I Ripper Page 3

  THEN THE MAN—

  THEN THE BEAST—

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Henry.

  —THE BEAST RAISED HER SKIRTS AND USED HIS KNIFE TO MUTILATE HER ABDOMEN, OPENING ANOTHER LONG, DEEP, AND THIS TIME JAGGED CUT.

  “New graf,” said Henry.

  FINALLY, HE FINISHED HIS GRISLY NIGHT’S WORK WITH A SERIES OF RANDOM STAB WOUNDS ACROSS HER BELLY—

  “Can I say ‘belly?’ ” I asked. “It’s rather graphic.”

  “Leave it for now. I’ll check with T.P. It’s right on the line. The gals don’t have bellies or tits or arses in the Star. Maybe the Express, not the Star. But times are changing.”

  —AND HIPS.

  POLICE SAY THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED AT 3:40 A.M. BY CHARLES CROSS ON HIS WAY TO WORK AS HE WALKED DOWN BUCK’S ROW, WHERE HIS HOME—

  “’is ’ome,” joshed Henry, playing on the cockney aversion to H’s, and evincing the universal newspaper stricture that all reporters and editors are superior to the poor sots they quote or write for.

  —IS LOCATED.

  “IT TOOK SOME STRENGTH AND SKILL TO DO THIS TERRIBLE THING,” SAID METROPOLITAN POLICE SERGEANT JAMES ROSS.

  POLICE REMOVED THE BODY TO THE OLD MONTAGUE STREET MORTUARY, WHERE A SURGEON WILL FURTHER EXAMINE IT FOR CLUES. MEANWHILE, A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WOMAN’S FACE WILL BE TAKEN FOR CIRCULATION IN HOPES OF IDENTIFICATION.

  There was a last bit of business. Since my pseudonym, Horn, was affiliated with music, it occurred to Henry Bright that I should write crime under my own name. Gad, I didn’t want that, as I had aspirations of mingling with the quality and wanted no whiff of blood floating about my presence. So he said, “All right, then, lad, come up with something else. Dickens called himself Boz; certainly you can do better than that.”

  “I can,” I said, and reached into my past to something only my sister, Lucy, had called me, as her child’s tongue could not manage my initials and they had eroded into a single syllable. “Call me Jeb.”

  Sept. 5, 1888

  * * *

  Dear Mum,

  I know how you worry, so I thought I’d write and tell you that all is fine here, even if you never answer me, even if I never send it. I know how disappointed you are in me, at the low way I turned out, and I wish it had been different, but it ain’t, and there you have it.

  Anyhow, I didn’t know the girl that got cut. There’s a lot of us down here and our friends are usually in the same area, a block or so, and poor Polly was out east, near a mile. Never laid an eye on the poor thing. We’re all talking about it, and we all feel pretty safe down here. We’re always together, and as I gets it from the newspapers, poor Polly was all alone on a dark road and the fellow that done her just did it for her purse and the thrill it gave him, and now he’s gone and won’t be back again. They’ve increased the coppers everywhere because the newspapers have made such a big skunk about it, so all of us believe he’s long gone and won’t be coming back, and if he does, it won’t be this year or even the next.

  Other than the fright it give me at first, I am fine. I have so many things to say to you, I wish I talked and wrote better to get them all out. I know what upsets you and Da the most is the s-x. Really, that’s the smallest thing in my life. You get used to it early, and it comes to not mean nothing. It just happens, it’s over in a second, and you go on, it’s all forgotten.

  As for the blokes, you’d think I’d be down on them, but I’m not. Most seem like gentlemen. I’ve never been cuffed about, nor coshed, nor robbed. Nobody has ever forced himself onto me against my will. Even the coppers, at least the ones in uniform, are nice enough to us gals. They have no interest in hurting us or “punishing” us, we’re just something they get used to fast down here, and they don’t want no bother from us, only to get through the day like we do, and go on home to the missus.

  My problem ain’t never been the blokes, or the s-x they wants. Don’t all men want that? They’re going to get it one way or the other, is how I sees it. No, what my problem has been, ever since I were a little girl, is the demon gin. I do like my gin. I like my gin so much. All the girls down here drink it for the way it makes them feel and the happiness it brings. You and Da and Johnto never had no idea how young I was when I started it and how it explained all the trouble that I got into and why no matter how the nuns and priests talked to me and Da smacked me and you squashed me with that look you get when you’re disappointed—do I know that look!—it was always the gin that was behind it, and here I am all these years later, sometimes down and out, having lost everything, even a bed to sleep in, and all I think about is the gin.

  I call it my disease. I can’t do nothing without thinking about it, and when I have it, I am happy. My happiness comes out in my singing, which I love, which is my way of telling the world that don’t otherwise notice I exist. Sometimes, too, I know, I can get pretty uppity on gin. I won’t let nobody tell me what to do when I am fortified up, because it don’t seem nobody knows any better than me, that’s how strong and good I feel.

  I will tell you, Mum, they’ll never take the gin away. If reformers close the shops and burn down the gin factories, someone’ll figure out how to do it under the tracks or in a cellar nobody don’t know about, and it’ll be back on the streets in a day and I’ll be first in line.

  Mum, I know you don’t want to hear that, but I have to tell it anyway, because it’s the truth. Mum, I miss you so much and remember such good times and how tender you always was with me before the sickness. I remember Johnto and Paul and the others and how happy we all was. I wished it had never changed, but it did and we went where we did and done what we done.

  I love you, Mum.

  Your daughter

  Mairsian

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Diary

  September 5, 1888

  * * *

  As I had anticipated, the excess butchery of my method, satisfying though it might be to mind and soul in and of itself, had an electric effect on London journalism. It was the new rag, the Star, that took up the clarion most energetically. It is run, so it is said, by an Irishman; therefore all is understandable by virtue of the cruder Irish temperament, their propensity for the bottle, their impulsiveness and natural tendencies to violence, all of which are manifest in the Star.

  MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN, it announced in a headline smeared across leader boards all throughout London. The newsboys bustled about, screeching, “Mad butcher, mad butcher, mad butcher!” You could not escape these tribes of annoying urchins, noses all runny, pouty faces red, the glee of greed in their beaming little rat eyes. I’m betting the dim, dull shopkeeps and salesclerks of the town couldn’t resist such titillation. More deliciously yet, an artist had provided a detailed drawing of the poor woman’s major wounds, by my memory quite accurately evoked. There, in all their glory, were the two fatal cuts, deep and profound, that settled the issue. And, flirting with the very limits of propriety, there was the abdominal excursion, with its sloppy jag halfway down as it veered to center.

  * * *

  A debate soon developed in the rags as the week wore on. This is excellent. Now, five days after the event, they have yet to put this bone down. It seems to be breaking along evening and morning lines. The Star and the Pall Mall Gazette, our leading afternoon exponents, are purveyors of the single-killer theory. Can you see why? It’s obvious. Unlike their morning brethren, whose product arrives by discreet carrier, the unruly afternoon boyos must sell their wares to walkers-by, people headed to the train stations or coming off shift from some coal-powered hellhouse or waiting to get aboard the horse trams or looking to amuse and edify themselves as they are trotted crosstown in a cabriolet. Thus, the fare offered them will be more salacious, more provocative, more tainted with the odor of sex, blood, and ruin. Their baser natures must be appeased. At the same time, at the end of their journey home, the dirty rag itself, sucked dry of the lubricious, can be stuffed in a refuse can, and our hero may enter his home under the fraud of being mo
rally sacrosanct, ready to speak the blessing before the dinner of meat and potatoes that his spouse has so dutifully and lovingly prepared.

  The morning papers, by contrast, do go into the home, to be devoured along with breakfast. They are limited in the extent of the gore and nastiness they can allow; it is of significantly lesser denomination than among their opponents. No filth can be allowed to besmirch the purity of the hearthside and the little nippers frolicking there before being shipped off at age seven to a decade of buggery and horsewhipping, plus proficiency in Greek. The same rags are also more likely read by women, whose delicacy in most cases cannot stand exposure to the rawness of life and death.

  The morning fellows—the Times, the Mail, the Sun, the Standard, all the others—backed the gang theory. It held, quite absurdly, that possibly the lady, in her peregrinations for customers, had bumbled into a robbery by a set of hooligans and, as a witness, had to be silenced. Had the poor girl failed to pay up or witnessed a robbery? Was it part of some initiation rite by which a novice proved himself manly enough? The gang theory was meekly buttressed by the lack of blood along the street, held to be evidence that she had been killed elsewhere and deposited along Buck’s Row. Obviously, the authors of this nonsense had not looked at the soppage in her knickers, which had absorbed all those pints of the vital life fluid.

  The Star led the pack, and the Gazette was not far behind in pursuing the mad-butcher thematic. It was a newsstand natural. It played brilliantly on primordial fears of lurkers with knives, and what evil simmered and boiled down dark city alleys or in precincts where whores sold their bodies to the night. There was probably a sense of divine punishment, unstated because there was no need to state it. The victim was beyond the pale of Queen Victoria’s formal, dark-garbed, earnest empire of rectitude, where the strength of conformity was just as strong on the home island as a bayonet’s steel in the outer rings of our Christian conquest of the world.

  You could see that pattern play out in the fate of the poor woman whose fate it was to encounter the butcher’s Sheffield. It turned out, courtesy of someone named Jeb on the Star who was running this story as if his life depended on it, that the poor dear’s name was Mary Ann Nichols, called Polly by all who knew and used her. She was exactly as expected, the dreg of a system that had no place for her, except to spread and pump her cunny in an alley, drop off a thruppence, and forget all about it in the next few seconds.

  She is exactly what our system must necessarily produce. A disposable woman. If she does not have the sponsorship of a male, there is nothing for her except the meanest of charity interspersed with the whore’s plight. Darwin’s absolutism becomes the ruling principle of her existence: She develops cunning, deceit, cleverness as her only means of survival, her only goal the thruppence that will get her the day’s glass of gin. She becomes horrid and disgusting, blackened by the streets, rimmed with grime, her teeth rotting, her hair a scabrous mess, her body flaccid and fallen, her language and discourse degraded, and thus we are able to dismiss her from our view without qualm. She is sewage. She exists only for those randy men in the grip of sex fever, and when they have spent their pence and jizz, off they go. Any sane system would spare provision for the wretched creature and possibly save her from her wretchedness. Possibly men will invent it someday—but I doubt it.

  The Star brought this tragic nonentity to banal life. No one read of it with more fascination than I. The method of identity: The police noted a laundry marker on one of her underclothes and, in a bit of time, found the laundry, displayed the morgue picture, and identified her. So Jeb, with that advantage, was able to track her last day’s odyssey toward a pool of blood in Buck’s Row. She was forty-three, he tells us, mother of five children. Her character flaw, for which God above and I below exacted our justice, was alcohol. It destroyed her life and, I suppose, killed her. After twenty-four years of marriage to a locksmith, as Jeb told the tale, her husband, finding her frequently inebriated, kicked her out. A divorce followed. There was no place to go but down and no place to land but the bottom. Her shabby last few years were mainly about raising enough money per diem for that glass of blissful gin or several, plus a grim bed in a doss house, of the many that festered in Whitechapel for her and others of the ilk.

  * * *

  Jeb constructed a template of her last hours. The details the plucky bastard unearthed were quite interesting. At twelve thirty A.M. she left a public house called the Frying Pan (who could make up such!) and shortly thereafter returned to her lodging house, where it turned out she hadn’t the cash to spend the night. Out she went. She met a friend and they had a nice chat, even if Polly was quite drunk, and Polly told the friend that she’d had her doss money three times that day but always drank it through, but she claimed that she’d get it again and everything would be all right. Then Polly walked on down Whitechapel Road and, when she saw a potential tryster following her, diverted to the far darker Buck’s Row to earn that doss fee. We know what happened next, don’t we?

  Jeb’s account was also notable for the narrative it gave of police movement, and it contained a warning that I took seriously. It seemed that minutes before the dispatch of Polly, two constables on their patrol entered and coursed Buck’s Row from opposite directions. I saw neither; obviously, neither saw me. Yet it is in the record, Constable Thain being the first in one direction, then Sergeant Kerby in the other. Within minutes of my departure, first along came Cross, then a Constable Neill who made the second discovery (after Cross) and signaled to Thain, turning up again like a bad penny. Finally, a Constable Mizen arrived, he being the copper Cross alerted.

  Good Lord, it was like Victoria Station when the express from Manchester arrives! All those men on that black, bleak little street in the space of twenty minutes or so, during which a dastardly deed was done unseen. How close I came! How lucky I was! How the whimsies favored my enterprise!

  It taught me an important lesson. Luck would not always be my companion, so I must plan more carefully. I must choose the spot, not the woman, henceforth, based on the patrol patterns of the constables, thereby decreasing the chances of discovery in flagrante. I must examine the spot for escape routes so that I would not hesitate in disarray if noted, but could vanish abruptly. I also must locate less well-traveled areas of Whitechapel than the one I had so foolishly chosen, that close to a main thoroughfare lit brightly by gas illumination and the glare of grog houses and constable’s lanterns.

  This was good to know, as certain auspicious signs suggested that I must strike again, soon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jeb’s Memoir

  Success is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

  I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

  Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

  Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and -girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.
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  “Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads—if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”

  “He’s right. Readers need to attach a human identity to whoever’s doing the talking. It makes the thing have a complete sense to it,” said Mr. O’Connor.

  “If you get the name, you’ll be way ahead. Also, cultivate that copper. The bastard detectives will play awesome, as if they’re university men among the pig farmers, but they probably don’t know half as much as the sharp-eyed street constable. Maybe your friend has resentments against them from slights delivered with which you can pry information out of him. Envy is the juice in which the world bubbles, with dashes of malice tossed in to bring the human stew to a delicious boil.”

  I did all of that, napping at the paper. It worked out surprisingly well. Indeed, Sergeant Ross gave me the name out of thanks for the light the Star’s original story had shone on him, more than the poor man had ever got in his life, after years of dedicated work. Most important to him, it turned out, was how his mention had buzzed off the gentlemen from the Metropolitan Police Bethel Green J Division, CID, who had been handed the investigation.

  Via the Records Department, I got to poor Polly’s husband first, and even broke the news to him. If I’d had a shred of human mercy left, I might have allowed the fellow a moment of repose after hearing that the woman he once loved, the woman who gave him five children, made his food, and gave him her body for twenty-six years before she lost her soul to demon gin, was now dead horribly in the gutter, all cut and minced. Quite the opposite: Knowing him to be vulnerable, I pressed him and got good details. My ambition was as fully sized as any addiction to opium by now. It had been a bit of time since he’d seen her, but through his eyes, I was at least able to give the poor old girl some humanity. That’s the rub of the newspaper game, I realized. It helps me, it does indeed, but it helps you, too, in the long run, though the gain may be a bit late to play out.