by David Waine
*
A grey September morning greeted Detective Chief Superintendent Ronald Abberline as he slammed into his command post at Bow Road Police Station to brief his team. They sat before him, silent, patient, competent in the main, decent coppers, professionals who could be relied upon to do their jobs properly. There stood Sergeant Matthews, who could be relied on to do as he was told efficiently. In front of him sat the only officer that he suspected came anywhere near his own capacity for solving crimes by the simple expedient of applying thought to the problem. Women's Detective Constable Rutter, she of the bright eyes, no-nonsense hair and athletic figure, equipped by the Almighty with a brain to rival the best and doomed by her gender to a life of obscurity in the lower ranks. He felt genuinely sorry for her and admired the fact that she did not appear to be sorry for herself. Maybe he was getting old, he wondered, and attitudes were beginning to change without requiring her to set fire to her underwear first. He hoped so.
“Right,” he began, dropping his briefcase with a loud crump and surveying his troops with a beady blue eye. “We don’t need some jumped up little miss smarty-pants of a reporter to tell us when we have cocked up, do we?”
There was a general nodding of heads at this as several of the others shifted uncomfortably in their seats and the redoubtable Matthews piped in with, “She’ll cause a panic, sir.” If he had one identifiable talent, it was his unerring ability to state the obvious.
“Of course she will,” agreed Abberline, “so it’s up to us to prevent it if we can. Miss Clever Clogs has let the cat right out of the bag.” He was referring to the television broadcast of the evening before. “Now every female in London, with something like the correct name, will be panicking, and who could blame them? Mass hysteria. The very thing that happened when the real Ripper was on the loose and the very thing that we have bent over backwards to prevent. History has repeated itself all through this investigation.”
Rutter spoke for the first time. “What about the numbers, sir?”
Abberline snapped his fingers and pointed straight at her in approval. “Right, Rutter.” Turning to the notice board behind him, he indicated two sheets of white A4 paper with the words ‘ONE’ and ‘TWO’ printed large across them, landscape format, in black ink. “These are just about the only things we know that she doesn’t. We have either revealed everything else, or she has surmised it. She’s even guessed at Roberta Henderson’s maiden name.”
Matthews perked up at this point, raising his ferret nose into the air and speaking in his slightly squeaky voice. “But she’s wrong, sir! Mrs. Henderson’s maiden name was Siffey, and Annie Chapman's was Smith.”
Abberline had learned to be patient with his bag man through long years of practice. “True, Matthews,” he replied patiently, “but what seems to have by-passed your limited brain is that Annie Chapman lived with a sieve-maker and called herself Siffey.”
Rutter now chimed in. Her face wore a concerned look. “That has been troubling me, sir. I think it complicates the case enormously.
Settling himself on the edge of the front table, Abberline leaned forward. “Go on, Rutter.”
She looked him straight in the eye. He approved of that. It demonstrated an assured confidence in her ability. “From the evidence that we have, sir,” she said, “Jack is targeting women with the same names as those in the original murders. Mary Anne Nichols was obvious enough…”
“But the originals were all prostitutes,” put in Matthews.
“Fair point, Matthews,” conceded Abberline with a nod to his sergeant.
Rutter turned to face the Sergeant, her counter-argument ready. “Maybe he couldn’t find a prostitute with the right name.” She looked around the room for confirmation of her theory. None was forthcoming. All eyes were on her. “What concerns me, sir,” she continued, “is the use of the name Siffey. Mrs. Henderson married when she was twenty-one years old, so she was Mrs. Henderson for three times as long as she had ever been known as Miss Siffey.”
An uneasy silence greeted Rutter’s statement.
“Meaning?” asked Abberline, more for the benefit of Matthews than for his own clarification.
“Meaning that he researched it,” she explained, indicating a stack of books in front of her. “I’ve been looking at the copycat theory and have worked my way through quite a few Ripper books since being appointed to the investigation. They all name Annie Chapman as the second victim, but only a few mention her alias. Our man must have a detailed knowledge of the original killings, and he must have consulted parish records, or whatever, to come up with a name match.”
Abberline nodded, impressed. “Good work, Rutter,” he said. “Right,” to the room at large, “so we begin to realise just how organised this character is. We’ll need somebody checking parish records for Whitechapel. See if anybody has been doing a lot of research lately.”
“There are other records, sir,” put in Rutter solemnly.
Abberline nodded. “Indeed there are. Saint Catherine’s House Index, electoral rolls and so forth. Matthews, divide the team up. Keep five on door to door, including yourself, and put the rest on research. We already have some psychological profiling on this character. It seems likely that he is a loner and very probably lives alone. He appears to be quite well-educated. The fact that he is capable of extensive levels of research would support that. We are looking at someone who is outwardly respectable, probably quiet and does not attract attention to himself. Given the nature of the attacks, he is probably bigger and stronger than his victims, but as they were both on the small side, that doesn't help us a great deal. He is probably obsessively clean, neat and tidy. Have a quick look inside when interviewing single men, living alone. Many will live in pig sties, but this boy won't. He owns a home computer. He won't have used a public access one in a library in case somebody saw him working on the notes. It isn't a top of the range one because the printer's a workhorse type, not a luxury job. That probably puts him in the middle income bracket, which in turn suggests that he is more likely to own his home than rent it.”
“There are a lot of assumptions there, sir,” pointed out Rutter soberly.
“There are,” agreed Abberline, “but with the lack of anything better to go on at the moment, that is what we have to work with. The profile can be amended when we have more information, which probably means more victims, I am afraid. Presumably he already knows who the remaining three will be. He would have sorted that out before he hit number one.”
Rutter was staring him in the eye again. “Something else, sir.”
“Yes?”
She gathered her thoughts carefully before giving voice to them. “Presumably he could be fairly confident that Mrs. Henderson would be where he wanted her at the requisite moment. She was an elderly widow, and hardly moved beyond her doorstep. With Mary Anne Nichols, though, it was a different matter. She was fifteen and had a lively social life. How could he know she was going to be there?”
“He stalked her.” Matthews stating the obvious again.
“I dare say he did,” replied Rutter, turning to face him again. “But if the job had to be done on August 31st, looking at it from his point of view, he couldn’t simply wait until the opportunity presented itself. How was he to know that she would even be in the country on that day?”
“The new school term was about to start,” ventured Abberline.
Rutter turned back to her chief. “Not for another five days, sir. Unless he was acquainted with her, which I doubt, given the identity of the second victim, she could have been in Benidorm with her parents on the very day that he wanted to kill her, for all he knew. That is the flaw in his plans. How does he know they will be where he wants them? How does he know they won’t be knocked down by a bus before he can get to them, or rushed to hospital with appendicitis, or simply gone away for a few days?”
Silence descended as all present digested this. It was broken by Abberline.
“I ta
ke your point. Let us assume, then, that he must have had a Plan B. Maybe a C and D as well. Mary Anne Nichols can’t be that uncommon a name. What if he had several of them lined up in case his prime choice wasn't available on the day?”
“She may not even have been his prime choice,” chimed in a voice from the back.
Abberline agreed. “In which case there is one very lucky woman happily unaware of how close she came to being murdered and one very unlucky young girl who simply happened to be there.”
“And several Annie Chapmans?” Rutter.
Abberline nodded. “Or several Annie Siffeys. That is where the numbers come in.”
He indicated the two sheets of paper with the large numbers printed on them as words. “Look at them. Done on a computer with a cheap desktop publishing program, and printed out on bog standard paper, using a dot matrix printer. Forensics tells us the paper’s 80gsm. and that the printer was probably an Epson, of which zillions are in circulation. The print is clean, so it’s either newish or has been well maintained. All that ties in with our profiling at least. We’re checking on sales of Epson printers in London over the past six months. No fingerprints, of course. The paper comes in sealed packets, and he will be careful about how he handles it. Probably uses surgical gloves. We do know that his home must be meticulously clean, because there’s nothing on the paper that wasn’t also present in the two victims’ houses. That also ties in. This boy is careful. He’ll destroy the packet after his last note, in case it leads us to him.”
“Are you suggesting we make them public knowledge, sir?” Rutter looked seriously worried.
“I am,” confirmed Abberline. “Partly to further this investigation and partly to save ourselves a bit of face after the savaging that Miss Ferguson gave us. Nobody outside of this room knows about these numbers. Mary Anne Nichols received the first through the post days before she was killed. We know that from her parents. The second was found in Roberta Henderson’s flat. So she, too, had a warning of what was about to happen to her, if she could but have known it. If we make them public, we can find out if he had a reserve list, and check their contacts.”
There was a flinty hint of disapproval in Rutter’s voice at this. “We’d also be giving licence to every headbanger in London to send fake threes, fours and fives to anyone they fancy putting the wind up.”
Abberline was fully aware of this, but he felt cornered and he had to make something happen if the investigation was not to grind to a complete halt. “They’re all we have,” he said at last. “We can soon discount the ones that were done on the wrong paper, or with the wrong printer. That should cut out some of the kooky ones and, who knows, it might provide us with our first real lead?”