What Alice Knew

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “Well, first in the neck, and then he cut her up down below in the privates.”

  “She told you that?” asked Alice.

  “That she did. Said as he cut things out of her horrible.”

  “And what did the man look like who did this? Did she tell you?”

  “He was dark and kinda small and spoke in that funny language them people speak.”

  “A Jew, you mean?” asked Alice.

  “I guess as it was, since he spoke them funny words, and he may’ve had the horns too, though she weren’t sure about that.”

  The voice stopped, and Mrs. Lancaster shook again, more violently than before.

  “What is it, Cassie? Is there something wrong?” asked Alice.

  The voice suddenly grew shrill and upset. “No, no, I says it wrong! That wasn’t it as I wanted to say!” Mrs. Lancaster’s face contorted as if struggling to break free of something. “It was his hands I wanted to tell of. They was pretty hands, small and delicate-like—white, but not the fingers. They was stained.”

  “With blood?” asked Alice.

  “No, not blood. More black or sootish. Maybe tar or somethin’ like.”

  There was more violent shaking, and Mrs. Lancaster frothed at the mouth. Something viscous emanated from her lips. She coughed a few times and took her hand away from Alice’s. The medium’s voice returned to its flat and nasal tone. “There it is: Annie Chapman.” Reaching up into the air, she grasped hold of a small image, seen in the dim light to be a picture of a woman—Annie Chapman, it appeared to be, if one had seen the woman’s face in the newspaper. As Mrs. Lancaster held the image a moment in front of her face, it just as suddenly disappeared.

  “That’s it. It’s done,” said Mrs. Lancaster drily. “You can turn the lights on now.”

  Katherine turned on the lights. Everyone was silent for a few moments.

  “Impressive!” William finally said.

  “Strenuous!” said Henry.

  “Very interesting,” said Alice. She addressed Mrs. Lancaster. “I want to thank you for giving us your time.” She went over to the desk drawer and took out a bank note, which she handed to the woman, who nodded stiffly in response and turned to go.

  “Not quite yet,” said Alice. “Would you mind, please, removing your shoes?”

  “Excuse me?” said Mrs. Lancaster, looking offended.

  “Remove your shoes. It shouldn’t be difficult. They look rather loose.”

  “I will not remove my shoes!” declared Mrs. Lancaster.

  “Then I must assume that you have practiced upon us through that means,” said Alice. “I have read about an American spiritualist who does all her tapping with her big toe—a highly developed big toe, not the sort one finds on most people, but a big toe nonetheless. Could we look at your big toe?”

  “You most certainly cannot!” said Mrs. Lancaster.

  “All right,” said Alice. “I’ll let you escape with your big toe unexamined. But there is one more thing.” She moved closer to the woman and then suddenly, with a surprisingly quick movement, squeezed her cheeks with one hand and with the other reached inside her mouth. She extracted a small piece of rubbery cloth and, opening it, displayed the imprint of a face. “Annie Chapman,” she announced. “Excellent sleight of hand and control of your jaw muscles for that trick.”

  Mrs. Lancaster, the tip of whose aquiline nose had turned bright red, grabbed her coat and seemed about to flee the room when a tremor passed through her, and she stopped and turned to Alice. Once again, her angular face seemed to undergo a change, to soften in some inexplicable way. Although she spoke in her own voice, the words came slowly, as if they were being dictated. “He says he’s sorry,” she said, her eyes staring at Alice’s face, which had suddenly gone very white. “He says as he didn’t know what to do with a girl like you, so quick and nervous and bright. He appreciates the care you took of him at the end, but he couldn’t stay. He’s sorry, he says, he couldn’t give you what you needed. His heart aches for it.”

  The two women stood for a moment in complete silence, staring at each other dumbly. Mrs. Lancaster then shook herself. Her soft gaze hardened into an angry glare, and turning on her loose pumps, she walked rapidly from the room.

  “What in God’s name was that about?” said William.

  “Nonsense,” said Alice softly.

  “You’d think she was giving you a message from Father,” said Henry. “Not that it was particularly specific. ‘He’s sorry.’ What parent, I’d like to know, isn’t sorry?”

  “Yes,” murmured Alice. “Anyone might have come up with that.”

  “I have to say that you did an impressive job debunking her,” continued Henry, “though your method was a bit foolhardy. The woman could have bitten your fingers off.”

  “You certainly humiliated her,” said William gruffly.

  “Humiliated her!” Henry exclaimed. “She had the audacity to try to dupe us!”

  “It may be more complicated than that,” said William.

  Alice looked at her brother and seemed to pull herself out of a stupor. “The woman is a fraud,” she pronounced tersely. “She makes her money by taking advantage of people who are bereft or desperate or simply, like us, seeking the truth. How is that complicated?”

  “Because there may be some truth mixed with the falsehood.”

  “That’s absurd. The whole thing with the child reporting on what Annie Chapman said—there was a logical fallacy in it. Annie was dead after her throat was cut, and the premise of these things is that the spirits can report only what they saw while alive. But the child said Annie had been cut down below. That happened later and completely destroys the premise.”

  “I noticed that,” said William. “But I also noticed the strange way in which she reported on the murderer’s hands. There was something oddly compelling there, almost as though she was being forced to tell the truth.”

  “That was a dramatic touch,” piped in Henry. “The stained hands. I should like to use it in a story.”

  “I say it’s all nonsense!” said Alice, addressing William irritably. “You cling to the notion that there is something beyond the simple reality of our existence; I am reconciled to the fact that there is not. I do not believe in fairy tales, but I do believe in evil men. And this one must be caught. Unfortunately, no spirit from another world is going to help us do it.”

  Chapter 18

  The next morning, William and Abberline met, as agreed, at Paddington Station before sunrise. They had both brought their breakfasts, wrapped in brown paper, thus revealing a similarity in habit that made them glance with amusement at each other.

  When William had proposed that they visit the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, the inspector had initially demurred. “I’ve sent many a man there,” he said, “but I don’t see what kind of good it would do talking to any of them.”

  William argued otherwise. He had read in the police reports that one of the early Ripper suspects, John Pizer, known throughout the East End as Leather Apron, had been sent to Broadmoor. Even after the police had verified Pizer’s whereabouts at the time of the murders, there were people in Whitechapel who remained convinced of his guilt; after all, they said, the devil could be in two places at once.

  “So you want to interrogate a criminal because people associate him with the wrong crimes?” scoffed Abberline.

  “I do,” William replied seriously. Indeed, this was precisely the point as he had worked it out.

  He had been cultivating an idea on the subject for some time. The perverse impulses that resulted in criminal behavior must, he believed, have utility for the criminal, as a response to trauma or stress that might otherwise be insupportable. The key was to find the context in which the behavior appeared logical, even necessary. William looked down at his fingernails, which had been bitten raw. Wasn’t his compulsion a kind of perversion, developed to keep his demons at bay? In cases of sociopathic perversion, like that of Jack the Ripper, the principle was
the same. The murders, in this sense, were like nail biting, only on a spectacular scale, a means by which the killer protected himself against some profoundly debilitating pain.

  This idea was behind his determination to speak to Leather Apron. He not only wanted to study the man who had been mistaken for Jack the Ripper; he wanted to ask him for his help. Wouldn’t someone who had terrorized women be in the best position to understand what might propel someone else to do the same? Wouldn’t such a man, mad though he was—indeed, in being mad—know more about the twisted motives of the Whitechapel killer than the most seasoned policeman or psychologist?

  These were William’s thoughts, but all he said to Abberline was, “We might learn from one madman how to catch another.”

  The inspector surprisingly acquiesced. There was trouble at headquarters, he muttered, and he might as well get out of the office. A trip to Broadmoor would at least be a diversion, if not an especially pleasant or productive one.

  As they sat together on the train, finishing their breakfast, Abberline pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to William. “This is as good a time as any to show you this,” he said. “It was delivered to headquarters yesterday.”

  William looked at the envelope. It was postmarked East London and addressed: “The Boss, Scotland Yard, London City.” Previous Ripper letters, he recalled, had been addressed to “The Boss” at the Central News Agency. He opened the envelope and extracted the paper inside. The writing was a raggedy scrawl.

  Tell your professer to keep his nose out or be sory for it.

  My minds not disesed but he can get the knif too

  if he dont watch out—ha ha.

  William stared at the message. “Is it authentic?” he asked softly. He had a sudden recollection of the shove that had sent him careening in front of the curricle on the way to Sidgwick’s club.

  Abberline shrugged. “There are points in common with some of the other letters. The paper has the mark of Pirie and Sons, for example. But then, Pirie is a popular stationer in London; no need to make too much of that. And previous letters have been publicized enough to explain the similarity of locution. It’s odd, regardless, that you’re singled out for a joke of this sort. Who do you know who’s aware you’re investigating this case and might have let the word out?”

  William furrowed his brow. There were, he realized, plenty of people; Sidgwick and Mrs. Lancaster, to begin with. The Sargents. His brother, Henry, with his general tendency to blab. And something might have come out from their visit to the East End.

  “The letter most likely comes from a colleague of yours,” explained Abberline, “perhaps a rival in your line of work, who’s having malicious fun at your expense.”

  William could not imagine a colleague doing such a thing, except possibly one of the French.

  “As I say, it may be a nasty joke,” continued Abberline, “and chances are, it is. But my advice, Professor, is to take care. Our man is a lunatic, but a cunning one, and if he has his eye on you, I’d make a point to keep out of his way.”

  Chapter 19

  The Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was located in a remote terrain on the edge of the Berkshire Moors, thirty miles outside of London. Its only neighbor was an orphanage for wayward boys, society favoring the placement of the madman and the orphan conveniently out of sight of meddlesome politicians and reforming ladies.

  The asylum itself was a massive stone structure in which two broad turrets flanking an archway seemed to stand open, like a giant maw, to swallow its occupants. The building’s placement in the ancient moor and the worn look of the gravel path leading up to it made William feel the weight of entrenched and unchanging experience. He could imagine written above the wide arch the lines from Dante’s great poem: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

  Yet Abberline explained that the asylum had been built relatively recently, after a group of altruistic ladies got it into their heads to visit the Bethlehem Asylum in London. The conditions at “Bedlam” had appalled the ladies, and a wave of reform had followed. The result was the construction of more humane asylums like Broadmoor. Of course, a humane asylum was a relative thing. Broadmoor was not squalid or unhealthy in the way that Bedlam had been. There were provisions for proper exercise, diet was regulated, and sanitation was modern enough, but that was the end of it. If the bodies of the inmates were treated better here, their souls were no better tended than they had been before.

  Entering through the vast portal, William and Abberline were met by a burly guard who instructed an orderly to take them to the director of the asylum. The orderly had sloping shoulders and a lazy eye and looked to William exactly the way an orderly in a lunatic asylum should look. If, as he had written, “to laugh was to be happy,” then perhaps “to have a lazy eye was to be a lunatic,” or at least, an attendant of lunatics.

  They followed the lazy-eyed attendant through a large courtyard, where in one area, a sullen group of men were in the process of taking exercise. Under the supervision of another burly attendant, the inmates were linked arm in arm, walking in rote fashion back and forth. At intervals, someone would break off from this chain and loiter in a corner, at which time the attendant would walk over and strike him on the back of the legs so that the man would scurry back to rejoin the group.

  “Do they engage in corporal punishment here, then?” asked William. “I thought it was a humane institution.”

  Abberline grunted. “A swat on the legs is humane enough when compared to being pummeled senseless, and I suppose they do that too if they feel the need.”

  William stood for a moment watching the inmates, their heads bowed, walking back and forth in a patient shuffle. Were they in identical states of torpor, or were they merely resigned, after months or even years of this routine, to submerge whatever sparks of selfhood they had into private reveries? Once again, he was bothered by the basic philosophical paradox of where the individual began and ended, of how social conditions and personal habits shaped the self, and how the worst aspects of character could be imposed on an individual as the result of the best intentions.

  He and Abberline were finally led into a room that had been equipped with some of the amenities of normal society. An effort had been made to add color in the way of a carpet and a variety of bric-a-brac, but the effect was unwelcoming. The room was too large for its furnishings, and a quality of emptiness and desolation prevailed.

  In one corner were several armchairs positioned around a low table. In the other corner was a large desk, strewn with papers and files, and behind the desk sat a scholarly-looking man of about William’s age, who rose as they entered and stiffly put out his hand. “Henry Maudsley,” he said. His handshake was overfirm in the manner of someone used to controlling situations, or at least determined to do so.

  William felt a leap of pleasure at hearing the name. Henry Maudsley was a respected figure in the field of psychological research, someone allied with the materialist school, which believed that abnormal mental processes could be entirely explained by physical causes. Although William faulted the materialists for refusing to consider nonphysical aspects of mental illness, he valued their work for supporting the connection of mind and body, albeit from one direction only.

  He therefore shook Maudsley’s hand with enthusiasm, and in introducing himself, expected that his host would respond to his name with equal pleasure. Maudsley, however, merely nodded and set about explaining his presence at the asylum with a pontifical air. “I am here at Broadmoor on an interim basis, following the retirement of the venerable Dr. William Orange. I find that the institution provides ample subjects for my research.” Abruptly turning to William with an accusatory air, he then said, “You hold to a nonmaterial view of mental debility, don’t you, Professor James? I reject that. My latest research, in keeping with Darwinian principles, shows that lunacy is the result of neurological deficiencies—debilities of mental process that cause images and ideas to take distorted and unnatural forms.”r />
  William bristled. He had hoped to find common ground with Maudsley, despite their differences in approach, but the man’s confrontational manner put him on the defensive. He began to argue, somewhat shrilly, that social, cultural, and indeed spiritual factors certainly did contribute to mental illness.

  Abberline intervened. “We are here to meet with an inmate by the name of John Pizer,” the inspector said curtly. “As you may know, he was an early suspect in the Whitechapel murders and would have been hunted down and torn to pieces had he remained in the community. Fortunately, he also happened to be mad. It’s a dire state of affairs when we have to send people to a lunatic asylum for safekeeping.”

  Maudsley seemed to become more reasonable in the face of this professional exposition. He pulled out a file from the cabinet near his desk and read aloud, “‘John Pizer. Age: thirty-two years. Residence: East End, London; specific address unknown. Trade: Boot maker. Diagnosis: Mania alternating with melancholia. Treatment: Spinning, blistering, immersion in cold water.’” Maudsley glanced up. “That was the treatment prescribed by Dr. Orange; I have discontinued it.” He closed the file. “It’s a fairly routine case of mental imbalance. The patient has periods of lucidity but is given to unpredictable ravings and disorientation. No doubt there are lesions on the brain. But you’re welcome to speak to him if you think it will do you any good.”

  He took a set of keys from his desk drawer and led the men from his office. As he approached the doors that led to the patient area, he paused. “I should like to take a detour before we proceed and have you visit someone you might find of interest. He’s mad enough, but he hardly fits the conventional mold of the madman.” Maudsley addressed William now with more consideration than he had shown formerly. They had reached the end of the corridor, and he motioned to a door. “We don’t bother with the locks in this case. This man poses no danger. He killed someone years ago, but here, as you’ll see, he’s found a modicum of peace.”