by Andy Conway
“What do you mean?”
“Jack the Ripper’s clever. Everyone knows that. You’re clever. You’re cleverer than the police. You eluded them every time. The entire London police force. You’re a legend.”
“You want me to go to the police? I’m not a fool.”
But Danny could see it in his face. He was at the end of it all. A devil sick of sin. A part of him wanted to be caught. Another part of him would always fight against it and go on murdering. “But they won’t arrest you.”
“Why won’t they?”
“Because you tell them she hung herself. You woke up and found her hanged. She committed suicide. But you panicked. You thought they’d arrest you for murder, so you hid her in the trunk. It’s what any normal man would do.”
“They’d lock me up,” Bury spat. But he was beginning to believe. He was warming to the idea.
“No. They’d believe you. You’re smarter than them. You fooled the smartest police in the land. These here are children by comparison.”
“Yes. They’re all stupid up here.”
“Just imagine it,” Danny whispered. “You could walk right into a police station, with blood all over you, and they still wouldn’t catch you. That’s what Jack the Ripper would do.”
Bury giggled. “No one can catch him.”
“No one can catch you.”
“They’ll never catch me.”
“Never. Not even when you walk right up to them and say Here I am.”
Bury nodded furiously, convincing himself, then he cackled and pushed himself up off his stool and pointed a finger in Danny’s face.
“You old devil, you!” he cackled. “You sly boots!”
His breath stank of cheap whisky and death, and Danny tried not to flinch back, just smiled and nodded as if he really were this mad killer’s guardian angel.
Bury went to a cloudy mirror on the wall and straightened his tie, spat on his fingers and brushed his hair flat, stroking his beard, grinning evilly at his mad face, his insane, invincible face.
And with that he threw on an overcoat and walked through to the next room. Danny heard Bury’s feet scuffle across bare floorboards. A door opened and the wind howled through, the fire roaring in the grate.
Danny limped through and found the next room empty but for a couple of rags of red curtain hanging either side of the window. Through broken panes he saw Bury climb to the street above.
He followed, struggling up the seventeen stone steps, and emerged onto the snowblown street.
Bury was already walking down the hill, illuminated by a gas lamp for a moment, snowflakes whirling all around him like a swarm of flies, before disappearing into the dark, singing a song, the words whipped away on the wind, something about green grow the rushes.
Danny watched him disappear into the night and felt the balm of certainty flow through him. It felt like changing history. Bury would walk into the police station thinking he was invincible. They would come and find the body in the trunk and arrest him. And hang him. And William Bury would be no more.
He’d done it. He’d brought Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror to an end. He had done something good after all.
He looked down at his foot and saw blood spreading around one of his boots and he knew he was going to die.
But I got you, he thought. I got you in the end.
A fog of fatigue swept over him, clouding his eyes, and he wondered if he would fall in the snow and die right there.
He looked up into the teeming night sky and felt himself flying through starlight like an arrow of light, through space and time, hurtling towards what he knew would be his own time, his own present. It was almost as if he was becoming superhuman. Perhaps this had been his destiny all his life. He was caught up from the Earth in a whirlwind he couldn’t control, and borne away in a chariot no one could follow.
As he hurtled towards the bright white light that was God, or the sun, or the future, he had a last flicker of doubt, wondering if he was ascending or falling. The light ahead, growing so fast, was like the light of an oncoming train, and he wouldn’t know until it was upon him whether it was the light from Earth or from Heaven or from Hell.
Acknowledgements
WILLIAM BEADLE’S BOOK, Jack the Ripper: Unmasked, which puts a very convincing case for William Bury, was an invaluable resource and sat beside my laptop throughout the writing of Buried in Time, as did Euan Macpherson’s The Trial of Jack the Ripper (The Case of William Bury 1859—89). While looking for names for my two detectives, I decided to commemorate the authors of the two major volumes on William Bury. I hope they don’t mind.
There were other works on Jack the Ripper that led me here, so it seems only right to thank Stephen Knight and Alan Moore too. And also Trevor Jones, whose From Hell soundtrack was a constant companion while writing. But mostly, it is the many and varied contributors to the Ripper Casebook website and forums and JTRForums to whom thanks is owed. It was their diligent and painstaking research that forced me into a myriad of rewrites and corrections. I’m sure there are still a great many factual and historical errors they might take issue with, but I thank them for the things that have made this novel better.
David Wake went above and beyond the call of duty in editing this book, and his excellent series of Victorian adventure novels, The Derring-Do Club, were particularly inspiring. James Donaghy shared many hours of Ripper talk over the years, fuelling an obsession that quite possibly led to me even thinking about tackling a Ripper novel. He also criticized the hell out of the first draft, along with Jack Turner, who cruelly forced me to perform a last-minute rewrite, for which I killed his horse.
Finally, thanks, as always, to Lorna Rose, who is my most critical reader and tells me when she doesn’t like my writing, and who put up with endless nights of me stealing her iPad to pore over Ripper Casebook debates.
Buried in the Archives:
Historical Notes and Ripperological Reflections
MORE THAN ANY OTHER book in the Touchstone series, Buried in Time has referenced a great many historical characters and events, and the work of a number of other authors, in particular regarding the Whitechapel murders. So I thought it appropriate to address each reference here and discuss some of the historical background to the novel.
Red handkerchief. The significance of the red handkerchief, and the reason for its use as a visual motif throughout the book, comes from Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper, The Final Solution, in which he draws attention to the painter Walter Sickert’s obsession with just such a handkerchief. Apparently, he couldn’t paint without it and attached morbid significance to it. The notion that the red handkerchief contains a collection of spots of blood retrieved from the victims is my own invention.
Walter Sickert is, of course, a Ripper suspect, and I have played on this by making Daniel a painter very much in Sickert’s mould. The paintings he paints are quite obviously Sickert’s.
Walter Sickert took a very keen interest in Jack the Ripper and claimed to have lodged in a room used by him (according to the landlady) His painting of the room, titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, was the first in a series that referenced the Ripper crimes, and have been claimed as evidence of his involvement in the murders (Stephen Knight’s royal conspiracy has him as an accomplice, whereas Jean Overton Fuller and Patricia Cornwell believe him to have been the lone killer).
Much of the evidence for Sickert’s guilt points to the fact he painted references to the crime scenes of Mary Kelly and Catherine Eddowes years before the photographs were ever published (in 1972), so can only have known them from firsthand experience. But this has been successfully debunked by Wolf Vanderlinden in his dissertation, The Art of Murder, where he proves that photographs detailing the horrific injuries to Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly were in fact published in France in 1899 in Alexandre Lacassagne’s book Vacher L’éventreur et les Crimes Sadiques. This was a year after Sickert had moved to Dieppe, and it was six years later, back in London, that he beg
an painting his controversial series of paintings, a full fifteen years after the actual crimes.
Thomas Conway is known to us only as the common-law husband of fourth canonical Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes. Born c.1837 in Kilgever, Louisburgh in County Mayo, Ireland, he joined the 1st Battalion of the 18th Irish regiment in October 1857 (aged 20) serving in Bombay and Madras. Suffering from a heart condition brought on by the heat, as well as rheumatism and chronic bronchitis, he was pensioned out of the army at 24. A year later he met Eddowes, with whom he had three children. It does give me great delight to see that my namesake was something of an early self-publisher. Conway wrote lives of the famous, which he published as chapbooks, and specialized in gallows ballads. An article in the January 1995 Black Country Bugle paints a vivid picture of Tom and Catherine engaged as a travelling self-publishing husband and wife team, which perhaps might explain why they stayed together for nineteen years. Their relationship eventually broke up in 1881 due to Catherine’s alcoholism, with Tom keeping custody of the children. He also used the name Thomas Quinn, it is said, to avoid Eddowes tracking him down.
Reverend Colmore of St. Mary’s (according to A History of Moseley, Alison Fairn) was optimistic, practical and noted for his cheerful, light touch. He seems to have taken an active role in local affairs: he was keen on amateur dramatics and founded Moseley Amateur Drama society in 1882; was Hon. Sec. of the Moseley and Balsall Heath Institute from its inception, campaigned for cabman’s shelter to be built on the village green and was an opponent of steam trams.
Wedding vows. I am indebted to David Wake for his detailed account of a Victorian wedding, to be found in his excellent adventure yarn, The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead. It proved invaluable as a resource from which to copy and paste, and saved me researching it and typing it out myself, which is ironic seeing as I advised him to cut it from his own book.
Moseley. As covered in the very opening of the Touchstone saga (1. The Sins of the Fathers) Moseley was not a part of Birmingham and would not defect from the borough of Kings Norton until 1911: Moseley people had feared annexation to Birmingham since the 1870s, believing that the character of the area and its population were very different from those of the vast industrial city (A History of Moseley, Alison Fairn).
The war memorial next to the lychgate at St Mary’s was not built until 1919, commemorating the fallen of the First World War, so it’s not surprising that Daniel, from the future, expects to see it. This is the first of many such things he finds eerily absent from the ever-changing landscape of Birmingham.
Illustrated Police News was Britain’s first tabloid newspaper, a lurid account of everyday true crime stories that would become particularly popular with the Whitechapel murders in August 1888.
Inspector Beadle and Sergeant Macpherson. While looking for names for my two detectives, and largely out of sheer laziness, I decided to commemorate the authors of the two major volumes on William Bury. So Beadle and Macpherson it is.
Queen’s Hotel. The main entrance of New Street Station on Stephenson Street incorporated the Queen’s Hotel, designed by William Livock, which was opened on the same day. Built in an Italianate style it was originally provided with sixty rooms, but expanded several times over the years.
Gaze & Son Railway & Steamship Passenger Agency. By strange coincidence, a few weeks after writing this account of Daniel emerging onto Stephenson Street from the station, I found myself doing the same from New Street Station’s latest modern incarnation and discovered that renovation work at the rear of the old Lloyd’s building (now a Waterstones book shop) had uncovered an old shop hoarding for a Railway and Steamship Ticket Agency. It struck me that this was exactly what Daniel would have seen in 1888, so I went back and inserted it. Kelly’s Directory of 1888 reveals it to be either Thomas Cook & Son or Gaze & Son. I went with the latter because I liked the name.
Christ Church, Birmingham. I couldn’t resist giving a great deal of significance to the now sadly demolished Christ Church, Birmingham, and making the link with Christ Church, Spitalfields, the Hawksmoor designed church that looms over the site of the Whitechapel murders and is given Masonic significance in Alan Moore’s brilliant From Hell.
Council House Square. Now Victoria Square, and very different in character in 1888. While the Council House and the Town Hall remain, the old square was dominated by Christ Church, standing roughly where the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ now sits. There are tantalising glimpses of what this square looked like in several photographs of the square from the late 1800s. There is also an illustration from 1886 by H. W. Brewer, taken from The Graphic which gives a great bird’s eye view of the city centre, in particular Chamberlain Place, which will be relevant later in the story. I have posted these images on the Touchstone website.
Birmingham Municipal School of Art. I don’t think the BMSA would have been appalled at the thought of a female student attending a life drawing class. In fact, I imagine it might have been quite progressive on the issue, but for the sake of introducing conflict to my story, I wanted to make it an issue with Daniel at his place of work, and to make that distinction between a more conservative strand of art being challenged by the modern.
Choosing to make Daniel an artist does have a seed in Touchstone (1. The Sins of the Fathers), where we witnessed his skill as he sketched his first encounter with Amy Parker, so it is highly conceivable that this skill would have developed into a career in the intervening 14 years.
I think 1888 is a fascinating moment in the art world. It’s the high water mark of Impressionism and the first Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat and Sickert are exhibiting in Paris and at the Les Vingt exhibitions in Brussels. In terms of how this fits in with the story, I see the old stabilities of formal, classical art being undermined and challenged by Modernism. Britain is still locked into the tail end of the by now highly conservative Pre-Raphaelite movement (Millais’s awful Bubbles had just been acquired by Pears’ Soap). To my mind it would be a very challenging time to be an art teacher, especially one who would see the modern and understand it immediately, and especially one teaching at a college in a conservative province such as Birmingham, where the Whistler trial of ten years previous would still be regarded as scandalous, and ‘modern’ art akin to throwing a bucket of paint in the public’s face.
Suzanne Valadon is unusual as an artist in that she is so well known as a model in many great works of art by the likes of Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and Lautrec. She first worked as a model for artists, observing and learning their techniques, before becoming a noted painter herself.
Les Vingt was a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers and sculptors who held an annual exhibition of their art, inviting 20 international artists to exhibit. At the 1887 exhibition, Daniel would have seen works by Sickert, Pissarro, Morisot and Seurat. The major work shown was Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. In 1888 he would have seen works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Whistler and Odilon Redon, amongst others. Had he travelled across the channel as early as 1886, and I like to think he had, he would have heard the first ever performance of César Franck’s Violin Sonata (which served as a decent mood piece while writing this novel, and provided an occasional break from Trevor Jones’ epic score for the From Hell film.)
Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes lived and worked in Aston (now part of Birmingham, but then a separate town) for several months each year, from about spring 1879 to early 1882. He was nineteen at the beginning of that period, taking up a temporary medical assistantship, as a dispensing assistant (what we might call an assistant chemist or pharmacist) while studying at Edinburgh University. His employer and landlord in Birmingham was Dr Hoare, and Doyle developed a close friendship with his family, whom he visited more than once subsequently. So the thought of him visiting Birmingham in 1888 is not so bizarre.
Netley. The Royal Victoria Hospital, or Netley Hospital, was a large military hospital in Netley, near Southampton
, Hampshire, England. While there is no record of Arthur Conan Doyle ever setting foot in the place, it is only 16 miles up the coast from Southsea, where he had his medical practice and might, just might, have provided a less than useful launch point for a doctor setting off to London from the south coast. It is, however, much more useful for a writer trying to make a tenuous allusion to John Charles Netley (1860–1903) the English cab driver who was allegedly involved in the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor is the tenth of the twelve stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The story was first published in Strand Magazine in April 1892.
Corbett’s Temperance Hotel was demolished in 1889 to make the new Birmingham post office building, which, amazingly, with the city’s penchant for destroying any building made before the war, still stands.
No. Let her see me as I leave. Let her see what devastation I have wrought on her. William Beadle (188-9) points to an interesting aspect of Jack the Ripper’s modus operandi: that after Polly Nichols, who was left staring up at the sky, he began to leave his victims’ heads turned to one side. With Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes they were turned away from him, but Mary Kelly’s head was turned so she might see him leave. Beadle supposes this is because he knew Mary Kelly. I have no idea if this is true or not, and whether it is evidence for or against Bury’s identity as the Ripper (it would rather point more to her boyfriend Joseph Barnett, in my view).
The edge of night town. This is a reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses for no other reason than it’s my favourite novel. However, I did find myself thinking of Ulysses a great deal while writing Buried in Time. The period is almost similar, even though Joyce’s book is set 18 years later than mine, and there is a case for its connection to Sherlock Holmes. Sam Rosenberg’s Naked is the Best Disguise is a book that speculates on the alleged hidden meanings in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and examines the influence of his writings on other works, especially James Joyce's Ulysses.