Whitechapel - Sex Stories

Whitechapel

... Defiant? They'd soon find out. Except they wouldn't. New policemen arrived, more than Rose had ever seen in one place, and, with pushing and prodding and shouts and threats, they forged a path. It looked like the Red Sea parting, and even then the warnings of the constables weren't enough to stop most people from letting whatever weapons they had let fly in a clattering rain when the suspect was finally, finally brought out and whisked away. Rose saw him as they paraded him by: shaking, wide-eyed, pale. He looked like an animal in the bottom of a pit, waiting for the hunter to come. He was close enough that she could have cracked his skull with the rock in her hand. Her fingers clinched, but she stopped herself from taking the shot. Barely. *** He wasn't the killer, of course. The arrested man just a neighborhood drunk, wanted on charges of (accidentally) hitting a child with a brick during a brawl. He'd finally poked his head out of hiding and when the police recognized him and gave chase the sight of a fleeing criminal whipped the neighborhood into a frenzy. Or maybe the frenzy had been there all along. Common opinion around Whitechapel Road was now that no Englishman could be the killer. Probably the murders were being committed by an immigrant--maybe one of the Polish Jews. Rose overheard two morning men discussing it: "Put them all on a ship back, I say. Never should have let them in in the first place." His partner, though, objected. "Jews have an absolute horror of ...

... blood. They soak their butcher's meat in water before they will prepare it. I've seen a Jew shrink from anything with as much blood in it as a beef steak. It couldn't be one of them." But the other didn't seem convinced, and neither did the neighborhood. There was other talk. There were even arrests, but none that came to anything: A bricklayer confessed to the murders, but he shortly proved a liar and the police threw him out. Then they brought in a barber who had once been a surgeon's assistant, a madman with a habit of brandishing knives in the middle of arguments. No one doubted he was a menace, but the police were eventually forced to admit he wasn't the killer. There was a butcher too, and a Jewish shoemaker (the neighborhood's favorite suspect) who was always in the habit of carrying his leather-cutting knife and who sometimes harassed the girls at night. They were all arrested with much fanfare and all released a day or two later, quietly. Some of the girls took to carrying knives themselves. Rose was one of them. She knew that the killer would most likely take her from behind with her skirts raised, leaving her no opportunity to defend herself, but she still liked having it. Times like these called for knives. The day she bought it she ended up out on Brick Lane again, shivering and waiting in vain for anyone to buy. She'd made no money and in a few more hours the last beds at the lodging house would all be rented. She'd be on this corner until sunrise... Two women ...