Three features of this account terrified me. First, the incident occurred in Whitechapel, on the very street and among the very buildings where I had stayed for my time in London. Secondly, Martha Tabram worked for a madam who had been one of Petit’s own girls—one of Susanna’s housemates. This woman who had been murdered could have just as easily been my Susanna eighteen years back. But worst of all was the way she had been murdered—stabbed thirty-nine times. No one that I had ever profiled killed like that. Here was a new kind of murderer—who did what he did not for profit or for business but for erotic joy.
I let the newspaper slump from my jangled fingers and stared at the wall. A monster like this could not live in a world with my Anna in it. Before I brought down the whole house of cards that had built up since Susanna’s death, I was going to track down this one killer.
I drew out a clean piece of paper and began listing what I knew: Whitechapel, Angel Alley, George Yard, soldier, Martha, Ann, thirty-nine stab wounds, soldier friend … . This would be a new calculus. Susanna’s work began with the person and ended with the crime, but I must go in the reverse. I must begin with the crime and find the killer.
When the second and third murders hit the papers, I at least had a name for my quarry: Jack the Ripper.
28
JACK THE RIPPER
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
Martha Tabram haunted me. I imagined her murder—a woman on the street, desperate for money; a man with hidden motives engaging her; an empty apartment on George Yard; the squalor and his apology for it; her request that he place three crowns on the dresser … . It was a terrible fancy, but I could not banish it from my mind, could not imagine Martha as anyone but Susanna.
And always, in the end, she lay on the landing in a pool of blood.
“Father, what is it?” Anna asked one night.
I was sitting across from her in our parlor, the Times on my lap and my hands draped across the embroidered arms of the chair. She had caught me in the throes of another terrible vision. “Huh?”
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
I folded the Times. “Um, yes, I—I’m not feeling well.”
She rose and came to me. “It’s as if you’re back seven years ago, on that horrible day.”
I blinked in shock at her. “Yes, Anna. It’s like that. It’s very much like that.”
She sat down on the arm of the chair and placed her hand on my shoulder. “What is it, Father?”
I shook my head.
“I’m not a child anymore. You don’t need to protect me.”
“Oh yes, you are. You’re sixteen. And, oh yes, I do need to protect you.” She scowled at me, and I tried to explain: “Anna—men are monsters.”
“Not all men—”
“Many are. Too many.”
Her hand flitted to the paper and flicked it open. “What’s this? ‘Dear Boss’?”
I sighed deeply. She had found it, the trigger of my latest bout of terror. “A letter. The police hope someone will recognize the handwriting.”
I couldn’t stop her from reading—Anna was too headstrong, too smart—and some small part of me wanted her help. She leaned over me and began to read:
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them til I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.
Yours truly,
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha
“Jack the Ripper,” Anna murmured.
“There have been three murders, Anna—women in Whitechapel, where your mother came from: Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman. Stabbed, throats slit, bodies mutilated, organs removed … . And this letter is either from the killer or from someone as sick as he.”
Anna breathed quietly. Her eyes studied the handwriting: the kinked J, the arrogant R, the smooth strokes of fingers as clever with ink as with blood. “Sent to the Central News Agency?”
“Yes,” I said, “which means he wants publicity. He talks of a ‘trade name,’ as if he is trying to sell something, Maybe it’s just a newspaperman trying to make a fortune. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a hoaxer—”
“Or maybe it’s real. This letter feels real. That bit about trade names just shows we’re dealing with a new type of killer. He’s in it for fame. Immortality.” Already Anna’s mind had found the same groove mine had been following. “What about the police?”
“Useless,” I snarled.
Anna turned from the paper and looked at me. “What about you, Father? I know you’ve been working this out.”
How much did she know? “Equally useless,” I said evasively. Anna frowned, and I felt the need to justify myself. “Oh, I’ve profiled each victim: they’re about forty, poor, with common-law marriages, supported with prostitution. The killings have happened in secluded corners of Whitechapel, places accessible to the public. The crimes are stabbings and throat slashings and mutilations. So, I’ve profiled them … but what does any of that tell about the killer?” The question was rhetorical.
The answer was not. “It tells us quite a bit, I’d say.” Anna got up to pace the floor. “The letter writer’s sane, for one—though he’d like to be perceived as insane. An insane man wouldn’t hide his crimes this way. An insane man wouldn’t clean himself of blood or cover the blood up so well. He’d be noticed stalking away. This man isn’t noticed. He is even careful not to mail the letter when he is still … so to speak … red-handed.”
A chill went through me. Anna sounded just like her mother. She had parsed out in moments what had taken me days to deduce, and she was taking a rare delight in it.
“He’s intelligent, well educated,” Anna continued. “The handwriting is refined, and the spelling is, for the most part, correct. This isn’t a thug’s letter.”
“Anything else?”
“The man clearly has trouble with authority. He mocks the cleverness of the police but indicates that he expects someday to be caught by them, with words like ‘they wont fix me just yet’ and ‘shant quit ripping them til I do get buckled.’ He can’t control women who are his equals, so he’s ‘down on whores’—preying on the most destitute, helpless, and hopeless women. He controls them first with money and then with a knife, making sure to ‘rip’ them before they have time to ‘squeal.’ He wants to be a grand man—to have a trade name—but he’s really a skulker, afraid of police and prostitutes, both.”
“Yes, you’ve parsed it out,” I admitted.
Anna turned a triumphant smile on me. “We can catch this man!”
I shook my head. “No. No, not we, my girl. I couldn’t risk you.”
Wagging her finger at me, Anna came to sit again on the arm of the chair. “You are planning something, aren’t you?”
“I can’t let this man kill again.”
“You’re planning something right away.”
“I have to stop him—for the sake of your mother’s memory.”
“Yes. My mother. Which gives me the right to help.”
“Out of the question.”
“Last time, you left
Mother behind because you thought she’d be safer.” Anna gripped my arm. “You can’t leave me behind.”
I shivered, thinking, I damn well can, but Anna had my number. For seven years, I’d regretted my actions that fateful night. I couldn’t leave Anna now.
“What are you planning?” she asked.
“He kills on the weekends—as one month ends and another begins. Tomorrow begins one such weekend. He kills in Whitechapel, and I have already booked passage for myself on a train that will arrive there at six tomorrow evening.”
“Book me as well.”
I held up my hand. “Given the killer’s monthly schedule, I deduce that he has work that keeps him away from Whitechapel for three weeks at a time. According to one account, the killer arrived in Whitechapel with a soldier friend. I’d guess the soldier to be a seaman—and our killer to be one of his comrades. Sailors are notorious for landing in port and seeking easy women. I’ve checked the manifests of all the Royal Navy ships that dock on the Thames along Wapping, and the steam cutter Union Jack has kept a schedule that perfectly matches the dates of the killings.”
Anna’s mouth dropped open. “The cutter Jack? Jack the Ripper?”
“Precisely,” I said. “And on the ship’s manifest, there are three men who answer to the description that you have given—well educated, intelligent, sane, socially awkward, trouble with authority and women: Bo’s’n Drew Beckworth, Ship’s Mate Greer Haines, and Master of the Tops John Harder.”
“And so, it’s merely a matter of arriving at Wapping before the ship docks, identifying these three men as they debark, and following them to see which will seek out a prostitute in Whitechapel.”
“All of them will seek out a prostitute in Whitechapel,” I replied, though it nettled me to think that I was speaking to my sixteen-year-old daughter this way. “We’ll have to follow these men to see which one of them attempts murder.”
“But there are only two of us, and there are three of them.”
“Luckily, Beckworth and Haines are best friends and constant companions. I’m betting that they were the two men seen together the night Martha Tabram was murdered.”
“So, you follow them, and I follow Harder.”
Here it was, the fateful decision. “Harder is the least likely suspect. He is master of tops—an authority with a problem with authority? But you cannot follow him, Anna—only watch from a safe distance.”
“Won’t we be conspicuous?” Anna asked. “A Cambridge don and his frilly daughter in Whitechapel?”
“We’ll be in disguise.”
ON THE thirtieth of September, 1888, Anna and I crouched in the lee of a little alleyway in Wapping. We wore clothes from a ragpicker’s stall—attered gray jerkins and trousers, boots yanked to midcalf, and misshapen felt berets. Even our faces were disguised, rubbed with ash and coal. We looked like any other desperate blokes in the shouldering mass of humanity. No one would recognize us; we could hardly recognize ourselves.
The alley gave us a clear view of the docks, where the Union Jack even now settled in its berth. While deckhands hurled lines over the mooring blocks, other crew hoisted a section of rail from its posts and slid a gangplank through the gap. The great ramp boomed down onto the dock.
“They’re ready to debark,” I whispered. I’d brought a bottle of gin as a prop, though now I lifted it in my fist and took a little swig for courage.
Anna grabbed the bottle, took a mouthful herself, and sprayed gin across the alley. Coughing like a woman with consumption, she choked out, “You have your sap?”
I fished in my breast pocket and pulled out a little leather bag full of lead shot. “Yes. You have your nightstick?”
She opened the flap of her rucksack, showing ten copies of the Times folded over a small club.
“Follow at a distance. Don’t approach. Don’t make eye contact. Get out your papers and start to sell them. Notice every woman he approaches, and when he snares one, track them to whatever spot he chooses—”
“And blow the whistle,” Anna replied.
“Right. And keep blowing it until I or the police arrive.”
“I understand the plan.”
“You need to understand, also”—I reached up to touch the side of her face—“that I cannot lose you.”
Her voice was sullen in the alley. “I know.”
“Be careful.”
“You, too.” She flashed a smile. Then she looked up beyond the alley. “There’s my mark.”
I glanced out to see the crew of the Union Jack rambling down the gangplank. There, in the mass of them, was John Harder. We recognized him from a photograph in the Royal Navy archives. A short man in blue bell-bottoms, Harder walked jauntily down the gangplank. Though it was a cool night and fog was beginning to rise from the fetid Thames, most of the sailors wore no coat. John Harder, master of the tops, however, wore a greatcoat—sufficient in length to hide a long blade and the gore that it brought out.
“Be careful,” I repeated.
Anna reached back to me, squeezed my hand, and said, “I’ll be all right.” She hoisted the rucksack on her back and ambled out onto the pavement.
I watched her go, strong and gawky like an adolescent boy. She was a born actress, just as her mother had been. “I love you,” I said to her back as she marched out into the street and vanished.
I did not have time to fear for her, though. My own marks descended the gangplank now. Ship’s Mate Greer Haines was easy to spot. He was a head taller than his mates, his hair was the color of straw, and his unclean teeth flashed in a perpetual smile. But the greatest evidence of his identity was the bosom friend at his side, Drew Beckworth, boatswain of the Union Jack. The man was squat, with long black hair in braids, a gold ring in his nose, and a silver tooth in his smile. One of these two men—the blond blade of grass or the black truffle—was my killer. I was sure of it.
They strode down the gangplank side by side, laughing, and I shambled up from my spot in the alleyway and went to lean on a wall of crumbling brick. Ahead of me, the tide of sailors moved like a river toward Whitechapel Road—the avenue that sluiced into the heart of the dissolute East Side. Haines and Beckworth simply rode the tide. With bottle in hand, so did I.
I followed Haines and Beckworth down a canyon of Tudor shops, their upper stories leaning out above the pavements. The seamen stopped at a vintner’s shop for a bottle of wine and had the cork out and the first swigs down before they had even emerged. With bottle in hand, they sauntered up to a mustachioed fellow with an apron across his broad belly and a little iron oven at his feet. He was baking great doughy pretzels in the oven, skewering them on bamboo, and selling them for a halfpenny each. Money changed hands, and the sailors snacked.
I began to grow nervous. What murderer buys pretzels?
As Haines and Beckworth reached the heart of Whitechapel—the throbbing center of prostitution, drug trafficking, and gambling, the game changed utterly.
Beckworth’s hand sneaked into the hand of Haines.
I stopped, heart pounding. These two had come to Whitechapel not for prostitutes but for each other. They weren’t interested in women at all—dead or alive—but only in the rites of Sodom.
It was a fatal error. Neither of these men could be the murderer, which meant … .
A whistle sounded—long and shrill and desperate. “Anna.”
The bottle of gin fell from my nerveless grip, and I pelted down the street, trying desperately to track the sound of that whistle. Beyond the garrulous laughter, beyond the snort and humph of ill-used horses and the melody of an oblivious piano, there came that shrill tone. I rounded a corner and heard it the more: strident, terrified. As I dodged past the bleary walkers, I saw her: Anna. Alive. Blowing that damned whistle. She stood by a lamppost, her newspapers spilled out across the ground but the nightstick in her grip.
I rushed up to her and slid to a stop. “Where? Where!”
She was white-faced and horrified, her arm jutting toward a stairway
across the street.
“Stay here, and stop blowing that thing!” I snarled, and then ran, dodging traffic to reach the stairway.
It was ancient and decayed, descending between two buildings into a dark emptiness. I wished I’d brought a lantern but grabbed the sap, the next best thing. My feet struck the stairs, and I bounded down them, three at a time, to the landing, and down again.
At the bottom, I bolted out into an abandoned square bathed in the blue light of a gibbous moon. Hip-high weeds jutted up through the paving stones, but some had been trammeled down into a narrow path ahead. Stalking along that trail, I heard a gurgling sound. I lifted the sap high, ready for Jack the Ripper. Instead, moonlight revealed a woman lying in the weeds—the dying form of Elizabeth Stride.
Of course, I didn’t know her name then, but it lives with me now, forever. Long Liz lay in a wreck of weeds, eyes wide in terror as her slit throat bled onto the ground. I knelt beside her and lifted her head in my lap. I pressed my hand on the slit, but there was no way to stop the blood flow.
“Too late, my darling,” I said even as her eyes fluttered. “Too late to save you.” She shivered once and was still. I kissed her and embraced her. The tall Swede, the sad lady, lay dead in my arms.
But Jack the Ripper was still alive.
Anna’s whistle sounded again—two short bursts, and then silence.
“Anna!” I laid Elizabeth among the weeds and ran back toward the stairs. My heart thundered as I vaulted to the top.
Anna caught me and dragged me to a stop. She had crossed the road to peer down into the darkness, and she was terrified. “He was here,” she gasped.
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Page 16