‘Lights!’ cried Mansfield. ‘Give us some lights!’
Suddenly the room was full of movement. We had sat transfixed for an hour, caught in Oscar’s spell. Now, at Mansfield’s command, Macnaghten, Wellbeloved, the doctors, Shand – all were on their feet, reaching into their pockets for matches and striking them, lighting the candles around the table and in the sconces. In no more than a matter of seconds, the room was filled with light.
And all became clear at once. The immovable figure at the head of the table was not Ivan Salazkin: it was Michael Ostrog, dressed in the ringmaster’s costume, hidden behind his master’s beard and whiskers. Oscar began to laugh.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ cried Macnaghten.
‘We’ve been gulled, Chief Constable,’ roared Oscar. ‘After we’d finished our meal and before I launched into my exposition, in a cubiculo in the gentlemen’s lavatory, Salazkin and Ostrog must have changed clothes and changed places. We’ve been gulled by the oldest trick in the magician’s handbook.’
‘Where will he be now?’ demanded Macnaghten angrily.
‘Salazkin? Halfway to Dover, I imagine.’
‘We must stop him!’ cried Macnaghten.
‘Will Major Ridout not have stopped him?’ I asked.
‘No. I warned Ridout about Ostrog, but Salazkin was our “guest of honour” tonight. He was Labby’s “friendly informer”, remember – a Foreign Office favourite. Major Ridout will doubtless have saluted as he passed and waved him on his way.’
‘Perhaps that’s best, Wilde,’ said Labouchere, looking down at the still motionless figure of Michael Ostrog. ‘This is the man who committed the crimes. You’ve satisfied us of that. Dr Gabriel is here. Macnaghten can no doubt provide a police escort to accompany the doctor and his patient back to the asylum. That’s where he should be. Kosminski is still under the charge of Dr Rogerson. We need say no more about whatever else you have disclosed to us tonight. What purpose would it serve?’
‘The truth?’ murmured Oscar.
Labouchere shook his head. ‘Over the years Salazkin has done the state some service. He has brought us intelligence of value from other countries. He has alerted us to the existence of anarchists at work here in London. Something is being plotted even as we speak. We are aware of that, thanks to Salazkin. He has been an ally to our government. Do we want to reveal to the world that an ally of the government is Jack the Ripper? Besides, as you tell it, Wilde, he masterminded these crimes. He did not commit them.’ Labouchere looked around the room and his steady gaze carried undeniable authority. ‘Mrs Wilde, gentlemen, I hope we can be agreed: in the national interest, whether they are to be believed or not, tonight’s revelations should not leave this room. They are for us to know and no one else.’
‘So,’ said Oscar softly, ‘we all have secrets and these are to be ours. The world is not to know the true identity of Jack the Ripper?’
‘You’ve established that Mansfield and Wellbeloved are innocent,’ said Labouchere. ‘That’s enough.’
‘And what you’ve told us about Druitt I accept as well,’ said Macnaghten gravely. He was on his feet and, I now saw, holding a pair of iron handcuffs. He looked down at Ostrog. ‘On your feet,’ he ordered. ‘Give me your hands.’ Ostrog obeyed. Macnaghten slipped the handcuffs over the man’s wrists. ‘Case closed.’
‘Who has the key to the room?’ asked Labouchere.
‘I do,’ I said. I moved around the table and unlocked the door. Within a minute they were all gone. Labouchere, Macnaghten and the two doctors surrounded the unresisting Ostrog as they led him away. Wellbeloved and Mansfield followed, with George R. Sims and Alec Shand bringing up the rear.
‘I’m glad the book proved useful,’ said Shand. ‘Did you notice that it was dedicated to Constance?’
‘I did,’ said Oscar. ‘The eyes are indeed the windows to the soul. I see yours, Alec, and I notice that you love her still.’
‘Goodnight, Oscar,’ said Shand, smiling. ‘Goodnight, Constance.’ He kissed her hand and bowed and went on his way.
Martin the waiter came into the room. ‘Is all well, sir?’ he asked cheerily.
‘Yes, Martin, thank you. Have they all gone?’
‘They’re getting into the carriages now, sir. None of them tipped me and they all looked a bit dazed, sir, if I’m honest. I hope the meal was to your liking?’
‘It was all most excellent, Martin.’ Oscar reached into his pocket and produced two sovereigns, which he handed to the boy. ‘I think my guests were somewhat preoccupied.’
‘Thank you, Mr Wilde. You’re the best. I will begin to clear now, sir, if I may.’
‘Give us just a moment, would you, Martin?’
‘Of course, sir.’ The waiter touched his forelock and left the room.
‘Will you come home tonight?’ asked Constance. ‘I would be grateful.’
‘Yes, my dear.’ Oscar smiled. ‘I rather think I’d better or, before I know it, you’ll have left me for Alec Shand.’
‘I shall read his book with interest,’ I said.
‘It won’t disappoint you,’ said Oscar. ‘It cracked the case so far as I was concerned. When Salazkin looked at that photograph of your sweet children he showed no emotion whatsoever – though I imagine he recognised the delight the picture gave to others and resented it.’
‘Can we drop off Willie in Oakley Street?’ asked Constance.
‘Oh no,’ said Oscar. ‘He’ll wake up the whole house. He can have my room here at the hotel.’ Oscar went over to his slumbering brother and shook him by the shoulder.
Willie opened his bloodshot eyes and looked up blearily. ‘Is that you, Oscar?’
‘It is, Willie. I trust you slept well.’
‘Did I nod off? My apologies, old man. Did I miss the best of your performance? I so often do.’
‘Oh no,’ said Oscar, ‘not this time. I have kept the best till last.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘We were speaking of Jack the Ripper . . .’
‘I know.’
‘You recall how the name of Jack the Ripper entered the public domain?’
‘I do,’ said Willie, rubbing his eyes and smacking his lips. ‘It came from a letter and a postcard sent to the Central News Agency at the height of the killings in 1888 and purporting to come from the murderer himself.’
‘But the letter and the postcard did not come from any murderer.’
‘Did they not?’
‘What murderer would think of sending a letter to a news agency? A murderer would send it to a newspaper or to the police. Only a journalist would write to a news agency. Only a journalist would know the news agency’s address.’
‘Is that so?’ said Willie, getting to his feet and stretching his broad shoulders as he did so. And do you know who that journalist was?’
‘Yes, Willie, I do,’ said Oscar.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. It was you, Willie. It was you who gave Jack the Ripper his name.’
‘And what makes you so certain, Oscar? Is this another poetic leap?’
‘No, this comes from the evidence of my own eyes. Chief Constable Macnaghten gave me a file containing a photographic copy of the letter and the postcard. They were written in a deliberately awkward, childish hand, but I recognised it the moment that I saw it. We were boys together, remember, Willie, I knew at once that I had seen that hand before.’
AFTERMATH
1924
These events took place thirty years ago, in the first two weeks of 1894, and the discretion that Henry Labouchere demanded of us all that night in the Winter Room of the Langham Hotel each of us has shown in the intervening years.
On the morning after Oscar’s night of revelations, the Russian Circus left London, never to return. Four weeks later, on 15 February 1894, an anarchist – one Martial Bourdin – was killed by his own bomb outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park. Bourdin was a member of the Club Autonomie and his name was k
nown to the authorities because it was on a list supplied to them by Ivan Salazkin.
Oscar was always fascinated by the power of names. ‘Would that young man have turned to bomb-making,’ he asked, ‘if his name had not been Martial? Would I be as I am, were I not called Wilde?’
I saw much less of my friend in the months that followed and when I did see him I found him increasingly wild, gripped by a growing ego-mania that seemed to me to border on lunacy. He enjoyed a year of extraordinary theatrical success, culminating in the productions of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, but these professional triumphs coincided with personal disaster. His young friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, returned to England and he and Wilde resumed their intimate relationship. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, pursued them both to a bitter end. In the early summer of 1895, Wilde was tried for offences of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. The presiding judge was Mr Justice Wills, who lived across the way from the Wildes and Melville Macnaghten in Tite Street, Chelsea.
Constance Wilde, one of the loveliest and most decent women I ever knew, stayed loyal to her husband to the last. She died in Italy, following an unsuccessful operation, on 7 April 1898, aged only thirty-nine. My own amiable and gentle wife, Touie, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1906, aged forty-nine. My second wife, Jean, whom I married the following year, has brought me all the comfort and joy I have known since.
Oscar found no such consolation. After his release from prison in 1897, he rekindled his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, but it was not as it had been before. Oscar died aged forty-six, alone and in debt, in a small hotel in Paris, on 30 November 1900. His nemesis, The Marquess of Queensberry, died at the beginning of the same year, on 31 January 1900, aged fifty-five. Lord Alfred Douglas is alive still. After Wilde’s death, he married and fathered one son. He writes poetry which is admired by some.
Henry Labouchere died in 1912, aged eighty-one. As a member of parliament, Labouchere’s principal legacy remains the amendment he introduced to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. This was the legislation that, for the first time, outlawed all male homosexual activity and enabled the successful prosecution of Oscar Wilde. Labby was a controversial and combative figure and I liked him, though many didn’t. He operated sub rosa, partly because he enjoyed the excitement of secret operations, but, also, because he was denied formal public office. The prime minister, William Gladstone, wanted him in his Cabinet, but Queen Victoria vetoed the appointment on the grounds that Labouchere was disrespectful of royalty.
Royalty had no such reservations in the case of Melville Macnaghten. Chief Constable of the CID in 1894, he went on to become Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1903, was knighted in 1907, created a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1912 and awarded the King’s Police Medal in 1913. He died quite recently, in 1921, aged sixty-eight. Shortly before his passing I read his autobiography, Days of My Years, and went to visit him in the mansion flat in Westminster where lived out his retirement. His book made no mention of the momentous events of the first two weeks of 1894. When I saw him, he said, ‘You do understand why?’
‘I think so,’ I answered tentatively, hoping to coax more from him.
‘What could I say?’ he asked. ‘Labouchere had called for our discretion and with good reason. Ivan Salazkin had undoubtedly been of use to the British government – he had been a “friendly informer” for several years – and his accuser was the unfortunate Wilde, who, while undeniably brilliant and probably correct in every conjecture regarding the Whitechapel murders, had few true friends in high places and was quickly engulfed in a scandal of his own that led to his disgrace and imprisonment.’
‘Why did that happen?’ I asked. ‘London was awash with men of a similar inclination to Wilde, but they weren’t prosecuted and imprisoned. To avoid scandal, they were allowed – even encouraged – to leave the country. They weren’t sent to gaol.’
Macnaghten shrugged. ‘Wilde brought about his own downfall,’ he said, sucking on his unlit pipe. ‘Wilde was properly tried. He was guilty as charged.’
‘But why was he charged?’ I persisted. ‘He could simply have been advised to flee to France – as others were.’
‘Wilde had become unhinged. We were fearful of what he might do and say.’
‘“We”? Who do you mean by “we”?’
‘The authorities – the Metropolitan Police, the War Office, Labouchere . . . There was nothing to be gained by letting the world know that Jack the Ripper was a quasi secret agent who had supplied intelligence to the British government. That would have caused a scandal! In the months that followed Wilde’s night of “revelations” at the Langham Hotel, he grew increasingly reckless. In one of his plays, he even included a mythical character called Bunbury! At large, he was a loose cannon. When the chance came to have him put away, we seized it. I’m sure you understand.’
I said nothing.
Macnaghten continued, reflectively: ‘I was in court throughout Wilde’s trial. On the final day, as he was sentenced, he looked up from the dock and called out to the judge, “And I, my lord, am I to say nothing?” My heart was in my mouth, I can tell you. What might he not have said? Fortunately, Mr Justice Wills silenced him at once and sent him down to the cells.’
‘And in prison, of course, he could say nothing.’
‘And once released he was a ruined man – who went into exile, drifted around Europe and drank too much. Whatever he said then would not matter. No one would be listening.’
‘And what happened to Salazkin?’ I asked.
‘Salazkin and his circus left the country and never returned.’
‘Do we know anything more of him?’
‘I made some inquiries – discreetly, of course. From police contacts in France and Germany, I learned that while the circus continued to tour, Salazkin was no longer part of it. He appeared to have vanished into thin air – or at least to have returned to Russia. I heard nothing of him until much more recently – a few years ago, just after the end of the war. I was staying with a friend for the weekend – a former diplomat – and, leafing through his scrapbooks, I came across a newspaper cutting about the aftermath of the October Revolution in Russia. There were photographs of some of those who had been executed. One was named as Ivan Salazkin, Minister of Culture in the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. It was a small photograph, not distinct, but I think it was our man.’
‘So, Jack the Ripper died in 1917,’ I said. Macnaghten made no reply, but smiled. ‘And what of Kosminski and Ostrog?’ I asked.
‘Kosminski died in the lunatic asylum, just recently. According to Dr Rogerson he was a virtual vegetable at the end. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in East Ham. Rogerson and I were the only people to attend the interment. There was nothing to be gained from trying to prosecute him and Ostrog, of course. They could have given no evidence of value. Salazkin was back in Russia and Wilde was in Reading Gaol.’
‘What of Ostrog?’
‘I believe he is dead, too, but I cannot be sure. Officially, “Michael Ostrog” died in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum sometime in 1904, but that “Ostrog” was the substitute – the vagrant from underneath the arches in Pinchin Street, not the real man. When we left the Langham Hotel that night, we took the real Ostrog directly to the asylum. Dr Gabriel agreed to keep him as a secure patient for the rest of his natural life, but on condition that he could invent a new alias for him. As Gabriel said, Ostrog had lived his life under a string of aliases: one more would make no difference. I didn’t object, because Ostrog should have been inside the asylum in any event – he had been correctly committed there even if, initially, with Salazkin’s help, he had managed to evade his incarceration. And I could understand that Gabriel – a good man doing a difficult job – did not want it known that for years he had had a patient who had been locked up in error and whose identity was unknown. He advised me to forget all about Ostrog.
He told me that our lunatic asylums are full of people who don’t know who they are or were. He said, rather amusingly, that at Surrey County hardly a month goes by without a new patient arriving claiming to be Jack the Ripper.’ He laughed. ‘Once all the lunatics wanted to be Napoleon. Now it seems it’s either Jack the Ripper or Sherlock Holmes.’
I liked Macnaghten. He was a decent man whose instincts were sound. I enquired after the report he had prepared on the Whitechapel murders – the one that Oscar and I had been privy to in draft. He told me that in the final report, submitted to his superiors, he had removed the names of Richard Mansfield and Walter Wellbeloved from his list of suspects, but other than that had let it stand as it was.
Most, but not all, of those who were in that room at the Langham Hotel on that memorable night in January 1894 are dead now.
Richard Mansfield died in New London, Connecticut, in 1907, aged just fifty. The New York Times said of him: ‘He was the greatest actor of his hour, and one of the greatest of all times.’ His last major success was in the title role of Ivan the Terrible.
Oscar Wilde and the Return of Jack the Ripper Page 29