Music Macabre
Page 29
Murder can not, of course, ever be condoned, but the process of hanging – even in these humane times – is an ugly business, and we confess to a rather guilty feeling of gladness that this warm and vivid lady did not endure it, and that she met her death in the spectacular and dramatic way she would probably have wished.
As they walked back along the Mile End Road, Phin said, ‘So she really did escape the hangman.’
‘I’m glad she did. That reporter was glad, too.’
Phin said, suddenly, ‘I’d like to have heard that “Listen” song. I know we’ve got what were probably the words, or some of them, but I’d like to know what it would have sounded like.’
‘So would I.’
‘I’d like to know who composed it, too,’ said Phin. He looked at her. ‘I refuse to make a connection to Liszt,’ he said.
‘Do you? I’d make it.’
‘All right, just between us, I will make it, but I shouldn’t think it could ever be proved. And promise you’ll never tell Liripine or Purslove about it.’
‘I won’t. Where are we going?’
‘Well, I thought,’ said Phin, ‘that we might go across to Linklighters for some lunch.’
‘And raise a glass to Scaramel?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think she’d like that,’ said Arabella, slipping her hand through his arm.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It’s possibly fair to say that no mass-murderer has left quite such a wealth of dark legends as the man that nineteenth-century England came to know as Jack the Ripper.
Even today, the truth about Jack’s identity and his eventual fate remain the subject of discussion and speculation. Films have been made about him, books have been written about him, and the theories posed as to his motives and his identity range from the sensible and near credible to the outright bizarre and the wildly fantastical.
He has, severally, been credited with being a person of some prominence – a leading doctor or surgeon, a member of the police force, or the government, or a famous painter. Some theories connect him to royalty – even to having been royal himself.
The suggestions as to why his killing spree stopped are almost as thick on the ground. But one of those suggestions is that it stopped because he was incarcerated in one of the grim lunacy asylums of his day – either because he had not been recognized for who and what he was, or because he had been recognized, but was too well-known a figure to stand trial.
When I set out to write this book, I had not intended Jack to be an especially major player. Phineas Fox, happily pursuing scholarly research into the life of Franz Lizst, was to unexpectedly come upon a fragment of music – a song – that the women of Whitechapel had used as an alarm signal at the height of the Ripper’s reign.
But very gradually – almost without my realizing it – Jack got into the story in a far stronger and much more insistent way than I had bargained for. He was present in every plot twist, he influenced characters’ motives and directed their actions – it was as if he peered out of every dark shadow surrounding the nineteenth-century players, and reached out to the present day through them.
Jack the Ripper – the Whitechapel Murderer, Leather Apron – seized the public’s horrified imagination more than a century ago and never seems to have let go.
His dark legacy has reached into the present, and it was that dark legacy that brought about Music Macabre.