Chương 44: Chapter Forty-Two: A.D.

She'd expected the streets to be thinning out by the time she passed through the gate into the city proper as most honest trade packed up by this hour, settling into evening quiet. Instead, this time she found more people out than she'd have seen in weeks, clustered in twos and threes along the road, heads bent together, voices pitched low in hushed but excited whispers.

"Extra! Extra! Evenin' edition, only a penny! Get your paper 'ere!" Newsboys didn't usually work this late. By the time Alice crossed into Aldgate there were three of them within earshot of each other, all shouting some version of the same handful of words, and none of them bothering to compete for territory the way they normally did. That alone told her they weren't worried about making their sales that night. Boys who'd cheerfully elbow each other bloody over a good corner didn't share one without a reason.

She would have passed them by if it weren't for what she had heard one of them say.

"Don't miss it! Ripper's victims named at last! Special edition, penny a copy!" Well. She hadn't expected their names to be released much at all. She had assumed that after the last time with Ms. Ruth Calder, the police would at least have tried to protect the privacy of the rest, but she had overestimated them or underestimated the tenacity of the press. Alice caught the attention of the nearest boy before he could dart past her toward a more promising cluster of pedestrians.

"One paper, please."

"Penny," he said, already holding a copy out to her. She dug the coin out and pressed it into his palm. He'd pocketed it and moved on before she'd even finished unfolding the paper, already shouting the same line again at someone else. She'd meant to wait until she was home to actually read it, preferably somewhere quiet, where she could sit properly with a cup of tea at hand instead of standing in the middle of a crowd as the sunlight dimmed.

But the headline was set too large to put away unread, her eyes glancing right there across the top of the page before she'd even finished tucking the rest of it under her arm. THE EAST END HORRORS. FIVE VICTIMS NAMED AT LAST. A SIXTH LIVES – WHO IS "A. D." Her eyes skipped straight to the third line, her pulse ringing loudly in her ears. She unfolded the rest of the paper on the spot and read it in the open street. A sixth individual is understood to have survived an encounter believed connected to these crimes.

The East End Courier has learned from a confidential source that the survivor's initials are "A. D." The Metropolitan force has declined to confirm this detail, and a spokesman stated only that the department "does not condone, and will investigate, any unauthorised disclosure of information pertaining to an active case." She couldn't make herself move on to anything else, for some time.

Someone, somewhere inside Rowe's own police department, had decided that her identity waw worth selling, or trading, or simply letting slip over the wrong drink to the wrong person, and now her initials were sitting in print, available to anyone in the city. She made herself breathe out slowly, calming herself and her heartbeat before it turned into a panic attack. It's still not a name, she tried to think optimistically, but it was considerably less comforting than she wanted it to be.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. There was no telling whether the paper already had more than it had chosen to print, either. Papers held things back all the time, she'd gathered that much just from watching how this one had doled out Ruth Calder's name weeks ago and precious little else, holding back the gorier details, like the murder weapon being a knife or dagger, for the better part of a week.

Initials today could easily mean a full name tomorrow, once tonight's edition had sold through and the next one needed something to sell it with. And if that was not the case, if the paper, this East End Courier, didn't know more, there was nothing to say that whoever had handed over her initials for whatever price or favor wouldn't think twice about doing it again. If leaks were this common inside Rowe's own investigation, one loose word over one careless dinner might be all it took to turn "A. D."

into her actual name by the end of the week. She made herself set the worry aside for the moment, she couldn't act on anything, let alone break down while standing in the middle of a street, and made herself read the rest of it.

The victims' names were laid out such that the Courier clearly wanted its readers to feel it took the matter seriously: Ellen Marsh, of Wapping; Ruth Calder, of Clerkenwell; Agnes Dowd, Harriet Fenn, and Frances Cole, all of the parish of Whitechapel, and each was given her own short paragraph, a life reduced to a trade, a lodging, and the number of weeks before the body was found by authorities or whoever was unfortunate enough to come across it.

Whatever seriousness the paper meant to convey, Alice doubted it counted for much against having an entire life reduced to four lines of newsprint, especially to the families of the victims. Still, there were only five names, and no sixth.

It was a strange sort of comfort to find amidst all the bad news, but a comfort all the same, that she now had confirmation, at last, that every name on the list the original Alice had hidden away belonged to a real victim of this same killer, and that her suspicion from weeks ago, that Rowe had been testing her rather than simply asking her questions on these names, had been right all along.

But seeing as Eleanor Mercer's name wasn't among the list of victims, Alice believed that meant that Eleanor Mercer had not been murdered yet, and not that the police had managed to keep her name private. She was actually quite certain about it, which given how little she actually knew of police work, was strange.

Inspector Rowe seemed too thorough a man not to have asked her about that name outright when they'd spoken, and the police department were clearly too rattled and visibly frustrated by this case, to reasonably believe that the leaker had held back such information, not when they'd already proven willing to leak plenty else regarding the victims. If the police had found a body belonging to an Eleanor Mercer, Alice was sure the paper would have published about it by now.

Despite these thoughts, the name 'Eleanor' did something faintly absurd to her, conjuring Nell's face even though there was no indication that Eleanor Mercer was the Eleanor she knew. Not to mention that although Nell had confirmed the name itself, the surname had not shown up on Nell's status window and Nell had never indicated having one.

This weird connection that Alice was making between the two of them remained entirely her own, built on nothing she could honestly call evidence or reason, merely a hunch that did not seem to leave her be. There was a quote from Rowe near the bottom, boxed off separately from the rest of the column. Inspector P.

Rowe, of the Metropolitan force, stated that the investigation "continues in earnest," and firmly denied that these killings had been officially classified as the work of a single culprit, "whatever certain organs of the press have seen fit to print without authority." He further stated that "the department owes it to these women and their families to see the matter through to its proper conclusion, however long that takes," and urged the public "not to be further misled by irresponsible speculation."

It seemed that Rowe was terribly unimpressed by the journalists he had to deal with. Below the quote, near the end of the article sat a short paragraph written as if the paper wished to sound more informed than it actually was. There, the Courier noted that certain " gentlemen of the Order of the White Rose"were rumoured to be taking a private interest in the case, with" discreet inquiries expected from that quarter in the weeks to come."

It was a sentence that made little sense to Alice, for she knew almost nothing about what such a ceremonial-sounding knightly order could possibly want with a string of East End murders, and that unsettled her just as much as the reveal of her initials to the public. Alice folded the paper slowly, and stood there for a moment longer than necessary, watching the little groups of people around her drift apart, still murmuring, still trading half-formed theories they had no way of confirming.

She had not yet worked through all her emotions and thoughts regarding everything the article had and hadn't told, but worry seemed to be the theme that would follow her in the coming days. It didn't take long before the church bells began to ring. The sky was already quite dark and soon it would be evening proper. She needed to leave.