What Alice Knew

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Yet something from that night nagged persistently at his memory. It was not the attack itself but something that had occurred earlier. He closed his eyes, trying to remember, but all he could summon up was a blur of faces around a table. If there was a germ there—the kind of hint that so often sparked his stories—he could not recall what it was.

  No, he would not write about murder, but he would take an interest in the case and help where he could. The observations of Mrs. Smith had left an odd resonance. He felt a vague kinship with the murderer—he had felt this before, but when?—a sense that the impulses that drove this deranged creature to kill were not so very different from those that drove him to write. He had learned early on how to transform frustration into a fantasy of fulfillment, to turn life into art. To catch Jack the Ripper, he understood, was to effect a reverse transformation, to uncover the frustrated desires that found their perverse fulfillment in murder.

  Chapter 8

  William and Abberline were seated in a small cubicle in Scotland Yard, where they had repaired following the viewing of Catherine Eddowes’s corpse. It had been Abberline’s idea to review the photographs of the other victims in the hope that William might see something of value that had been missed by the police. The inspector had become convinced that the key to solving the case lay not in material evidence but in something more ineffable—what was called, in certain circles, “the psychological aspect.” It had been his idea to consult William, a suggestion agreed to by Sir Charles, a man always willing to be accommodating so long as he did not have to do any work himself.

  Abberline took a folder from the cabinet and opened it on the table where he and William were seated. The folder contained photographs of the Whitechapel victims. There were two photographs included for each of the four murders: one of the victim found at the scene and one of the victim on a slab in the London morgue.

  The first set of photographs was of Martha Tabram, killed August 7. In the one taken at the scene, the woman was sprawled on the ground, so drenched in blood it was impossible to tell where she had been stabbed. In the second photograph, one could see clearly the crazy quilt of jagged slices to her abdomen.

  “I’d like to eliminate this case from our investigation,” said Abberline, pointing to the second photograph by way of explanation. “The stab wounds to the stomach are not symmetrical, as in the subsequent cases, and the weapon used appears to be a bayonet rather than a knife, which produces neater incisions. Finally, the throat wasn’t cut, which appears to be the cause of death in all the other cases.” He jabbed his finger at Tabram’s neck with a certain violence, which indeed showed no mark, though the face itself was contorted in a terrible grimace. William looked away for a moment as Abberline continued. “There’s a determination to see Tabram as the first Ripper murder, perhaps to ratchet up the number of his crimes, perhaps to alleviate the need to seek out another killer. It’s an ongoing problem. The public, and many in authority as well, try to press into service acts of violence that are clearly the work of other hands. Pin it on this Ripper fellow and be done with it.” He snorted contemptuously, as though familiar with the rationalizations and dodges of his colleagues.

  William felt compelled to add another perspective. “It’s human nature to want to find pattern,” he noted. “Once we begin to think there is one, we are likely to see it reinforced. It’s the drive to create order out of chaos.”

  Abberline, disinclined to this more forgiving view, had moved on to the photographs of Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, murdered August 31. He pointed to the relevant points in the morgue shot, speaking with authoritative coolness (William imagined Abberline had gone over these photographs many times already and had become numb to their horror). “Throat cut in simple execution style, symmetrical wounds to the stomach, opening of the abdominal cavity and exposure of the viscera.”

  He flipped to the third set of photographs of Annie Chapman, killed on September 8. “Throat cut. Symmetrical abdominal cutting. Exposure of viscera. Uterus removed.” He paused to editorialize. “Our killer is becoming more ingenious…and more invasive. But the pattern, as you see, remains similar to the Nichols case.”

  He moved on. “Elizabeth Stride, killed in the early morning of September 30. Throat cut. That’s all.” He gave a dry laugh, as though struck by the irony of referring in such a way to a cut throat. “It might not seem to fit the pattern,” he continued, “since there are no other mutilations, but it’s clear that the murderer was interrupted in his work. Note the state and disposition of the body.” He turned to the photograph taken in the morgue and pointed to where the victim’s dress was ripped but not torn off the body, and then shifted to the photograph at the scene, where the body was shown slumped, face forward, suggesting it had been pushed down in haste. “What also supports this hypothesis, of course, is that the Eddowes’s murder occurred less than an hour and a half later. Frustration at the earlier interruption would also account for the level of brutality here.” He displayed the photograph of Eddowes on a slab in the morgue, which had been taken before the stitching up of the wounds. The head was twisted to the side, almost severed from the trunk; great flaps of skin were exposed on the face; and the abdomen was a thicket of standing flesh. The killer had carved up that area of the body with frenzied completeness.

  Abberline droned out the details. “Throat cut, extreme and symmetrical cutting of the abdomen and the face, uterus and kidney taken away, left ear partially severed—something new there, suggesting that our murderer may have in mind additional variations to come.” He had spoken without emotion, but a sigh escaped him at the prospect of what those variations might be. He quickly resumed his professional tone and moved on to conclude, “There are marked similarities in the pattern of cutting in Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes, not to mention affinities in their age and occupation. They were all in their late thirties and early forties, all prostitutes. All were in dire physical condition, not necessarily underfed, but unhealthy. Our man likes to prey on weakness.”

  “Did the murderer commit on them acts of a…sexual nature?” asked William carefully. He was prone to prudery, despite his medical training, and had noted that his European colleagues were less tentative on this score.

  Indeed, Abberline responded bluntly, “No. The women were found in suggestive positions, legs exposed and spread, but there was no indication of sexual intercourse, neither in vaginal tearing nor in the presence of the expected fluids.”

  “What you describe seems to suggest a desire to possess and penetrate these women, but apparently not in the sexual sense.”

  Abberline nodded. “Possibly a case of severed or maimed organs on the part of the killer.”

  “Perhaps,” mused William, “but my sense is that he would not commit these acts unless some additional expressive route were inhibited or blocked. The form of the killings is indicative of more than sexual frustration. Or sexual frustration instigated by something else.”

  He gazed down at the photograph of Catherine Eddowes, with its grotesque flaps of skin, and thought of the stitched image he had seen in the morgue. Somehow the photograph was even more disturbing than the actual body. It was not a sharp image, yet the graininess contributed to the horror of its effect. He was reminded of the mourning photograph taken of his son Hermie before the burial, a carefully staged shot of his little boy tucked into bed, just as he might have been after he had been kissed good night. That picture, meant to be a beautiful keepsake, had given William terrible dreams, and his Alice had finally hidden it, for fear that it would precipitate another breakdown.

  A photograph was a kind of haunting, he concluded, a representation of a reality not literally present. And the photograph of a dead person was a double sort of haunting. As for these murdered women, their photographs were also testimony of their society’s neglect and abuse. Strangers would look at them years, perhaps even decades, hence and be haunted by them. It was a grotesque sort of immortality.

  He was flippi
ng back through the pictures, musing about these things, when a young officer entered the room, walked quickly over to Abberline, and whispered in his ear.

  The inspector’s face grew taut as he rose quickly from the table. “There’s been another murder…or at least, the suspicion of one. I try not jump to conclusions, but it’s imperative to investigate. You’re free to come along.”

  He was already halfway out the door before William grabbed his hat from the hook and followed rapidly on his heels.

  Chapter 9

  The two men arrived by police carriage at the corner of Hanberry and Latham streets and descended with their destination still a block away. A large crowd had gathered in the vicinity, drawn by the rumor that another Ripper murder had taken place, and Abberline decided it would be faster to get to the scene on foot. While the inspector, whom the officers recognized, was ushered quickly to the front, William was left behind to make his way forward alone. As he moved through the crowd, he saw that a number of policemen were pushing people back in a brutal, unthinking manner. It struck him as an example of the psychological dimness that operated on so many levels in governance and that, left unchecked, could incite revolutions.

  He explained his presence to one of the policemen, who took him by the elbow and led him through the crush of onlookers. There were catcalls of “Who’s the fine gent?” and “What’s he seeing Jenny for, when us who knew her can’t get a glimpse o’ the poor girl?” He finally made his way to the front, where a phalanx of policemen were attempting to shield the view in front of the alley where the body had been found, kicking away the smaller children who were attempting to peek through their legs. William’s escort said a few words to one of these sentinels, and an opening was provided for him to slip through.

  He had already been shocked at the sight of Catherine Eddowes’s stitched body and of the grotesque photographs that Abberline had shown him of all the victims, but what greeted him now was more deeply moving. It was death in its most profoundly immediate form. The chief inspector was standing with two officers, along with a white-smocked gentleman whom William assumed to be the medical examiner. They stood around the body of a young woman lying on the pavement near the alley, behind a row of tenements. One of the woman’s legs was extended, the other leg bent. One arm lay near her body; the other was outstretched, the palm open. The posture was oddly graceful, almost balletic, and the effect was enhanced by the appearance of the face pressed to the pavement in profile. The dead woman could not have been more than thirty years old, with finely etched features and an abundance of auburn hair that lay spread like a luxurious drape to one side of her head. But what gave the image its most compelling aspect was that around the head and merging with the thick hair was an almost perfect circle of blood. There was no indication that the clothes had been disarranged or ripped, and from the angle at which the face lay, it looked entirely unblemished. William assumed that the woman’s throat had been cut on the side on which she was lying, so that all one saw was the roseate halo of blood. She might very well have been a rather plain sort of person in life, but in death, laid out in this dramatic pose, there was something breathtakingly beautiful about her.

  As he gazed at the body, he noticed that the outstretched arm was turned up, exposing a thick scar on the wrist above where the delicate fingers lay unclasped.

  He approached Abberline, who was standing with the physician over the body.

  “Sorry to have brought you out for this,” said Abberline. “One of my men heard her throat was cut and assumed we had another Ripper murder on our hands. I encourage them not to make assumptions, but it’s difficult, given the climate at the moment.”

  William looked down at the body again. “What happened to her?” he asked.

  “Suicide,” said Abberline succinctly.

  “How do you know?”

  “All the standard indicators: the disposition of the body, the knife found there.” Abberline pointed to a spot where a mark had been made on the ground. Nearby, one of the officers was holding what looked like a medium-sized kitchen knife wrapped in a rag. “And of course, she’s tried it before.” He motioned to the scar on the woman’s wrist.

  “I see all that. But the method seems so unusual.”

  “Not really, among these people, sadly enough,” noted Abberline, “though it’s more the women who do it. The men drink themselves into a stupor and stumble under a carriage or fall off a bridge, but the women tend to be more efficient. It’s a gruesome death, and it takes a sort of nerve. One almost has to admire them for it.”

  “But why did she do it?”

  “Why? Not hard to find an answer to that. Because life got too hard, too much poverty and hopelessness. Look at the neighborhood. They say she wouldn’t bring herself to do what so many of the others do—sell herself to live. So this is what comes of it. It’s a sad state of affairs that when they can live by their bodies, they die at the hands of a lunatic killer, and when they can’t, they die by their own hands.”

  The wagon had arrived to take the corpse to the mortuary, and several of the officers turned the body over. A kerchief was placed around her neck to hide the wound, and the woman was moved gingerly onto the cart. Something about her ethereal beauty inspired reverence and caused even the coarse officers to handle her gently and arrange her clothing carefully around her.

  Several onlookers were speaking to Abberline, explaining that the woman, Jenny Stoddard was her name, was a ladylike sort of person, but too sad for this world. “There was the death of the first child,” said one large matron with a gruff but not unkind manner. “She cried for months—too long to mourn a child. Then, when another came, we thought she’d rally, but she didn’t. If anything, it made her worse, reminded her of the other one she’d lost. She did what she could for him at first, but her heart wasn’t in it, and then she just stopped caring. The husband wasn’t a bad sort, but he had no patience for her weeping. He took off. After that, she tried to do away with herself, but her boy found her, and they patched her up. But now, she done it, and it’s just as well. He won’t be no worse off with her gone than he was with her here, poor soul.”

  “Where’s the child?” asked William, though as soon as he asked, he wished that he hadn’t.

  The woman pointed to one of the doorways, where a boy stood watching. He looked about ten, though he was undernourished, and William imagined he was probably a year or so older. His face was drawn and expressionless, but his eyes looked perceptive, and for a moment William thought he saw something like relief in them. Was it a relief to have his mother, perennially sad and useless, finally gone out of this world?

  Looking at the boy made William’s throat constrict. The thought of his own beloved and pampered child dead, and of this child, so neglected and impoverished, alive—what did it mean? Whose will was behind it? On what basis could William cling to the spiritual belief of which he had spoken to Abberline? Wanting to leave the scene, he nonetheless found himself walking over to where the boy was standing. “It’s your mother there, I hear,” he said gently, feeling it best to be direct.

  The boy looked at him a moment before speaking. “She wanted to do it, and she done it,” he finally said.

  “I’m sure she’s in heaven and at peace,” said William.

  “I dunno ’bout that,” said the boy. “But she won’ be crying no more. That’s somethin’.”

  “And what about you? What will you do with her gone?”

  “Same as I done with ’er ’ere.” The boy shrugged.

  “Did you live with her?”

  “Naw, she coulden have me. Not much room in that basement she lived in, and it made ’er sadder to see me, so’s I stayed with the ol’ lady.” He pointed to the top of the building in whose doorway he was standing. “She can’t walk, so’s I bring ’er things, whatever I can get ’er for dinner, and she lets me sleep on ’er floor.”

  “And how do you get money to eat?”

  The boy shrugged again. “I dunno. I
ha’ my ways. And I don’ eat much. I once had a job with one of them greengrocers, but he went out of business. The ol’ lady says I’m smart enough to fin’ somethin’ respectable if I grows a bit. They don’ like ’em as small as me for mos’ things.”

  “I’m sure you’ll grow to a good size,” said William, wondering how the boy would ever grow if he didn’t eat.

  “Can I ask you somethin’, sir?” said the boy, obviously feeling that he had met that rare creature, a respectable person who listened to him when he spoke, and that he ought to take advantage of it. “What’s for me to do in the way of buryin’ ’er? That’s been on m’ mind since they found ’er. She diden care for me, but it wasen her fault. She were still my mother. I want she be buried proper and not in one of them graves where they put all the bodies in a heap together.”

  William looked at the boy. He wished he could be rid of him and be alone, back in his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he could lose himself in his books or, as he sometimes did, put his head on his desk and weep. His Alice was an exceptional woman who knew when to console him and when it was best to leave him alone. But here he was in the middle of London, and it wasn’t the loss of Hermie or his own father and mother or the burden of his own existence that he had to deal with, but this poor soul with more misery than anything he had ever suffered. What was the use of all the philosophy he’d read and the thinking he’d done when confronted with so simple a piece of human misery? He drew a breath. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked quietly.