‘Yes,’ I ruminated, ‘why are these murders suddenly happening in Tite Street?’
‘They’re not “happening” in Tite Street. The bodies are being discovered in Shelley Alley, off Tite Street, that’s all.’
‘It’s significant, Oscar. You can’t deny it. Macnaghten, charged with producing a report on the Whitechapel murders, invites you to assist him and suddenly two bodies, mutilated in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of the Whitechapel murders, turn up on your doorstep.’
‘Shelley Alley is marginally closer to Macnaghten’s doorstep than mine. I don’t believe Oscar Wilde has anything to do with the mise-en-scène.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t. The first body was discovered before our meeting with Chief Constable Macnaghten, remember – before I was involved in the matter in any way.’
‘But you knew what Macnaghten wanted to discuss with you, didn’t you?’
‘I had an idea, yes. But no one else knew. Macnaghten told me that he had not mentioned it to any of his colleagues and wouldn’t do so. I’d only mentioned it to you – and to Constance.’ He got to his feet. ‘Our task is to concentrate on the Whitechapel murders, Arthur.’
‘But we keep being pulled back to Tite Street.’
‘Perhaps it is Constance, then? Do you think she’s contriving these murders to lure me home?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Even as a joke that’s a horrible thing to say.’
‘Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.’
I looked at him. His face was flushed and covered in sweat. I saw tears in the corner of his eyes. ‘You are a strange fellow. You say something quite horrible and then you come up with a lovely line like that.’
He smiled. ‘I’m glad you like it. It’s one of my favourites. I stole it from a dead man. I steal a lot of my lines, you know. It’s one of my smaller secrets.’
‘Do you have many secrets?’ I asked.
‘We all have secrets.’
‘I hope I don’t have secrets,’ I said.
‘You may not now, Arthur, but you will have one day.’
17
Whitechapel
We did not dine in town, after all.
‘We’ll find something in Whitechapel,’ said Oscar, as we climbed up into the two-wheeler he had ordered for us. ‘There’s a stall I know by the docks that sells cockles and mussels. And gin. It’s close by my favourite opium den. Wonderful silks on the walls.’ My friend was in a teasing mood, but somehow, although I’d taken to my bed for an hour’s rest in the afternoon, I hadn’t the energy to rise to his bait.
It was a cold evening, and not yet seven o’clock. The day had been a dreary one and now a dense, drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. As we drove east down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light that threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces that flitted across these narrow bars of light – sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human-kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I was conscious, too, of missing Touie and my children, and feeling that if I could not be with them in Switzerland I should then, at least, be at home in South Norwood earning their keep, writing a publishable story – with a satisfactory ending.
Oscar’s mood was very different. He was ebullient, gaily filling the cab with his favourite aphorisms and purple cigarette smoke. ‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,’ he declared. ‘It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied.’
‘The fog in here is worse than the fog out there,’ I said dourly.
‘This is not your best mood, Arthur, but happily moods don’t last. It is their chief charm.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking about these poor women. All so brutally murdered. For what?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ he asked, smiling at me slyly, drawing slowly on his cigarette, his head half turned away.
‘It was – probably,’ I answered. I was not inclined to conversation, but Oscar would persist.
‘All so brutally murdered,’ he repeated. ‘For what? Not for money, that’s for sure. All of the Whitechapel victims were prostitutes. None was worth robbing for what she possessed. And the police explored the sad history of each of them and there is no reason to believe that any one of them was killed because someone – husband, lover, rival – wanted them dead and was ready to pay to have them dispatched. So, if not for money, then for what? For pleasure?’
I shuddered at the thought. ‘Could there be any pleasure in such perversity?’
‘Oh, a great deal, I fear, Arthur. You’re a moderate man. You don’t touch the extremes, but there are others for whom life is unfulfilled if they have not experienced every experience that life has to offer. These are murders most foul and to the murderer that is what makes them most delicious.’
I looked out of the cab window. The streets were darker and emptier now. I only gave half an ear to Oscar as, with a mellifluous fluency that was quite maddening, he continued to expound his philosophy of the perverse. ‘You contain your baser impulses, Arthur. You keep them well-buttoned within your tweed waistcoat, but you have had passions that have made you afraid, surely? Thoughts that have filled you with terror? Dreams where mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—’
‘No,’ I said emphatically. ‘No, Oscar. No.’
He lit another cigarette and grinned at me through the light of his flaming Vesta like a latter-day Mephistopheles. ‘I hear you, my friend,’ he said soothingly, ‘but others sing a different song. To us every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and your soul grows sick with longing. And nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’
‘Sometimes, Oscar, I believe you talk too much.’
He laughed. ‘I am merely setting out the case for the new Hedonism. We have to consider every possibility.’
‘So Jack the Ripper is one of your new Hedonists, is he?’
‘Well, it’s an avenue I doubt the fellows at New Scotland Yard have explored. And if he is, then I suppose Richard Mansfield could be our man – playing all the parts, tasting all the fruits of all the gardens in the world.’
‘I think a loner and lunatic with a grudge against prostitutes is more likely to be our man.’
He lowered the carriage window and threw out a half-smoked cigarette. ‘I agree. I was just filling the night air with sound.’ He looked at me benignly and brushed his gloves across my knee. ‘I need to talk myself out sometimes.’ He laughed. ‘I was going to say, “Pay no heed, Arthur”, but I don’t believe you did.’ The cab came to a halt. ‘We’re here now.’
‘Where are we?’
We clambered down from the two-wheeler. ‘Buck’s Row, Whitechapel,’ said Oscar, ‘where it all began.’ He called up to the cabman. ‘Meet us in two hours at St Katharine’s Dock – at Harry’s whelk stall. Do you know it?’ The man nodded. ‘If we’re not there, look for us. We won’t be far away.’ The cab drove on. The air was cold. The street was strangely silent.
‘We should have brought a map,’ I said, looking about me. The driver had dropped us off at the end of a narrow, sloping cobbled street. It was deserted and unlit. At the far end from us, there was a faint glow of yellow light coming from a ground-floor window. At our end, there was darkness. If there was a moon up above, it was not set to penetrate tonight’s pea-souper.
‘I have one,’ said Oscar, pulling a folded paper from his coat pocket, ‘but it may be of little use.’ He
peered up at the black brick walls to either side of us. ‘The streets appear to have no names.’ He beckoned me to follow him. We left the cobbled roadway and turned right, down a small dirt track.
‘I smell horses,’ I said.
‘Yes, there’s a stable at the end. It’s by the gate to the stable yard that she was killed, I think.’
In the gloom, through the fog, I could just see the black shadow of Oscar’s heavy frame as he moved along the track. ‘Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, struck down, then cut to pieces.’
‘Poor woman. May she rest in peace.’
‘Christ almighty!’ cried Oscar, suddenly stumbling forward, toppling to the ground, reaching out for the wall as he fell.
A woman’s shrill voice rang out. It was less a cry of alarm than a yelp of pain. Oscar pushed himself up from the ground and, as he did so, in the dark, came face to face with a bedraggled beggar woman, dressed in rags, squatting on the ground.
‘Forgive me, madam,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘I did not see you there.’ He stood over the woman, recovering his balance, fumbling in his pockets for change. He found some coins and dropped them into her lap. ‘Get yourself some sustenance – and then a room for the night,’ he said.
The pathetic creature looked up at him and said nothing. I could not see her face. She held up her hands. Oscar reached into his coat for more change.
‘Come, Arthur,’ he said quickly, turning away from her. ‘We don’t need to see the yard where the hapless Polly died. We have seen enough. We can imagine the rest.’
Swiftly, our eyes now curiously adjusting to the gloom, we marched back down the alley into the street and turned left, up the slope towards the house at the far end whose window gave off a faint light. As we reached it, Oscar took his paper from his pocket. ‘Where are we?’ he said, holding it up to read. ‘It’s a small corner of hell, isn’t it?’
‘It’s bleak, certainly,’ I said.
‘Ever the realist, Arthur. But you’re right. If it was hell at least there’d be fires to keep us warm and some amusing company.’ He held the paper against the window pane. ‘This is where we are and each cross marks the spot where one of the murdered women was found.’
‘Where next, then?’ I asked.
‘Here, Hanbury Street. Half a mile as the crow flies, but through these dark alleys and backwaters, God knows how long it will take us.’
In fact, it took us no more than twenty minutes. The alleys and passageways were all unlit. We scuttled through them as quickly as we could, stepping over occasional bodies lying in our path, making way for drunken figures that lurched past us, avoiding darkened doorways in which stood the shadowy figures of men in working clothes, smoking pipes, and women of the night, dressed in little more than rags, pitifully plying their trade.
Hanbury Street itself was, by that night’s standard, a busy, almost wholesome, thoroughfare. Young women sat on doorsteps, chatting, making paper flowers. Dogs ran across the cobblestones. A handful of young men – sailors and carters, by the look of them – stood around a roasted chestnut vendor’s brazier. It was a long street and mostly dark, so that figures kept making entrances and exits through the shadows. Every hundred yards or so a street lamp threw down a murky pool of gaslight. Beneath one of them stood two policemen. Each touched his helmet as we approached.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ said the older of the two. He had broad shoulders, mutton-chop whiskers and a boxer’s face. ‘Mind how you go now.’
‘Thank you, Officer,’ said Oscar. ‘We’re looking for number twenty-nine.’
‘Where the girl was done in?’
‘Yes,’ said Oscar. ‘Annie Chapman.’
‘It’s down there,’ said the policeman, ‘on the right, past the lodging house. There’s nothing to see. But people still come.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘I knew all the Ripper’s victims, sir. We all did.’ His companion nodded. ‘I call her a girl. She was a woman. Nearly fifty. Fat and drunk and stupid.’
‘You didn’t like her?’
‘She was all right. They’re all the same. They drinks too much. They gets in to fights. Their men beats them. They drinks some more.’
‘Did her man beat her?’
‘Her actual hubby was dead. She had two regulars, though, who paid for her services.’ He chuckled, not unkindly. ‘They didn’t pay much. They didn’t have to.’
‘“Harry the Hawker” and “The Pensioner”,’ said Oscar.
‘You’ve read all about it, then? There’s been plenty to read. Only “The Pensioner” wasn’t an old soldier like he said. He was a brickie of sorts. And a brute. Ted Stanley. He used to beat her black and blue.’
‘Did he kill her?’
‘No. She died for the want of fourpence. Like Polly Nichols.’
‘Meaning?’ I asked.
‘They lived in one of the lodging houses – fourpence a night for a bed. We got 146 lodging houses in this square mile, common beds for six thousand souls in all. The sheets are changed every week and there’s a cup of tea every morning. But if you ain’t got the fourpence, you don’t get the bed. They was both turned out, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, and had to spend the night on the street. That’s where he found ’em, the Ripper, and did his stuff.’
‘Do you know who he is?’ asked Oscar lightly.
‘I know who he isn’t,’ said the policeman firmly. ‘He isn’t any of the lads round here. They drink, they’re rough, they’re crooked. Some of them is evil. But none’s the sort to go round killing women and carefully cutting out their privates. That’s not Whitechapel.’
‘You know your patch well,’ said Oscar disarmingly. ‘Five murders in ten weeks within one square mile, yet you didn’t get close to finding the man?’
‘We arrested a hundred of ’em. And more. Any man those women knew, any man seen anywhere nearby on any of the nights in question, we had ’em in. The long, the short and the tall. The lame, the halt and the lunatic. The lot. They all had a sorry tale to tell, but most of ’em had solid alibis too. We couldn’t make it stick on any of ’em. Not one.’
‘It’ll be a stranger,’ said the second policeman. ‘An outsider. Got to be. A foreigner most like.’
‘Could be a gentleman,’ said the older policeman, ‘Look at you two.’ He enjoyed his little joke. Oscar smiled obligingly. ‘Someone who comes and goes and no one thinks to stop. Someone with a hat and cloak to hide behind. Someone who can afford a hansom to get away from the scene of the crime. I was on duty at the inquests.’
‘We both was.’
‘It could be a doctor. That would explain the way they was all cut up. Maybe the doctor what drowned himself.’
‘Druitt,’ said Oscar.
‘Him,’ said the policeman with finality. ‘He drowned himself and the killing stopped.’
‘Well, thank you, officers,’ said Oscar. ‘That’s most interesting. We’re much obliged. We’ll be on our way now.’
‘Go carefully. Avoid the alleys. Don’t stay too late.’
‘May we ask who you are?’ said the younger policeman. ‘Just for the record, just in case.’
‘Of course,’ said Oscar. ‘I am Henry Labouchere, Member of Parliament. And this is my friend Lord Rosebery.’
The policeman touched his helmet. ‘I thought you looked familiar.’
18
Darkness
‘Why the devil did you do that?’ I asked him, in an exasperated whisper, as soon as we were far enough away.
‘I thought it prudent.’
‘And why those names?’
‘I thought it amusing.’
‘You’re a curious fellow, Oscar Wilde,’ I said, shaking my head. A boy with a metal hoop had just brushed past us, but there was no one else near us on the pavement where we stood. ‘We are investigating murders of the most horrific kind – unspeakable crimes – and you’re telling lies to the police while trying to be amusing.’
‘And if I laugh at any mortal
thing, ’Tis that I may not weep.’
He looked up at the building we had reached: 29 Hanbury Street. It was made of red English brick, four storeys tall, a narrow terraced house of no consequence. It stood in darkness, all shuttered up. ‘Unlit, unloved, unlovely,’ murmured my friend. He put his boot on the doorstep. ‘Is this where she died?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I think it was at the back of the building.’
We walked on past the house and found the side-alley that led to the back-alley than ran behind the terrace. It was a narrow dirt track, no wider than three feet, muddy under foot, and littered with old newspapers, broken boxes and vegetable peelings. Each house had its own small yard, with shed and privy, enclosed by a wooden fence. ‘This’ll be it,’ I said. Oscar, some inches taller than me, stood on his toes to peer over the paling. He stepped back at once, as if losing his footing. It was his turn to whisper now. ‘Come away. Come!’
‘What is it?’
He pulled me back along the slippery, littered path. ‘A man and a woman – against the wall – rutting. I saw her vacant eyes and his heaving body. That was enough.’ He shook his head and reached into his pockets for his cigarettes. ‘They made no noise. The squalor of it, Arthur. This is a vile world.’
‘Would you recognise the man again?’
‘No, of course not. I only saw his back. He was hunched over the poor creature.’
‘When Annie Chapman was murdered, it was just before dawn. A man next door, at number twenty-seven, heard a woman’s voice call out “No” and then heard what sounded like someone falling against the fence.’
‘And he did nothing. As we’ve done nothing now.’
‘And twenty minutes later a carter on his way to work discovered Annie’s mutilated body lying in the dirt by the doorway to the yard.’
Oscar drew deep on his cigarette.
‘Did the woman you’ve just seen appear to be in danger?’
[Oscar Wilde 07] - Jack the Ripper: Case Closed Page 12