All they were good for were as patches on existing clothing, or maybe as a very thin scarf. So, I’d give them as gifts sometimes.
Or, you know, in a trade for services rendered.
My best friend at the time was a man named Herman. He had the same problem with my frequenting the local prostitutes as most people have when one says, I spend a lot of time with prostitutes, except he threw in a lot more bigotry.
“It’s…well, it turns my stomach, if you want the God’s truth,” he said one day. We were at a pub in a much nicer part of town at the time. “I don’t know how you can do it. I don’t know why, moreover.”
“You don’t know why?” I said. “You’re familiar with the mechanics of the act, I trust.”
“That isn’t what I mean. Honestly, Jack, I would be less appalled if you were putting it to a farm animal.”
So, here’s an uncomfortable detail. The name I was going by at the time was Jack, which was a really unfortunate coincidence.
“You’re exaggerating,” I said.
“Not in the slightest.”
“Exaggeration is in your national character, sir. I daresay it’s your distinguishing characteristic.”
“Nonsense!”
Herman was an American, which was one of the reasons I’d decided to make him a friend, because he was one of the first ones I’d ever met. He said he was from New Hampshire—which I learned was in New England, leaving me to wonder if everything in the United States was established as a form of envy for all things Britain, going according to how they named their locations.
I was, of course, around for the American Revolution, but that only means that I happened to be alive when it was going on. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t in England. I also wasn’t in France. I actually can’t remember where I was, but it wasn’t in one of those three places.
Probably, I was drinking.
I recall hearing later that ‘the colonies’ had revolted and it was a big deal, but honestly I may not have even known which colony they were talking about. Europe had a fair number of them, and they revolted semi-regularly.
I did eventually work out that the American colonies were no longer a part of the British empire and had decided to become their own nation, and I remember thinking that was sort of cute and endearing, but that was probably the extent of my opinion on the whole thing for a decent amount of time.
Herman was a medical doctor studying overseas on what I gleaned was his family’s fortune rather than an official exchange program of some kind. He told me his work involved studying patients at St. Mary’s Bethlehem Hospital, and I had no reason to question that, because I didn’t care for doctors all that much and so was trying not to listen about his work, as I didn’t want those details to result in my disliking him.
(Side note: you’ve probably heard of St. Mary’s before, only referred to as Bedlam, which was its nickname at the time. You would be correct to infer that bad things happened there, given a common-use noun came out of the place’s nickname.)
The larger point was that when you worked in a place like St. Mary’s, you tended more often than not to deal with the poor, and the poor more often than not (for this particular period in London’s history) were Irish.
So, what I was getting from him was that he didn’t think all that highly of his patients. I can’t say this was something I found surprising. Again, I’m not a fan of doctors.
“Here,” Herman said, pulling a newspaper from his valise and slapping it on the table. “Proof of their savagery, as if any were needed.”
My memory of the period isn’t stellar, but I think this conversation took place at the beginning of October. The papers were calling him Jack the Ripper by then, and there had been four bodies.
“That only proves someone’s killing them. Unless you know the killer, and can vouch for this Irishness, I say it goes too far to argue that they do this to themselves. Any man could walk those streets at night and do those things.”
“Any man?”
He smiled gently. Herman had a round face and an enormous mustache that obscured a portion of his mouth. It was the style at the time, but one I couldn’t abide; every time I wore my facial hair that long it ended up in my beer. It was, anyway, a trustworthy kind of face. I imagined that made him a good doctor, regardless of what he thought of his patient’s lineage.
“I’ll amend,” I said. “Any man could walk those streets at night. Only one could do those things to these women.”
“Ah, I like this direction.”
He held his mug up to get the attention of the keep, who refilled the draught. For the time, he was something of a lightweight, as this was only his second stein. I was on my fifth.
“I think, Jack, that I prefer your initial overestimation to your correction,” he said. “Any man could, and quite a few are inclined. This fellow, your namesake… not only is he not unusual, he’s not even particularly exceptional.”
“The police would disagree.”
“They are also not particularly exceptional. But look: this man—and surely, it’s a man who does this—wants to cut up women, and so he does. Bully for him. Only he does it all wrong.”
When Herman questioned whether or not we spoke of a man, my inclination wasn’t to imagine instead that it was a woman; it was to think of other species that might do this sort of thing to a person.
I couldn’t think of any. It wasn’t that this kind of predation never turned up in other creatures—demons, for example, are notoriously bloodthirsty—just that the killer’s particular methodology seemed uniquely human.
I took another look at the tabloid page, which included a gruesome description of the state of one of the victims. If I have the date right, this was shortly after the ‘double incident’ in which two women were killed on the same night, so we wouldn’t have suffered from a lack of detail.
“As I’m not sure of his intent, I can’t say whether he does what he does correctly or well,” I said. “Perhaps this is going exactly as planned.”
“I’m assuming his goal is to cut up women,” Herman said, “and he’s doing it poorly.”
“His surgeries appear quite extensive, and the deaths are entirely irreversible. If he means to kill and also to dissect… again, I fail to see how he does a poor job of this.”
“Obviously, he does it poorly because we know he’s doing it.”
“I see. And if he were better—”
“If he were better at it, these women would have simply disappeared.”
I looked down at the story again, and realized I was looking at the description of someone I knew.
“…all that difficult,” Herman was saying. Something about how easy it was to dispose of a body; I wasn’t paying attention.
“I know her,” I said.
“What, really? One of the victims?”
“Kate, yes. Catherine. She was more of a Kate than a Catherine.”
He snatched the paper from the table to re-read the section on the death of Catherine Eddowes.
“Oh, I see how you could have known her,” he said. “Were you a regular?”
“I didn’t know her like that. We shared an interest in a local establishment.”
This was true but also not entirely accurate. I recalled negotiating a price with her once, but we either never arrived at an agreement or I forgot to counter-offer or something.
The establishment was the Ten Bells Pub, a much rowdier spot than the one I was sharing with Herman. I doubted it was the kind of place he’d have enjoyed, but it was one of my favorite spots in the city.
“Well then, it sounds as if you’d make a fine suspect,” Herman said.
“Stop that.”
“I mean it! You knew one of the victims, you spend plenty of time in the neighborhood, and best of all, your name is already Jack. I wager that’s all the CID would need to hear.”
I laughed, but he was actually right, and that was a problem.
Things have gotten a whole lot worse sinc
e 1888, but even back then my background wasn’t the kind that stood up to extensive scrutiny. I was fortunate in that I dressed and acted like a gentleman, which pretty effectively insulated me from a lot of attention I might otherwise draw, but that was only true as long as the police continued to assume the killer was a low person. Already, news reports had begun to suggest that “Jack” was clean and well-dressed, and a member of the upper class.
Incidentally, this was how murder investigations used to go. The people who committed murder were, of course, uneducated drunk immigrants from the worst part of town—how could they not be!—so that was where the police started. It didn’t matter if there was no proof that the crime was committed by a person matching this description: some people were just expected to be murderers.
I had cover, then, because I didn’t look or act like that kind of fellow, and I was wealthy enough and had the right kind of manners to indicate a high-class upbringing.
But only for a while.
It was obvious even from a relatively safe remove that the frenzy surrounding the killings could easily end with someone getting railroaded for the murders, despite a lack of real evidence. (Or so I thought at the time. Obviously, nobody was ultimately charged for the crimes, which is both a testament to the honesty of the police force, for needing real proof, and a criticism of them, for never having found that proof.) For someone like me, getting out of that kind of situation would require friends in high places. I had a few, but I didn’t think they were connected enough to help me out of that particular hypothetical jam. Nobody close to the crown, certainly. And it didn’t matter how long I’d been alive up to that point; being hanged by the neck would be just as effective on me as on anybody.
All of that ran through my head as soon as Herman suggested I’d make a good suspect. And I wasn’t nearly sober enough to convince myself it was just paranoia.
“Oh! My goodness!” Herman exclaimed. “You should see your face! I’m sorry, Jackie, I was only having you on. There are a legion of men in this city who would make a more likely suspect, myself included!”
“It’s all right,” I said, “I’m only wondering if I should verify my whereabouts during the killings, just in case.”
“Stop. I know you, now you’re going to dwell on it all night. Forget I posed the notion. If you’re really concerned, I’m sure I could dig up an adequate suspect from the depths of Bedlam to take your place. The police would no doubt be happy to put a lunatic down for it, and the right lunatic might like it as well.”
“That would be splendid, right up until the real killer does another girl.”
“Nonsense. They’ll just say it was another killer altogether, and if there are a few more after that, I’ll kick another lunatic to them. We could empty Bedlam and Whitechapel at the same time.”
“You know Herman,” I said, polishing off my ale, “I can’t believe it took this long to realize exactly how unsettling your sense of humor is.”
He laughed.
“It’s thanks to my grim side that we’re friends in the first place, Jack. You have one too, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“Call the inspector, boys, I’ve got Jack right here.”
A pair of large hands clamped down on my shoulders a great deal more tightly than was really justified, given the owner of those hands was only joking. But Rob was one of those people who became more aggressive the drunker he was, and he was hardly ever fully sober.
“You’re a riot,” I said, wriggling out from under those hands. They smelled like urine, which matched the rest of him. Rob was a tanner, and that’s how they smelled.
“You leave him be, Rob,” the bartender said. His name was Eric, and he was probably half Rob’s size. But Eric always seemed like the biggest fellow in the pub, which was an important talent to have in this part of town.
I was at the Ten Bells Pub, roughly a week after that conversation with Herman, and thus about a week after I should have probably just left town. I’m obviously working with the benefit of hindsight here, but I’ve abandoned identities sooner for more petty reasons than sharing a name with a killer.
I think I probably didn’t want to leave before learning who the killer was. This also undoubtedly sounds silly in hindsight, but remember that at the time, I had no reason to think this was ever going to be anything but a regional story.
I’ve always found it odd, how people treat serial killers as if they were a modern concept. The only thing new about them is the term ‘serial killer’. If anything, humankind evolved to the point where we stopped having destabilizing local wars every generation, which was where people like this tended to be most at home.
I can recall a similar killing spree in Baghdad sometime around the ninth century. It, too, centered around one neighborhood, and was quite the talk of the city. I left—I was a traveling merchant then too—before learning if the killer was ever caught, and if so, who he turned out to be. By the time I returned again, thirty years had gone by, and when I asked if the killer had ever been caught, nobody knew what I was even talking about. The same thing happened in Bangladesh sometime in the 1200’s, Tyre sometime before the birth of Christ, and Athens on two occasions during the Classical period. I can think of four Roman protectorates that suffered from the same malady, too, during the height of the Empire.
These are just the ones I know about. There were obviously more. And except for one of the Roman killers—in Gaul, if I’m remembering right—I couldn’t tell you if they ever caught any of them.
“Ahh, he knows I’m riding him, yeah?” Rob said, clapping me on the back. He shoved up to the bar and took a seat that wasn’t actually unoccupied at the time. The guy who was already there recognized a losing situation early, and got out of the way before Rob sat on him.
“Might be wisdom in changing your name ‘til this blows over,” Eric said.
“I thought of that,” I said, “but decided it might draw more attention for my having changed it. “And none of you lot would use the new name.”
“Change it to arsehole,” Rob said, “we’ll call you that all day.”
“You’re a prince among men,” I said.
“Tell my woman that.”
“I would, but I can’t afford her.”
Rob grabbed me by the collar and glared, like he was about to brain me with his teeth. It lasted about a second-and-a-half, before he burst out laughing.
“You’re a fine fellow for a gentleman, Jackie. And that’s a damned lie, she’s right affordable.”
He smacked me hard on the shoulder and then turned his full attention to the ale.
It’s difficult to explain why I liked hanging out in East London. I couldn’t put it to words in the moment, when it was Herman asking, and I still can’t now. I mean, I can get close, I guess, but every explanation feels a little inadequate.
Victorian era London was pleasant for a few, and nasty and terrible for almost everyone else. The city’s population was something over one million, but built on top of an infrastructure that was only intended to support a few hundred thousand, so for starters the whole place was basically one enormous toilet.
I’m not exaggerating; I mean this literally. Nobody knew what to do with their feces, other than to keep putting it where they always did: in the sewers the Romans built a millennium earlier, or in holes in the ground, or their basement if they had one.
The overcrowding was largely thanks to the Industrial Revolution, which was also doing a stellar job of polluting large portions of London. A lot of that manufacturing was done outside of the original city limits—East London being one of those places—so that was where the poorest lived, and in the worst conditions. Basically, nobody on this side of the Thames could breathe they air, drink the water, or get any rest in the substandard housing that slept as many as twenty to a room.
The solution to not being able to drink the water was to drink alcohol instead—this was, honestly, one of the reasons alcohol was invented—which meant an epide
mic of public drunkenness was stirred into this overpopulated, underfed stew.
So, why did I like it there? Could be, I appreciate savagery more than is entirely healthy, I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt differently if I was biologically capable of catching one of the many, many diseases that perpetually made the rounds in East London. I could get beaten up or shot or stabbed (although I’m quite capable of defending myself) but when it came to sickness, I may as well have been looking at a zoo through a glass observation window.
“What’s the word on the Ripper, then?” I asked. The question was put to whoever was in earshot.
“You’re seeing the same papers as we,” Eric said.
“I am, but what’s the word? There’s what the pages say and there’s what you lot say. I’ll take you over the ink.”
By this time, probably half the people in the pub had been questioned by a constable—even me, informally—and everyone there knew one or two of the victims.
“Coppers are looking wrong,” said a man to my right. I recognized him, but didn’t know his name. “They think it’s one of ours, but it’s one of yours.”
Meaning, I think, not an East Londoner.
“I have heard that,” I said. “That’s not passed out of their consideration.”
“Oh, they say it, but I don’t believe it.”
“Mary seen him,” Rob said.
“Mary?”
“Pretty girl, from Limerick. You know her, she’s been ‘round. Boards near here.”
An Irish girl named Mary, currently residing in or around Whitechapel or Spitalfields, was a woefully inadequate description. About one in ten local girls matched that description.
“She goes by Marie at times,” Eric said. “Likes to pretend she’s French or summat. There she is, back of the room.”
“Oh, Marie?”
I turned to look, because I did know who this was. She had indeed been ‘around’. I’d been around with her on one or two occasions myself. Eric caught her attention and waved her over.
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