“I thought she looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”
Ernie looked shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she was. A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”
Jack Be Quick
BARBARA PAUL
Barbara Paul (b. 1931) was born in Maysville, Kentucky, and educated at Bowling Green State University, University of Redlands, and the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her Ph.D. in Theater in 1969. Before becoming a full-time novelist, she worked as a college professor and drama director. Her first novel, An Exercise for Madmen (1978) was science fiction, but beginning with The Fourth Wall (1979), she would devote most of her energies to mysteries, often with a theatrical background. Among her works are a series of opera-related historical mysteries in which Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar figure as amateur sleuths (Farrar is the smart one, Caruso the Watson), beginning with A Cadenza for Caruso (1984), and a contemporary police procedural series about homicide detective Marian Larch, beginning with The Renewable Virgin (1984).
Paul’s work in the field shows an unusual variety and versatility, reflected in her gift for striking titles like Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (1980), Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (1981), He Huffed and He Puffed (1989), Good King Sauerkraut (1990), and Inlaws and Outlaws (1990). The whimsically titled But He Was Already Dead When I Got There (1986) suggests her pleasure in playing with genre conventions.
In “Jack Be Quick,” Paul suggests a solution to one of the most notorious unsolved cases in criminal history. Jack the Ripper, killer of prostitutes in 1880s London, operated in a time and place, sadly unlike here and now, where serial killers were rare. Non-fictional accounts of the case could fill a library, and fictional
treatments, direct and indirect, go back at least as far as Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger (1913). Paul’s approach to the mystery, in the 1991 anthology Solved, is among the most original, as well as being notable for a highly appropriate feminist slant.
30 September 1888, St. Jude’s Vicarage, Whitechapel.
He took two, this time, and within the same hour, Inspector Abberline told us. The first victim was found this morning less than an hour after midnight, in a small court off Berner Street. The second woman was killed in Mitre Square forty-five minutes later. He did his hideous deed and escaped undetected, as he always does. Inspector Abberline believes he was interrupted in Berner Street, because he did not…do to that woman what he’d done to his other victims. My husband threw the Inspector a warning look, not wanting me exposed to such distressing matters more than necessary. “But the second woman was severely mutilated,” Inspector Abberline concluded, offering no details. “He finished in Mitre Square what he’d begun in Berner Street.” My husband and I knew nothing of the double murder, not having left the vicarage all day. When no one appeared for morning services, Edward was angry. Customarily we can count on a Sunday congregation of a dozen or so; we should have suspected something was amiss. “Do you know who the women were, Inspector?” I asked. “One of them,” he said. “His Mitre Square victim was named Catherine Eddowes. We have yet to establish the identity of the Berner Street victim.” Inspector Abberline looked exhausted; I poured him another cup of tea. He undoubtedly would have preferred something stronger, but Edward permitted no spirits in the house, not even sherry. I waited until the Inspector had taken a sip before I put my next question to him. “Did he cut out Catherine Eddowes’s womb the way he did Annie Chapman’s?”
Edward looked shocked that I should know about that, but the police investigator was beyond shock. “Yes, Mrs. Wickham, he did. But this time he did not take it away with him.”
It was one of the many concerns that baffled and horrified me about the series of grisly murders haunting London. Annie Chapman’s disemboweled body had been found in Hanbury Street three weeks earlier; all the entrails had been piled above her shoulder except the womb. Why had he stolen her womb? “And the intestines?”
“Heaped over the left shoulder, as before.”
Edward cleared his throat. “This Eddowes woman…she was a prostitute!”
Inspector Abberline said she was. “And I have no doubt that the Berner Street victim will prove to have been on the game as well. That’s the only common ground among his victims—they were all prostitutes.”
“Evil combating evil,” Edward said with a shake of his head. “When will it end?”
Inspector Abberline put down his cup. “The end, alas, is not yet in sight. We are still conducting door-to-door searches, and the populace is beginning to panic. We have our hands full dispersing the mobs.”
“Mobs?” Edward asked. “Has there been trouble?”
“I regret to say there has. Everyone is so desperate to find someone to blame…” The Inspector allowed the unfinished sentence to linger a moment. “Earlier today a constable was chasing a petty thief through the streets, and someone who saw them called out, ‘It’s the Ripper!’ Several men joined in the chase, and then others, as the word spread that it was the Ripper the constable was pursuing. That mob was thirsting for blood—nothing less than a lynching would have satisfied them. The thief and the constable ended up barricading themselves in a building together until help could arrive.”
Edward shook his head sadly. “The world has gone mad.”
“It’s why I have come to you, Vicar,” Inspector Abberline said. “You can help calm them down. You could speak to them, persuade them to compose themselves. Your presence in the streets will offer a measure of reassurance.”
“Of course,” Edward said quickly. “Shall we leave now? I’ll get my coat.”
The Inspector turned to me. “Mrs. Wickham, thank you for the tea. Now we must be going.” I saw both men to the door.
The Inspector did not know he had interrupted a disagreement between my husband and me, one that was recurring with increasing frequency of late. But I had no wish to revive the dispute when Edward returned; the shadow of these two new murders lay like a shroud over all other concerns. I retired to my sewing closet, where I tried to calm my spirit through prayer. One could not think dispassionately of this unknown man wandering the streets of London’s East End, a man who hated women so profoundly that he cut away those parts of the bodies that proclaimed his victims to be female. I tried to pray for him, lost soul that he is; God forgive me, I could not.
1 October 1888, St. Jude’s Vicarage.
Early the next morning the fog lay so thick about the vicarage that the street gaslights were still on. They performed their usual efficient function of lighting the tops of the poles; looking down from our bedroom window, I could not see the street below.
Following our morning reading from the Scriptures, Edward called my attention to an additional passage. “Since you are aware of what the Ripper does to his victims, Beatrice, it will be to your benefit to hear this. Attend. ‘Let the breast be torn open and the heart and vitals be taken from hence and thrown over the shoulder.’”
A moment of nausea overtook me. “The same way Annie Chapman and the others were killed.”
“Exactly,” Edward said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “Those are Solomon’s words, ordering the execution of three murderers. I wonder if anyone has pointed this passage out to Inspector Abberline? It could be of assistance in ascertaining the rationale behind these murders, perhaps revealing something of the killer’s mental disposition…” He continued in this speculative vein for a while longer.
I was folding linen as I listened. When he paused for breath, I asked Edward about his chambray shirt. “I’ve not seen it these two weeks.”
“Eh? It will turn up. I’m certain you have put it away somewhere.”
I was equally certain I had not. Then, with some trepidation, I reintroduced the subject of our disagreement the night before. “Edward, would you be willing to reconsider your position concern
ing charitable donations? If parishioners can’t turn to their church for help—”
“Allow me to interrupt you, my dear,” he said. “I am convinced that suffering cannot be reduced by indiscriminately passing out money but only through the realistic appraisal of each man’s problems. So long as the lower classes depend upon charity to see them through hard times, they will never learn thrift and the most propitious manner of spending what money they have.”
Edward’s “realistic appraisal” of individual problems always ended the same way, with little lectures on how to economize. “But surely in cases of extreme hardship,” I said, “a small donation would not be detrimental to their future well-being.”
“Ah, but how are we to determine who are those in true need? They will tell any lie to get their hands on a few coins which they promptly spend on hard drink. And then they threaten us when those coins are not forthcoming! This is the legacy my predecessor at St. Jude’s has left us, this expectancy that the church owes them charity!”
That was true; the vicarage had been stoned more than once when Edward had turned petitioners away. “But the children,
Edward—surely we can help the children! They are not to blame for their parents’ wastrel ways.”
Edward sat down next to me and took my hand. “You have a soft heart and a generous nature, Beatrice, and I venerate those qualities in you. Your natural instinct for charity is one of your most admirable traits.” He smiled sadly. “Nevertheless, how will these poor, desperate creatures ever learn to care for their own children if we do it for them? And there is this. Has it not occurred to you that God may be testing us? How simple it would be, to hand out a few coins and convince ourselves we have done our Christian duty! No, Beatrice, God is asking more of us than that. We must hold firm in our resolve.”
I acquiesced, seeing no chance of prevailing against such unshakable certitude that God’s will was dictating our course of action. Furthermore, Edward Wickham was my husband and I owed him obedience, even when my heart was troubled and filled with uncertainty. It was his decision to make, not mine.
“Do not expect me until tea time,” Edward said as he rose and went to fetch his greatcoat. “Mr. Lusk has asked me to attend a meeting of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and I then have my regular calls to make. Best you not go out today, my dear, at least until Inspector Abberline has these riots under control.” Edward’s duties were keeping him away from the vicarage more and more. He sometimes would return in the early hours of the morning, melancholy and exhausted from trying to help a man find night work or from locating shelter for a homeless widow and her children. At times he seemed not to remember where he’d been; I was concerned for his health and his spirit.
The fog was beginning to lift by the time he departed, but I still could not see very far—except in my mind’s eye. If one were to proceed down Commercial Street and then follow Aldgate to Leadenhall and Cornhill on to the point where six roads meet at a statue of the Duke of Wellington, one would find onself in front of the imposing Royal Exchange, its rich interior murals and Turkish floor paving a proper setting for the transactions
undertaken there. Across Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, with its windowless lower stories, and the rocklike Stock Exchange both raise their impressive façades. Then one could turn to the opposite direction and behold several other banking establishments clustered around Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. It still dumbfounds me to realize that the wealth of the nation is concentrated there, in so small an area…all within walking distance of the worst slums in the nation.
Do wealthy bankers ever spare a thought for the appalling poverty of Whitechapel and Spitalfields? The people living within the boundaries of St. Jude’s parish are crowded like animals into a labyrinth of courts and alleys, none of which intersect major streets. The crumbling, hazardous buildings fronting the courts house complete families in each room, sometimes numbering as many as a dozen people; in such circumstances, incest is common…and, some say, inevitable. The buildings reek from the liquid sewage accumulated in the basements, while the courts themselves stink of garbage that attracts vermin, dogs, and other scavengers. Often one standing pipe in the courtyard serves as the sole source of water for all the inhabitants of three or four buildings, an outdoor pipe that freezes with unremitting regularity during the winter. Once Edward and I were called out in the middle of the night to succor a woman suffering from scarlet fever; we found her in a foul-smelling single room with three children and four pigs. Her husband, a cabman, had committed suicide the month before; and it wasn’t until we were leaving that we discovered one of the children had been lying there dead for thirteen days.
The common lodging houses are even worse—filthy and infested and reservoirs of disease. In such doss houses a bed can be rented for fourpence for the night, strangers often sharing a bed because neither has the full price alone. There is no such thing as privacy, since the beds are lined up in crowded rows in the manner of dormitories. Beds are rented indiscriminately to men and women alike; consequently many of the doss houses are
in truth brothels, and even those that are not have no compunction about renting a bed to a prostitute when she brings a paying customer with her. Inspector Abberline once told us the police estimate there are twelve hundred prostitutes in Whitechapel alone, fertile hunting grounds for the man who pleasures himself with the butchering of ladies of the night.
Ever since the Ripper began stalking the East End, Edward has been campaigning for more police to patrol the back alleys and for better street lighting. The problem is that Whitechapel is so poor it cannot afford the rates to pay for these needed improvements. If there is to be help, it must come from outside. Therefore I have undertaken a campaign of my own. Every day I write to philanthropists, charitable establishments, government officials. I petition every personage of authority and good will with whose name I am conversant, pleading the cause of the children of Whitechapel, especially those ragged, dirty street arabs who sleep wherever they can, eat whatever they can scavenge or steal, and perform every unspeakable act demanded of them in exchange for a coin they can call their own.
12 October 1888, Golden Lane Mortuary, City of London.
Today I did something I have never done before: I wilfully disobeyed my husband. Edward had forbidden me to attend the inquest of Catherine Eddowes, saying I should not expose myself to such unsavory disclosures as were bound to be made. Also, he said it was unseemly for the vicar’s wife to venture abroad unaccompanied, a dictum that impresses me as more appropriately belonging to another time and place. I waited until Edward left the vicarage and then hurried on my way. My path took me past one of the larger slaughterhouses in the area; with my handkerchief covering my mouth and nose to keep out the stench, I had to cross the road to avoid the blood and urine flooding the pavement. Once I had left Whitechapel, however, the way was unencumbered.
Outside the Golden Lane Mortuary I was pleased to encounter Inspector Abberline; he was surprised to see me there and immediately offered himself as my protector. “Is the Reverend Mr. Wickham not with you?”
“He has business in Shoreditch,” I answered truthfully, not adding that Edward found inquests distasteful and would not have attended in any event.
“This crowd could turn ugly, Mrs. Wickham,” Inspector Abberline said. “Let me see if I can obtain us two chairs near the door.”
That he did, with the result that I had to stretch in a most unladylike manner to see over other people’s heads. “Inspector,” I said, “have you learned the identity of the other woman who was killed the same night as Catherine Eddowes?”
“Yes, it was Elizabeth Stride—Long Liz, they called her. About forty-five years of age and homely as sin, if you’ll pardon my speaking ill of the dead. They were all unattractive, all the Ripper’s victims. One thing is certain, he didn’t choose them for their beauty.”
“Elizabeth Stride was a prostitute?”
“That she
was, Mrs. Wickham, I’m sorry to say. She had nine children somewhere, and a husband, until he could tolerate her drunkenness no longer and turned her out. A woman with a nice big family like that and a husband who supported them—what reasons could she have had to turn to drink?”
I could think of nine or ten. “What about Catherine Eddowes? Did she have children too?”
Inspector Abberline rubbed the side of his nose. “Well, she had a daughter, that much we know. We haven’t located her yet, though.”
The inquest was ready to begin. The small room was crowded, with observers standing along the walls and even outside in the passageway. The presiding coroner called the first witness, the police constable who found Catherine Eddowes’s body.
The remarkable point to emerge from the constable’s testimony was that his patrol took him through Mitre Square, where he’d found the body, every fourteen or fifteen minutes. The Ripper had only fifteen minutes to inflict so much damage? How swift he was, how sure of what he was doing!
It came out during the inquest that the Eddowes woman had been strangled before her killer had cut her throat, thus explaining why she had not cried out. In response to my whispered question, Inspector Abberline said yes, the other victims had also been strangled first. When the physicians present at the postmortem testified, they were agreed that the killer had sound anatomical knowledge but they were not in accord as to the extent of his actual skill in removing the organs. Their reports of what had been done to the body were disturbing; I grew slightly faint during the description of how the flaps of the abdomen had been peeled back to expose the intestines.
Inspector Abberline’s sworn statement was succinct and free of speculation; he testified as to the course of action pursued by the police following the discovery of the body. There were other witnesses, people who had encountered Catherine Eddowes on the night she was killed. At one time she had been seen speaking to a middle-aged man wearing a black coat of good quality which was now slightly shabby; it was the same description that had emerged during the investigation of one of the Ripper’s earlier murders. But at the end of it all we were no nearer to knowing the Ripper’s identity than ever; the verdict was “Willful murder by some person unknown.”