I put on my wrapper and sat in front of my empty grate until dawn, thinking about this new and almost unbelievable horror, and what it meant. Of course I didn’t know if Mary, or Rosie Levi, or anyone I knew had been killed, nor could I until the bodies had been identified, which might be some hours.
This madman was still at large. It looked as if nothing and no one would stop him in his career unless he was caught, red-handed, by the police or informed on by a person who knew who he was. Meanwhile I had booked my passage for America. I would leave in two weeks’ time, for I could not, and would not, stay any longer. I had business to conduct in Canada. I had now done all I could to find Mary. I had followed her tracks as far as I could – now she would have to find me. But if she was hiding from me in the East End, and I still believed she might be, then perhaps now fear would make her reveal herself.
I cooked my own breakfast early, a shaky Dora coming down a little later. The horror of last night’s information induced us both to drop our mutual irritations and suspicion.
‘Has the boy gone?’ I said, nodding at the ceiling.
She said he had. ‘I can’t stay here no more,’ she said. ‘I’m so frightened. It’s getting worse and worse. And,’ she said defiantly, ‘you’d better not go out at night no more.’ She added ‘madam’ as an afterthought.
‘I’m going back to Canada,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you my address.’ She stared a bit at this, but made no comment.
Then the breadman banged on the back door, handed over a small loaf and said, ‘This is the best I can do. Your bread comes from Whitechapel, two of the bakers didn’t come to work this morning – their wives wouldn’t let them, they wanted them by them.’
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
He looked very discouraged. ‘Same story. This time, two old …’ He evaded the word and went on, ‘Caught in dark spots. One woman was very sorely used. Very sorely, they say.’ He shook his head. ‘They don’t seem to be able to catch him.’
A moment later my landlady, Mrs Cooper, came in with a tall, uncomfortable-looking fellow, her brother-in-law.
‘Who was that man you were talking to?’ she demanded.
‘The breadman,’ Dora responded, looking pointedly at the small loaf on the kitchen table.
‘Well,’ she said rapidly, ‘Mr Ellman and I have checked the locks and shutters and that, as far as I’m concerned, is that. This is no place for a woman to be conducting a business. I shall return when this is settled.’ She was in a panic, opening and closing the clasp on her handbag. ‘I don’t know what the police are doing. This man should have been caught weeks ago. But I’m certain there’s no safety for women in London any more.’
Dora broke in: ‘I can’t bring myself to stay here any longer, madam, especially with an empty shop below. I shall have to give notice, with respect –‘
This startled her. She broke in. ‘What? You want to leave? Where will you go? This will be very inconvenient. Mrs Frazer will have no attendant. Someone else will have to be employed.’
Dora looked at her hopelessly.
She rattled on again, ‘Well, that’s as may be – I must be on my way. I have other things to attend to.’ And with that she turned and, trailing the lanky Mr Ellman behind her, hurried off.
There was the sound of the shop door opening, a rattling of bolts and locks as the couple retreated through the premises in haste. Dora shrugged hopelessly. It was obvious that if she left, she would be going without pay or a reference.
‘Where will you go?’ I asked.
Then there was a knock on the door at the side of the shop. She went to answer it. A tall boy in knickerbockers and big boots came into the kitchen, startled and embarrassed by two strange women in their wrappers. He held out a piece of paper to me, at arm’s length. ‘Father asked me to bring this round to you. The maid found it on the doormat early on. It must have been pushed through the letterbox in the night.’
It was a note, written in pencil on the back of what looked like an old bill. It read, ‘Mary. Things have gone too far now it’s time you knew the truth. Your sister is at 26 Dorset Street Millers Court. Dont go there by night for fear of murder.’ At the foot of this note, written in fluent handwriting, was the signature, ‘A Friend’.
The boy – I suppose he was Mr Ratcliffe’s son – went off. I stood clutching the note in the chilly kitchen. It smelt of the truth. I had almost no doubt Mary was in Dorset Street.
‘Dora,’ I said, ‘I have to go out quickly. Get me a bath.’
She began to fill the big kettle. ‘No,’ I said, ‘just bring up the water. I’ll have it cold.’
Upstairs in the boxroom, as she filled the bath from a bucket, I told her, ‘I’m going to leave my address in Canada for you on the table. I have a business there, employing many young women. If you ever think of making a change, write to me.’
My tone, urgent and commanding, brought her up short. She straightened, still holding the empty pail, looked me in the eye, and said bluntly, ‘You’re very young to have a business. What sort of business would that be?’
I was in a desperate hurry to get to Dorset Street before the bird had flown. I didn’t have time to fence with her. ‘What sort of business do you think it is?’ I demanded. ‘Now, fetch another pail of water.’
Very startled, she walked off obediently, then turned in the middle of the sitting-room to make another enquiry, I suppose.
‘Look sharp, Dora,’ I snapped.
Suddenly she looked terrified. My mask had dropped, startling her, and I think she was making some fearful connection between me and the Whitechapel murders. In ten minutes she’d be round at the police station laying some incoherent information against me. Everyone seemed to have lost their wits this morning. No wonder.
‘Oh, don’t bother with the bloody bucket, Dora,’ I said. ‘Look, here’s the address and a sovereign for yourself I scribbled the address, went back into the boxroom. I threw off my clothes and stepped into the icy bath and began to sponge myself down.
She babbled uncertainly from the doorway, ‘There’s Red Indians there.’
‘What the bloody hell do you think is here?’ I asked her ferociously. ‘I suppose you feel safer in London – after what happened last night.’ I was shivering now. I got a towel and put it round me, still desperately cold. ‘Don’t stand there with your mouth opening and closing,’ I said, going into the bedroom. ‘Run out and get me a cab and tell it to wait at the kerb. Then pack up my trunks when I’m gone and I’ll consider your services to me terminated. And if I find anything missing when I unpack, even a hairpin, I’ll settle you for good and all, you can rest easy on that score. Don’t worry your head about it. Whether I’m in Canada or Africa or at the other end of the earth, if you rob me, I’ll see to your punishment.’ As I’d spoken I’d put on my underclothes. Now I got into a brown woollen dress and was slipping on my boots. Dora disappeared.
I sat on my bed and looked again at the note. ‘Things have gone too far now …’ It was well-formed writing, firm and fluent. Why did it look familiar? I turned the note over. It was written on the back of an account from a Whitechapel brewery for three barrels of stout, delivered to Mrs Mundy, in Brushfield Street. Cora! I thought in astonishment. No, not Cora. She could barely write. This was from Harry Mundy. I’d seen his scribble, on newspaper edges, lists on bits of paper, many times. But why would he, or he and Cora in combination, send me information anonymously, yet make it pretty plain where it came from? It could be no accident. Harry was very intelligent. His idea must have been to get the information to me, yet to be able to deny it, say the bill had been picked up and used by someone else. Yet, if money-hungry Harry wanted to deny having supplied information which might lead to a reward, then it was because fear of reprisals from another quarter outweighed his never-flagging desire for cash. So someone else was involved or more than one, and Harry was afraid of whoever it was. Unless it was a hoax of Harry’s, but I couldn’t believe he would be so stupid as t
o play such a nasty, pointless joke on me at such a grim time.
I was fearful as the cab went east through the banking and business areas, and I was feeling a little dizzy, too, and took it for a sign of nerves. These unstoppable murders, all taking place in one square mile of London, seemed to be filling the atmosphere with fear and mistrust. Sometimes it was as if no individual were responsible; the very air we breathed was a miasma, carrying plague. And again, since all natural order had broken down, was anything to be trusted? Even a note, probably from the hand of Harry Mundy, a straightforward person in his way, might be from someone else, might be a trap. The address I’d been given was in the next street from Mundy’s alehouse, but five minutes away in one direction from the house where Martha Tabram had been stabbed over and over again on a landing, and another five minutes away, in the other direction, from where Annie Chapman had been ripped open in a back yard. What confidence could I have in the message? Was it a trap?
My cabbie, a taciturn man, stopped his horse outside Liverpool Street Station and said, ‘No further.’
‘No further? Why not?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t take a woman alone down there,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you heard there’s been more murders?’
‘Not there,’ I said.
‘He may have moved off a bit because of the coppers,’ the driver said. ‘But Commercial Street’s his base. That’s where they’ll find him, if they do.’
‘I’ll walk it, then,’ I said, getting out.
‘On your own head be it,’ he replied, pocketing his fare and whipping up his horse.
I walked down Brushfield Street., It was only eight o’clock. Clusters of dark-clad women, the respectable, stood on the pavements, talking in low voices. There was none of the febrile excitement a revolting crime can often bring to the streets. Even the children seemed subdued. The only life was a dog which had evidently snatched a chicken from someone’s yard and was consuming it in a heap of flying feathers in the angle of a building. The women watched me as I went along, well-dressed, neatly shod, with my big bag. I began to bang on the door and shout for Mrs Mundy. ‘Cora! Cora! It’s me – Mary.’ They were in, must have been, but asleep, or pretending to be. I went on shouting, my voice seeming to echo in the silence of the street, while the women watched. Finally a woman slid up to me, holding a baby. ‘Do you want some help, dear?’ she asked.
‘Are they in?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t seen them go out.’ She frowned. ‘Have you heard about the murders?’
I said I had.
She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t stay around here if you haven’t got to.’
Two policemen walked round the corner opposite us. We both looked at then. ‘They can’t stop him,’ she said flatly.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d better be getting along.’
There’s a point where, if a man’s beating up a woman, as often as not when it gets bad enough the woman gives up pleading, or shouting angrily, crying for help or fighting back and just lies there, taking the kicks and blows like a poor old horse who can’t drag his load any further. He can’t go on, the driver could beat him to death, nothing will make him move. The women here, after this new shock, were like that. And every time a man walked past, they looked at him, long and hard. In such a situation each man’s face speaks of vice, secrecy and depravity. The eye of fear and suspicion sees everyone as guilty, milkman, chimney sweep, policeman, judge, doctor, tram-conductor. Three of the murders had taken place at the week’s end. The murderer could be a respectable employed man, taking himself from a factory or warehouse, even from the Bank of England or the Old Bailey to find his terrible pleasure.
I went round into Dorset Street. Two tired whores, in finery, caught another coming out of the door, with an empty milk can. They grasped her one on each side and spoke into her face, urgently. I saw the expression on the face of the woman with the milk can change to one of horror. Her mouth dropped open. She started to shake and looked ready to faint. They went off together, arm in arm, three whores, to fetch a drop of milk for their tea at nine in the morning.
‘D’you know Miller’s Court?’ I called.
They all turned back to look at me. ‘Through the arch,’ one said, pointing a little further down.
Through the arch was a court, with no exit at the far end. Five or six small houses stood on one side, on the left someone had cut off the back parlour of the Dorset Street house and put a door in the side wall. Beside it were two windows, making a one-room apartment. There was no one about. A dirty net curtain covered the windows but it was caught up a little on one side, by some object on the window ledge inside the room. I went and looked in.
To cover the inessential features first, it wasn’t a bad room. It might have looked squalid to my suitor, Marcus Brown, my landlady Mrs Cooper and many others, but by local standards a twelve-foot square room inhabited by one person is luxury. I saw a fireplace, full of ashes, opposite the window through which I was peering. Beside it was a table covered with a cloth. On this were a couple of plates, a kettle, a pair of little, tidy red boots, very smart, and hanging from the table, pinned down by a flat iron and a jug, a petticoat with lace, drying. And these were the signals which, as I stared, made me know my anonymous informant had led me to my sister’s lair, for as an Indian can trail an animal by tiniest signs, knowing the terrain and the animal as well as he knows his own hand, so we know each other, if we know each other well, by little habits and ways of doing things. The manner in which the boots lay and the drying petticoat had been secured, even the placing of the kettle, told me Mary Jane lived here. I was shaking as I stared, and here I come to the essentials of the case.
The bed was to the right of the door, under the window. And on that bed, bold as brass, perfectly at home in shirt and trousers, and barefoot, dreamy, staring up at the ceiling, lay – Jim Bristow. The hand far from me held a pipe, smoke curling up. The hand near me, just below the window, idly caressed a large, villainous-looking black cat with a torn ear, which had had more fights than hot dinners, I’m sure. As I stared, watching that hand stroking the beast, the cat saw me, turned big, empty green eyes towards me, held my gaze. I felt as if I were sinking into those pitiless, animal eyes. My knees shook. I straightened up, my head was spinning, I took a few paces, fell against the damp and unforgiving wall of 26 Dorset Street, expecting my head to steady, but it did not. I realized I was fainting, tried to go into the street and fell, I believe, in the archway leading into Dorset Street.
Part III
Nightmares came. A hot, hot night. My mother’s stumbling steps as she came up the stairs. The door opened. Bloody cloths soaked in an enamel basin on the floor on a boiling hot night. I was on the merry-go-round at Victoria Park, round and round and round I swung, fearful of falling. A night in the bar-room of Esmeralda’s, the piano playing, the card game going on, a woman in a scarlet dress downing a whisky, straight, at the bar. I open the door for dawn coolness, but it will never be cool or light, ever. A shot rings out. At the music-hall Rosie Levi tells me she knows a murderer but will not say his name. Wouldn’t you like to know? she mocks. The ship in the river sways to and fro at anchor. We know the murderer, Mrs Brown tells me confidentially, in the sunken garden, but it would be unsuitable to make his identity public. The dried-up fountain with the little statue suddenly bursts. There’s water everywhere. Three little girls in white frocks with hair ribbons in their long hair sing a silly song, swaying to and fro, seductively, like music-hall singers. Three little maidens, all unwary. I’m turning down Thames Street past the women, past the pubs, shouting, ‘Quick, he’s after me, he’ll kill me, you, too,’ but no one can hear for the clanging of the engines coming to the fire. Calgary’s on fire and all burned down. St Katharine’s Dock is on fire. London Bridge is burning down. Blood and fire. Calgary’s on fire. It’s burning up, horses stampeding, the good women of the town and their children all running to Esmeralda’s for shelter (only Mrs O’Rourke still nods to her former host
ess; the rest have returned to snook-cocking and, if vulgar, sniffing at the whores). And the fire sweeps on, taking wooden house after wooden house. A boy weeps for a yellow cat. Stampede. I’m running away from the murderer, but somehow into the flames. My sisters are calling me from the ship in the river. It’s hotter and hotter. I shall have to turn and face him. He puts his knife in my stomach. The lamb’s fleece is bloody. We used to scream on the wall looking down into the abattoir. Three little maidens all unwary, come from a ladies’ seminary. Blood and fire, flood and fire.
Then, some time later, I suppose, I wake from the fever, see a green arched ceiling, gas-lamps, metal beams overhead, hear a moan, a sentence I cannot understand. Then, I’m afire again, but drowning, down in the sea, tangled in weed, Thames weed, I see my sister’s face, floating towards me. She swims past, laughing at my struggles. I cannot breathe. ‘It was very nise. Catch me if you can, Mr Lusk.’ I cannot breathe. I hear rasping breaths. Mine. A cargo of oil has been released from the hold of a docked ship. Fire sweeps the water. I break the surface, aflame.
Still later, a voice says, ‘Drink this.’ Now, I’m swimming in the river, a hot day, pelicans line the banks. A flight of them sweeps overhead.
Ahead of me now, I see a window, the frame painted green, the centre, where the glass should be, solid dark yellow. As I watch, it moves, the yellow, and waves about. I sleep, or faint. Later the voice says again, ‘Drink this.’ I feel water on my lips and tongue. I want more, but it goes. I think I saw a hand, square, pink, rough and clean, with big reddened knuckles, a wedding ring embedded.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 19