“So, Long, out with it. You found it; the story, man.”
We crowded about poor Long as if we were going to devour him, to discover the red nose and bloodshot eyes of a man who’d soaked the better part of his brain in gin for a dozen years and smelled the same as well.
“I’s on me beat, and it’s near on three A.M.,” he began, and then told a dreary tale of walking down Goulston with his lantern, peeping into nooks and crannies, when his light illuminated a bright splotch of crimson on a crumple of cloth in the corner of a doorway arch that could be but one thing. He picked it up, smelled it to learn that the red was indeed blood and that stains of a certain ugly shade suggested fecal matter. He claimed that he thought it might be evidence of a rape, as he had not received the bad news about Mitre Square and Dutfield’s Yard, and then he noticed some words scrawled on the wall. He went straight back to the Commercial Street station and showed them the clue, and a wiser detective sergeant put the picture together, which is how now, at around five in the pale light of dawn, such a scrum had formed in front of the Wentworth Model Dwellings.
“What was on the wall?” Cavanagh demanded, rather harshly, as it was not this poor idiot who’d ordered it erased but Sir Charles himself, who had adjudged it important enough to arrive at the scene posthaste.
Long said in an uncertain voice, “It read, ‘The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ ”
“Jews?”
“Yes, sir, so it did, and here’s the odd-like part, even a bloke like me knows ‘Jews’ to be spelled J-E-W-S, but this fellow must have been off his chum, he spelled it all wrong, it was ‘J-U-W-E-S,’ it was.”
All of our pens took the strangeness down.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’m standing here before you.”
We all shook our heads. Indeed, the Jews had been a theme in this thing, and my own paper, the Star, had not been circumspect in controlling speculation. Jews were, to so many, an alien element, and certain were quick to blame them. It would, for that same some, be quite helpful if the Jews or a Jew were in some way to blame, and the strange opacity of the graffito tended to point to that possibility, if to anything at all.
“Has the piece of bloody rag you found been definitely linked to the dead woman’s apron?”
“Sir, you’d have to ask at the mortuary, sir,” said Long, and then another copper—this may have been Constable Halse, of the City Police, who would make himself more visible in a few seconds—chimed in with “I can help with that; I’m just from the mortuary, as Commissioner Smith has put many of us out on the street, and yes, indeed, the rag matches by shape, texture, and size exactly the torn apron that was on the poor woman’s remains in the square.”
That was it, then. He had come this way. But were those his words? It certainly seemed so, for indeed they spoke to the central social issue of the case, and it seemed that he had indeed communicated a thought.
But . . . what thought?
Before we separated, we coagulated a bit on our own, we old boys who’d been on the case since Polly, even the penny-a-liners, treated for once as if they were equal, and we stood there in the pale light as Whitechapel came awake around us, and tried to make sense out of it. I cannot recall who said what, but I do remember the various arguments and now set them down as relevant and, moreover, typical of what transpired regarding this issue not merely in the week and the weeks that followed, but even now, twenty-four years after, is argued vehemently.
Some, I should add, believe poor Long got it wrong. It developed that the aforementioned Constable Halse of City had shown up before the erasure and inscribed in his own notebook a slightly different version. Thus there was no stationary target, which is why the damned thing still floats in the ether so provocatively.
Halse said the words were “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” as opposed to Long’s “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”
That damned “not”! It drifts hither and yon like a balloon, untethered, on the zephyrs of the interpreter’s bias.
“Double negative,” said Cavanagh, university man. “Technically, grammatically, by all the rules, the two negatives cancel each other out, so the true meaning, regardless of the placement of the ‘not,’ is that the Jews are indeed guilty. It is saying, ‘The Jews are the men who will be blamed for something.’ ”
“That does not impute guilt,” said another. “It is neutral, simply stating the Jews will be blamed, and as we all know and have observed, the Jews being this era’s prime bogeymen, indeed they will be blamed.”
“So he’s merely a social critic, like Dr. Arnold?”
There was some laughter at the idea of killer as essayist, but then the subject drifted elsewhere. On and on it went for almost an hour, as the boys tossed various ideas to and fro. Was our nasty chap really mad or only pretending? Did he have a program, or was he random? Was he intelligent, even a genius, or pure savage brute out of the dark forests of the east, full of primal blood lust for arcane religious purposes? Could he even be, after it all, someone similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, two separate personalities in one body? Perhaps, as in the Scot’s fiction, the one did not know of the other. It was all quite curious—pointless in the end, I suppose—but one remark stood out and colored my reactions to all that was to come.
“Well,” someone said, “one thing’s for certain, the only man who could solve this one is Sherlock Holmes.”
Laughter, but not from me. Now, that was a damned fine idea. I had read Mr. Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” the previous year in a magazine where it was published, though I understand it has since come out in book form. Sherlock was exactly what we needed: a calm, dispassionate intellect with a gift for deduction, who could master a complex set of clues and make appropriate inferences, and through the swamp of this and that track a steady course that led inevitably to but one culprit. It was to be done, moreover, stylishly, with dry wit, wry observation, and despite a sort of academic diffidence, a true grasp as to how the world actually worked.
Where could we find such a man? Where was our Sherlock Holmes? I was ready to be his Watson.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Diary
October 4, 1888
* * *
I have been named.
It had to happen. If I am the demon incarnate, sooner or later some fellow will pin a moniker on me, first, to simplify communication of my charisma, and second, in some way, to diminish me by cramming all my nuances, improvisations, heroic acts of sheer will, bravery, and long-term shrewdness into one banal package that at first holds those attributes in high regard but eventually erodes until the name—and I—become commonplace.
25 Sept. 1888
* * *
Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha
However, I rather like it. Whoever coined it is not without a certain low genius. Jack the Ripper.
I, Jack. I, Ripper. It’s both violent and short, it combines two commonalities in an unexpected way, it uses the verb “to rip” in an equally unexpected way, as very little of what I’ve done involves ripping. But Jack the Cutter would not work, because cutting is a term, though accurately employed here, that more usually finds its place in discussions of tailoring. So Jack the Ripper it shall be.
I suspect it’s the business of the ear that drove it home. Whichever pusillanimous journo coined “Jack the Ripper” had no way of knowing that in my frenzy in Mitre Square involving what was left of Mrs. Eddowes, I indeed loosed an ear from its mooring on the side of the skull. I had no memory of doing so; that was a period of blur, although rereading my last entry, I see I retained enough recollection to record it immediately postcoitus, if ever so swiftly it vanished under the tidal swell of sleep that overwhelmed me.
But that freak of circumstance gave Jack the Ripper’s missive, with its lurid silliness about using blood as ink, a certain kind of instant celebrity. You need a vivid detail to nail something hard and permanent into the public consciousness, and whosoever my benefactor was, he provided that. He should be writing adverts!
Meanwhile, the “double event,” as the papers are calling it, seems to be seen as evidence of a particularly malignant higher genius. How I wish it were so! Were I that genius, I might not have had to improvise so desperately and to depend on luck so totally. But nobody seems to have cottoned to the fact that the second event existed purely because the first was so unsatisfactory, just as no one has an inkling as to why JEWS is spelled JUWES in my graffito, or why that sentence seems to make no sense, grammatically or otherwise. I have to laugh at how incompetent are our supposedly great minds. It appears that nobody has the gift of putting these things into their proper pattern and inferring where this campaign is ultimately going. That pleases me no end.
In fact, I am at this time more happy than I have ever been in my life. Those who smote me so deeply and took from me that which I had created and loved, they will meet the knife—of one sort or another—soon. Those who criticized me, those who disdained my work, those who found me shallow and overambitious, I am in the process of proving them all wrong, in thunder. “Ha ha,” as Jack has written, and whoever he is, the anonymous scribe got exactly the joy I feel in confounding the world. Sir Charles, the boys of the press, all the mobs who cannot help themselves but for prattling and dreaming of Jack, all of them are miles from the truth, and the only crime is that if I succeed, as I surely feel I will, no one will be wise enough to put it all together.
I have a little left to do. I must be on with it.
October 24, 1888
* * *
Dear Mum,
Well, I know you heard the news. He done two up, one real bad. They even have a name for him these days, the newspapers do, they call him “Jack the Ripper” on account of some letter he’s said to have written, although if you ask me, it’s all a bunch of horseradish, as a fellow who could do what he done to the last one wouldn’t make no sense when it comes to writing letters on account of his being all crazy and everything. He’s like an orang or something, in human form, some kind of crazy ape with a knife, maybe a Russky or a Pole or a Chinaman, but no Englishman, that I’ll tell you.
That’s what us girls think. No Englishman could do such horrors and so we still feel safe with our own kind, which seems to be how we’re doing things these days.
And we are not alone. You’d think the city might sit back and enjoy this foul brute chopping on unfortunates but it’s like everybody is behind us! It’s something! Why, just a few weeks back, before the double event, two constables spotted a local hooligan and gave chase to him. People thought it was Jack himself, and they got in on the game, and soon a mob was on this chap’s tail, they right near strung him up. Well, he weren’t no angel, but he weren’t Jack, either. It was a fellow called Squibby, a low common bully. The coppers got there in time to save him a jig under the gallows tree. They even went to the police station and tried to get him for the rope, sure it was Jack, but the coppers held firm.
I know all this scares you and Da, Mum. But don’t let it. See, I’m not like those other girls. They all works the street and their jobs take them into alleys. All Jack done, he done in alleys and squares or other dark nooks. Myself, it’s all different for me. I’m safe and snug as a bug in a rug in my own little room. My fellow and I are sort of on the outs now, but I see him every day and I know he’ll be back soon. Having Joe around is one thing, as he won’t let nobody hurt me. Oh, and on top of that, there’s a watch dog. Well ha ha ha, there I go again, making jokes. It’s not a dog, it’s a cat. The lady upstairs, Elizabeth, she keeps a kitten she calls Diddles, but Diddles ain’t no ordinary cat. Diddles knows when somebody’s about who shouldn’t be, and you can be sure Diddles will let out a racket if anyone shows up here who don’t belong.
So I know I’m safe. I’ve got my room, locked hard by automatic spring mechanical system, so even if I ain’t paying mind because of my thirst, it’s solid shut behind me, and then upstairs there’s Diddles, and he’s paying attention if anyone comes poking around, and then there’s my fellow Joe who wants me out of my business and comes by every day to talk about it, and believe me, if anyone tries a thing when Joe’s here, Joe’s going to leave him in the worst shape he’s ever been in. Then there’s Constable Johnny Upright and there’s Constable Walter Dew, who chased after and arrested Squibby, and above ’em all is Detective Abberline, the smartest fellow there ever was, and then there’s the big boss himself, Sir Charles, a war hero, so I’ve got all these important and powerful men to save me from Jack the Ripper.
So Mum, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll lose my thirst, maybe I’ll marry Joe, maybe we’ll leave London if Joe finds work someplace clean, away from all this trash here, and maybe we’ll even take Diddles the cat along with us.
Oh Mum, miss you so, wish it had worked out different, but I know it’ll be okay. I have nothing but hopes for a bright future and happiness for all.
Your loving girl,
Mairsian
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jeb’s Memoir
Since the aftermath of the famous “double event” is so well known, it hardly needs dramatization; summary will suffice. As it turned out, the murder of the two shocked not merely London and the empire that sustained it but the entire world. At the precise point in the hysteria, the name Jack the Ripper arrived out of nowhere (that is, if my fevered imagination can be considered nowhere) and, taken with the coincidence of the chopped ear and the brilliance of the contrivance (ahem!), became instantly accepted by that same world, a globe terrified with Jack and yet desperate for information about him. By midweek the enigma of “Juwes” had emerged, lodged as it was in an opaque sentence, to further excite comment, fear, hysteria, and all sorts of bad behavior. Various suspects were named, their curricula vitae examined, and ultimately, when their regrettable innocence was proved, they were left to fade back into nothingness. We did our best to keep the hubbub hubbing along nicely, as O’Connor insisted on running a letter, a postcard actually, that he knew to be fraudulent, simply because it rehammered the Jack idea and contained the felicitous self-identifier—clearly inspired by my insouciant tone—“Saucy Jacky.”
Jack became a virtual industry, as all papers went all Jack, all editions. Replate, replate! (I still hadn’t figured out what that meant.) I’m not sure if fear was driving the frenzy or something a little bit more dubious, being some kind of secret, sick fascination with the hideous tragedy of others. As long as Jack limited his slaughter frenzy to whores, he’d have hundreds of thousands of fans among the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, safely fenced from his hunter’s dementia as they were. Let him knock off one of those poofs, however, and he’d be less titillating and by far a more palpable threat.
In all this, I was kept incredibly busy. On Sunday the first, Harry Dam and I worked through the night with Henry Bright, who united our two stories into a
single seamless piece of reportage that I thought, having read what the Times and the Evening Mail and the Gazette offered, was quite the best. Henry was a talented journalist and an ethical one, and he knitted the stories into a calm tapestry of murder, mystery, mayhem, and official police ineptitude. It can be read today with profit, I say with some pride. It was my best journalism.
I will merely allude to subsequent developments of the next week or so, among them the upping of various rewards, the holding of inquests, funerals, the staging of a bloodhound test at Regent’s Park that produced yet more humiliation for Warren (his prize beasts, Barnaby and Burgho, managed to find only a couple copulating in the trees!), who was rapidly becoming the laughingstock of Western civilization. The victims of the double event were quickly identified, and their names became as well known as any West End ingenue’s. Poor Elizabeth Stride, who is always short-shrifted, as her murder is so much less interesting, was the lady who met her end at Dutfield’s Yard, being a Swedish immigrant, who, despite her nickname Long Liz, was another dumpling, she having just returned from the country where she and her paramour had been hop picking, though without much success. The second was Catherine Eddowes, in Mitre’s, where Jack had taken his time to do right by her and left some kind of hideous exhibition on the theme of “her guts for garters” for all to see.
When everything had been reported, we in the journalism business, knowing a good thing, rereported it with embellishments, theories, illustrations, and so forth and so on. Issues emerged: How had Jack miraculously escaped from Dutfield’s Yard when the pony wagon clearly trapped him in it? How had he then gotten cross town, near a mile by the shortest street route (shorter by crow, but as far as was known, he was not a crow) to butcher Mrs. Eddowes within forty-five minutes under the very noses of two separate City constables, without a noise being sounded, and then, still more intriguing, how had he escaped from that locked box, surrounded as it was by patrolling coppers, to arrive at Goulston Street and the Wentworth tenements to deposit his obvious clue and leave his opaque, tantalizing inscription? And what could those words mean? What was the secret of “Juwes”? Was it a code, was it a foreign word, was it a willed misspelling, was it a Masonic symbol, was it a tsarist ploy, was it an obscure cockneyism? Many a tea and crumpet were downed over consideration of the Juwe jigsaw.