A/N: This is the twelfth, and probably the last, fic in an AU/canon continuation series that begins with After the Fall. All previous fics are available from my profile. Further notes at the end of the chapter.

At a quarter to five in the morning on the tenth of January, John Reeves left his flat to go to work and found a dead woman in a pool of blood on the first-floor landing.

Lestrade, on a run of night shifts to subtly punish him for having the past week off, had shown up on the scene thirty-three minutes after being called. The cause of death, at least, wasn't a mystery: stabbing. One of the most enthusiastic stabbings he'd seen in recent years. The woman's black jacket had more holes in it than Swiss cheese; Lestrade had casually counted more than a dozen of them there on the spot.

"So you just found her like that, out of the blue?" he asked Reeves, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. Even indoors, and with gloves on, they were freezing. "You didn't hear a scuffle beforehand or anything?"

Reeves, a young dockside labourer who wore a pair of outlandish gold earrings, stood at the bottom of the stairs, hugging himself. "Oh, I heard a lot of that going on last night," he said. "Brawls going on all night down in the street. Trouble is, I didn't think it was important."

Lestrade looked suddenly attentive. "What exactly did you hear?"

"Voices." Reeves ran his hand over his thinning black hair. "Women, mostly, but there were a couple of men down there too. A lot of screaming."

"What time did this happen?"

"All night, on and off. Half eleven. Half midnight. One o'clock. I was pretty pissed off about that. Got to be in bed and asleep before ten if I'm up early for work." Reeves looked around regretfully. "You promise you'll have a word to my boss? I need this job, Mr. Lestrade. I-"

"It'll be fine, Mr. Reeves," Lestrade said. "I'll have a word with your supervisor and explain what's happened. They're not going to fire you because you found a body and had to help the police." He had no doubt that Reeves was telling the truth about needing his job. George Yard, the grubby little tenement building they were standing in, was only a slight improvement on the streets. Here and there on the landing were puddles of rainwater where the roof guttering and insulation had failed. Just the thing for washing away evidence.

"Now anyway," Lestrade went on. "These brawls you heard. A lot of screaming. Did you find out what was going on?"

"Sounded like drunk idiots to me," Reeves said frankly. "You get a lot of pub spillover on a Saturday night around here. You-looked-at-my-wife-the-wrong-way, you-pinched-my-last cigarette crap. When everyone's pissed, it can get pretty nasty."

"Were the police called?"

Reeves shrugged. "No idea, sorry. Me and the wife didn't call them. The last time I heard anything was around two." He looked thoughtful. "Actually, though," he said. "That sounded like just the one woman screaming that time."

"In here, or down in the street?"

"Couldn't tell. In the street, I guess; I'd have gone out to see what was wrong if I thought someone was in the building screaming. Safe is safe, right?"

"Right…" Lestrade spoke vaguely, gaze straying to the lower staircase. Sherlock Holmes - coat, scarf and all - had just arrived.

And he seemed determined to make it clear to everyone that he was attending the scene under sufferance. Attitude popping off his skin like static. Jake Dyer, on his way down to the first level with an elderly lady who lived in one of the landing flats, offered him a cheerful greeting on his way past. Sherlock gave him as much acknowledgement as he gave the spider holding court in its web under the second-floor stairs.

Lestrade sighed. Today he was going to be wrangling with an overgrown toddler—without the toddler's usual wrangler around, it seemed. "No John?" he asked Sherlock lightly, knowing full well that 'hello' or any of its variants would be a waste of breath.

"He couldn't find a babysitter at 5am," Sherlock said, without looking at him. He got down on his heels beside the dead woman and looked her over carefully, then leaned closer, ran his fingers along her shirt, and hesitantly sniffed her.

To be fair, Sherlock's policy of sniffing—and sometimes tasting—a murder victim often made sense. But in the close, dark stair landing of George Yard building, it was impossible to not be blasted in the face by the smell about the dead woman: body odour and alcohol, probably whisky.

"What do you think?" Lestrade asked at length.

"Why am I even here?" Sherlock got to his feet. "There's nothing interesting about this."

"Too bad, sunshine." Lestrade still spoke lightly, but he wasn't smiling. "You know perfectly well why you're here. You get to do three things for the next month, and only three: attend rehab, help John out with his family, and solve crimes for me. I've got plenty of those to keep you off the Colombian marching powder, if you're worried we'll run out. We can go through the cold case files—unsolved murders dating back to the 1880s. I wouldn't mind being the DI who solved the Pimlico Torso Murders."

"This is absurd. It barely even qualifies as a mystery."

"We don't even know her name."

"Readily available information that you haven't retrieved isn't a mystery either." Sherlock glanced over to the landing staircase they'd just come up. Sally Donovan had just arrived, bunched up in a green woollen coat, a white knitted cap shoved over her dark curls. She stopped for a second at the top of the stairs, looking at him in honest surprise; for a second he thought she was going to come over, but at the last second a PC in uniform came down the second-floor stairs and drew her aside to ask her something.

"But here," Sherlock went on, dismissing Donovan for the time being. "I'll hand feed you the information a few minutes early, if you like. The victim is in her late thirties or early forties. She was once married, but is now separated, and probably has at least one child. She's lived a difficult life, but didn't sleep rough last night. She was a part-time prostitute. She was an alcoholic and was probably drunk at the time she died. She also suffered from malnutrition, high blood pressure and, probably, kidney disease. She was adenoidal and a snorer."

"And she was in here sheltering from the cold?"

"In a manner of speaking. She came here with a client, who murdered her."

"Okay, just for my own amusement," Lestrade said. "Where'd you get all that from?"

"Her age is obvious from her hands—they're a much better indication of age than her face or neck, both of which are prematurely aged, indicating a harsh lifestyle. The way she's dressed says both 'prostitute' and 'part-time': these are clothes of an otherwise average level of modesty, arranged to look like she was advertising. She's done very little but undo a few buttons and dispense with stockings and underwear. If she was a career prostitute, she'd have invested in that career in terms of her clothing."

"Okay," Lestrade muttered.

"The dark rings around her eyes and blue marks on her fingertips indicate malnutrition and suggest kidney disease, especially, as is likely from the smell on her, she was an alcoholic. High blood pressure is an educated guess, since she was overweight, drank, and ate poorly. Her nose and mouth composition suggests an adenoidal problem, and people with adenoidal problems snore." He indicated the dead woman's face. It was true that her eyes were blue-rimmed, though closed; her mouth was hanging open, as if she might let out a loud snore any moment.

"Okay," Lestrade said, grateful that Sherlock was at least talking to him now. "What about the bit about being separated from her husband?"

"She's wearing a wedding ring on a chain around her neck."

Lestrade folded his arms, making a monumental effort to hold in a sigh. "Maybe it just doesn't fit her finger."

"Did you see her fingers? The ring fits. If she'd been widowed, she'd still be wearing it, either in its usual place or on her right hand. If she was divorced, she'd have got rid of it. But no; she's hiding it under her clothing. Therefore, separated. But the husband isn't a credible suspect, so look elsewhere for your murderer."

"Why?"

"She wasn't sleeping here on the landing—if she'd come here to sleep she would have arranged her clothes and belongings in the space around herself, the way those sleeping rough do. She's not well-dressed, but her clothes are in fairly good condition, yet she brought no blanket here with her. But the big giveaway is her legs. No stockings, no underwear. In this weather?"

"What I want to know," Donovan broke in, having extricated herself from her conversation with the PC and wandered over, "is how come I'm hearing that three people saw her lying here before Reeves did, and none of them were bothered?"

"Welcome to Whitechapel," Lestrade said grimly. "Not uncommon in these parts for people to sleep rough anywhere they can. If they're quiet, people tend to just leave them alone."

"She was certainly quiet," Donovan said acidly. "Dead quiet. Anyway, Genius, what are you doing here? Nothing weird about this one. Sex worker killed by a client."

"Sherlock owes me a favour," Lestrade said before Sherlock could venture a word. "And I want to get this one wrapped as quickly as possible before the press gets wind of it and start carrying on about a serial killer on the loose."

She grinned. "A serial killer case might be just the free advertising you need, Silver Fox."

"Oi," Lestrade said. "Do you want a payrise in the next decade or not?"

In November of the previous year, Lestrade had been interviewed on camera for a BBC documentary about the murder of Mona Flemming by her son Justin in 1999. The case had been Lestrade's first major breakthrough, his ingenuity almost certainly putting Justin behind bars, and he'd done it without the help of Sherlock Holmes. To his mind, the interviews had been all business. But the night it had aired, just the week before, someone on Twitter had tweeted: "#IntentToKill Who is THAT? #SilverFox" and the name had stuck. Two days before, he'd even been recognised by a woman in a Tesco's. It had turned bizarre when she'd absent-mindedly started caressing his chest like she was afflicted with the King's Evil. Melissa had laughed the whole car ride home.

But Sherlock didn't take up the opportunity to dig Lestrade about his media appearances. Instead, he crossed the landing to the lower staircase, going down it and then up again. Then he moved to the upper staircase, on the way to the Reeves's flat, and did the same thing, darting up and down first on the left, and then on the right.

"What's up?" Lestrade asked him.

"Is the body exactly the way she was found?" Sherlock asked.

"Yeah. Why?"

"It's a provocative position. Her knees are bent apart, suggesting sexual assault, but you'll see her arms are straight and by her sides."

"Hands bunched into fists," Lestrade said, looking down at her again. "Not something we'd expect to see from a woman who fended off an assault."

"Very likely she was too drunk to defend herself, if not actually unconscious. Then she was posed," Sherlock said. "Posed in a sexually violent manner for the first person down the staircase in the morning to see."

"Great," Lestrade said. "So we're looking for a psychopath… stop smiling, Sherlock. Or we'll be spending the next six months tracking down the perpetrators of every nineteenth century unsolved murder in the East End. There's a few of them."

After securing the crime scene and deputising the detective workforce under him, Lestrade went back to Baker Street with Sherlock. This was ostensibly to continue with the case, though it was obvious that he wanted an excuse to sit down and have a decent breakfast before what was probably going to be a sixteen-hour shift. It was still dark, and bitterly cold, when they reached the street door. Sherlock let them in with the key, but as the took off their coats in the hall the front door of 221a opened. John looked tired and haggard, but he was awake and dressed, and his damp hair indicated he'd just stepped out of the shower.

"Sorry," Lestrade said to him.

"I was up," John replied. "New case?"

"It's a good one," Lestrade said, ignoring Sherlock's scoff and eye roll.

"Come in," John said. "Don't worry about whispers; Charlie's awake."

"Play time?"

"Still between three and five in the morning," John said with a light sigh, letting them in. "Then I can't keep her awake until lunchtime…" He led both of them through into the kitchen, where Charlie was standing near the table. She was rugged up in pink pyjamas and a knitted hat shaped like a cupcake, and dragging a naked baby doll along the floor by one arm.

"Baby," she announced as they came in.

"You've no idea yet, kid," Lestrade said.

"Hoping having a baby of her own will help it sink in," John agreed. "I mean, she's seen her sisters, but I don't think it's dawned on her yet that they're ours and we're going to be taking them home at some point."

"Have fun with her on that blessed day," Lestrade said, sitting down at the table. No sooner had Sherlock taken a seat opposite than she put the doll in his lap, none too gently.

"Sherwee baby?" she said.

"Oh," Sherlock said awkwardly, picking it up. "Er. Thank you, Charlie… oh, what are you two smirking for now?"

John, exchanging an amused grin with Lestrade, pointed to the doll. "Sorry," he said. "But come on, that was funny. She's been dragging that thing around by the foot since Christmas…"

Sherlock realised, with an odd sort of pang, that he had the doll lying in his arms like a real baby. With a scowl, he handed it back to Charlie. By one elbow.

"Are you in the right mood to read one hell of a medical report, John?" Lestrade continued, bringing out a small file that Dyer had printed off for him at the crime scene and passing it across the table.

"I could be," John said easily, taking the papers. "A medical report about what?"

"Early on New Year's Day, a woman named Emma Smith arrived at the Royal London hospital in a pretty terrible state. She said she was walking up Brick Lane when three or four young men started following her. She thought they were just drunk idiots giving her a hard time, so she ignored them. They stopped her on the corner of Wentworth Street and attacked her. They emptied out her purse and left her lying in the street, so you'd think the motive was robbery, but it's what they also did to her that has me wondering. I've dealt with a lot of muggings, but that's the first time I've heard of anyone doing that during one."

"Jesus," John muttered, having just reached that in the report. He got out of his chair. "Sorry," he said, "do you mind if I put Charlie in her playpen for this? She's started repeating what people say. I don't want her to come out with the word r-a-p-e for a few years yet."

As John took Charlie into the living room, Sherlock and Lestrade exchanged a look.

"Does he seem all right to you?" Sherlock asked.

"God, no," Lestrade responded.

"Charlie is clean and well-fed, and the flat is spotless."

"Yeah, exactly. An eighteen-month-old kid lives here, and it's spotless…" Lestrade trailed off as John came back in. He shut the screen door connecting the living room with the kitchen and sat back down at the table, picking up the report in a businesslike way. After reading for half a minute in silence, he put it down and looked at Lestrade in disbelief.

"She walked to the hospital after that?" he finally said. "How far was it?"

"Five hundred metres, roughly."

"Jesus. What did they think she was raped with?"

"She couldn't explain when asked, but they think it was something like a broom handle. Lapsed into a coma an hour or two after being admitted, and she died last Thursday, poor bugger." Lestrade got up as his phone started to ring, the sound muffled by his jacket pocket. "Excuse me," he muttered. "Can I…?"

"Go for it," John said absently, waving his hand down the hall in the direction of the bedroom. He picked up the report again just as Lestrade shut the bedroom door and answered his phone. The electric kettle reached boiling point and clicked over, and Sherlock got out of his seat and started retrieving cups and spoons for all three of them. But neither of them said a word until Sherlock had brought the coffee back to the table, and Lestrade returned from the bedroom.

"Right," Lestrade said, plunking his phone down. "That was Donovan: they've identified her. Seems she had plenty of friends in the area, but she was on the game, like we thought, and used so many aliases it was hard to figure her out. Her real name was Martha Tabram. Thirty-nine. Two sons in their teens. Separated from her husband."

Sherlock smirked and took a sip of his coffee.

"Yeah, smart-arse, I wasn't actually doubting your word on that one," Lestrade said as John got up and put bread in the toaster. "She'd been living with another guy, Henry Turner, for the past twelve years, and more often than not used his name. But guess what?"

"They recently split up," Sherlock said. "Turner's not your man either, Lestrade. It only explains why she was turning tricks after a long period of relatively domestic bliss."

"Well, I've got Donovan looking at that angle, anyway," Lestrade said defensively. Donovan had extensive training in domestic violence issues, and at the slightest hint of one, he was more than happy to let her do her own digging. "Anyway. The post-mortem is booked in for seven this morning. I said you'd go, John."

"I can't," John said. "You know I can't; I've got Charlie."

"You need to get out of the house and go somewhere without Charlie. Somewhere that's not the hospital, anyway."

"I'm assuming her post-mortem is taking place in a hospital, Greg."

"You knew what I meant. Honestly, go. I'd like your medical opinion. And Sherlock will babysit for you, won't you, Sherlock?"

Sherlock gave him a reproachful look.

"Yeah, you're not doing a good job of selling this," John muttered, though this was his way of agreeing to attend Tabram's post-mortem. "So what's all this stuff about Emma Smith got to do with Martha Tabram? They seem like very different crimes to me, even if you're counting the… blunt object."

"Agree," Lestrade said. "I was more or less trying to rule out a serial offender; these were both pretty brutal crimes, even for a rough area. But that's the other thing Donovan just told me. Martha Tabram's last known address was 19 George Street, Spitalfields."

"So?"

"Emma Smith's last known address was 18 George Street. What's the odds?"

A/N: Anecdote time: A friend of a friend of mine actually met Rupert Graves in a Tesco supermarket, and the chest-caressing incident really happened. She was mortified. Fortunately, Graves and his wife thought it was hilarious.

A/N 2: This, like most of the others in the series, is an updating of a real case: that of Jack the Ripper, who murdered between five and ten women in the East End of London in the summer and autumn of 1888. As per the BBC series, this fic is set in the present day. In part, 'Letters from Hell' is my attempt to put forward a sensible theory on who might have been responsible for the real Jack the Ripper killings. (Being a canon continuation of The Reichenbach Fall, comments in The Empty Hearse about Jack the Ripper don't exist in this universe.)

A word on the content of this fic: The Jack the Ripper murders were gruesome sex crimes. I won't be writing anything depicting a sexual assault or mutilation taking place in "real time", and I've got no interest in being sensational or overly graphic. However, some of the material, mainly crime scene and postmortem descriptions of the injuries inflicted on the victims after death, may be confronting.

I've tried, in the interest of playing fair with my solution, to use as many real details of the historical case as possible, including direct quotes from witness statements, post-mortem reports, coroner's findings and the infamous letters 'from hell' that were sent to various news outlets and purported to be from the killer. These are all in the public domain due to their age and the fact that they are real statements, not works of fiction from other writers.

Updating characters and locations so that they both fit into the 21st century and are accurate to their historical roots has been tough. The original murders took place from August to November, but because of my overall narrative I've decided to move them much earlier in the year and closer together. I've had to bend the present-day geography of the East End slightly, since most of the locations of the original murders and other important addresses no longer exist (a lot of the East End slum blocks were torn down between the wars, and much of what remained was destroyed in the Blitz of 1940.) The ethnic and political population of the East End in this fic fits closer to 1888 demographics than 2017 demographics, since they played an important part in the original crimes. Poverty levels are closer to 1888 levels than 2017 levels. The high number of sex workers and extremely poor people in the East End, too, reflects more on 1888 than 2017. And in a spectacular act of handwaving, I've decided to significantly downplay the fact that modern London has a ridiculous amount of CCTV cameras on public streets. If this had been the case in 1888, the identity of Jack the Ripper would no longer be a mystery.

Most of all, I hope what comes across is that the victims of Jack the Ripper were human. They had parents and husbands and children; they were people's friends and lovers and workmates. They were loved. They died before their time, and at the violent hands of a psychopath. And although the people who could remember them in life are all long dead, these victims deserve to be commemorated.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell this story, and for reading it.