Free The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell Page B

broke up when she started turning tricks to supplement her income.’
    Costain realized, as he was looking at the spot the guide was pointing to, what he wasn’t seeing here.He looked to Ross, and saw a puzzled expression on her face too.The two of them had started to anticipate seeing all sorts of terrors in London, visions associated with particular places, disconnected from current reality.Ross had taken the team to Vauxhall Bridge Road to see a weird house at the end of the bridge itself that had five chimneys and five coffins.They had all felt that the dust that rose from the coffins would be deadly should they venture inside and stay for any length of time.They hadn’t found out what that was all about yet, despite all their research.But here, at one of the most famous murder sites of all time … Ross nudged him, and he looked around.Oh.There she was.As clear as daylight.But she was actually behind them, in the opposite direction from where Fennix was pointing.The Sight could sometimes be more accurate than history.It was a painful memory of what had really happened, before power had written over it.It wasn’t that the Sight gave you the ability to see every murder victim, just the ones about whom there was … story, Costain supposed, was the way to put it.London seemed to remember the big stuff, the emotional stuff, the memorable stuff, whether or not its people did.But the metropolis also forgot most of what it saw.Otherwise they’d be tripping over phantom bodies with every step.
    Here was a young woman in what were actually rags, with a strikingly colourful bonnet on her head.She was emaciated: her legs two bows of muscle, her face marked by disease, a vision of famine in Africa stamped into a British shape.She was looking hopefully at Costain and Ross, like any homeless addict, telling you the lightest generalizations about how great the world is in return for what they needed.What she needed was shockingly beyond their ability to give.She was holding her stomach, her hands pressed back into her skirts, trying to restrain a bloom of blood that actually hung in the air around her, as if she was caught in a single frame of a violent movie.Her need reached into them and made them feel the cold on this sunny afternoon.Her shadow looked like black ice.
    ‘No silver goo on her,’ Costain whispered to Ross.
    ‘Noted.’
    There was the Ripper himself, the archetypal figure, more of a shadow really: a silhouette that fluttered over all these buildings, like a misfiring advertising logo beamed down at them.His shape was diffuse, remembered hugely but not precisely, glamorously mysterious, while whenever anyone thought of his victims, it was all in the gory details.
    ‘She left a pub in Brick Lane at half-past midnight, and, lacking four pennies for her lodging –’ again, Costain heard the familiar lilt in the way the man said it, as if this was a song he’d sung many times, an inaccurate mantra – ‘was thrown out of 18 Thrawl Street, the latest victim of merciless capitalism.’There was his new narrative, a new geological layer, flung on top for new money, with no thought as to what was underneath.This bloke didn’t care if he contradicted himself; he had no idea, in the end, what he stood for or what he meant.That pricked Costain.These days, he had to be careful about his every action, about everything he said.He only hoped, and he glanced over at Ross again, that didn’t extend to what he thought. He put all that from his mind and went back to listening to this man who had given up all such limitations.
    ‘She said she’d go and find the money on the streets,’ Fennix continued.‘It’d be easier that night … she’d just bought a new bonnet.We can only wonder if that was what caught the eye of the man who turned out to be the most important encounter of her life, the man who … made her famous.At 2.30 a.m.she had a conversation with one Nellie Holland at the Frying Pan pub, which is now a