It happened that on that night, August 31, 1888, I had returned to the offices of the Star to hack out a two-hundred-word piece on that night’s performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 9 in A Minor, the “Kreutzer”) by a pianist and violinist at the Adelphi named Miss Alice Turnbull and Rodney de Lyon Burrows. They are forgotten now by all but me.
I can even remember my leader: IT TAKES NERVE, I wrote in the all-caps face of the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, TO PLAY “SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO NO. 9 IN A MINOR” IN MODERATE TEMPO BECAUSE ALL OF THE MISSED NOTES AND HALF-KEYS STAND OUT LIKE A CARBUNCLE ON A COUNTESS’S PALE WHITE CHEEK-BONE.
It went on in that vein for a bit, pointing out that Miss Turnbull was forty but looked seventy and Mr. de Lyon Burrows was sixty-two but looked like a twenty-five-year-old—alas, one who had died and been embalmed by an apprentice, and so forth and so on for a few hundred prickly words.
I took my three flimsies to Mr. Massingale, the music and drama editor, who read them, hooked the grafs with his pencil, underlined for the linotype operators (notoriously literal of mind) all the caps that should be capitalized, crossed out three adjectives (“white”), and turned one intransitive verb transitive (with a snooty little sniff, I might add), then yelled “Copy down” and some youngster came by to grab the sheets, paste them together, then roll them up for insertion into a tube that would be inserted into the Star’s latest modernism, a pneumatic system that blasted the tubes down to Composing, two floors below, via air power in a trice.
“All right, Horn,” he said, using a nickname derived from my nom de Star, as my own moniker would have impressed no one, “fine and dandy, as usual.” He thought I was better than our number one fellow, as did everyone, but since I was not first in the queue, that was that.
“I’d like to hang by and read proof, do you mind, sir?”
“Suit yourself.”
I went down to the tearoom, had a pot, read the Times and the new issue of Blake’s Compendium (interesting piece on the coming collision between America and what remained of the old Spanish empire in the Caribbean), then returned to the city room. It was a huge space, well lit by coke gas, but as usual a chaotic mess covering a genius system. At various desks editors pored over flimsies, tightening, correcting, rewriting. Meanwhile, at others, reporters bent over their S&Gs, unleashing a steady clatter. Meanwhile, smoke drifted this way and that, for nearly everyone in the room had some sort of tobacco burning, and the lamps themselves seemed to produce a kind of vapor that coagulated all that ciggy smoke into a glutinous presence in the atmosphere.
I picked my way across the room, weaving in and out of alleys of desks and tornadoes of smoke, stepping around knots of gossiping reporters, all in coats and ties, for such was the tradition in those days, and approached the Music and Drama Desk. Massingale saw me and looked up from his work. Under his green eyeshade, his eyes expressed nothing as he pointed to a nest of galleys speared into place on a spike.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Hurry up; they’re wanting us to close early tonight. Something’s frying.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I pulled my galley proof off the spike, read, caught a few typographical errors, wondered again why my brilliant prose had yet to make me a household name, then turned the long sheet back to Massingale. But he wasn’t paying attention. He was suddenly jacked to attention by the presence of a large man at his shoulder. This fellow had a beard that put the stingy ginger fur clinging to my jaw to shame, and the glow of a major general on a battlefield. He was surrounded by a committee of aides-de-camp, assistants, and errand boys, a whole retinue in obsequious quietude to his greatness. It took me a second to pull in the entire scene.
“Horn, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Mr. Horn,” the powerful figure said, fixing me square in his glaring eyes, “you’ve left the hyphen out of de Lyon Burrows’s name.” He was holding my original flimsy.
“There is no hyphen in de Lyon Burrows’s name,” I said, “even if all the other papers in town put one in. They’re idiots. I’m not.”
He considered, then said, “You’re right. I met the fellow at a party recently, and all he did was complain about that damned hyphen.”
“You see, Mr. O’Connor,” said Massingale, “he doesn’t make mistakes.”
“So you’re persnickity about fact, eh?”
“I like to get fact right so that my overlords don’t confuse me with the Irish, from whom I am but of whom I am not.” I was always at labor to point out to all that I was Protestant, not Catholic, had no snout in the Irish republicanism trough, and considered myself English to the bone, in both education and politics.
It was intemperate, given O’Connor’s heritage, but I never enjoyed playing mute in the presence of power. Still don’t, in fact.
“Chip on the shoulder, eh? Good, that’ll keep you going full-bang when another man might take a rest. And fast?”
“I wrote it in Pitman on the hansom back,” I said. “It was merely a process of copying.”
“He’s very good with his Pitman. Maybe the best here,” said Mr. Massingale. “Pitman” was the system of shorthand I had taught myself one recent summer in an attempt to improve myself.
“So, Horn, you’re a bit frivolous, aren’t you? The odd book review, mostly music, silly nonsense like that, eh?”
“I feel comfortable in that world.”
“But you’re comfortable on streets, in pubs, among coppers, thugs, and Judys? You’re not some fey poof who falls apart outside Lady Dinkham’s drawing room.”
“I’ve studied boxing with Ned Corrigan and have a straight left that could knock a barn down, and you’ll note me nose ain’t broke yet,” I said, adding a touch of brogue for emphasis. It was true, as all Irish-born learn the manly art at an early age or spend their lives among the girls.
“Fine. All right,‘Horn,’ whatever your real name might be, I’m in a fix. My night crime star, that damned Harry Dam, is cobbing with a floozy in a far beach town this week, and we just got a call from our fellow at Scotland Yard with news of a nice juicy murder in Whitechapel. Someone downed a Judy, with a butcher’s knife, no less. I smell the blood of an English tart, fee-fi-fo-fart. So I want you to take a hansom, get out there before they move the body, snatch a look at it, find out who the unlucky gal is, and let me know if it’s as much the meat-cutter’s work as the fellow says. See what the coppers say. The Bobbies will talk; the detectives will play hard to get. Take it all down in your Pitman, then get back and hammer out a report. Henry Bright here, our news editor, will talk you through it. Can you do this?”
“It doesn’t sound too terribly difficult.”
* * *
The hansom dropped me there at about four-forty-five A.M., and I told the fellow it was worth half a quid if he’d wait, since I didn’t want to have to look for another at that ungodly hour in a neighborhood known for coshes and Judys. My noggin was too delicate to enjoy a gnashing by a Russky sailor or some such.
Buck’s Row was a kind of subshoot of White’s Row, which was bigger and brighter, but just before the rail bridge over the tracks into Whitechapel Station, it divided into Buck’s Row and Winthrop Street, both tiny and dark. I could see the coppers clustered around something down Buck’s Row, itself a nondescript cobblestone thoroughfare of brick walls fronting warehouses, grim, shabby lines of cottages for the workingman, gates that locked off yards where, in daylight hours, I supposed wagoners would load goods of some sort or another—I really couldn’t imagine what—for delivery. It was but twenty or so feet wide.
A bit of a crowd, maybe ten to twenty pilgrims in black hats and shapeless jackets, Jews, sailors, maybe a worker or two, maybe some Germans, stood around the cluster of coppers, and so, caution never being my nature, I blazed ahead. I pushed my way through the crowd and encountered a constable, who put up a broad hand to halt my progress. “Whoa, laddy. Not your business. Stay back.”
“Press,
” I announced airily, expecting magic. “Horn, Star.”
“Star! Now, what’s a posh rag like that interested in a dead Judy?”
“We hear it’s amusing. Come now, Constable, let me pass if you will.”
“I hear Irish in the voice. I could lock you up on suspicion of being full of blarney and whiskey.”
“I’m a teetote, if it matters. Let me see the inspector.”
“Which inspector would that be, now?”
“Any inspector.”
He laughed. “Good luck getting an inspector to talk to you, friend. All right, off you go, stand there with the other penny-a-liners.”
I should have made a squawk at being linked to the freelance hyenas who alit on every crime in London and then sold notes to the various papers, but I didn’t. Instead, I pushed by and joined a gaggle of disreputable-looking chaps who’d been channeled to the side and yet were closer to the action than the citizens. “So what’s the rub, mates?” I asked.
Fiercely competitive, they scowled at me, looked me up and down, noted my brown tweed suit and felt slouch hat and country walking shoes, and decided in a second they didn’t like me.
“You ain’t one of us, guv’nor,” a fellow finally said, “so why’n’t you use use your fancy airs to talk to an inspector.”
The holy grail of the whole frenzy seemed to be acknowledgment by an inspector, which would represent something akin to a papal audience.
“It would be beneath His Lordship,” I said. “Besides, the common copper knows more and sees more.”
Perhaps they enjoyed my banter with them. I have always been blessed at banter, and in bad circumstances a clear mind for the fast riposte does a fellow no end of good.
“You’ll know when we know, Lord Irish of Dublin’s Best Brothel.”
“I do like Sally O’Hara in that one,” I said, drawing laughter, even if I’d never been brothelized in my life.
“Sell you my notes, chum,” a fellow did say finally. He was from the Central News Agency, a service that specialized in servicing second- and third-tier publications with information they hadn’t the staff to report themselves.
“Agh, you lout. I don’t want the notes, just the information. I’ll take me own notes.”
We bargained and settled on a few shillings, probably more than he would have gotten from Tittle-Tattle.
“About forty, a Judy, no name, no papers, discovered by a worker named Charlie Cross, C-R-O-S-S, who lives just down the row, at three-forty A.M., lying where you see her.”
And I did. She lay, tiny, wasted bird, under some kind of police shroud, while around her detectives and constables looked for “clues,” or imagined themselves to be doing so by light of not-very-efficient gas lanterns.
“They’ve got boys out asking for parishioners to come by and identify the unfortunate deceased, but so far, no takers.”
“Cut up badly, is she?”
“First constable says so.”
“Why so little blood?” It was true. I had expected red sloppage everywhere, scarlet in the lamplight. Melodramatic imagination!
“I’m guessing soaked into her clothes. All that crinoline sops up anything liquid, blood, jizz, beer, wine, vomit—”
“Enough,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Now you know what we know.”
“Excellent. Will the coppers let us see the body?”
“We’ll see.”
I stood there another few minutes, until a two-wheeled mortuary cart was brought close to her, and two constables bent to lift her. They would transport her—now technically an it—to the Old Montague Street Mortuary, which was not far away.
“I say,” I said to the nearest uniform, “I’m from the Star. I’m not part of this jackal mob but an authentic journalist. It would help if I could see a bit, old man.”
He turned and looked at me as if I were the lad in the Dickens story who had the gall to ask for more.
“The Star,” I repeated as if I hadn’t noted his scowl and astonishment. “Maybe mention you, get you a promotion.”
I was naturally corrupt. I understood immediately without instruction that a little limelight does any man’s career a bit of good, and having access to it, which the penny-a-liners never did, was a distinct advantage.
“Come on, then,” he said, and although it wasn’t expressed, I could sense the outrage and indignation of the peasants behind me and rather enjoyed it. He pulled me to the mortuary cart, and as the fellows struggled to shove the poor lady into her carriage, he halted them, so that she was held at equipoise between worlds, as it were, and pulled back the tarpaulin.
I expected more from my first corpse. And if the boys thought I’d puke my guts up, I disappointed them. It turned out that, like so much else in this world, death was overrated.
She lay, little bunny, in repose. Broad of face, blank of stare, doughy of construction, stiller than any stillness I’d ever seen. There seemed to be the purpling of a bruise on the right side of that serene face, but someone had otherwise composed her features so that I was spared tongue, teeth, saliva, whatever is salubrious about the bottom part of face. Her jaw did not hang agape but was pressed firmly shut, her mouth a straight jot. I wish I could say her eyes haunted me, but in fact they bore the world no malice and radiated no fear. She was beyond fear or malice. Her eyes were calm, not intense, and bereft of human feeling. They were just the eyes of a dead person.
I looked at the neck, where the dress had been pulled down so the coppers could have their look-see at the death wounds. I look-saw two deep if now bloodless slices, almost atop each other, crisscrossing from under left ear to center of throat.
“He knew what he was doing, that one,” said the sergeant who was sponsoring my expedition. “Deep into the throat, no mucking about, got all the rivers of blood on the first one, the second was purely ornamental.”
“Surgeon?” I asked. “Or a butcher, a rabbi, a pig farmer?”
“Let the doc tell you when he makes up his mind. But the fellow knew his knife.”
With that, one of the coppers threw the tarpaulin over her again, and her face vanished from the world.
“There’s more, I’m told,” I said. “I have to see it. Spare me her notch if you can, let the poor dear have a little dignity, but I have to see what else the man did.”
The three officers held a conversation with their eyes among themselves, and then one flipped up the material at midsection and carefully burrowed into her nest of clothing, exposing just the wound and nothing of delicacy.
“That, too, took some strength, I’d judge,” said the sergeant.
Indeed. It was an ugly excavation running imprecisely down her left side, say ten inches to the left of the navel (which I never saw), curving at her hip bone, cutting inward toward the centerline of her body. It, too, was bled out; it, too, left flaky blood debris in its wake; but it was somehow rawer than the throat cuts, and I could see where the blood had congealed into a kind of black (in that light) gruel or even pudding.
“Show him the punctures,” said the sergeant.
Another adjustment was made, and I saw where the knife’s point had been lightly “danced,” almost gaily, across her abdomen. A smudge of pubis hair was exposed in this exploration, but none of us mentioned it, as such things, even among men, were unmentionable twenty-four years ago.
* * *
THE BODY OF A WOMAN WAS DISCOVERED LAST NIGHT—
“No, no,” said Henry Bright. “We’re selling news, not informing the ladies of the tea party. Get the blood up front.”
Henry was hovering over my shoulder as I assailed the Sholes & Glidden, moving my Pitman notes into English prose. I had just returned from Buck’s Row, paying the hansom driver extra to force his way through the dawn and its increase in traffic, and seated myself directly at the machine. Henry was on me like a crazy man. Maybe he was the murderer!
A WOMAN WAS BUTCHERED LAST NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL BY PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN.
“Yes,” said Henry. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”
THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED—
“No, no, save that for the jump. Get to the wounds, the blood. Get a copper assessment up there, too, to give it some spice.”
HER THROAT WAS SLASHED—
“Brutally,” offered Henry.
—BY TWO PENETRATING BLADE STROKES WHICH CAUSED VIOLENT EXSANGUIN—
“No, no. Are we at Oxford? Are we chatting with Professor Prissbottom about the latest in pre-Renaissance decadence?”
—BLOOD LOSS. SHE EXPIRED IN SECONDS.