by David Waine
CHAPTER 8
Sunday, September 30th, 1888
Long Liz Stride had drunk her final pennies in the Ten Bells, a rough pub on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street. There was a grand church hard by, Christ Church, but she never went there. She could not remember a time when her prayers had ever been answered, so what was the point of praying? Her vow to stay off the mother’s ruin so that she could earn enough to ‘pretty herself up a bit’ and concentrate on the high class trade had lasted less than three weeks. Two of those goals had soon proved elusive. Staying off the gin was easier said than done after more than thirty years of drinking it in large quantities. As for prettying herself up a bit, she had never been pretty and the ravages of three decades of whoring had taken their toll on such looks as she had once possessed. Her failure to achieve the first two targets had rendered the third unattainable. With her hopes shattered, she had soon resorted to her traditional alcoholic comfort to drive away the demons that haunted her footsteps every night, and that, naturally, had emptied her purse.
“And stay out!” bawled the landlord as he slammed the door shut. She stood in the shadows, shaking, her latest humiliation cutting her every bit as much as the others had ever done. A lone tear trickled listlessly over the stretched skin of her cheek, for she knew in her heart that, at best, another long, lonely night lay ahead of her. At worst it would be a knife in the dark. Dispiritedly, with a long, tearful look back over her shoulder at the pub, she gathered her shawl about her and began to shamble off in a generally eastwards direction. The search was likely to be fruitless. The murders of Polly and Annie had driven many girls off the streets for fear of their own lives. Only the most desperate, like her, flaunted themselves now. Bizarrely, the killings had also emptied the streets of men, so there were no punters. She was drunk, penniless and alone.
“Come on, Liz,” she told herself, “there must be one.”
Unable to walk in a straight line, she tottered off into the labyrinth of gloomy, filthy alleyways, crooning a pathetic romantic tune that floated back into her memory from her childhood near Gothenburg, turning corners wherever she found one and not caring where she went as long as it wasn’t back. She was on a meandering, pointless journey that would bring her eventually to Berner Street.
The door of the Bishopsgate police station opened and a shrivelled, middle-aged drab was allowed through it with a stern admonition to behave herself in future. The woman was Catherine Eddowes, also known as Kate Kelly, an alias that she used to lend herself an air of respectability whenever she lived with John Kelly. She even wore a ring on her wedding finger, but she had never been married. Arrested earlier that evening for being drunk and disorderly, she had been locked up in a police cell until she sobered up. According to regulations, that moment arrived at the stroke of one in the morning, whereupon her cell door was unlocked and she was thrust out into the night to fend for herself. The fact that she was still almost as drunk as she had been upon arrest was irrelevant. So was the fact that a brutal killer, who preyed on women of the streets, was still on the loose. Regulations were regulations.
As the door slammed shut behind her, she turned and called out, “G’night, old cock!” before shuffling off in the direction of Houndsditch.
Catherine Eddowes was also croaking a sentimental old tune as she flung the trailing end of her shawl around her neck and began to weave her way tipsily down the dark, smoky road. Her back hurt, partly rheumatism and partly Bright’s Disease, so she had once been told. Being still sozzled with gin, she felt more carefree than she did when sober and had no idea that, at that very moment, Elizabeth Stride, with whom she was on a nodding acquaintance, had just died in Berner Street at the hands of a man with a long knife, and that the same man would catch up with her as she tottered into Mitre Square. He would then chalk a bizarre message on a nearby wall: The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.