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alcohol, my tiredness had vanished, as had Charles’ childlike joviality, and we were both focused entirely on the task of putting together the puzzle of death that had been presented to us. Even stripped of the maggots, her flesh was so badly decomposed that as we measured the length, waist and chest, we couldn’t even ascertain whether her skin tone had been light or dark. The copy of The Echo that had wrapped herwas dated the twenty-fourth of August, but we did not need that to know that she had been dead for at least six weeks.
    ‘What do you think, Charles,’ I said, softly, ‘shall we say approximately the twentieth for her date of death?’
    ‘I’d agree.’ We looked at each other across the table. ‘The twentieth, though?’ he continued. ‘Is it possible it could be him?’
    As always these days, when violent death was mentioned, there was no need to clarify who he was: the twentieth of August fell between the first two ‘Jack’ murders, of Martha Tabram and Polly Nicholls. I could see why people would think perhaps this could be his work too, and perhaps it would be easy to claim it as such, but I shook my head. Although I had not attended the crime scenes of those cases, I had read the reports of Jack’s work. His attacks were more frenzied than this. Also, our victim had a fair amount of flesh on her, so she ate regularly, and those few organs that had been left for us, the heart, liver and lungs, were all relatively healthy.
    ‘She’s in too fine a condition to be a street girl, and this’ – I kept my eyes away from her severed neck as I gestured – ‘this is not his method.’ Ridiculously I found the lack of the head to be more haunting than if it were there, her dead eyes glaring at me for this analysis of her person.
    ‘And a strange method it is, too,’ Charles said,peering closely at the large cavity at the base. ‘Why not just cut off her legs? It would have been an easier task than this. Less to clean up after too.’
    The body had been separated about an inch below her navel, as if bitten in half by some great sea monster.
    ‘I presume he wanted to get to her internal organs – those ones we don’t have – and he didn’t want to open her up through the stomach for some reason of his own purpose – although who can begin to reason the purpose of a madman?’
    ‘If anyone can, Thomas,’ Charles smiled, ‘it’s you.’
    I shrugged, slightly embarrassed. Charles Hebbert was an excellent surgeon and had a mastery of anatomy, but he had no skill in applying what he saw on the post mortem table to the workings of a man’s mind. For me, however, the two were inextricably linked.
    ‘And what could he want with her arms and legs?’ he continued, frowning. ‘Where are they?’
    My brain tingled. I looked at the torso again, and the dark brown hairs that still clung to the skin in the brutalised remains of her armless pit.
    ‘The arm,’ I said, breathlessly, looking up. ‘I think we already have one of her arms.’
    After a moment of confusion, Charles’ eyes widened with dawning realisation. ‘Of course!’
    Three weeks previously an arm had been pulled from the Thames at Pimlico, and Charles and I had both examined it. Perhaps I should – we should – havethought to fetch it immediately, but as gruesome a find as an arm might be, in the days since there had been plenty more bloodshed to occupy us. I cursed my tiredness and his bad dreams.
    ‘This isn’t Jack,’ I said, stepping back from the table. ‘This is Rainham.’ Somehow, that thought filled me with more dread, for it meant there was, without a shadow of a doubt, another killer stalking the streets of London. A second one.
    Neither of us spoke for a long while after that.

6
    London. October, 1888
    Inspector Moore
    ‘Did Abberline send you over?’ Dr Hebbert asked, leaning against a bench laden with recently washed surgical instruments.
    ‘You’ve got an arm and a torso and we have a madman on the loose,’