by Will Thomas
He was in a manic state and fighting for his life. But he was clever as well, devilishly clever. He seized the blade from the trapped hand and I gasped as the blade entered between my ribs on the other side.
That was it. The gloves were off. Someone was snarling, and I think it was me. I turned and thumped him hard with the bottom of my fist over the socket of his left eye. His head bounced off the floor. He stopped moving. Pushing myself up off him, I sat back and pulled the whistle from my mouth, panting heavily. My trousers were soaked in blood. Where was a policeman when you needed one? Where was Cyrus Barker? Surely he knew what sort of trouble I might find here.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and just managed to catch Aaron’s wrist before the blade he held in his fist ripped my jugular. We rolled onto the floor again. Aaron’s feet were dug into my sides, trying to injure me further with his jagged nails, as with one hand I held his wrist while trying to jam a thumb in his eye. It was the ugliest, dirtiest fight I had ever been in. He was quickly reducing me to the same kind of animal he was in order to survive.
Surely his strength couldn’t hold up forever, I thought. How can I best him? For if I didn’t best him I would become his final victim. Perhaps I was on the wrong side. If I could get behind him, and wrap myself around him, he couldn’t get at me with his makeshift knife.
I had wrestled a good deal in our antagonistics classes, though never with an opponent wielding a blade. I latched onto his forearm and tugged and pushed and kicked and dragged until I was nearly behind him, and then clasped my limbs about his waist. I fell onto the floor and held him as he squirmed to release himself. Then I wrapped my right arm around his neck, squeezing, and inserted the whistle into my mouth again. Finally, I blew for all I was worth and held on as he buckled. He jumped and flailed and screeched over the wail of my regulation Metropolitan Police whistle.
At one point his body was bowed with only his head and his feet on the ground and I was nearly off the ground myself. Both of us were jigging about as he gyrated in a kind of mad fury, a beast captured and cornered. If I could just hold on to him for a few minutes, surely help would come from somewhere.
Then I looked up and there was a dark shape in the doorway. It was Barker in his coat and bowler hat. He bent over slowly and lowered the barrel of a pistol to Aaron Kosminski’s forehead. I felt the strength suddenly go out of him.
“Look out!” I cried, as something moved beside him.
Wolfe Kosminski had materialized out of nowhere. He seized Barker’s wrist that held the gun. Barker did not hesitate. His elbow swung out horizontally as if it were on a hinge, and it clipped the elder brother on the point of his chin. Wolfe Kosminski dropped like a stone. The Guv’s pistol returned to his brother’s head.
“Mr. Kosminski,” he growled. “My name is Cyrus Barker. I am an inspector from Scotland Yard. You are under arrest.”
Then before I knew it, the room was full of constables, and things began to get confused. There was a doctor, and Barker told me not to move, and I think he told me I had done well, but perhaps I just dreamed that part. A handcart was brought and then I was being wheeled down a very bumpy road; the residents were watching me as I went by. That was the last that I can recall.
CHAPTER FORTY
I awoke sometime later in London Hospital. I was in a casual ward, which I shared with at least two dozen other patients. It was the middle of the night and the gas was low. I remembered I had been stabbed twice. Gingerly, I felt for the heavy bandages about my abdomen. They had been wrapped from my chest to my waist. The wounds had been stitched closed, I assumed. It hurt to move, so I did so as little as possible. Simply lying on a small hill of pillows seemed to be enough for the moment.
My neighbors were asleep. My thoughts were slow. I suspected I had been injected with opium. I had just helped capture Jack the Ripper, I told myself, but it seemed largely academic at that moment. There were no emotions currently attached to the statement. In my condition, it might just as well have happened to someone I did not know.
A nurse came in carrying a candle, making her rounds in semidarkness. She came along slowly, stopping to study a chart by one patient’s bed. Not feeling sleepy, I watched her move about the room. She was a stout woman, with a personality that seemed to brook no nonsense. Not a woman to chaff.
“Awake, are we?” she asked, when she reached my bed.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My voice came out in a whisper.
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
She lifted my chart. “You were in a fight of some sort. Two stab wounds. Tsk.”
“I’m with Scotland Yard. I was in Whitechapel.”
“Did you forget you are a man and not a pincushion?”
They are like that, you know, nurses: not satisfied until one is put in one’s place. If there was one thing I had learned from my previous visits to hospital it is that it is best not to argue. It only incites them to further discipline.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She gave me the gimlet eye, making certain I was not being sarcastic. Actually, I was, but I had not the energy it required. Also, the opium was still working, as if my mind was a chalkboard and I was writing down sentences, but just as quickly a hand was erasing them again.
“Get some sleep, Constable,” she said, and moved on. I did not answer because the few words I said had left me exhausted.
For the next hour, I carried on a long soliloquy in my head. I have no recollection of what it was about, merely that I must remember it when I awoke again. It might have been as deep as a cohesive philosophy for the universe, or as common as remembering to look for my notebook in the morning. At some point, I fell asleep again.
The next I knew, it was morning. Sunlight was streaming in from some windows high in the wall. Cyrus Barker was there, looming over me as he had the day before. At least, I hoped it was the day before. Instead of a pistol, he held a bouquet of carnations in his hand. For a moment, I wondered if I were hallucinating.
“For me?” I asked, my voice sounding raspy in my throat.
“They are from Philippa,” he explained. “She said she hopes you will be well again soon. But I see these are not the first.”
I tried to turn my head, but it barely moved, as if it weren’t constructed to move from side to side. There was another bouquet there, of mixed flowers, not large, but tasteful.
“Who is it from?” I asked.
The Guv set down the flowers, then rooted about in the other bouquet for a card.
“Here it is. ‘Get well soon. Mrs. A Cowen.’”
Rebecca. Who had told her? I wondered. Israel, perhaps? Word travels fast in the East End. It felt good that she had sent them.
“How are you feeling?”
“Thirsty,” I said.
He poured water from a pitcher into a tumbler, then lifted my head to drink. Normally when he seizes my head it is to show a pressure point, or the proper method to break a neck.
“I’m having you moved to a private room,” he continued.
“Can’t I go home, sir?”
“The doctor wants to be sure your wound is knitting and that there is no foreign matter in it.”
“Then here is fine enough,” I said. “Save the room for someone who needs it. What happened to Kosminski?”
“He has been moved to Colney Hatch, and is being watched carefully. The manic state he exhibited when he killed Mary Kelly and tried to kill you has given way to lethargy. He sits in his cell unmoving for hours. He ignores any conversation or command. He doesn’t appear to notice that anyone is in the room, even when he is shaken. I cannot guarantee that his reason, if he ever had any, will return.”
“Oh, he had some,” I said. “Remember the rat.”
“Aye.”
“So, it’s over?”
“I believe so. The government has decided to keep the matter out of the newspapers, since he was a Jew. They fear there would be riots. Their fears are not groundless, I
suspect.”
“I was just standing there when he came down through the coal chute, covered in gore.”
“And wrestled with him and was stabbed twice in the process.”
“I couldn’t let him hurt anyone else.”
“Well, he won’t now, thanks to you. Exemplary work, Mr. Llewelyn.”
Normally, he reserved my surname for when I’d done something boneheaded. Exemplary? I was just trying to restrain the fellow until someone got there.
“It was you who deduced the Ripper’s identity, sir,” I said. Then I realized I had called the killer by that name.
“Aye, in spite of the Illustrated Police News’s attempts to sensationalize what were actually just a few murders.”
“As I said several weeks ago, sir. They instilled panic in the streets merely to sell newspapers.”
I stopped and settled back on my pillows. The conversation was draining me.
“I suppose it is time for some laudanum,” he said.
“No, no. I still have some questions. What’s going to happen at Scotland Yard?”
“I hear the order has come through for constables to be returned to their regular beats. There will be no more patrolling Whitechapel.”
“So they agree that Aaron Kosminski is the Whitechapel Killer?”
Barker nodded. “They do. There is a small chance we are all wrong. There is no way to prove the blood that covered him belonged to Mary Kelly. However, there was no other bloody occurrence yesterday and no obvious way for him to be found covered with blood otherwise. The only way to know for certain is if no more similar murders occur. This conclusion is logical. We went in looking for a madman, and we found one, right on Goulston Street where I expected him to be.”
“Occam’s razor.
“Precisely.”
“Do you suppose Warren is satisfied?”
“Yes and no,” my employer said. “He believes Kosminski is the Whitechapel Killer. However, he holds himself responsible for not capturing him sooner, or so Abberline tells me.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He’s responsible for running the Yard, not finding the killer himself. That was Swanson’s and Abberline’s duty. And yours, too, I suppose.”
“So many letters from the public and articles in the newspapers have been published, pointing to the inefficiency of the Yard, that in order to circumvent a vote of no confidence for the government and for the Metropolitan, in particular, Warren may decide to resign.”
“But wouldn’t that be exactly what Munro wants? He would be a natural for the position. It would be uncontested.”
“Abberline says by Warren taking the blame, a new and better Yard may grow from the ashes, or at least that is what Warren believes.”
“But, I—ah!”
Barker frowned and stepped forward. “What is it, Thomas?”
“A pain, sir. A sharp pain in the ribs.”
“Your medication has worn off. I shall return in a moment.”
I sat back and tried to relax, but I was angry. It wasn’t fair. Barker had solved the case on Warren’s watch, and he deserved to share in the success therein. To take the blame merely because he hadn’t caught the Ripper sooner was simply unfair. At the same time, I had to admire his stamina and resolve. He would eventually take the blame and sail off with it, leaving Scotland Yard to expand in reputation and move into its new buildings. It was like Moses not being able to enter the land of Canaan.
Barker returned with a nurse who wasn’t satisfied until she had ladled laudanum down my throat. I hate the licorice flavoring that is used to disguise the taste in patent medicines, but worse than that is nothing to hide the taste of the laudanum at all.
“There you go,” she said. She wasn’t the same one as the night before, but her bedside manner was no improvement. “That’ll start taking effect in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, nurse,” Barker said, as if he was bestowing blessings from heaven. I’m blowed if the woman didn’t begin to simper. I don’t understand it, but sometimes he has that effect on women.
“So,” I said after she was gone. “Warren may be out soon. Is there a way to keep Munro from getting his position?”
“You don’t think he can do the work?”
“I didn’t care for the way he went about it,” I said.
“That isn’t what I asked. Do you think he can do the work?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. He was second in command when Warren took over, and expected to succeed. I suppose he can.”
“So do I.”
Barker leaned forward and sniffed Rebecca’s flowers.
“Hothouse flowers,” he said. “Not as much bouquet as naturally grown ones, but nice, all the same. Is that not Rabbi Mocatta’s daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was not aware you had retained your relationship.”
“We met by chance while I was in Whitechapel.”
“And how is Asher Cowen?”
“Right enough, or so I hear. I haven’t spoken to him yet.”
Barker’s blasted eyebrows rose above the edge of his round spectacles.
“I only spoke to her once, and shall probably not be renewing our acquaintance. I presume Israel must have told her I was injured.”
“Mmmph,” Barker said. Tacit disapproval, with the expectation that I should do better in future.
“We should have thought of the coal chute, sir.”
“Aye, Thomas, you are right. There is an incline between Goulston Street and the alley to the east, so that the ground floor of Kosminski’s factory becomes the cellar in Aaron’s room.”
“What is to become of the family, sir? Was Wolfe arrested?”
“Arrested and released. It was rather obvious that this family was suspicious of their brother’s involvement in the Whitechapel killings. They did not know about the chute, which was disused, but suspected he might be getting out somehow. If the Yard arrested them, however, it would have to admit in court that Aaron Kosminski is the killer, and they—we—hoped to avoid that at all costs. Not that we told them that. We kept Wolfe and his brother for several hours until they voluntarily signed him over into the custody of Colney Hatch. He will have alienists watching and assessing his mental abilities and condition. Do you know why he smelled so terribly?”
“I assumed it was because he never bathed,” I said.
“True, but he had taken the blood of all his victims and smeared them across his chest. That is why he was so fetid.”
“My word, that’s disgusting! Did you search his room thoroughly? I was wondering if they ever discovered any sign of the organs he carried away with him.”
Barker shook his head. “Oh, lad. I hoped you had worked that out. The young man with whom you have been sharing the premises at 27 Goulston Street is a cannibal.”
“But I thought it a joke, the Lusk letter and the half a kidney, fried and et. That was written by one of the newspapermen.”
“It happens to be true. Perhaps he was not the gentleman everyone expected Jack the Ripper to be, but in terms of being mentally depraved, Aaron Kosminski was everything Grub Street could hope he would be. Of course, they will never know.”
I tried to think of that, but it was too much for my worn-out brain to take in just then.
“You’re starting to shimmer, sir,” I said.
“I imagine that is the laudanum taking effect. I’ve kept you talking far too long. You must get your rest.”
“Have you moved back into Newington, sir?”
“I have, but we’re still at Scotland Yard for now.”
“Has the doctor given any indication of when I can leave?”
“A few days. No more than a week. We shall take it one day at a time. Now, rest.”
By then the room appeared to be teetering, and I thought I was on some large seagoing vessel, a floating hospital, and I fell asleep again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A week later, I was finally able to leave the ho
spital. The doctor had weaned me from the opiates and was reasonably assured that no bit of foreign matter such as a small scrap of shirt had been left inside the wound, which could lead to a fatal infection. Sometimes I think my chief attribute as an enquiry agent is that I heal quickly.
The doctor had ordered another week of bed rest, but I was having none of it. It was time to settle this case and return to our offices. People would be clamoring for Barker’s services by now and it would be nice to sort things out and get things back to the way they were, if that was Barker’s intent. I put on my uniform, conscious of the fact that it would probably be the final time I wore it.
It was good to be home again, and I would not miss the Frying Pan. Etienne Dummolard was not effusive, but he made a pain au chocolat for my breakfast with fresh-pressed coffee. It was no pleasure pulling myself up into the hansom cab that was ordered to our door and I understood how Robert Anderson must have felt the night he hired us. My biggest fear was that one of my wounds might open again or begin to seep blood, and I’d have another week of enforced bed rest. After a couple of days I start to go mad from inactivity, especially if I know Barker is out doing things without me.
Alighting slowly in Great Scotland Yard Street, I pushed through the gate and into the entrance of the main building. No sooner had I entered than I knew things had changed. The desk sergeant looked pleased to see me. In the hall, one of the detectives patted me on the shoulder, and another said “Good work.” By the time I reached the small kitchen, it was full of officers wanting to hear the story of how I had captured Aaron Kosminski, also known as Jack the Ripper.
They say that any true account, if told enough, becomes a story. One discards certain facts and retains others. Events are rearranged for the effect they have upon the audience and one attempts to be dramatic or humorous. To tell the truth, I had not been rehearsing my tale beforehand, preferring not to think of the events surrounding Kosminski’s capture. When I told it to Barker during my convalescence, it had been disjointed and brief. In front of a room full of detectives, however, it had to be coherent. Whether it was or not, they tore it apart, asked questions, combed through facts, and pulled inferences from me I hadn’t thought of before. Barker listened and nodded approval.