Chapter 13: Jack's Inheretance
1793 Words
London had always known how to lie to itself, but Whitechapel perfected the craft. It learned early that if you repeated a horror often enough, it softened into rumor, then folklore, then something safely distant. By the time bodies were found, the city had already rehearsed its disbelief.
Laura Swanson sensed the shift before the first headline screamed it into print. The air changed—tightened, sharpened, like metal drawn slowly across stone. Fear redistributed itself again, but this time it did not settle into familiar channels. It scattered, like someone had overturned the city and shaken all its shadows loose. That was new.
The first woman was found near Buck’s Row just before dawn. Bell brought the details with his jaw set hard enough to ache, rain clinging to his coat and the smell of Whitechapel’s alleys still clinging to him.
“Careful,” he said, dropping into the chair across from her desk. “Deliberate. No theft. No spectacle for spectacle’s sake.”
Laura closed her eyes briefly, letting the description arrange itself into a pattern she did not want to recognize. “Precision isn’t comfort.”
“No,” Bell agreed. “It’s signature.”
Whitechapel erupted the way it always did—lanterns burning late, doors bolted, rumors multiplying faster than facts. The broadsheets reached for old language because it was ready-made. A monster. A fiend. A butcher. They dusted off a name the city half-remembered and pretended it explained anything.Laura-Swanson-1.pdf
Jack the Ripper had returned.
Laura did not believe in returns. Only continuations.
The second body confirmed it. Same restraint. Same cruel efficiency. The wounds weren’t chaotic—they were studied, as though the killer were editing rather than improvising. Whoever this was, he understood anatomy the way Mortimer understood ledgers, cutting not for frenzy but for demonstration.
Bell said the name aloud in her presence only once.
“You think it’s him,” he said, voice flat, as though neutrality could protect him from the answer.
“I think it’s still him,” Laura replied.
Mortimer had vanished too cleanly when Blue Hour fell. No body. No witnesses willing to swear to seeing one. That alone was suspicious. Men like Mortimer did not dissolve. They reconfigured. If Harlan had been excess and spectacle, Mortimer had been the quiet architecture beneath—the man who believed systems were god and paperwork the liturgy. When his system failed, he would not simply retire. He would change the vocabulary.
She returned to Whitechapel at night, moving through streets that remembered her too well. The pavements still knew the sound of her boots from the Harlan days; some doors opened a fraction out of habit, then shut again when they saw her face. She listened—to barkeeps, to midwives, to women who learned to read men the way sailors read weather. The fear here was different now. Not explosive. Focused.
“He’s polite,” one woman whispered in a gin-soured back room, fingers twisting the hem of her apron. “That’s what frightens us. He asks questions like he’s curious, not hungry. Like he wants to understand the shape of you before he cuts.”
Mortimer.
Laura traced the killings backward—not by location, but by logistics. The timing avoided patrols with uncanny accuracy. The escape routes were clean, preplanned. Windows of safety opened and closed like clockwork. This wasn’t a madman spiraling. This was a man testing control, measuring the city’s reaction the way an accountant watched columns settle.
She found the room three nights later, tucked above a shuttered print shop that had once run Caldwell’s campaign broadsides. The irony did not amuse her. The lock yielded too easily.
Inside, the space was sparse. Ordered. A bed with corners tied tight. A basin cleaned obsessively, too clean for Whitechapel water. The air smelled of carbolic and faint copper. Notes lined the wall in a precise, narrow hand—distances, times, patrol shifts, alley widths, door positions. Not trophies. Data.
On the desk lay a folded scrap of paper, edges straightened, placed in the exact center as if in offering.
One word written twice, then crossed out.
Order.
The murders weren’t indulgence. They were proof.
Mortimer had believed restraint was strength. When his system failed, when Blue Hour’s ledgers burned and his carefully tended hierarchies collapsed under flintlock thunder and court proceedings, he sought a purer demonstration of dominance—one that couldn’t be negotiated, regulated, or co-opted. Fear without hierarchy. Terror without infrastructure.
Jack the Ripper wasn’t a man. It was a role.
Mortimer had stepped into it.
Bell resisted the conclusion until the fourth body. Denial held like damp plaster until then, sagging but unbroken. After that, denial became negligence.
“He’s staging it,” Bell said, staring down at the latest report, fingers smudged with ink and something darker. “Using the myth.”
“Yes,” Laura replied. “Because the myth does half the work for him.”
Mortimer understood narratives. He always had. As Harlan ruled through excess and spectacle, Mortimer ruled through absence and implication. Jack the Ripper was anonymity weaponized—fear divorced from motive. A story without an author, just a recurring set of details anyone could inhabit.Laura-Swanson-1.pdf
“He’s punishing the city,” Bell said.
“No,” Laura corrected. “He’s educating it.”
Bell looked up sharply.
“He wants to prove something,” she continued. “That when systems fall apart, people still obey fear. That he can pull more obedience from an alley and a knife than he ever did from ledgers and stamped approvals.”
They found him not in Whitechapel, but near the river, where fog erased edges and the city’s memory thinned. A constable with more nerve than rank had followed a shadow from Aldgate, watched it move with too much purpose to be ordinary. His report left out the part where his hands shook.
Mortimer stood beneath a bridge, hands gloved, posture calm, as if waiting for an appointment that had finally arrived. Fog slid around him like it had been told to step aside. He didn’t run. Running would have implied he had miscalculated.
“You were supposed to disappear,” Laura said, stepping out from the archway with Bell at her flank, revolver already drawn. Her voice carried easily over the muffled slap of water against stone.
“I did,” Mortimer replied. “This is someone else.”
Bell raised his revolver higher. Mortimer ignored it like an impertinent clerk.
“You think this is chaos,” Mortimer continued, tone almost conversational. “It isn’t. Chaos is inefficient. This is clarity. When order fails, fear is the only constant people understand.”
“You’re killing women to make a point,” Bell said, voice shaking with effort he was trying and failing to hide.
Mortimer’s eyes flicked to him, briefly, with the same interest he had once reserved for unfavorable balance sheets. “I’m reminding the city who it belongs to.”
Laura stepped closer, boots scraping stone slick with river mist. “You don’t own it.”
“No,” Mortimer said softly. “But I can make it remember me.”
That was the difference. Harlan had wanted legacy. Mortimer wanted imprint. One built monuments; the other carved warnings into the dark.
“You could have rebuilt,” Laura said. “Quietly. Found another boardroom. Another ledger.”
“I tried,” Mortimer replied. “Men don’t follow quiet after they’ve tasted noise. After Harlan, no one respected a man who didn’t leave a mark.”
The river shifted behind them, black and patient, carrying away whatever the city could not bear to keep.
“You chose the oldest lie in the city,” Laura said. “That fear is control.”
Mortimer smiled then—small, almost regretful. “Fear is honesty.”
Bell fired before Laura could stop him. The shot cracked across the water, sharp and final, echo slamming against the bridge’s ribs. Mortimer’s body jolted, the impact catching him high in the chest. Surprise flickered across his face—not at the pain, but at the interruption, as if Bell had spoken out of turn in a meeting he thought he still controlled.
He tottered backward, heels finding nothing but air. For a heartbeat, he balanced on the edge like a ledger poised between profit and loss.
Then he fell into the Thames. No operatic flail. No final speech. He dropped like a figure erased from a column—one line struck through, the sum adjusted.
They found the body at dawn, caught against a tangle of pilings farther downriver. There was no mystery to it. The shot had been clean. The river had been indifferent. Mortimer’s face, drained of cunning and purpose, looked smaller than Laura remembered. The myth of him had been taller.
The killings stopped immediately.
Whitechapel exhaled, slowly, cautiously, like lungs testing the idea of relief and not quite trusting it. The papers declared the Ripper dead again, satisfied with the symmetry. A monster slain. A chapter closed. London filed the terror away under solved, though nothing had truly been settled. The city loved conclusions too much to ask if they were honest.
Bell signed the final report with a hand that did not feel like his. “Cause of death: gunshot, followed by drowning.” It sounded simple, almost bureaucratic. It was not.
Laura stood at the river the next morning, coffee cooling in her hands as the tide rolled past like time refusing to answer questions. The bridge loomed above, the same. The water carried on. The city rehearsed normalcy.
Jack the Ripper was real.
He had always been.
Not a madman in the dark—but men like Mortimer, who learned that when systems fail, terror becomes the simplest structure left. The role existed before him and would outlive him. But this actor was finished. She had seen the body. She had watched it laid out, cataloged, reduced to evidence and then to absence.
The fog lifted as the sun shouldered its way through a tired sky. London pretended to understand.
Laura knew better.
She turned to leave and almost kicked the object lying just beyond the damp line where the river had retreated an hour before. A small, leather-bound notebook, waterlogged but intact, as if the Thames had decided this, at least, was not its to keep.
She bent, picked it up, thumb running over the familiar, precise hand on the first still-legible page. Mortimer’s script. Columns. Times. Names.
And at the bottom, under a heading written in steady, unshaken letters:
“Contingency: If Removed.”
Beneath it, a list of dates that hadn’t happened yet.
The nearest one was tomorrow.
- Writer
