CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Jeb’s Memoir
“You are dead,” I gasped.
“It’ll take more than a locomotive to kill this old buzzard. I still have a cat’s reflexes. I went flat, and the beast lumbered over me. I crawled to safety.”
“Then, sir, you are Jack the Ripper.”
“I am no more Jack the Ripper than you are Queen Victoria. What madness has Dare infected you with, you bottlehead? Convince me you’re his dupe and not his partner, and maybe I won’t plug you before I plug him.” He rammed the hard barrel of the revolver deeper into my flesh.
My mind, as it so often does when confronted with naked aggression, simply collapsed into shards. I was worthless.
“Bunny brain! Cat ate your tongue, the whole thing? Now, you walk with me over to Russell Square all nice and happy-like, and we’ll sit under a tree and have a little chitchat. Move to get away, and I’ll finish you here.”
The gun—and the limp—disappeared under his cape; he straightened and pushed me gently across the street. I could see the vaulted arches of the elms ahead. We entered the park and found a quiet bench. The cheek on the fellow. He held me at gunpoint in the middle of the most civilized square in the world, and all about me, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of the British empire, wandered to and fro, oblivious to the mortal drama in which we were locked.
We arranged ourselves, though I could make out the shape of the big revolver under his topcoat, easily at hand. He could draw and shoot in a second.
“What is Dare to you?”
“We have been looking into the Ripper. Our investigations have indicated that he is you and that you are mad. You have Annie Chapman’s rings, I saw them in your hand in the opium parlor. You confessed to killing her. ‘The blood,’ you said, ‘her guts were pulled out.’ More, you share a spelling impediment with him in the form of the rogue vowel U you dropped into the Goulston graffito.”
“You are a buffoon,” he said, “a tweedy twit with aspirations of grandeur and the sense of a frog in a hot pan. The rings were brought to me by my betrothed, Emily Standwick, God bless her gentle soul, who was murdered and butchered by Sepoy on the road to Lucknow on the first night of the Great Mutiny of 1857, thirty-one years ago. I have carried them with me ever since, as I have carried the image of what was done to her. Yes, I smoke a pipe, because sometimes the memories are too savage and I long to end them with a large piece of lead from the revolver.”
“A convenient story.”
“Easily verified.”
“Dare is—”
“A madman.”
“Sir, he has a profound moral vision of the world, which he hides behind witty cynicism. But he believes in the possibility of world peace and the equal sharing of material goods. He believes that differences in language keep us apart.”
“I’ve read his book,” he said.
“He believes in universal language, universal culture, no national disciplines, no reason for war or poverty, no hate, no jealousy. It’s utopian, I admit, but it shows a profound moral sense.”
“Ask the girl chained in his cellar how profound his moral sense is.”
I let this ominous declaration hang in the air a bit. No need to prompt him. The pause was theatrical, and when, with his superb sense of timing, he’d milked all the drama out of it, he proceeded. “Allow me to tell you a thing or two about the moral Professor Dare. About five years ago he was done with the theorizing. He decided on an experiment. The idea was to take an unfortunate off the streets who swallowed her H’s, washed when she could, and perhaps even once in a while said yes to a thruppence offered by a fine English gentleman for a lean-to in a dark alley.”
I said nothing.
“So he finds a cockney waif. And he works on her. And I do mean works. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just a few voice lessons. He had to tear her down and build her up again new. It was a battle almost to the death: screams, threats, hysterics, sleepless nights, even those chains in that cellar.”
As he spoke, I could see it. Behind Dare’s languor and sarcasm, a crazed zealot could have existed. The sarcasm, the wit, the grace—maybe that was all camouflage for the elemental Thomas Dare.
“Where is this going?”
“After six months of grinding, he reintroduced her to H. ‘In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen,’ over and over again, night after night, until the poor child was in hysterics. He brought her to the miracle of the vowel A. ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.’ Over, over, over yet again. Mad to begin with, he made her half mad, the poor child, with no defenses, no place to run, no inner strength. And yes, he did it. I must say, near-on destroying her, he beat her until she spoke like a true lady of means. Not only that, cleaned up, put in fashionable gowns, she turned out to be, God in heaven, beautiful. He squired her about town for a bit, showing her off, showing off his triumph. Was he using her for immoral purposes? You’re a man. You tell me.”
I let this sit where it was. I had no comment. It disappointed me how right it felt, as ascribed to Thomas Dare.
“I hope you’re not waiting for the happy ending,” said the colonel.
“Please continue.”
“It seems another man was involved.”
“She met someone?”
“Someone was living with Dare. Nobody got a good look at him, but he was gone every day, then up every night late, writing in his attic room. Anyhow, it seems that even as Dare fell in love with his creation—”
“Pygmalion,” I said.
“This isn’t literature, you bloody fool. This is what’s real and dark in the world. This is what bites. The core of the situation is that Dare’s in love with this girl, but in the end the other man cannot stand what Dare’s doing to her. Maybe she reminded him of someone he knew and loved thirty-one years earlier. So one night, the other man gives her a pile of money and urges her to run away, to get away from Dare because she is too much Dare’s toy; he will crush her to nothingness. Dare wants a statue, not a wife. She knew that, she saw that in him. So just before Dare is about to announce his betrothal to Miss Elizabeth Little, she disappears.”
I tried to justify it. If true, it meant merely that Dare was a bastard, but he had tendencies toward being a bastard anyhow, as that is so often the penalty of greatness. “I’m trying to think how this fits in. It speaks to character, not action.”
“Character is action,” said the colonel.
It was here that it finally occurred to the idiot inside my head to ask about the mysterious “roommate” who seemed to be the servomechanism for all the turmoil.
“I say, even for having spent so much time reading, you are thick,” said the colonel. “I was the other fellow.”
I must have gulped or swallowed or blinked, for I could not have encountered this without an appalled reaction. The colonel, however, kept his disinterested duty face square to me, betraying nothing.
“If you”—I struggled—“if he, if . . .” and then I was out of ifs and left with only one. “If he knew you, the profile preceded the murders,” I blurted. “He knew it all, your skills, your career, your spelling deficiency, your strong vision, your courage. He knew of your rings, your memories of a young woman butchered. The murders were informed, shaped, sculpted to fit the profile. Then . . . who committed the murders?”
There could be but one answer.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Jeb’s Memoir
Three days later, I invited Professor Dare to meet me at Dutfield’s Yard, the murder site of Elizabeth Stride. I chose four P.M. It was a brisk December afternoon, though I was impevious to a lot of treacly Christmas nonsense.
The professor seemed chipper enough. He was the jovial ghost of murders past, I supposed, and I made an effort to match his easy glee. He was in tweed, as usual, with a warm slouch hat of wool keeping his magnificent head of blond hair warm. He smoked a jaunty pipe, his cheeks were pink, and he radiated happiness and satisfaction. I don’t believe I’d
ever seen him so at peace and content with the world.
“Yes, Jeb. Please tell me what you need. I am at your disposal.”
“Sir,” I said, feeling the chill as we stood next to the wooden slats of the door in the gate that led into the yard where poor Liz had been killed what seemed so long ago, “I was not here that night, so I need some guidance if I’m to put this one together in a story. It’s my weakest account.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “But do recall, I have not been here, either. Perhaps the two of us can work it out.”
With that, we opened the gate and confronted Liz’s falling place, which was now bare and prosaic, a simple joinery of brick wall to the pavement of the yard. Looking inward, we saw not much space, hardly justifying the name “yard,” hardly bigger than Miller’s Court, just an opening between the crazed and unplanned construction that marked the East End where the bricklayers designed the city on the fly. We could see a couple of small shops and, deeper in, a stairway running to the balcony of a small cottage. Nothing at all remarkable.
“I make it here,” I said, pointing to the spot where it seemed certain Liz had been discovered, just beyond the rotational arc of the open right-hand door.
“So it is.”
“Jack has killed but not desecrated. He is caught by an interloper who has just opened the gate. He freezes. The driver of the cart, sensing his pony’s sudden reluctance, jumps off his wagon and strikes a match. He sees the body in the cone of light. He goes racing off to alert colleagues, and Jack slides out in the narrow gap between the pony cart and the gateway.”
“That, I believe, is how the papers had it,” he said. “Do you have another idea?”
“Hmm,” I said. “I’m just astounded how he was not spotted as witnesses and coppers arrived. The driver did not hold on his alert. He returned with three colleagues from the club almost immediately”—I pointed to the two-story building that formed the northern boundry of Dutfield’s Yard beyond the gateway, and its doorway just twenty feet beyond where we stood—“by way of its main entrance, which fronts on Berner. It was quite full, as some sort of anarchistic meeting was taking place, and in under a minute more of those men poured into Berner Street and were very soon swarming thickly on the area. Meanwhile, the coppers were quick to arrive—street constables, that is—plus many people from Berner, and farther up, from the well-traveled Commercial. It was hardly an obscure spot.”
“I cannot answer for what the newspapers say. Perhaps you should discuss this with your friend Harry Dam, when he is not busy constructing an auto-da-fé for the Jews. But what you are describing does not seem to me impossible. Remember, he’s slight, and thus the pony won’t shy at him, thinking him a child and fearing no whip from him. He’s slight enough to squeeze between the cart and the gateway and be gone quickly.”
“I suppose,” I said, “but the pony is already alerted, already skittish, by smell. It seems just as likely that the sudden appearance of a figure from the dark, child-sized or not, would have caused the nervous beast to create a disturbance.”
“Who knows the minds of ponies?” said the professor.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But does it not strike you odd, Professor, that we are hard upon the single building in London that is regularly trafficked by revolutionaries, secret policemen, spies, the whole monkey house of Mittleuropean battle between autocratic governments and the men who would overthrow them. This building would be, would it not, full of intrigue, plot, plan, various stratagems and deceits, to say nothing of talents for escape and evasion?”
“Have you been talking with someone?” he asked. “That does not seem like your sort of intuition.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It just came to me in the writing.”
“Ah. In any event, what difference does it make, ultimately? They’re all politicals. Such men would have no interest in a fellow cutting up whores, because it advances no revolutionary cause. They are a hard breed.”
“Indeed. However, all those men, no matter of what faction, have one thing in common, which I would term ‘fear of raid.’ They are haunted by raids, have memory of raids, have themselves escaped raids. The raid spells their apprehension, execution, imprisonment, or exile. It means that all they stand for is destroyed. Theirs is a dangerous universe and a fragile one. So does it not stand that they would have an escape from such a place? They are not the sort to be caught like rats in a trap. Come, let’s examine.”
We walked into the unlocked building, entering by way of that side door onto Dutfield’s Yard, finding ourselves in a dingy corridor, which in one direction, back, seemed to lead to a printing shop from the mechanistic sounds, and in other direction, toward the street, where a kind of foyer must have offered a stairway that presumably led to the large meeting hall upstairs. There the workers were bellowing out a hymn to worker solidarity much sung in radical nests across Europe. It was so loud its vibrations seemed to be banging hard off walls and wood. Instead of joining the chorus of heroes, I took Dare to a door just a bit down the corridor toward the foyer. It, too, was unlocked, after the anarchists’ happy assumption that property is theft and no hindrance should be placed in the way of those in need. I was certainly in need. This in turn took us down a few steps into a cellar, which contained what cellars contain: crates, rusted tools, refuse, scrap, rat holes, spiderwebs, dust, the smell of dankness.
“Hardly a highlight of one’s London tour,” said the professor.
“Let’s see, however, if it contains treasure, which may be found in the most unlikely of spots.”
We poked about, undisturbed. It was rather dark, so the going was somewhat difficult as we bumped and bumbled about until I said, “Hello, what’s this?”
I pointed to the cement floor, where squibs of candlewax had accumulated, as if much illumination had been required on this one spot.
“Very Sherlock Holmes of you, sir,” he said. In a second I pushed aside the nearest crate and found it easy enough going. It slid three feet to the right and, when moved, revealed a ragged but ample hole chopped into the cement, though all its excavation debris had been carefully swept away. The two nubs of a ladder stuck beyond the edge of the hole.
“I would say tunnel. Isn’t this interesting? Built, I’m sure, to save the anarchists from goons hired by the tsarist secret police or foreign agents being hunted by our own Special Branch. Wouldn’t you think that a brilliant tactical mind like the colonel’s would have understood the high theoretical possibility of such a structure existing and looked for it? Perhaps that is why he chose this spot, knowing a secret escape was possible.”
“Capital thinking,” said the professor. “It existed theoretically, now it exists actually. By God, this is a wonderful discovery.”
“Shall we see where it leads?”
“We have a moral obligation to do so.”
I went first. It was not a long descent, perhaps ten feet, and it led to no vast underground chamber but into what appeared to be a kind of abandoned sewage containment, though of ample height and width for a man to nearly stand. One would expect a lantern at the base of the ladder to assist the escapees, and there it was, a primitive candle-powered implement whose contribution to illumination would be more helpful to morale than practicality. As the professor eased his way down, I found matches carefully wrapped against moisture, unwrapped them, ignited one, wincing at the flare, set the wick aflame, then closed the glass front of the piece, which magnified its vividness somewhat. Lifting it in my left hand, I exposed the gap in the ancient terra cotta through which the anarchists had battered their way to gain access; sweeping the lantern about, we saw that the length of space ran about ninety feet or so. At the same time, the miasma of abomination rose to our noses, for at one time this was a privy, to Romans, to medieval Londoners, who knew? Perhaps it contained Samuel Pepys’s shit or Messrs. Johnson and Boswell’s. It was said London was undergirded by abandoned tunnels and chambers; the anarchists had simply encountered one and put it to use aga
inst emergency. We were not alone, however, for then we heard the skittering or chittering or scrabbling or whatever word may be used to describe the sound of large numbers of rats. We had entered their kingdom, though the firelight drove them away from us, not from fear, I’m guessing, for what would five hundred such creatures fear from us, but because the blaze of light disturbed their delicate darkness-adjusted eyes.
I pointed to the end of the vault. “It’s a big crapper,” I said. “Romans and Normans must have shat here. I’m guessing that comes out in some abandoned building in Fairclough Street.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Professor, who had fully entered the place. “The colonel dips in the side door while the pony cart driver runs for aid on the street, and first a few, then a lot of, anarchists spill from the main door. He’s vanished in seconds, makes his way to the exit, and is out unseen very quickly. From here it’s but a ten-minute walk to Mitre Square, where he has ample time to track and do his horrors to Kate Eddowes. Yes, this is a brilliant discovery, Jeb, and it will do well to enhance the accuracy and drama of your piece.”
“Yes,” I said, “but here is my problem. This is the only secret passage in any of the murder sites. I have examined them exhaustively. Neither Buck’s Row nor Hanbury Street, certainly not Mitre Square with its several passageways out, and nothing in Miller’s Court could be construed as a secret passage. Only here. What is interesting is that, as you and I have just proved, there is no limiting provision for size in achieving passage. Full-grown men fit quite nicely. So the most elementary and the only empirical point of your profile—Jack’s slightness—is thereby disproved. That, furthermore, is the only empirical index to his identity. All the rest are cognitive, based upon inference of what he knew, what he learned, what his skills would be. But the whole theorem rests upon the conviction that his size was essential to the commission of the crimes. Yes, he was slight, but it had nothing to do with anything. A man my size or even yours could have escaped after killing all five without difficulty.”