Once I got the rather large segment free, leaving the missing piece so obvious that even the most obtuse copper idiot would be sure to notice, I wetted it with blood, then wadded it into my pocket. Now to the night’s real work.
I situated myself at her middle, perpendicular to the body’s length, and rolled up her garments to lay bare that which was indecent. She was a scrawny thing, ribs all slatlike against her skin, breasts like shrunken cookies. These poor girls are rarely heavy because their access to food is so inconsistent. I put the knife into her and cut her good, straight down the middle, and laid open her guts. I had need to make a show, as my mad plan required an increase in frenzy at each stop along the way. Gloves on, of course, I reached in and disconnected the guts. It was slippery and squirmy in there, and nothing seemed stable at all; organs squirted from my fingers as if unwilling to be cut. But cut I did, sawing through tubes whenever I came upon them, and when I adjudged my efforts enough, I set down the knife and reached both hands into the slithery mess, took a heaping handful in both left and right, and pulled them out, dripping, and flung them over her shoulder, where they made a kind of a wet plop against the stones when they hit. The smell of feculent matter reached my nose, as did the tang of urine, and I realized that a nick somewhere had let those unpleasant reminders of the biological reality of our species out to play. Where once it had thrilled me in its perfervid illicitness, I was by now so old-salt at this business that it meant nothing. I looked and a long tangle remained, evidently untouched in my butchery, so I sliced it through at one end and laid it like a dead snake between her body and her arm.
I needed a trophy, something that would get them talking, as they had after Annie Chapman’s sweetbreads turned up missing. (Deposited, if you must know, in the River Thames, never to be heard from again.) I reached in and, owing to my study of Dr. Gray’s epic work, took hold of something, then, securing it with one hand, cut it free with the other. I pulled it out, whatever it was—spleen, kidney, maybe displaced heart, uterus, some other womb part, whatever—and slid it into a pocket. And then I looked up, and across the square, holding a lantern, was a copper.
I froze instantly, though I doubted his eyes could have penetrated the darkness that cloaked me. He stood at the head of what looked to be a sort of passageway between buildings of whose existence I’d had no suspicion. His circle of light seemed to capture with great precision the texture of the brickwork that was his backdrop. It was a moment of high dread. If he advanced, in a very few feet the limit of his lantern’s illumination would reveal me, red of hand, crouched over opened body, viscera everywhere like the remains of a gaudy party. Then he would instantly go to whistle, his shrill blasts filling the night air and bringing aid from all quarters. More distressingly, he was too far away for me to bring down fast, as I had planned to do with the man on the pony cart. Plus, in physical affray, he would indubitably prove a wilier opponent than a man who drives a pony cart for a living. He would know tricks, blows, holds, be well versed in pugilism and knockabout play. He would net me sure. Thus did the angel of death’s wings flap o’er me, so vividly I felt the noose tightening and sensed the crowd’s ardor as I stood on the trembly platform of the Newgate Gaol gallows.
It seemed like an eternity. He stood there, peering about, but did not take one step closer. The odor of my lovely’s shit must not have reached him yet, nor the penny-bitter smell of her blood.
He turned, he retreated, and soon even his light was not in evidence as he departed by that narrow passageway.
I felt the rush of air from my lungs, as I had just had another escape so near it was disorienting. Disaster that close, so close you can hear the whisper of the ax, is an unsettling thing.
And perhaps that is why my next reaction, unbidden, unexpected, was rage. It was as if I had my guts clenched in a giant fist, and when whoever held it tight let me go, what rushed in was anger, the urge to hurt, to smash, to kill that which had been killed. Someone in science should make a study of what secret fluids race to a man’s brain in extreme moments. Whatever they were, they did not leave me calm and collected, capable of wit or irony. Instead they turned me—perhaps this would surprise a reader if ever, by chance, this volume should come to light—insane. Insaner, this theoretical reader might say, but I reply, No, no, I was perfectly sane through it all, except this one moment. Forgive me, unknown unfortunate, it was not you upon whom I was spending my wrath, but it—the universe, the empire, the system, the nearness of my own destruction, the whimsies of fate and chance, in short, all those permanent entities that no man may affect—upon which I felt the need to rain destruction. Alas, your freshly murdered body was the only vessel available.
I destroyed that which had been heretofore sacrosanct. I took the dear lady’s face from her. It took but a minute, a sharp knife being an instrument of great utility when properly applied. I had been until then a cutter, but now I sank another grade deeper into human depravity and became a stabber. I stabbed her face, feeling the blade puncture and slide off the hard mass of skull below, then slide through the flesh, ripping and tearing and removing immense pie-shaped units of skin with each drive. I could not stop myself and was almost sobbing in hysteria. I cut her eyes, even, driving the blade through the lidded orbs, feeling what lay beneath go all slippery and slidey, like grapes in a bed of mechanic’s grease.
And I chopped, another new thing. I chopped strong against her nose, cutting through the cartilage that gives that organ shape, and before I could stop myself, I slightly rotated the blade, yanked hard, and the whole damned thing came off. I went for her ear, sawing like a laborer, and was not rewarded with so smooth a response as from the helpful nose. The ear fought me hard, and I never got it off cleanly, leaving it hanging on a gristly ribbon of cartilage.
I brought my focus down and, in childish tantrum, began to stab at various massifs left in her innards, a kind of mechanical up-down of arm, fist, and knife point, and I could feel the thing bucking into various and sundry structures left aboard. Then my rage exited the excavation proper and moved to skin unopened and unflayed on abdomen and pubis; I stabbed, I stabbed, I stabbed, again feeling point overcome the tensile elasticity of the skin and give way to the subcutaneous tissue beneath, and I further felt that human aspic split and sunder to my enraged energies. Suddenly, I was spent.
I looked at what I had wrought. The face was ruined, a seething mass of dappled black in the lightlessness of the square. It required color to express its truest, purest horror, but it would be the coppers who got the benefit of that display, not me. I would not let myself view the body. I was not squeamish. How could a squeamish man author such an atrocity? I suppose I was still in shock and suddenly, as well, became aware of the passage of time, and knew I had other appointments to keep. I rose, secured the blade in my belt, peeled off my sodden gloves and pocketed them, made sure the apron—so important—was still in my frock coat pocket and Judy’s sweetbreads in the other, rose, and pivoted without a sound.
I crossed the square, clinging to shadow. I didn’t want to leave the same way I had entered, by the opening to Mitre Street, because that copper might have circled on his beat and been headed down Mitre Street even now, and I’d hate to run into him as I exited the square. I turned in to the blackness where I’d seen him, finding it a narrow brick lane between two buildings, and rushed down it. I heard the harsh, overpropelled pitch of the police whistle and realized that constable or another had just discovered the body. Another close-run thing! I continued unabated until the passage delivered me to a dark street leading on the right to Aldgate, on the left to more darkness. This had to be Duke, from which I had seen my thrush emerging a few minutes ago. I took the darker option and came shortly thereupon—insane!—another Duke Street. I was therefore at the corner of Duke and Duke, and despite the bloody business of the evening, I could not suppress a grin at the absurdity of such a thing and the centuries of confusion it must have engendered. Soon I was beyond Houndsditch and moving at a com
fortable pace toward the next duty of the evening. As for what was going on in that little chunk of London I had left behind, I neither knew nor cared.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jeb’s Memoir
It was all different. For one thing, the Peelers weren’t the embittered lackeys in a class war between constables and detectives, and for another, there was no looming figure of mad authority like Sir Charles Warren to impress fear and confusion and other idiocies of his ill-trained, overused crew.
All this is ascribable to the higher level of proficiency of the City of London Police over their much more intellectually impoverished brethren of the Met’s H Division. They ran a far cleaner crime scene: no crazed wandering this way or that in rogue hope of encountering something even they would recognize as a “clue,” such as a note saying, “I am the murderer and I reside at 15 Cutthroat Terrace, W3.” Whichever executive was calling the directives gave each man a zone that was his and his alone, and the man crawled it, touching, feeling, looking. They brought in, first thing, a large supply of bull’s-eye lamps, as all the constables carried, and dim as they were, lighting and placing them about brightened the scene considerably. The Met’s rozzers never would had thought of such a thing. Most astonishing of all was how they treated we Johnnies of the press.
“I’m Jeb, the Star,” I’d said to the first constable I’d encountered as I arrived on-site and slipped through the crowd gathered at the Mitre Street entrance to the square.
“Yes, sir,” said the constable. “Now, if the gentleman will follow me, I’ll lead him to the gallery where we’re asking reporters to collect until we’ve throughly examined the scene. It shan’t be a long wait, and Inspector Collard will speak with you directly as soon as his duties allow him. Our police surgeon, Dr. Brown—”
“Full name?”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, will arrive shortly and supervise the removal of the body to the mortuary.”
“May we see it?”
“Inspector Collard will make that decision, sir, but our policy has been to cooperate with you lads in order to get the best information out to the public.”
“If you know my reputation, Constable, you’ll know I don’t make mistakes.”
“Yes, sir, as you say, sir.”
I followed him to a roped-off area in the center, where I learned that I was the first of the real reporters on-site—the others were penny-a-liners—and took a few seconds to look about. The square was quite small, particularly in scale to the larger industrial buildings enclosing it, mainly vast, mute warehouses of sheer brick, two owned by Kearley and Tongue, one by Horner and Sons. Beyond, over the hulk of Horner’s building, I saw an even larger behemoth that I knew to be the back wall of the Great Synagogue where the Jews gathered each Saturday for their worship. I thought that made it less likely, rather than more, that a Jew was involved, for a Jew would be careful to absolve his own heritage group by distance if nothing else.
All the activity was centered in the southeast corner of the space, where a wooden fence seemed to mark off a yard behind it; another house was hard by it, maybe a few feet away. Certainly someone in that house had heard something! Meantime, a doctor—he was in a white medical coat—stood by, not doing much (I was later to learn he was a local, the earliest to the scene, who had pronounced the poor girl dead, and he had not touched the body save to determine how warm it was, and infer from that a time of death. She was too much in disarray for him to get any closer.) The others were detectives or detective constables, some of them sketching, some of them looking at goods on the ground that must have been the victim’s, perhaps to make a catalog.
I kept waiting for the others to show up—where was Cavanagh of the Times or Renssalaer of the Daily Mail or any of the boys I’d run into at these damnable sites? No sign. I guessed they were still tethered to the Berner situation, looking at Jack’s last crime, and couldn’t get over here, though it was under a mile. The Star was lucky again, as was I; having a chap in the building when the call came got him to the place first and fastest, while the other rags had to round up a late-night second-stringer, their fancier boys having been sent to Berner.
In time, a large fellow with a walrus moustache, a derby, and an overcoat that could have concealed an army rifle came over to our little crowd, looked at us, and singled me out with his inspector-intense vision. “You’re Jeb of the Star, is that it?”
“That I am,” I said.
“You other fellows, I’m taking Mr. Jeb for a look-see on the poor gal. You’ll have to hold here because I can’t have you all mucking up the crime scene. He’ll tell you what he sees, won’t you, sir?”
“I will, they can be sure of it,” I said.
If there was discontent, the large officer didn’t care, and his bulk and seriousness of mien stood firm enough to close out any objections. I dipped beneath the rope and made to accompany him step by step to the body.
We made it to her but halted a few feet out, so the details were not exact yet. I could see general derangement, mussed clothes, implications of disorder, but it was somehow so abstract at this distance, I could make little sense of it.
He said, “By the way, I’m Collard. My first name is ‘Inspector.’ Dr. Brown, our surgeon, will be along in a bit, as will, I’m sure, Commissioner Smith.” Smith was the high sheriff of the City of London Police, the rough equivalent of the Yard’s Sir George Warren.
“Yes, sir.”
“Jeb? First name or last?”
“Last. My first is ‘Reporter.’ ”
“Very good, then. Some spirit. I like that. As for the particulars, we have called in all our officers and are mounting one of the biggest dragnets, if not the biggest, the City of London has ever seen. We have detectives everywhere, canvassing for witnesses. If anything’s to be found, if this mad brute left anything behind, we’ll find it, I assure you.”
I took this down in Pitman while answering, “As a reporter and citizen, I am grateful.”
“Now, as to the body, I must warn you to steel yourself.”
“I have seen all the other bodies, except for the concurrent one on Berner Street.”
“I hear it’s not too bad.”
“I hear that as well.”
“Well, this one is very bad. From your accounts, I suspect it’s the worse by several degrees. As I say, time to be all manly and stiff-upper-lip, all that brave-Englishman rubbish you journos preach.”
“I will try and buck up and play the game.”
“So has said many a rookie to murder, only to end up vomiting fish and chips in the gutter. You have been warned.” He led me to her.
Must I describe this? I suppose I must. I will not censor, but I will go hazy on the details, for myself as well as readers.
She lay on her back, her palms outward and up, one leg bent over the other. Her dress and petticoats had been scrunched up to her shoulders, with no concession to Victorian modesty. She lay bare from collarbone to pubis, showing things that are never seen, much less acknowledged, though I cannot conceive a fellow getting an illicit masturbatory thrill off the spectacle. If so, he’d be as guilty as Jack.
After that, the thing that struck me was new to Jack’s crimes, the redness of the blood. I realized I was noting this for the first time because the City of London coppers had put so many more lanterns in place, so the degrees of illumination, color, and detail were amplified. This being the first time I’d encountered it in the raw, I was almost knocked flat by the visceral power of the color. It touched so many primal, mythic chords. It seemed to spring not merely from the girl’s body but from the slaughter in the last act of Hamlet, the quartering of William Wallace, the beheading of Mary Stuart and Anne Boleyn, the many mythological tales in which beings were sundered for dubious reasons, like the death of Oedipus’s father or the sack of Troy, our sense of the suspicious lack of it in Richard Caton Woodville’s glorious-seeming battle paintings. When cut, we bleed. And bleed. And bleed. The kindness of night’s
dark had shielded me from this base epiphany until now.
Near upon that was the face. Or, should I say, was not the face. There was no face. He had taken it. What animal hatred could propel a man, supposedly in some fashion civilized, to do such a desecration? He had removed her nose, he had jabbed her eyes, he had flayed the lower half of her visage until it resembled some hideous slop of thick red jelly upon a sleeping woman.
“Good Christ,” I blurted.
“I hope you have plenty of adjectives in your little pouch, Reporter Jeb,” said Inspector Collard. “You’ll need every last one of them.”
Though normally I enjoy badinage and consider myself more than adequate at the quick riposte, I did not have enough oxygen left to consider such a thing. The air seemed thick, and the more I inhaled, the more reluctant it was to inflate my lungs.
“But the face is for show. It’s really the gut that’s remarkable,” said Collard coolly. “Had a bit of the fray in earlier days in Africa and saw enough of this kind of butcher’s work done on the wogs we loosed our Gatlings upon to last me forever. This poor daisy looks like someone blew off a three-pounder in her stomach.”
The allusion to explosion was apposite. Indeed, not a bomb but a human stick of dynamite called Jack the Ripper had blown up her belly, pulling, yanking, flinging, cutting out this, that, and the other thing, and when finished, as one could tell from close by, he’d stabbed. And here I go to mute. You can imagine. Actually, you cannot.
But it was now that head cheese Smith and a small retinue showed, and in seconds a tall chap of scientific imperturbability whom I took to be Dr. Brown arrived. He went straight to the body, touched it full-handed, shaking his head, looked up at the man who had to be the first doctor, and nodded.
“I’m guessing not an hour dead,” Brown said. “Maybe not half. She’s still warm as a biscuit. Do you agree, Doctor?”