‘This is London, Arthur; that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained – as you once told me. All human life is here, the best and the worst of it, side by side.’
‘What I meant is: this isn’t Whitechapel, this isn’t Jack the Ripper country.’
‘Perhaps it’s worse. In the East End, you know exactly where you are. Everybody is poor in Whitechapel. There are no exceptions. Destitution and crime are evident for all to see. Whereas in this part of town, they’re not so obvious. They lurk in the dismal back alleys and hide behind the grandest front doors. Confusion reigns. Who’s respectable, who isn’t? Who’s innocent, who’s guilty? Where are you safe? At home or abroad? Nobody knows.’ He stopped in his tracks and looked up and down the deserted roadway. ‘A High Court judge lives in that house there. Mr Justice Wills, a good man, I’m told, decent and honest, but can we be sure? Friend Macnaghten, Chief Constable, lives down there – next to the Shelley Theatre, built by the poet’s son, don’t you know? Yes, Arthur, the man whose mother gave birth to Frankenstein gave birth to that little theatre. It’s quite beautiful inside – and haunted, they say. And just opposite is the studio of Mr John Singer Sargent. I admire his work, but what do we know of the company he keeps? Not long ago, I saw Lady Macbeth ringing the doorbell.’
I furrowed my brow, as I felt Oscar expected.
‘It was the actress Ellen Terry, of course, in costume, coming to have her portrait painted.’
I smiled and gazed along the varied range of handsome, high-windowed red-brick and stucco-fronted houses. ‘And a stone’s throw away,’ he went on, ‘at the end of that alley you now know too well, parallel with Tite Street, lies another street, one of the foulest and filthiest in all England.’
‘Paradise Walk?’
‘So named by one of the masters of irony employed by the borough council, yes. It’s a hellhole, a miserable mishmash of slum dwellings, hovels and tenements.’
‘Who lives there?’ I asked, as we walked on.
‘Poor unfortunates like that woman whose body you have just seen. Old prostitutes, old soldiers, old lags. All sorts: refugees from the workhouse, a few Jews from Poland and Lithuania, even the odd gentleman down on his luck. There’s a former courtier I know who glories in the name of Festing Fitzmaurice. He took to drink and paid the price. Once he lived at Windsor Castle and Osborne House and danced attendance on the Queen. Now he lives in a rat-infested room in Paradise Walk – above a pigsty. The street is rich in livestock: pigs and chickens, dogs and rats.’
He stopped in his tracks once more. ‘And here, in a house that overlooks all that, dwell I.’
We had arrived at 16 Tite Street. I had been to the house before, but did not know it well. It had been Oscar’s home since the time of his marriage, some ten years before, and though a building very much of its type and period – four narrow storeys, plus a basement, with just two rooms on each floor – Oscar had had it done up in his own peculiar style. His friend, the artist Whistler, had been closely involved in the decoration – and it showed. I knew that Oscar had once loved the house very much: I sensed now that he felt almost indifferent to the place.
As we stood looking up at the front door, it opened and a tall, portly, bearded gentleman emerged, pulling the door shut behind him. At first glance, he had the appearance of a prosperous, if not entirely trustworthy, Levantine merchant. As he turned to come down the front steps, he noticed Oscar and, touching the brim of his hat by way of salutation, murmured, ‘Oscar.’ Oscar made no reply and continued to fumble in his pockets, looking for his keys.
The man passed us without further acknowledgement and made his way down the street towards the river.
‘I feel I know him,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Oscar. ‘I hope not.’
‘He looks familiar.’
‘He might well. He is my brother.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Yes, my older brother. William Charles Kingsbury Wilde. I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.’
By now my friend had found his keys, but he did not need them because, as we reached the front door, it opened again and there stood Constance Wilde, smiling and with her hands outstretched to greet us.
‘This is a lovely surprise,’ she said. ‘I thought it was Willie come back, but it’s you. Come in.’
She wore a long, black velvet dress, with a white pageboy collar and white lace cuffs. She looked quite beautiful. Her auburn hair fell down to her shoulders in soft curls. She appeared less tired than when I had last seen her: her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were pink. She was evidently in high spirits.
‘What was Willie doing here?’ Oscar demanded as we stood together on the threshold.
‘He came for lunch.’
‘You had lunch with Willie?’
‘Well, Oscar, I must have lunch with someone.’
‘How much did he drink?’
‘Too much, I’m sure. He’s a creature of habit.’
‘Did you give him champagne?’
‘“What gentleman stints his guests?” – as you are so fond of saying. Yes, he had champagne and whisky and soda. He is your brother.’
‘You are not my brother’s housekeeper.’
She turned to me and drew me into the hallway. ‘How are you, Arthur? You look so well.’ She took my coat and umbrella. ‘How is Touie? Is she gaining strength? I hope so. How are the children? How was your Christmas? There’s so much to ask. You were in Switzerland, I know. You must tell me all about it. You have been skiing. I long for Oscar to take us skiing. The boys would love it.’
‘Where are the boys?’ asked Oscar, removing his own coat and pacing about the hallway like a cat on the prowl.
‘In Oakley Street, visiting your mother.’
‘My sons are with my mother and my brother is with you. This has all the makings of a tragedy by Euripides.’
Constance smiled. ‘Your brother came with a purpose,’ she said.
‘What? He wants to borrow money.’
‘No. He wants you to go to his wedding.’
‘I’ve already told him I can’t go to all his weddings. I went to the last and I may go to the next. I shall sit this one out.’
Constance went over to her husband and put her hands on his shoulders to calm him. ‘He came to ask me to intercede on his behalf,’ she said soothingly. ‘He says you will adore his new wife.’
‘I doubt it. From all I hear he doesn’t like her very much himself. He’s only marrying her because he has to. A not-so-happy event is in the offing, I imagine. He wants me to be there to add a veneer of respectability to the proceedings.’ Oscar caught my eye in the hallway mirror and addressed me over Constance’s shoulder: ‘His first wife was an American lady, considerably older than Willie, considerably wealthier, and considerably more energetic. Willie was her fourth husband and she made short shrift of him, throwing him out of the house after eight months and telling the world he was of no use to her, “either by day or by night”.’ Oscar laughed.
‘Come now, Oscar,’ said Constance, putting her finger to her husband’s lips to hush him.
‘You know it’s true, my dear. Willie’s hopeless and I pity any woman who marries him. This new girl is Irish and frail and penniless. It’s a fatal combination. The marriage is doomed before it’s started.’ Oscar broke away from Constance and gave a heavy, weary sigh. ‘I’m not going to Willie’s wedding and that’s that. I’m going to lie down. You can look after Arthur. I offered him a drink at the Langham, but he said he wanted tea – so we’re here. We can’t stay long. We have an appointment at six.’
And with that Oscar disappeared up the stairs and into his oriental smoking-cum-dressing room.
Constance watched him go and then turned back to me. ‘We had a very happy time at Christmas. Bosie has gone to Egypt, you know – at Oscar’s
suggestion – and life here has been much calmer as a consequence.’ She took me by the hand. ‘We shall have tea, Arthur, and perhaps a game of cards, and you must tell me all about the family – and your new book. I’m sure you have a new book. I’m writing one, you know.’
I sat with Constance in the white dining room and we talked. She told me about the book of fairy tales that she was writing and about her boys and their progress at school, and I told her about the book that I had been writing about my life as a doctor and about my small ones – and about my fears for Touie and her tuberculosis. We played no cards: we needed no distraction. We took tea – Constance prepared it for me herself – and we chatted – comfortably, as good friends – and I cannot recall a happier afternoon.
At half past five, as the clock on the sideboard chimed, I asked, ‘Should we be rousing Oscar, do you think?’
‘He’ll be down in a moment, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘If it’s the policeman you are seeing, Oscar won’t want to be late. He’s been anxious about the interview. I don’t know why. Has he anything to fear, do you know?’
‘I’m sure not.’
‘We have money worries, you know.’
‘What author doesn’t?’
‘He seemed quite content over Christmas and then he got this note from the policeman who lives here in Tite Street and he’s been anxious ever since. He moved back to the Langham Hotel on Saturday. He’s been quite distracted. It’s my birthday tomorrow. I know he won’t remember.’
‘I shall remind him,’ I said.
‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like me growing older.’
5
9 Tite Street
‘How has your afternoon been, gentlemen?’
Melville Macnaghten had answered his own front door when we had pulled his doorbell on the very stroke of six. He helped us off with our coats and ushered us immediately into his study: a man’s room’, book-lined, comfortably untidy, lit by gaslight, and smelling, reassuringly, of burning logs and pipe smoke. In Oscar’s study the walls were painted pale primrose and the woodwork deep red. Here the predominant colour was brown. Macnaghten himself was dressed all in brown: brown suit, brown tie, brown boots. Even his handsome face had a brown tinge to it. He looked like a man who had spent a good few years in the southern hemisphere.
‘I have rested,’ said Oscar, accepting a glass of brown sherry from our host – having surveyed the sideboard to ascertain that nothing paler or more interesting was likely to be on offer. ‘My friend, Dr Conan Doyle, has been flirting with my wife. He’s a married man, but wholly irresponsible. Nowadays I find that all the married men I know behave like bachelors and all the bachelors behave like married men.’
Oscar stood in front of Melville Macnaghten’s fireplace as though it were his own. If he was anxious about the forthcoming interview, he betrayed no sign of it.
‘And how has your afternoon been, Chief Constable?’ I asked.
‘Grim,’ he answered, indicating a leather armchair at the side of his desk for me to sit in. I took my place and, as I did so, on the desk I noticed a bundle of papers, on top of which was a file marked with one word: ‘WILDE’.
Macnaghten perched himself against the edge of the desk and sucked on his unlit pipe. ‘Grim,’ he repeated, grim and unsatisfactory. We’ve taken the body to the morgue and searched the alley. No sign of a murder weapon. No sign of anything, beyond the poor woman’s blood and some buttons from her torn clothing. Nothing else. We’ll search some more in the morning, by daylight. We have no idea who she might be. None whatsoever.’
‘No wedding ring?’ asked Oscar.
‘No jewellery of any kind,’ said Macnaghten. ‘No one has been reported missing and the house-to-house inquiries have yielded nothing so far.’
‘I don’t believe she is a prostitute,’ I said. ‘My examination was only cursory, as you know, but there was no obvious evidence of a carnal encounter – at least not a recent one. She had been foully mutilated, but, from what I could tell at a glance, the outward condition of her private parts suggested that she was continent in her personal life.’
Oscar raised his sherry glass towards me. ‘You have both a quick eye for detail and a delicate way with words, Arthur. I salute you.’
Macnaghten placed his pipe in the pipe-rack on his desk and drummed his fingers softly on his pile of paperwork. ‘You will write a report for me, won’t you, Doctor?’
‘Tonight, sir. Without fail.’
‘Thank you.’ He turned to Oscar, smiling. ‘And now, Mr Wilde, to business.’
‘Yes,’ said Oscar eagerly, lighting a fresh cigarette and throwing the spent match into the fire grate with a flourish. ‘Jack the Ripper. The curtain rises ...’
‘Yes, “Jack the Ripper” – how I loathe the name,’ said Macnaghten, shaking his head wearily. ‘But loathe it as I might, it has caught the public’s imagination, there’s no denying it – and we must either catch the man or prove him dead, or this “Jack the Ripper” business will go on for ever.’
‘It’s a telling name,’ said Oscar, ‘that is why it has caught the public’s imagination. It has a ring to it – like Oliver Twist. And it touches something deep in all of us, going right back to the mythic figures of our childhood. Jack-o’-lantern, Jack and Jill, Jack the Giant-killer ... Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper. Say it softly. Say it slowly. Say it as night falls. The name tells you everything you need to know.’
‘Where does it come from?’ I asked, as crisply as I could, sensing that Macnaghten might not be appreciating the relish with which Oscar was repeating the name.
‘From a letter and a postcard sent to the Central News Agency at the height of the killings and purporting to come from the killer himself.’
‘But not coming from him?’
‘We don’t know. There’s a great deal we don’t know.’ The policeman drummed his fingers lightly on his file of papers once more. ‘That’s why I have been charged with producing a report – a definitive report – that eliminates the speculation – of which there is a great deal – and focuses on the facts – which, unfortunately, are very few.’
‘You will unmask “Jack the Ripper”,’ announced Oscar, raising his glass towards the policeman. ‘I know it.’
‘I will produce a report on the “Whitechapel murders”, as we refer to them at Scotland Yard, and I will leave no stone unturned, that’s all I know.’
‘How many “Whitechapel murders” have there been?’ I asked.
‘There are eleven in all on the file, committed between the third of April 1888 and the thirteenth of February 1891.’
‘And all the work of the same inhuman hand?’
‘Probably not. Certainly not, in my view. Five of the murders are remarkably similar in terms of the killer’s modus operandi – with deep cuts to the throat, specific knife marks on the face, mutilation of the abdomen and private parts, the removal of internal organs—’
‘Enough,’ cried Oscar, closing his eyes.
‘Grotesque,’ I said.
Macnaghten nodded. ‘Grotesque and distinctive. That’s the point. The other six involve strangulation, decapitation – all kinds of horror – but they don’t carry the unique hallmarks of a Jack the Ripper killing.’
‘Who was the first victim?’ I asked.
‘The first two murders on the file are those of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. Smith was robbed and sexually assaulted in Osborn Street, Whitechapel. That was on the third of April 1888.’
‘It was Easter, was it not?’ said Oscar, opening his eyes.
‘The Easter weekend, yes,’ said Macnaghten. ‘A blunt instrument was thrust into her private parts rupturing her peritoneum. She survived the attack, but died in hospital the following day of peritonitis.’
‘Was she able to describe her assailant before she died?’ I asked.
‘She said there were two of them, possibly three. She could not describe them in any useful way, but she was certain there was m
ore than one. Months after the event, the newspapers decided to link Smith’s murder to the Jack the Ripper killings – without good cause.’
‘I believe nothing that I read in the newspapers,’ said Oscar, gazing into his empty sherry glass. ‘Journalists get everything wrong, in my experience. Instead of monopolising the seat of judgement, journalism should be apologising in the dock.’
‘Emma Smith was brutally murdered,’ said Macnaghten, ‘but by a gang, not by Jack the Ripper.’
‘And Martha Tabram?’ I asked.
‘She was murdered on the seventh of August 1888, in George Yard, Whitechapel, not far from Osborn Street. She is more likely to have been one of the Ripper’s victims, but I do not believe that she was.’
‘Why not?’
‘The Ripper slashed his victims,’ said Macnaghten, lifting his pipe from the rack and sawing the air with it. ‘Martha Tabram was stabbed in the throat and the abdomen – repeatedly.’ He used the pipe to make a short, sharp stabbing gesture. ‘She was stabbed thirty-nine times in all.’
I looked up at the chief constable. ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. An interesting coincidence, but after more than five years and in a quite different part of town, I don’t see that it can be anything more.’
‘Really?’ I said, both puzzled and perturbed.
‘Really,’ replied the policeman emphatically. He got to his feet and collected the sherry decanter from the sideboard. A little more, Mr Wilde?’
‘Thank you,’ said Oscar. ‘I can resist everything except temptation.’
‘And your five undoubted victims?’ I enquired.
‘Five women, all prostitutes, savagely murdered and mutilated in very similar circumstances, within a few streets of one another, within a few weeks of one another, between the thirty-first of August and the ninth of November 1888:Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.’
‘You know the names by heart.’
‘I do. I know the details of each case by heart.’
‘Five murders,’ said Oscar. And how many suspects?’
Oscar Wilde and the Return of Jack the Ripper Page 3