for Millie personally, but she recognised that its timbre would send shivers up and down a man’s spine.

“Go home,” the woman said. “A great danger walks these streets; a killer is on the loose. Do you not know that you put yourself at great risk, coming out on a night like this?”

Even in the gloom Millie felt the woman’s eyes upon her. They seemed to pierce her skin and to be looking inside her, looking for something. Millie shivered, and not just from the fog.

“Yeah, I know. ‘E got a coupla my friends, the bloody sod! But ‘e don’t come aht ev’ry night, so I gotta take my chance. ‘Ow else is a poor girl like me to make a livin? You don’t look like yer need it, Miss. I do. So why don’t you go, please? Any’ow, ain’t you afraid a this killer?”

The woman stepped into the circle of light, and smiled.

“I am in no danger, Millie Naismith.”

In the glare of the gas lamp something glinted in the woman’s mouth. And it was as if a giant hand had seized Millie’s heart, and was squeezing it. Starting to tremble, Millie said:

“Ere, ‘ow do you know my name? Who are yer?”

As the woman’s smile broadened, she saw for the first time that it was not just a woman but – something more.

“W-what are yer? You’re – you’re evil, ain’t you?” And she began to back away. Or rather she tried to back away, but some force held her and seemed to cement her to the spot.

“Yes, I am what you would call ‘evil’. I do Lord Satan’s work; tonight he will take one of his own. How strange then, that I do a good deed in passing. For as to who I am, I am Helen of Troy. Not the original Helen, but I wear her shape. The name means nothing to you, but any educated gentleman would know me. And it is one such that I seek. You will not be harmed tonight. Go home.”

It was as if there was an audible click, as if a trap had sprung open, and Millie was free to move again. And she would have, but something else held her.

“I ain’t made nuffing tonight. I gotta live some’ow….”

The woman opened her lady’s bag, and her elegantly black-gloved hand extracted something that also glinted.

“Here, hold out your hand.”

As if it were not her own, but under some other control, Millie did so. The woman dropped two coins on to it. They burnt like fire at first, but rapidly cooled. They were two ordinary gold half sovereigns.

The woman smiled again, showing fully what was in her mouth.

“Not perhaps as much as you might have hoped for, but still, as easy a night’s work as you will have had in a long while. Now GO!”

“Th-thank you…” Millie whispered. She was on the point of saying God bless you! but thought better of it. She turned and fled into the darkness.
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Some fifteen minutes later the woman heard his footsteps approaching long before she saw him. For some reason the fog, which muffled everything else, did not muffle them. He came with the collar of his greatcoat turned up against the chill, and a porkpie hat pulled down over his eyes. As he came into the range of the gas lamp, she said in an East End accent:

“Fancy a good time, sir? Reasonable prices!”

“Perhaps, my dear, I can give you a good time. Or at any rate something you’ve never experienced before.”

“Doubt that, sir. Seen everyfing, done it all ways you can fink of.”

“Oh I think I can. What are your prices?”

“Blow job four guineas, standard fuck five guineas, Greek six guineas. Anyfing more – unusual, we can negotiate.”

“Why should I pay you that sort of money – slut?”

“Because,” she slipped into a middle class English laden with sensuality “you would be getting something different. A lady. A genuine lady. A fallen lady.”

And she opened her coat to reveal her fashionable dress – a cameo brooch at the throat, two rows of lace down the front, a very tight waist and hips augmented by a bustle.

The man rubbed his whiskers in amazement.

“A lady? My God, why do you do this?”

“Because once your reputation’s gone there’s not much else you can do to make a living. A girl must try to live in this world somehow. You may kiss me if you wish.”

She removed her hat-pin, took off her hat, and shook out her hair, which fell down over her shoulders, black and glossy.

“Ah, you’re – beautiful.” He searched for a comparison and found one in his classical knowledge. “Like – Helen of Troy!”

For a minute his original resolution had seemed to desert him, but he recalled it. His voice changed.

“But you’re all the same. You pretend to be a lady, but you’re a slut like the rest of them. Bitch! Whore! Damned fucking whore!”

He drew the surgical knife from inside his greatcoat. He had perfected the technique now. Two thrusts only were necessary: the first to wound, to injure, the second straight to the heart to kill. He might have had difficulties penetrating her coat, but she had opened it for him. The material of her dress and underwear should prove no obstacle.

But then he would slit her throat to confuse a semi-competent police surgeon as to the cause of death. Finally he would eviscerate her, and at a whim remove one of her internal organs.

“You deserve this, bitch!” He thrust the knife into her.

She laughed at him.

He pulled the knife out. It was covered in blood, but the woman was still standing. He thrust it in again, intending the death blow, and again she laughed, and did not fall.

What was this? He thrust it in again, shouting “Die, you whore, die!” and then again. Her laughter was becoming continuous as though she found his failure, his incompetence a great joke. He stabbed again and again, ever more frenziedly, not judging now the best place for the blows to fall, but merely trying to penetrate her body ever more deeply, and still nothing happened to her, except that she went on laughing.

Finally she reached out, removed the knife from his hand as easily as removing a rattle from a child, and threw it to one side. She ripped his greatcoat down from his shoulders, and holding him by the arms, bent her fangs towards his throat. As the steel-tipped canine teeth penetrated his neck he heard screaming, and because it was usually his female victims who screamed, it was only gradually, as he began to lose consciousness through his loss of blood, that he realised it was his own voice that had screamed.
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Faustus let the inert body drop, and straightened up. He – no she felt reinvigorated, replete with blood and male essence, the body a husk, and only the target’s soul left as an offering to Hell, but it was always like this after feasting on a man. She felt more keenly and remembered more vividly that she had been – no was Doctor Faustus, the learned Doctor Faustus, who had made a pact with Mephistopheles, and lost.

Mephistopheles had promised Faustus youth and beauty, and he had kept his promise, after the fashion of Hell. She had retained all of Faustus’s memories, all of his learning and all of his skills, but he was now, and would continue to be, Helen of Troy, slave of the Lord Mephisto, and his servant and agent.

With a sigh she smoothed down the skirt of her dress, noticed a fleck of blood on it, and with her finger took up the blood, and automatically sucked it off. She noticed the knife lying to one side, and pointed at it. As she lifted her finger it rose and hovered in the air, began to smoke, and then burst into flame and disappeared entirely, leaving not even ash.

She looked round, picked up her hat and repinned it through her hair, rebuttoned her coat, and, satisfied that nothing else was left that was inappropriate, removed herself to another place entirely.
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The police found the body the next morning. It was clearly that of Dr. Arbuthnot, a well-known surgeon, but strangely it seemed to have been drained of all blood, and the look on the corpse’s face suggested he had died of fear. The inquest, which was hushed up, recorded an open verdict. But after that day no more prostitutes were found murdered in Whitechapel.

As for Millie Naismith, the next morning she went to the East End Mission, babbling that she had seen the Devil ‘herself’, and wanted to reform, because she was a good girl really, and wanted to be a good Christian. Of course they took her in, and fed and clothed her, and for a time she was shown as an example of a fallen woman who had been ‘saved’, and even met the Prime Minister, but after a few years she slipped back into old ways, and went on the streets again, saying a woman has to make a living somehow.

Copyright 2014