—
“You know Furman?” Jayson had asked, when the name was first mentioned. He must have seen my face fall.
“By reputation, mostly. He was at Western U. When I was an Associate. He’s not a nice man.”
“Gwen wants him,” Jayson said. Gwen Halstram, from the Beckworth Foundation, the biggest of our big-fish donors. “She says he’s a ‘real scholar.’ ”
“He’s a prick,” I began. “He—”
“We have to make nice,” Jayson said. “We need this.”
He was right. We’d been planning the meeting for weeks, checking the details and polishing the pitch. Jayson and I made a point of getting in early, with coffee and Voodoo donuts. It’s a Portland thing. We’d also covered the conference table with fun little party favors, to set the tone. There were little truncheons and police whistles, notepads with the outline of a skulking Jack the Ripper, and letter openers in the shape of a Victorian clasp knife. Everything had Jayson’s logo on it. Jayson Straight Exhibition Design.
The walls were covered with Ripper material. Photos, sketches, and maps. Newspaper headlines and Police Gazette mock-ups. Wanted posters and book jackets. A facsimile of the “Dear Boss” letter. And those grainy, ghoulish photos of the victims. I’d tried to pin those up in a far corner, so people could look away if they wanted, but Jayson insisted on putting them front and center. “Grist for the mill,” he said.
There was also a large gallery of pop culture stuff. The cover of a dime novel, with a blonde in a clingy dress cowering in the Ripper’s shadow. A poster from the 1959 movie (“This lady of the night has taken her last walk!”). A panel from “Gotham by Gaslight,” with the Ripper squaring off against Batman. We even had an old Life with Archie comic, with a frightened Betty peering up at a shadowy, cane-wielding figure. I kid you not. More grist for the mill.
My name is Annie Chapman, which is pretty messed up, when you think about it. Annie Chapman also happens to be the name of one of the Ripper’s victims from 1888—the second of the “Canonical Five,” as they’re known. I even look a little like her, if the records are accurate. Blue eyes, wavy brown hair, a little over five feet tall. I’m not related as far as I know, but I still have a hard time looking at the mortuary photo.
Some people think that’s why Jayson hired me, because of the name. Actually, I came on as a research assistant during Justice for All: The American Legal Experience. I thought it would be short-term—I needed a job with benefits—but that was eleven years ago. I soon found that I liked working for Jayson. Loved it, in fact.
—
We had fourteen chairs around the conference table, and six more people would be joining on speakerphones. We’d been having weekly conference calls for six or seven weeks by then, but Jayson wanted a three-day summit at the studio to hammer out the final details before we went into production. He called it a “design charrette.” He loved that phrase.
Most of us had been together since Cursed and we knew what we were doing. You may have seen that one. Cursed: Unraveling the Mysteries of King Tut’s Tomb. We built a full-scale replica of the burial chamber, with antechambers where you could design your own burial masks and scarabs.
Our team also did Forty Whacks: The Lizzie Borden Experience. That was our big hit. It had all the usual bells and whistles—historical overview, newspaper coverage from 1892, pop culture impact—but the centerpiece was a forensic module of the murder scene. We had fiberglass mannequins of Abby and Andrew Borden with realistic stage blood oozing from their wounds. The guests got to run spatter tests and vote on whether Lizzie did it or not. CSI: Fall River.
But that was four years earlier. Frankly, our next two exhibitions hadn’t performed all that well. Great Powers: The Inside Story of the United Nations just didn’t pull the crowds and Mayflower: Journey to the New World drew some backlash from the Native American Council. I’m not going to lie to you. We needed a hit.
The Ripper seemed like a natural, picking up where Lizzie left off. But we’d made some mistakes the first time around. There’d been complaints about the “Whack-a-Skull” booth. The science was good, but looking back on it now, we might have framed it a little differently. Long story short, some of our donors got skittish. That’s how we got saddled with Arthur Furman. He was supposed to keep us in line.
Arthur had written a book on the Ripper, some dry-as-dust accounting of how the murders were “contextualized” in the Victorian press. He was a media studies professor at Western U and he was already old when I knew him there. Tall, a little stooped, high forehead, wire-rimmed glasses. The only distinctive thing about him was his facial hair. He had this weird Franz Josef thing going on—a huge, bushy moustache that curled away from his nose and merged into a thick pair of sideburns. I suppose it was striking, if you’re into that sort of thing. Which I’m not.
—
I did my best on that first morning. I took charge of Arthur while the rest of the team drifted in and took their places around the conference table. I got him a coffee and walked him through the material I’d pinned up on the walls. If a particular item passed muster, he’d give a little grunt. If it didn’t, he’d let out an exaggerated sigh—a weary scholar among dullards—and make a note on his legal pad.
We made it halfway around the room before he got to a rare old book called The Whitechapel Murders. I’d pinned up a color Xerox of the cover, in a loose grouping of “penny dreadfuls” from the period. I wasn’t surprised that it caught his eye. The Whitechapel Murders: Or the Mysteries of the East End was a hell of a coup for us. The writing is awful but it’s a “high spot” collectible. It came out in 1888, while the Ripper was still on the prowl. The cover shows a bearded, scowling Jack slinking away, knife in hand, while his latest victim lies in a pool of spreading blood. A wanted poster is visible in the background, listing the names of the victims and offering a £500 reward. The printing is crude and pulpy, but somehow that makes it all the more menacing. You can just about see the light fading in the dying woman’s eyes. I could, anyway.
Arthur must have stared at it for a good five minutes. “Where did you get this?” he asked. He was clearly put out at finding such a treasure in the hands of the Philistines.
“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” I pointed at the gas lamp in the foreground. “I love the way the artist managed to—”
“Where did you get it?” No time for small talk, apparently.
“From the Horowitz Collection at Kent State.”
“You mean to say you have the actual novella? The Purkess edition?”
“It’s on its way. It’ll be here on Wednesday.”
“You can’t be serious.” He gave a wild glance around the room, as if searching for a grown-up. “The Horowitz archive doesn’t lend materials, not even to me. They wouldn’t just—”
“I spoke to Dr. Horowitz personally,” I said. “He was utterly charming.”
Arthur studied my face. I could just about see the gears turning behind his eyes. “This is a variant I’d never seen before. It’s exceedingly rare. It should be in a museum.”
“It will be,” I said. “We’re designing a museum exhibition.”
He snorted. “That’s not what I meant. I meant a real museum.”
—
Our goals for that first morning were modest. We gave an overview of the seven rooms that would make up the exhibit and sketched out some details for the “Hall of Suspects” module. To be fair, Arthur was reasonably civil for an hour or so. He put up a bit of a fuss over Walter Sickert and James Maybrick, but he passed over Thomas Neill Cream with a magnanimous wave of the hand. “We all know that Dr. Cream didn’t do it,” he said. “That absurd story of his confession from the scaffold just doesn’t hold water. But the man was a murderer, pure and simple. He just wasn’t our murderer.”
Jayson and I exchanged a look. This was promising. I made a checkmark next to Dr. Cream’s name. Jayson closed the manila file and lifted the next one from the pile in front of him.
“Who’s next?” he began. “Ah, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and grandson of Queen Victoria. Prince Albert is said to have—”
“Absolutely not,” Arthur said. “Not a chance.”
“I’m sorry?” Jayson’s tone suggested that he might have misheard.
“He doesn’t belong,” Arthur said. “It’s a discredited theory. It wasn’t even mentioned in print until 1962.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Ajay, one of our researchers. “It could have been hushed up. Isn’t he the one that got caught at a brothel? Wasn’t that covered up, too?”
Arthur rounded on him. “There’s no evidence, only hearsay. And even if that business could be proven, it wouldn’t make him guilty of the Ripper killings. He had a strong alibi for each murder.”
“But he’s part of the Ripper legend,” Jayson said. “Just like Dr. Cream and James Maybrick. Right?”
“This is different,” Arthur insisted. “The whole royal-Masonic conspiracy theory is a sham. It’s just bad scholarship. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
“I appreciate that it’s controversial,” Jayson began, “but it’s also—”
“Even Joseph Gorman washed his hands of it,” Arthur continued, putting on a head of steam now. “Even Gorman said it was a hoax. And it was largely his doing in the first place!”
Jayson laid his palms flat on the table and took a slow breath. “But it’s part of the whole—the whole fabric of the thing. The narrative. People have heard this story. They’d heard that a member of the royal family was involved somehow. They may not remember the name, they may not know the details, but they’ve read something about it. Or they saw it in a movie. And if we don’t have it in our Hall of Suspects, it will leave a big hole. People will grouse. What about the royal guy? Where was the royal guy? And then they’ll go on Yelp and give us two stars. It was good, but they forgot the royal guy.” Jayson pushed back from the table and folded his arms. “We can have a text panel that explains the whole story. All the holes; all the flaws. But we have to include it.”
Arthur narrowed his eyes and stroked his bushy whiskers. “I was brought here to uphold a certain standard. I believe that’s why Ms. Halstram asked me to come aboard. To instill a sense of academic rigor.”
Jayson closed the manila folder on Prince Albert Victor. “We’ll put a pin in it. For now.”
Arthur scribbled something on his pad. “We’ll see,” he said. “It’s all a question of knowing where to draw the line.”
—
That afternoon we went out back onto the construction floor to see where the autopsies would be done. The fabrication crew was pulling together a full-scale surgical amphitheater, with all the Victorian trimmings. We’d drawn up plans for a gas-lit chamber lined with tiers of horseshoe benches, rising from floor to ceiling. The benches would give the guests a full view of the solid wooden operating table at the center of the room and a long shelf of fearsome-looking surgical instruments—forceps, tenacula, saws, and trocars. Below the table there would be a tin tray filled with sawdust, for catching debris. Smaller workstations would be lined up at the far edge, with an assortment of cork-stoppered vials and Bunsen burners. That’s where the guests would do the hands-on work.
Originally we wanted to stage a science module at the crime scene. We mapped out a realistic Victorian alleyway, complete with gaslight and cobblestones, and some swirling fog from a glycol machine. The guests would actually see the body where it fell, and we’d do forensic exercises right there at the scene. But we had to scrap it in the end. We couldn’t make it wheelchair-friendly.
In some ways, the autopsy theater was better. The plan was to have the guests come in on timed tickets. White screens would obscure the table. When the benches were full, a short video would play on the screens. We’d have actors portraying Thomas Bond, the medical examiner, and Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline. They’d come in shaking their heads and wringing their hands because another body had been discovered in the East End. We hadn’t decided which one it would be yet—possibly Elizabeth Stride, since there were opportunities to do soil analysis and bruise patterns, but Catherine Eddowes gave us a better shot at blood spatter work.
“Bond and Abberline will do the necessary exposition,” Jayson explained. “They’ll have some back and forth, describing the injuries and laying out the tests and procedures. All the while, we’ll be raising the tension on what’s hidden behind the screens. We’ll do close-ups of Abberline’s face, looking a little green when Bond raises the sheet. Bond will say that he’s never seen such an atrocity—something like that. Finally, when we’ve laid it all out just right, Bond will turn to the benches and speak directly to the guests.” Jayson flipped through his notes, looking for the exact wording. Time is of the essence. You have your notebooks; you have your tools. I will be here to guide you. Can you help us catch the killer? He pointed to the autopsy table. “And then the screens will lift away on pulleys to reveal the body, prepped for the procedure. If we play it right, the crowd will absolutely lose it. They’ll go nuts.” Jayson grinned and closed his notebook. “What do you think?”
Kristina, our graphics chief, started clapping madly. Others joined in. “I love it, Jayson,” Kristina said. “It’ll be a huge draw. Bigger than Cursed, even.”
“I’ll find some spooky music,” said Gunter, the sound engineer. “Something on a harmonium, high and tinkly.”
“And we’ll have street noises in the background,” Ajay said. “Footsteps. Wooden cab wheels rolling by.”
It went on like this for five or ten minutes, everyone chiming in with suggestions. It was the happiest I’d seen Jayson look in months.
And then Arthur had to have his say. He’d been standing apart from the rest of us, sniffing at an especially vicious-looking skull saw. “Do you mean to say that there’s going to be a body on this table? An actual body?”
Jayson’s smile faded. “Of course not. We’ll use a dummy.”
“A realistic-looking dummy?”
“Fairly realistic.”
Arthur nodded primly. “And when you say ‘prepped for the procedure,’ what does that mean? Exactly?”
Jayson chose his words carefully. “It means the body will have been transported from the crime scene and readied for Dr. Bond’s examination, according to the practices of the time.”
“By which you mean an incision along the sternum. With the skin pulled back to expose the internal organs.”
“Well…yes, according to the practices of the time.”
“And you’ll have people crowding around to look at it? To poke around inside the body cavity?”
“No, Arthur, no one will touch it. We’ll have it sealed off. In Plexiglas, probably.”
“It’ll have to be nonreflective,” said Ajay. “Otherwise you’ll get glare from the camera flashes.”
Jayson continued as if he hadn’t heard. “They’ll just be observing the body, Arthur. They’ll take note of the bruise patterns—or the pooled blood, whatever. They won’t touch the body. They’ll just observe.”
I jumped in, trying to turn the page. “What happens next? After they observe the body?”
“They’ll take their findings to the workstations,” Jayson said quickly. “They’ll run an experiment. We’ll have a touch screen at each kiosk, with a clip of Dr. Bond guiding them through the steps. They’ll press a button that corresponds to the findings they recorded in their notebooks. When they finish, a clip of Inspector Abberline will pop up. He’ll say either ‘Well done,’ or ‘Back to the drawing board,’ depending on whether they got the right results or not.”
Arthur wasn’t buying it. “It’s utterly nightmarish,” he said. “Like one of those midnight creep shows.”
“Of course it’s a creep show,” I said, a little more sharply than I intended. “It’s not as if these women lived happily ever after.”
“But it’s too graphic,” Arthur said.
“Too gory.”
“Did you ever get a chance to see Cursed?” I asked. “Our exhibition on King Tut?”
Arthur shook his head.
“We had an interactive where the guests pulled out a brain with an iron hook. Through the nostrils, just like the ancient Egyptians did. Excerebration. Nobody ever complained. You can get away with a little gore, Arthur, as long as there’s educational content.”
—
Our production facility, Hawkswood Studios, sprawls out over more than one hundred thousand square feet, with a design center at the front and an enormous fabrication space at the back. We have woodshops, metal presses, electronics labs, recording booths, and custom paint benches. We can take a concept from a scribble on a cocktail napkin and turn out five to eight tons of exhibit material, all crated up and ready to ship out to museums across the world. On any given day the main floor might be set for the Battle of Argonne Forest, complete with scrub wire and foxholes, and the next it could be the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii. It’s an exciting place to work.
But we’re in the middle of nowhere. In the evenings, when we have out-of-towners in for a charrette, we literally have to make our own fun. That night some of the crew guys had done up the sound stage as a 1970s disco, with pulsing lights and throbbing music. There was even a glitter ball hanging from a sound boom and a cardboard stand-up of John Travolta, finger pointing to the sky.
I found Jayson at the bar with a Grey Goose and tonic, looking worried. “There’s going to be trouble, Annie,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. Arthur was perched on a folding chair at the far side of the room, wincing theatrically as somebody turned up the volume on Gloria Gaynor.
“He might come around,” I said.
“I hope so.” He lifted his glass and pressed it to his forehead. “We need this to happen,” he said, closing his eyes. “We really do.”
I helped myself to a glass of Shiraz. “We’ve been on the skids before, Jayson.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 123