“Absolutely, though I thought of a bun, not a biscuit. I did no poking about, leaving that for a man who knows his forensics.”
“You did well, Doctor. The crown thanks you. Time of death”—he pulled out his pocket watch—“one-forty A.M.”
“Does it accord, Collard?” asked Smith.
“Perfectly, sir. Constable Watkins found the body at one-forty-four A.M. and whistled; a watchman at Kearley came out, and he puts that notification at one-forty-five. A.M.”
“He killed another bloody woman at one A.M. at Berner Street, or so says the Yard,” said Smith. “You can say this for the bastard, he’s got a fine work habit.”
I was writing that down in the dizzying blur of Pitman when Smith noted me. “Reporter pukka wallah?” he asked me.
“I am,” I said. “Jeb, the Star.”
“Well, favor me by not using the juicy quote I just uttered. It sounds casual, but Peelers see enough of this raw hacking so they usually joke about it on-site. It doesn’t play well with the public.”
“ ‘Commissioner Smith solemnly told the Star that this new murder demanded the utmost in professionalism from all authorities, and pledged to provide it,’ that sort of thing, sir?”
“This man will go a long way. All right, Jeb, stay close, don’t make us look bad, and make no mistakes.”
“He never makes mistakes, sir,” said Collard.
“Yes, the fellow who uncovered the Mystery of Annie’s Rings. How poignant that was. How many extra papers, I wonder, did it sell?”
“My job, sir. That’s all.”
“May I interrupt to point something out that might be a clue?” said the surgeon.
“Good God, a clue! How novel! If you please,” said Smith.
“I note raw hem in the bunched cotton at her neck. May I unbunch it?”
“Why would you not?”
The doctor’s fingers probed the rolled lineaments and glibly separated one sheaf. He unspooled it, being sure to keep it off the body itself, so as not to contaminate it with blood or other fluids. It turned out to be apron or, rather, half an apron. A rather large segment had gone missing.
“A trophy, I wonder?” said Collard.
“Possibly. More like a missing piece of a puzzle,” said Smith. “We could not miss such a thing, nor the shape of what’s missing. Planted somewhere else, it would link sites for some mad reason that only this fellow understands. He likes that we wait, we wonder, and he explains when and if it pleases him. But it is something new; it is a communication. He has a message to put out. That’s why you’re here, Jeb. You explain it to us.”
“Perhaps it’s for himself,” I said. “He has taken organs before but has learned they are perishable. Or he’s eaten them already, with a fine claret and field beans from the South of France. He wishes to have something to cling to, to clutch tight to bosom, to look upon and remember his moment of glory. Something more meaningful than Annie’s famous rings, perhaps, which would carry no texture, no odor, no absorbency.”
“Mad as a monkey,” said Smith. “But in a highly organized way. This is no hot-blooded maniac. It’s something I’ve never encountered. A cold-blooded maniac. I believe he’s got a plan behind all of this.”
It proceeded then at a slow pace. I felt no pressure myself, for it was Sunday early, and the Star didn’t publish on Sunday, which meant my deadline wasn’t until seven A.M. tomorrow, Monday, over twenty-four hours away—so I knew that we had to be thorough, steady, fair, and well organized. The rush to deadline would not be an excuse, although I had yet to make a mistake.
I meandered about Mitre Square. The coppers had let more and more people in, including some of those aforementioned daily reporters. I shared what I had with them—you don’t want your peers hating your guts if it’s not necessary, now, do you?—and they appreciated Jeb’s cooperative nature. I saw that Constable Watkins was freed up and chatted with him, getting good quotations. Sometimes the directness of the nonliterary can be a refreshment. He said she’d been “ripped up like a pig in a market.” Good line, that.
Just when I thought I was done and could get back home, grab some sleep, curse out my mother again, then return to the office refreshed for a long session at the Sholes machine, what should enter the yard but a copper who raced to Smith in alarm.
I could see the jolt of electricity it supplied to the worn-down crew of police executives. Smith seemed especially to pop to life and began shouting orders. I moseyed to Inspector Collard, who seemed in a rush to leave. “I say, what’s it all about?”
“They’ve found the missing apron piece not four blocks off. And the bastard has left us a message.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Diary
September 30, 1888 (cont’d)
* * *
I strode through the night, imagining what I’d left behind. It may have been my happiest time in the whole adventure. Again, I had missed apprehension by the width of a hair, so I was feeling invulnerable. I felt my superior intelligence was validated on the grand scale, and in a game against not only my enemies but the entire city of London, from working girls to academic aristocrats. I was on the verge of not merely victory but triumph. I was routing them. They had no idea who and what I was, why I was doing what I was doing, what drove me. The last was important, because without knowledge of it, they assumed I was a chaotic madman and could be caught only by the net of chance, not logic. And all the lists of “suspects”—Jews, Poles, boyfriends, witnesses who lied—published by the newspapers proved that our best minds were hopelessly out of the game.
I eventually reached Goulston Street. It was deserted. By day a buzzing commercial street (the poultry market was thereupon), it was by night closed down, not a beer shop or Judy part of town, and the shuttered costers’ sheds along either side of the street were unpatrolled and locked. I could see piles of fruit behind iron gratings, hear the squawk and bustle of crated chickens that hadn’t been sold and had therefore earned another day of life in their tiny dung-crusted dungeons, smell the shit from the horses as it formed a steady presence on the dirt road. All the pennants—why are market streets usually festooned like medieval jousting tournaments?—hung limp in the moist though not rainy air. It had the feel of a city abandoned by its citizens, who’d fled to jungle or cave to escape a portended doom. Perhaps I was that doom, or at least its harbinger.
I eased down Goulston between the shuttered stalls and the blank wall of this or that apartment building, looking for a nook where I could do my business without observation. I was alongside something calling itself the Wentworth Model Dwellings, a grim brick fortress against the night for those fortunate enough to afford the tariff, when I espied an archway that contained a door to whatever squalor and degradation lay on the several floors above. It was perfect.
I nipped into it, and first thing, I pulled the damned lump of apron from my pocket and dumped it. It did not fall right—I wanted the blood to show conspicuously so not even the thickest of the thick could miss its implications. Some fluffing was required to achieve the proper show.
That done, I fetched a piece of chalk from my trousers, where it had been secured for just this purpose. I had thought carefully about the message for almost a month, parsed it as lovingly as any poet does his poem, for it had to carry certain messages and certain implications but nothing more. I found a suitable emptiness of wall and began to inscribe my message, large enough to be seen as language, not scrawl, taking my time. I had thought it out as a visual expression, lines perfectly symmetrical, a quatrain of long, short, long, short, a few brisk syllables, perfectly clear as to meaning and intent and—
Good Christ!
I nearly leaped out of my boots.
As I labored in intense concentration and was nearly through the third line, something—someone—had poked me in the small of the back.
I turned, aghast, my heart hammering like a steam engine gone berserk and near exploding, reached back for the Sheffield, and turned to
confront the enemy I must slay.
It was a child.
She was about six, frail and pale with a raw burlap makeshift sack on, her grubby feet bare, her hair blond and stringy, flowing down her face over huge and radiant eyes, skin like pearl yet here and there smeared with dirt.
“Would the gentleman care to buy a flower?” she said. She held out a single wilted rose.
Was this a scene from Old Man Dickens? Perhaps Mrs. Ward, who produced her share of the lachrymose treacle for genteel, tea-sucking lady readers, or even the humorless Hardy? They’d both killed off lads and lasses every fifty pages or so to make a dime or so off their penny dreadfuls. But this was not literature, it was real, this thin-shouldered beauty standing for all the dispossessed, the impoverished, and the slowly starving, cowering under their bridges and by the railway tracks in the cruel London night, aware that even crueller temperatures lay a month anon.
“What on earth are you doing out by yourself, child?” I said.
“Wasn’t no room in the doss ternight, so me mum took me under the bridge. I think she’s dead, though. She’s been coughing up blood awful bad. I could not wake her. I been walking an hour. Found a rose, thought I might sell it to a gentleman. Please, sir. It would mean so much.”
“You cannot be out here alone. It’s a dangerous time and place. Have you no people but your poor mother?”
“No, sir. We moved in from the country some months ago, for work, but Dad could find none. He went away some time ago, don’t know where to. Been alone with Mum ever since.”
“All right,” I said, “I shall find you a place to be.”
“Sir, just a penny for the rose is all I needs.”
“No, no, that will not do. The rose is worthless, you are without price. You come with me now, child.”
And so, the message unfinished and forgotten, I wrapped the child in my coat and lofted her to my torso, where she soon fell asleep across my shoulder. I headed up Goulston. At a certain point I looked back at what I had abandoned, wondered if I could get back to finish once I had attended to the girl, but instead saw, a block behind and approaching the nook where I’d paused for labor, the bull’s-eye lantern of a copper, swinging to and fro, at the end of the fellow’s long blue arm as he bumbled along, searching for rapers, robbers, bunco artists, pickpockets, and even the odd whore murderer such as myself.
Good Lord, I thought. Had this small girl not interrupted me, I’d be there still, finishing up my task. But no, she came along, I forgot that which had brought me there, and I abandoned my post. So once again my escape was too narrow to calculate, my luck too vast to appreciate. The whole episode seemed divinely plotted, though there was no room for divinity in my thoughts.
I carried the broken, tiny thing with me for several more blocks, past dark and sealed houses on streets that led nowhere, reached another intersection, and saw illumination a long block away. The child was light as a leaf. I thought at one point she perhaps had died, and it occurred to me that if so, I could be arrested and hanged for a crime I had not committed, and that might have been God’s way of showing me what an idiot I was to disbelieve in Him. But that was a petty hack’s irony, and our Father who art not in heaven or any place clearly saw through such a tinny conceit and stayed far away.
The girl stirred, rearranged herself to increase comfort against my shoulder, and I turned toward the incandescence, and in a bit found myself and my new charge in the gaslight of Commercial Street, perhaps a mile north of its intersection with Whitechapel Road. It was not crowded, but neither was it quite empty; a few public houses were open, spilling good cheer into the night; a few Judys patrolled this way or that; a few costers hawked meat and vegetables and candy to the indifferent after-midnighters.
I passed by several of the working gals and finally came upon one who seemed somehow less desperate than the others. I put up a finger to halt her. She showed no fear of the Whitechapel Murderer, as the street was well lit and I was with a child.
“See here, madam,” I said, “I found this poor girl wandering about a few blocks back with no place to go. Could you take her somewhere?”
“It’s a shame about the wee child, who reminds me of my own two girls,” she said. “But I’m a down-and-outer trying to earn me doss money for the night, guv’nor.”
“If I give you money for doss, will you first find a place for the girl, a church, a home, or something? I must be off. No gin, now. You’ve had your gin for the evening, haven’t you?”
She narrowed an eye at me, looked me up and down, and I prayed that whatever violence I had done back in the square or before, in the yard, had not left a scarlet letter on my face or chest.
It had not.
“All right, give me the girlie. There’s a home down the way for the wayward kiddies of the workers. Reckon she’ll fit right in.”
I handed my charge over to her, then pulled out a few quid and crunched them into her fist. Only a Rossetti could capture the soft light for The Good Whore, the Destitute Child, and the Insane Killer on a Whitechapel street late Saturday’s eve turning to Sunday’s morn; too bad he was dead. But then I thought: We are so beyond the artist’s ability to record that it nears a sort of black comic spiral of absurdity.
“I see you’ve a kind face,” she said, “as well as a kind heart. God will look after you.”
“Doubtful,” I said, and walked away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jeb’s Memoir
By the time I arrived at 108–119 Goulston, the idiot Warren had already ordered the inscription washed off.
“What?” I barked at the constable who told me this as I stood in a cluster with the gentlemen of the Times, the Evening Standard and the Mail, the Pall Mall Gazette, and others outside the doorway into the tenement. That vast building was known humorously enough as the Wentworth Model Dwellings—yes, they were a model, all right, for how to debase the worker by cramming him and his into a brick cracker box twelve to a room, hot in summer and cold in winter, with the crapper out back so that all who used it were degraded by its squalor.
“He ordered it removed?” seconded Cavanagh of the Times. We were astounded, restless, and I suppose quite rude. In other words, we were doing our jobs.
“Sir, he—”
“What’s the damned bother with these unruly gents now?” Somebody interrupted the poor constable’s excuse-making, and I looked away from the clearly troubled face of the messenger and thus encountered Sir Charles himself as he clomped over like Mrs. Shelley’s beast or the golem of Jewish lore, a brutish man, all ancient muscle and large bone and imperturbable glare in his beady eyes. Sir Charles Warren was made to wear a uniform—even as head of the Met’s HQ, known as Scotland Yard, he wore his like something you’d wear on the foredeck of HMS Pinafore; stuffed into civilian garb, he looked about to take a deep breath, expanding his chest explosively so that shards of black wool were blasted about without mercy. I will give the man this: He had a presence. His was the Gordon-at-Khartoum sort of Englishman, a human fortress of rectitude, self-belief, conviction of superiority, and view of world as only glimpsed down the barrel of a rifle at a running wog. A shame, then, he was so stupid. He was stout, bull-chested, bowler-hatted, waistcoated, and his blunt features were somewhat obscured behind one of those walrus mustaches that certain men of power found appealing, two great triangles of fur that both encircled and camouflaged his mouth. His chin looked as if it was made of British steel, and if you smacked it bang-on with more British steel, sparks might fly, but no damage to either piece of steel would be recorded.
“Sir, it’s a clue,” I said. “It might lead you to the fellow. One wonders how—”
“Nonsense,” he said. “We recorded the words, and Long will give them out. However, the message chalked upon the wall is clearly excitory in intention, meant to focus anger on certain elements. I will not have a riot in this city and need to call the Life Guards to quell it—”
“As upon Bloody Sunday, Sir Charles?” someone
asked, alluding to the great man’s most famous (heretofore) blunder. I think the person who spoke was me, now that I remember it.
“I’ll ignore that crack, sir,” he replied. “The larger point is that London needs no blood spilled. Public order is the first order of business, on orders of the Home Office, and all orders will be followed.” With that, he turned, then turned back. “You, who are you, sir?”
“Sir, I am Jeb, of the Star.”
“Lord of the rings, eh? Do you know the man-hours you cost us checking into reports of strangers with rings? An abomination.”
“It’s a fair clue, fairly reported,” I said.
“You should be advised, sir, that I have sent a letter to your Mr. O’Connor in complaint of your misrepresentations of our efforts.”
“Sir, with two more butchered on a single evening, and the case’s most important clue having been erased, it seems your efforts have come to nothing. The public has—”
“By God, sir, we at the Yard will do our duty, and intemperate commentary and preposterous, misleading clues in the press only worsen matters. I assure you, the Yard will prevail, good order will be kept, and all will be as it should be. We will catch this nasty boy and see him hanged at Newgate Gaol. But you must do your part, for we are all on the same side, and that part does not include making us look like asses. Good night, gentlemen!”
One perquisite granted a general is that he need not hang around to face the consequences of his decisions, and so it was with Sir Charles, who turned and was immediately surrounded by a flock of aides-de-camp who clucked and cooed around him and nursed him to a carriage, at which point he sped off into what had become the dawn.
Poor Constable Long was left alone to face us, while all the other Bobbies and detectives stood around, perhaps relieved that the big boss hadn’t made them perform close-order drill, as was his wont, in some cuckoo effort to instill military discipline on men who were underpaid and undertrained and overmatched.