London, 1888.
The fog in Whitechapel did not lift even after sunrise.
It clung to the narrow streets and pooled in doorways, thick with the smell of refuse and river damp. Men moved through it cautiously. Women walked quickly, collars raised, eyes lowered.
By then, the killings had acquired a name.
The newspapers favored it.
The public repeated it.
A phantom in the East End.
A butcher in the night.
A monster no one could catch.
They described the bodies in detail — the slashing, the mutilation, the precision. They debated motive. Madness. Foreign conspiracy. Surgical knowledge.
They did not debate judgment.
They did not debate confession.
But something else had begun to appear in witness accounts.
Men who claimed to have seen nothing would later return to the constable and insist they had struck someone in the past. A dockworker confessed to assaulting a rival years earlier. A clerk volunteered that he had falsified records. A woman admitted poisoning a lover who had never fallen ill.
These admissions were not connected to the murders.
They were incidental.
Unnecessary.
And they were increasing.
Sir Harold Draven III stood in the alley where the latest body had been found.
He did not look at the corpse first.
He looked at the air.
The constable spoke beside him in hushed tones, describing the injuries, the position of the body, the savagery of the cuts.
Draven nodded, but his attention remained elsewhere.
A thin mist hung low over the cobblestones.
Breath lingered from the gathered officers, faint in the early chill.
Too faint for September.
He stepped closer to the body at last.
The wounds were violent.
Excessive.
But what caught his eye was not the mutilation.
It was the expression.
The woman's mouth remained slightly open.
As if mid-sentence.
"Did she speak?" Draven asked.
The constable blinked. "Sir?"
"Before she died. Did she speak?"
"Witness says she tried. Said something about owing someone. Then nothing."
Draven nodded once.
He did not write that down.
Later that evening, in his private study, he unlocked a cabinet concealed behind a false panel.
Inside rested a manuscript bound in dark leather.
He placed it on the desk and opened it carefully.
The pages bore entries spanning centuries.
Names.
Dates.
Classifications.
He turned to one written in firm hand decades earlier.
Designation: The Iron Justicar.
Below it, in his grandfather's script, a note:
Courtroom collapse. Unseasonal cold. Multiple simultaneous confessions preceding structural failure.
Draven added beneath it in his own hand:
Whitechapel. Confession phenomena present in peripheral witnesses. Temperature anomaly observed at crime scene.
He paused.
The ink pooled at the nib.
Outside, a carriage rattled past.
Another killing would be discovered within days.
The newspapers would speculate again.
The public would invent new names.
But Draven knew what he was witnessing.
Not a butcher.
Not a madman.
Something older.
Something born in a chamber of law beneath falling timber and rope.
He turned the page.
A geometric diagram stretched faintly across it, lines connecting marked points.
One of the points had been darkened long ago.
He touched it lightly.
The candle flame beside him flickered.
The room grew colder.
Only for a moment.
He did not look up.
He closed the manuscript and returned it to its hidden place.
In Whitechapel, another woman would walk alone before dawn.
And somewhere in the fog, unseen, judgment followed.