So he’d showed Maybrick how to find his hideaway where Morgan had passed his last hours screaming out his miserable little life, and had arranged to meet Maybrick there again, after Annie Chapman’s murder. Maybrick ought to be arriving there shortly to change his clothes and rid himself of any physical evidence connecting him with the murders, including the knife. He’d left the long-bladed weapon at Lower Tibor after Polly’s death and collected again this evening, before setting out in pursuit of Annie. Lachley had planned to drug Maybrick after this latest murder, to use his mesmeric skills to erase the merchant’s memory of Lachley’s involvement, then send the knife and an anonymous tip to the Metropolitan Police’s H Division with the instructions that a search of Battlecrease House in Liverpool would yield written evidence of the identity of the Whitechapel Murderer.
Putting that plan into action was clearly out of the question, now, at least until he had obtained the letters from Stride and Eddowes, curse them. It was now September the 8th, nearly two weeks since he’d first determined to kill Morgan and finish up this sordid business. Yet he was no closer to ending this miserable affair than he’d been the day Eddy had arrived at his house with the unpalatable news in the first place. He wanted this over with! Finished once and for all!
When James Maybrick finally arrived in his underground sanctuary, only to break the news that he couldn’t possibly return to London until the end of the month, due to business and social commitments, it was all John Lachley could do not to shoot the maniac on the spot. He stood there breathing hard, with the gnarled oak limbs of his sacrificial tree spreading toward the brick vault of the underground chamber’s ceiling and the smell of gas flames and fresh blood thick in the air, and clenched his fists while James Maybrick changed his clothes, burned the coat and shirt and trousers he’d been wearing, and secreted some hideous package that reeked of blood in an oilcloth sack.
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