Part 2: Polly
Mary Ann Nichols, also known as Polly, was found dead outside a stable gate on Buck's Row at 3:40am on the morning of August 31. Pam might have not even given the occurrence further thought but for the gruesome manner in which the woman died, and the fact that she believed that she, Pam, had been the first one on the scene of the murder. It gnawed at her how she could have completely missed the murderer, despite her speed and stealth. In the few uninterrupted moments she had had with the newly deceased she saw only a few of the many wounds that had been inflicted on the forty three year old woman. The rest she had read about in The Times over the subsequent nights. But something about the entire scene had sparked her curiosity, and with Eric going to be away for a few more weeks, the intrigue that the papers and popular gossip were assigning to this 'Leather Apron', and to what might otherwise have been a 'run of the mill' murder (because sadly, so many in the Whitechapel district were), was compelling.
Besides the slit throat and the gashes across her abdomen, Polly also had five of her teeth knocked out, and bruises on her jaw that looked as though someone had held her face tightly in their fingers and begun to crush it, perhaps as he looked into eyes that knew they were about to die, or sadly, perhaps into a face that was so beyond forming those thoughts that nothing but the pain registered. The knife wounds had been very deep, severing the major arteries in her neck, and death, when it had come, because no one could truly say which injury came first in the rapid succession of them, had been quick and final. It was that arterial blood that had drawn Pam. The last screams of a heart pumping because it could do nothing else, and the flow seeping into the woman's hair and clothing, and her new hat.
Pam could understand the facial wounds, an easy way to disable and then kill someone. But the wounds to Polly's abdomen, they stuck with her, or rather would have stuck with her even if she didn't have the preternatural memory of her kind. Not that Pam had ever had much experience with butchers during her mortal life, or surgeons for that matter, but the method with which Polly had been laid open, or at least Pam's assumptions of such, put her in mind of those occupations; as if someone had fancied scrounging around in search of internal organs, though to what purpose Pam could not yet say. She also didn't yet know what it was that had killed Polly Nichols, but she could assure herself that it had not been a Vampire. No Vampire would have created such a mess and drawn such attention, not even a young one, as she herself still was, and none would have used a knife; it was too much of a waste.
It had been nearly impossible to stay close to the scene on the night of the murder, what with the cart men and then the constables, and finally the doctors who had been called; the street became as busy as the daylight hours. (At least Pam surmised that was as busy as the day was, it had been nearly a half century.) She had watched as long as she could, and listened to as much as she could and then she had faded away, much as the darkness did, to her own place of safety.
The following night she had dressed herself as she normally did for her outings; long skirts, a short jacket, a black and brown hat and matching gloves, with black-heeled leather shoes; enough to fade into the general population. Her skin was not nearly so pale as Eric's, she was much younger, and quite well fed then, but she still disguised her otherness with folds of fabric. Not that women generally drew attention to themselves in Whitechapel, at least not without a conscious effort that was. Hands wrapped around a small bag of nothing; another part of the disguise, Pam returned to Buck's Row, to see what might have become of the crime scene, and to see if there were things the good constables had overlooked. She felt a flutter of excitement in her chest. Eric was good company, and he had been teaching her different languages, and history, along with what it was to be an apex predator, and as exciting as those lessons were, she longed to stretch the mind she had been given with such a challenge as a brutal murder that needing solving.
It was almost sad how little trace there remained on that stretch of cobblestones, of the horror of the previous night. Someone had washed away the bloodstains, and of course the body was long gone. Only a few folk seemed to stop in their progress to recognize the significance of the place. But Pam understood it. And she could still smell the blood, and sense something else as she knelt to the stonework and brushed her gloved fingertips along the cracks between the pavers. There was something in the air, faded, but still there. Not a scent, but a feeling of a disturbance, even greater than the discomfort of believing that someone was watching you. It made Pam look up and around her as if there were something to see, but there were only fleeting shadows on the brick walls. Bending her head back she heard a breath in her ear, and wheeled around at her preternatural speed to find nothing. Fortunately her lapse earned little notice from the passers-by. In the East end, the less people see, the better for them all. And with that, she faded away, just like the corporeal shadows.
The papers told the rest of the story, though it was mostly conjecture about suspects. Pam read all the articles, remembering how it had felt to be in that place, but she discounted most of the theories; because it was obvious to her that the journalists were working on selling papers, and that the police had no ideas, or no serious desire to find any. But she had very little time to truly muse over the printed mistakes, because September 8th came up very quickly.