And, if you were interested, there was so much of the rest of London standing today that had stood in the winds of the late nineteenth century. It just wasn’t in the City.
Could Jack the Ripper have fled Whitechapel eventually and disappeared into another neighborhood? Even, why not, to this street in bourgeois leafy Hampstead?
He (the great unknown he), the murderer of prostitutes, named the Ripper for his tendency to claw out their throats and prevent them from screaming, he could have struggled up this street as she was now doing. In his day it would have been sluiced with carriage ruts, a mess in this weather; filthy; horse manure softening and liquefying and running downhill in this rain as loads of red brick were trundled up from the kiln. The rise of a pink coral reef in the fog of coal-burning London . . . Had the exteriors of the buildings already been finished by the time Jack the Ripper appeared in the street? Were the final details of interior lath work, plasterwork, woodwork, the plumbing for gas lighting still being fussed over, when Jack the Ripper reached the house that would later be number sixty-two, and could, or would, go no farther?
“You’re stuck on this,” he said, “I can see it on your face; you’re drunk on it. The shame of it all! Can’t you write something dim and domestic like Anita Brookner, some damp-browed seamstress too educated for her world? You’d like to wield bloody knives, but I tell you, you’re not constitutionally suited for it.”
“Don’t tell me what my constitution suits me for,” she said. “We all succumb to our contagion of choice. The question is, what if Jack the Ripper came to his senses and fled the scene of his crimes? What if he tried to set himself up as a laborer in outlying Hampstead Village? Or, of course, he could have taken a position as a butcher’s assistant. Only he falls prey to the spell of some gamine young Hampstead woman? Perhaps an Irish maid, recently engaged to swell the staff of the new household? Maybe he makes a delivery here and catches sight of a pretty redheaded maid down there in that kitchen. Look how public the windows are! You can see three-quarters of the room, more if you stoop down and look. Maybe, having evacuated himself from the nightmare zone of Whitechapel, scene of his frenzies, maybe he doesn’t even remember himself as Jack the Ripper. Maybe he reads about it in the used newspapers that he wraps meat in and he doesn’t recognize himself. Split-personality type. But there’s something about the pretty chin, the glimpse of stockinged ankle as a kitchen maid teeters to collect a basin from a high shelf. He slides the choice cut of lamb from side to side, and its blood gums through the paper and smears his apron.”
“We’ll have some supper and we can rent Dressed to Kill or Psycho if you like,” he said. “I can tell you’re way beyond reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs by now.”
She laughed. “Well, you know how much has been made out of the mystery of his disappearance. You know better than I. At one point they proposed that he was a syphilitic member of the royal family. He was a Mason, a surgeon, an insurrectionist. All this excites the fancy, as they say.”
“I can see your fancy is excited.”
“Don’t go on yet. I want to look in that kitchen window and imagine what he might have seen.”
“You’re looking for some leggy copper-tressed maid for a serial murderer to sink his meat cleaver into?”
She murmured, “Why, if a prostitute were unable to defend herself, would a kitchen maid in a middle-class house do better?”
“You’ve said the prostitutes were mostly drunk,” he answered. “Besides, kitchen maids work with cooks, and cooks know cleavers pretty well themselves. But I like your plot better when the man in the household comes home and finds some thug messing with his child bride or his nubile teenage daughter or his parlor maid. The good paterfamilias kills him and bricks his body up in the chimney still under construction. Up there in the maid’s quarters. Pater hides the evidence of the murder, to avoid the scandal and shame. The delicate ladies, after all! What do you think? And that’s why no one could ever find Jack the Ripper to arrest him. The son of a bitch was done in himself.”
“The story would go better, John,” she said, “if the intended victim could do the murder.”
“Too politically correct. Though your American readers would lap it up, no doubt.”
“Her father or beau could still dispose of the body to protect her honor and to shield her from prison.”
“You are incorrigible,” he said.
“I’m entirely corrigible,” she answered. “I think. Does that mean corruptible?”
“I know you’re corruptible. Corrigible means correctable. Shall we get out of this vile weather and find a scotch and soda somewhere?”
They moved past the house, laughing, Gothic fancy serving as a rather hearty appetizer.
She felt herself in the muzzy grip of too much wine at lunch. As she approached the front door of Rudge House with her key in her hand, the door opened of its own accord. Or rather, she saw, of the accord of Mrs. Maddingly, who stood there dressed in a shapeless coat the color of beef gravy. “Ooh, a gale,” said the old woman appreciatively. “I’m off to the post office to get my pension. You haven’t seen Nightshade I take it?”
“A cat? One of your cats? I have not.”
“She’ll turn up, or he will; I forget which it is, not that it matters to me, I’m not a cat,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “In fact, it didn’t matter to me as a human, either, except when dear Alan was interested, and he was the only one who ever was. You haven’t seen him either?”
“Your dead husband?”
“The same.”
With some irritation Winnie said, “Was I expected to?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Maddingly, passing her in disgust. “I meant to say did you ever see him? I can’t remember if you and I were friends back then. How do you expect me to remember trivial matters like that?”
“I’m sorry,” said Winnie. “I’m just—no, I never had the pleasure.”
“And you never will now,” said Mrs. Maddingly in a smart tone. She glided past and hopped off the front step, and pattered down the pavement on unsure feet. Maybe she was drunk, thought Winnie; maybe that was what gave her the courage to venture out. She watched the old woman test the pavement, as if expecting it to give way. Her flyaway hair was a corona of white; she had the look of an old ewe too long unshorn.
Winnie pocketed the keys and went on up, pausing only to remove her muddy shoes and leave them on the drop cloths the fellows had laid out to collect their own boots and umbrellas. “Well?” she asked the hedgehog. “Any word from Interpol or Scotland Yard while I’ve been gone?” The hedgehog squatted on the plastic and again refused to comment. “Hello, hello,” said Winnie, entering the flat, willing John to have mercy and show up. “John?” she said in a voice of hopeful irritation.
Except that the smell had abated, the place was no different, unless it could be said that a stalemate can grow staler. She could feel rather than hear the presence of skeptical Jenkins and slight-minded Mac there, not working. She wasn’t surprised to find them more or less as they’d been several hours earlier. “Good going, fellows. You’ve made no progress at all?” Her words came out tarter than she meant them.
“We were kept—” said Mac, and stopped.
“We’re dying to learn what you’ve turned up in your walkabout,” said Jenkins. He made a gesture, as if to touch the brim of an imaginary cap. His deference was mocking. She regretted her temper, its small stings and seizures, and she amended herself in that room: drew a breath, crossed her hands on her waistline like a figure from an older generation. She tried to smile.
“You’ve been considering the matter still,” she said.
“The noise is louder,” said Mac, and crossed himself. “Mother of Christ.”
“The wind is picking up too,” said Winnie. “Maybe there’s a break in the flue above, a chink in the plaster somewhere.” Bizarre, that it should be left to her to be the rationalist in the room. She who for several years had drawn sound five-figure royalty checks for The Dark
Side of the Zodiac. John would have enjoyed that irony, were he around. “Have you considered that?” she said. “The chimney as a kind of huge pipe organ, coughing?”
“You’ve a daycent portion of comment,” said Mac, “for someone who just walks in without warning—”
“Don’t, Mac, just stow it,” said the older man, “it does no good.” Something passed between them, but Winnie couldn’t tell what it was. Dread, superstition, suspicion of some sort. Of her?
“A message come in on the answerphone,” said Jenkins, jerking a finger toward it.
“John,” she said with relief, “well, it’s about time.”
“A man,” said Jenkins. “We heard the voice, but it wasn’t for us.”
“We listened by to hear if it was you ringing us,” said Mac, as if put out that she hadn’t called in with her findings.
She went to the machine and pressed Play.
She thought at first that it was John. No. Adrian Moscou again. “. . . you said don’t call but you left your number so I thought I would. London’s a long way to go to avoid our dinner invitation. But you’ve got a rain check. So give a call when you get back. I’m still wearing hairshirts for blowing the whistle about your being a writer—I may have to kill myself if I don’t hear from you. Besides, Geoff wants to push ahead in our application, but I’m more Capricorn and skeptical, so we wanted to hear your impressions of the child merchants of Forever Families. We feel somewhat—uh—marginalized in that crowd. Anyway, we like your books, or my students do anyway, so there might be—” The tape cut off.
She was tired of not getting where she wanted, of not being able to flee what she’d rejected. “Give me the damn crowbar, the adze, whatever it is,” she said, pacing into the kitchen. “If you won’t do the job John hired you for, I will.” She picked up an L-shaped lever with a wedged tip. She approached the boards of the newly exposed wall and ran one hand over them. The fellows must have been working this already; she could easily nudge the pronged edge around the nailhead she’d found. “Is this the idea?” she said, and put her weight on the implement.
The nail allowed itself to be worked out to a distance of two inches or so. “Hard work,” she said icily. She couldn’t loosen it farther so she replaced her tool around a lower nail, in line, and did the same. Again it stopped at a certain distance. “These nails have clawed points or phalanges back there?” she asked. “Or bolted tips, somehow? Well, we ought to be able to work this board away with our fingers, if we all put our backs into it, and then yank it off, shouldn’t we? Come on, something, anything.”
“She’d charm the Y-fronts off Jaysus himself,” said Mac. “The noise is stopped. What’s she done?”
It was true, the pounding was gone, but the silence itself was eerie, like the running down of a clock timing something urgent.
“I probably just let a little air into the space,” she said, getting to work on the third nailhead. “Now that I’ve started, are you going to take over? I’ve got some business in the City. . . .”
But when Jenkins came forward to take the crowbar, the rapping began again. Fiercely, less mechanically, more like the scrabbling of a trapped beast. Mac said, “Bloody hell!” and Jenkins flinched and retreated.
“Ah, the blood pressure,” said Jenkins, “and me just run through the last of the tablets.”
They all backed up and Winnie laid the crowbar on the floor. She said, “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”
“What the fuck?” said Mac.
“Dr. Seuss,” she answered.
“We’ll be needing some doctor or other,” said Mac. “Dr. Freud. Or maybe Dr. Kevorkian.”
Winnie’s voice was softer than she’d have liked. “It’s just annoying. How can we be spooked by redecorating? The kitchen that rejected new fixtures? What does it want?”
“Holy shite,” said Mac.
The nails, one by one, began to retract into the walls, like a cat sheathing its claws.
It was like trick photography, like watching a video in rewind. Cool and constant. Time in reverse, time broken. Winnie felt her grasp of things shudder, her thoughts wheel out, seeking for a scrabble hold elsewhere, in a world more obedient than the aberrations on display at this hobbled moment. Somewhere else, children on playgrounds were quietly ganging up on the unpopular isolate. Junior varsity teams were suiting up for a scrimmage. Middle-management types were plotting office putsches over the watercooler. Some bored child was tossing a book of Winnie’s on the floor. Some mother frantic for a cup of Tension Tamer tea was hacking through the cellophane wrapping with a meat cleaver. Everywhere else, furnaces were firing up, trucks were backing up, computers were booting up, things were going forward, except here, where the nails were retreating.
In a moment there was no sign of Winnie’s efforts, and the flat had gone silent again.
“A whole week of this?” she said.
“No,” said Jenkins, “we haven’t been able to get as close as you just did. Nerves.”
She put her weight on her heels, her back against the kitchen cabinets. “You’d better tell me everything,” she said. “You’d better just start at the top. Where are you guys from? Have you done work for John before? What’s the first thing you noticed that was strange?”
They didn’t speak. “Why would you not trust me?” she said. “You just better,” she added.
“I’m from Raheny, in Dublin,” said Mac after a minute. “And here four years and some, staying with mates in Kilburn, off Mill Lane. Been at this sort of thing since weekend jobs with my da. Five, six years now. Never seen the likes of this.”
“Have you got a real name, Mac?”
“Mac’s good enough for you if it’s good enough for me,” he said. He had the look of a ferret with mumps, his narrow elegant nose blooming out of a face raw with the last of adolescent acne. “I’ve been with himself the past two years.” He nodded sullenly to his partner.
“Colum Jenkins,” said the older man, his hand on his left shoulder, rubbing it. “Building’s been my trade the past dozen years, working now for myself, previously on a maintenance staff in a clinic in Birmingham. And I think my domestic arrangements are none of your concern. I did some work for a friend of Mr. Comestor’s and was recommended; Mr. C rang me a month ago or so. I came out to look at the job, deliver an estimate, collect my deposit. The usual. Mr. C was a pleasant enough chap, a bit distracted, you might say—”
“Distracted? How?”
“Oh, Monday morning we arrived, lots of to-ing and fro-ing on the phone. Some buyers interested in the flat below came pounding on his door to ask him some questions about the neighborhood. That sort of thing, don’t you know. He didn’t look like a man who stayed in one place with a newspaper for very long, did he, Mac? So when we arrived back on Tuesday and he wasn’t here, we weren’t so very surprised. We thought he’d be back in a moment, or maybe I’d just misunderstood. That was the day the nasty weather began. I left a note asking his permission to do the bathroom first. I didn’t care to risk breaking through to a chimney stack whose shaft could well have shifted over time, allowing in the rain, leaving us dealing with the elements. But Mr. C left no written reply on Wednesday morning to answer my proposal. He just disappeared. So we spread out the dust sheets, put our wet things to dry, and got to work, or thought we would.”
“So it’s been rainy weather all week?”
“Had to set out the oilcloth in the hall the first morning he was gone, Tuesday, it was, to drop our wellies on. We’ve not had to pick it up yet. Very English weather.”
They were all skirting the imponderable: that some thing or other had pulled the nails back into the wood so efficiently that the nailheads were once again flush. It was too strange, like biting into an apple and tasting a mouthful of cauliflower.
“Why didn’t you just say, ‘Oh, the hell with this,’ and take off?” she asked.
Mac looked as if he’d made that very remark to Jenkins repeatedl
y over the past four days. “It’s bad doings, and worse to come,” said Mac.
Jenkins sighed. “Mac is spooked if a mouse runs across his path, thinking it is the devil’s agent. But though I don’t fathom it and I don’t like it, I’m ashamed to be scared of it. And I don’t want to leave it till Mr. C comes home. I’ve a reputation, and a good one, the which I worked hard enough to get. And we don’t know where Mr. C is.”
“There must be a missing persons bureau at the police station,” said Winnie. “Why not call?”
“You ring, give your name, and tell some authority that you’re scared of your assignment?” said Jenkins. “Go ahead, try it.”
“You’re not telling it all,” said Mac. “He isn’t,” he said to Winnie.
“What’s he leaving out?”
“You mind your tongue,” began Jenkins, but Mac said stoutly, nearly in a shout, “This is a fecking waste of time. And there’s naught to it anyway, so just belt up.” He turned to Winnie and continued. “Wednesday we just stood around some, joking about it, trying to show we weren’t pissing ourselves with fright. Then yesterday even in the rain we thought we’d get up on the roof and look down, try to find a hole from above and block it. If it was a suction thing, a dark wind howling down the bones of this house, well, we’d clog its arteries and give it a stroke. Give the whole house a huge shake. A thrombosis.”
“Please,” said Jenkins, “my own heart is listening. Don’t give it notions.”
“So we did,” said Mac. “There’s no roof access from this flat right now; that’s what your friend Mr. C wants to improve by this rehab. We had to get the ladder out the study window, up in what you call the new house part. We had to steady one end on the window ledge and drop the other onto the pitched roof of the house next door to that, across the yard below. Not to cross to that house but just to have someplace to stand and get our balance so we could turn and begin to scrabble up the slope of the roof over the study, and then cross to where it joins the valley gutter of the older house—Rudge House as you have it—at the chimney stack.”