The Demons of Whitechapel

Chapter 2: History-2

Stackpoole found too many cases to be of any help for the time being. He used his cleaning trolley to heave them all upstairs into Simon’s office, but even then he was of little help.

“If only you could narrow my search parameters down a little, son,” he said, putting the files back on the trolley. “It’s simply too much. I underestimated the sheer amount of historical cases involving the cutting off of skin.”

Simon indicated the trolley and its contents. “These are all about victims who had their skin cut off?”

Stackpoole nodded. “Some of them merely torsos, mutilated beyond recognition. That’s why I need a narrower description.”

The janitor got his narrow description a few hours later when Simon had recovered enough from Doctor Jones’s official report to talk coherently again. He stood at the white board, his hand shaking. It was time for sanitizer, it was a matter of minutes, but he needed to finish the presentation first and put the latest details on the board, going over what they had so far.

“Hang on,” Heart interrupted him. “I’m sorry, my ears must be funny this morning. I thought I just heard you say rat DNA.”

Ralph stepped up, sparing Simon the burden of saying it out loud a second time. “That’s right. The doc found rodent DNA in the victim’s blood. The victim died because of rat’s blood in his system.”

Flemming grew white. Her eyes, impossible as it may seem, grew even darker than usual. “That’s disgusting,” she muttered.

Only Stackpoole seemed excited to hear this new information. In response to Flemming’s remark, he turned to the team. “We might think that today. Our technological and our medicinal advancement is such that we don’t often remember a time before NHS. However, a mere two hundred years ago, doctors still performed blood transfusions using animals. Oftentimes, lambs were used to replace what they thought was ‘bad blood’. Now, Edinburgh, 1912!” Stackpoole seemed to slip into the invisible coat of a show case man at a circus as he laid before them his findings. Simon let him talk, even let him embellish and give his opinion. He envied Stackpoole for the obvious passion he brought with him, and a part of him had the time to feel a little smug about having had the idea to involve the old man.

Rubbing sanitizer between his fingers, Simon tried to think. Learn from the past, he told himself. There was always something to learn, a detail to look for, a mistake not to make. In the safety of his office, behind the closed door, he allowed himself to groan in frustration. They had precious little to work with, the new insights just made matters more monstrous, not easier.

“It explains why none of the toms knew a junkie with a branding on the back,” Ralph, the only one allowed in the sanctuary of the DI’s office, said. He had followed Simon and now stood in front of the desk, hands in the pockets of his trousers. “Because our victim wasn’t a junkie then, was he. At least not in the traditional sense. We should check pet shops for rat sales. He may have bought them and used them to inject himself with their blood.”

“Either he himself, or somebody did it for him,” Simon replied darkly. “A doctor conducting experiments on human and animal blood. Just like in Edinburgh in 1912.”

However much today’s criminals wanted to stick out from the masses and commit the one perfectly heinous crime, chances were somebody else had already beat them to it. As if killing were a game.

The ‘Edinburgh Doctor’ in 1912 had used orphans as his subjects—untraceable, quickly forgotten, never missed—but of course such were hard to come by these days. The only other source for subjects was, Simon and Ralph realized simultaneously, homeless people.