Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Jeb’s Memoir

It all turned on three letters, and the colonel knew where to look for them, and quick as a fox, he provided Penny with the names so designated and specifics of three officers so marked, and just as quick, Penny forwarded them to me.

The three letters of the crucial designation were: “s/ID.” That meant “Seconded to the Intelligence Department,” which was both the kiss of professional death in the army—once tainted with exposure to the black world of intelligence procedures, the officer had sealed his administrative fate and would never rise to the level of a general officer, as the boys in charge did not trust their own spies—and the ticket to some truly interesting adventures. It was amazing how many brave officers would give up forever their chance at wearing the general’s insignia for a few years of scuttling around the hills beyond Kabul with the Pathan. To a certain mind, I could tell, it was someone’s idea of jolly fun! Pip, pip, ho, ho, all larky and merry in the Great Game, shan’t we have a dashing good time, Geoffrey, and to Hades with those hidebound mummies at headquarters! Perhaps sexual possibility was part of the lure, for the dusky-skinned, sloe-eyed beauties of the brown races were said to have lesser standards of acquiescence than our Victorian ladies behind their crinolines and tight bodices. Because we had so many men with these issues in their brains, we had an empire.

Two majors and a lieutenant colonel. The names meant nothing to me, nor the regiments from which they had sprung, though one fellow, a major, was a double outlier, as he was seconded initially from his “real” regiment to something all woggy called the 3rd Queen’s Own Bombay Cavalry. It was in the Bombay Cavalry that he had survived the ruinous defeat at Maiwand, in 1880, as had the other two in their respective regiments or whatever they were (I’ll never get the military system of regiment and battalion and brigade straight!). All were shortly thereafter “s/ID”ed, if such a term existed, at which point the archivists of the British army lost track of them, and at intervals of, respectively, eighteen months, two years, and, my God!, five years, they were “r/RHq,” meaning “Returned to Regimental Headquarters,” which is a way of saying home safe. Who knows how many of the s/ID boys never made it back to r/RHq and had their guts pulled out on some dry knob in the Hindu Kush? Such is the price of empire.

Major R. F. Pullham (Ret.), 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, (KCB) (DCM)

Major P. M. MacNeese (Ret.), E Battery/B Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery (DSO) (DCM) (CGM)

Lieutenant Colonel H. P. Woodruff (Ret.), 66th Berkshire Regiment of Foot (KCB) (VC)

The fuel of empire is bravery. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, whatever the mechanics of the thing, these fellows had it, as the bland display of initials compressed between parens behind their “(Ret.)” designation made clear. Knowing full well I was a congenital coward, I could never understand what makes a man brave. Is it strength, stubbornness, intelligence, instinct, possibly even fear of something worse than what awaits him in the ordeal immediately ahead, whether it’s a valley with guns to left and right, or the cunning pleasure of a tribal torturer? As I say, one can doubt the wisdom of it, the ethics of it, the sheer criminality of it on the global scale, but one cannot doubt the courage.

At the same time, I took to this development rather wholeheartedly. It provided something to Jack that heretofore was absent, and that absence—a clear frame of reference and possibility—had occluded, I believed, our attempts to understand and thereby locate him.

Clearly, the only men with answers were the listed three, all Afghan vets of great valor, all recently retired, all s/ID at length, all well under six feet. Like a Tantric prayer, I committed the rhythms to memory: MacNeese, Pullham, and Woodruff. One, it seemed, would have a spelling impairment and two purloined wedding bands and that, as they say, would be that!

Penny’s knowledgeable colonel had even provided addresses, so that cut one difficulty out of the process. Dare and I charted them on a map of London and learned that Major MacNeese lived on one of the better streets in Whitechapel, while both Major Pullham and the Welsh colonel (H stood for Huw, Welsh spelling) Woodruff were farther out, though all were within an hour’s walk of the murder sites, and all were close to public transportation—the Underground or horse-tram lines—that could get them there and back without a bit of trouble.

We agreed to start with MacNeese, on the grounds that the closer he was, the more likely his candidacy seemed. We were aware, too, that time was passing. We had gotten by the quarter-moon phase of late October without a death, for no reason anyone understood. If Professor Dare’s theory of quarter-moon-as-optimum-mission time held true, that meant that November 6 or 7 would bring Jack and his knife to the street again. We felt it best to make quick surveys of each man and determine if any was more promising than the others. If one stood out with a special vividness of possibility, he would be the one we focused on exclusively, and when we developed evidence, we would take it to Inspector Abberline. It seemed sound then. It still does, even when I know how it all turned out.

It was about now that the two genius detectives, Mr. Jeb of the Star and Professor Dare of the University of London, made an interesting discovery. They hadn’t the slightest idea what to do next! The actual detecting part of detective work was utterly beyond them!

We looked at each other, almost daft with disbelief. Did we follow the suspects? Did we hire professional investigators? Did we attempt to burglarize their home quarters? Did we interview their neighbors? Did we hire thugees to knock them down and rifle through their wallets and any other personal papers while they were unconscious? Did we research them at the British Museum? Did we . . . At that point, we more or less ran out of possibilities.

“You’re the practical one,” said Professor Dare—the site was his study, we were drinking some foul tea his Scots maid had assembled for us from terrier piss, he was smoking, and I was not.

“Sherlock Holmes would hire boys to watch each man,” I said. “He is a great believer in the skill of urchins as opposed to coppers in matters of observation.”

“That name again! Who the devil is he? Must find out.”

“You would find it interesting, as in so many ways you resemble him. As for this here and now, I do believe the more people we involve, the more difficult the thing will be to manage, much less keep secret. For that reason, I would also avoid private inquiry specialists. One cannot control whom others speak to and what gets known generally.”

“Well-made point,” allowed the professor.

“All right, I would say as follows. In the morning, you station yourself at the MacNeese house, and when he leaves for work, you follow him at a discreet distance. Perhaps you could address your wardrobe accordingly, as such fine tweed so well tailored is rather conspicuous.”

“I’m rather a dandy,” he said. “I hate to give up on it. Dressing well is its own deep pleasure. But if you insist.”

“I shall never insist, only suggest.”

“Excellent policy,” he said.

“You stay with him, determine what kind of employment he’s found, and if it’s open to the public, enter and discreetly observe. In the meantime, I shall go to the Hall of Records, find a clerk to run his name through various municipal filings, see what can be learned of his financial situation—I would infer that from taxes paid—and make other determinations, such as police records, birth records, marriage certificates, and so on, all traces of him recorded by the government. Then I shall go home and nap for several hours. You, meanwhile, stay with him through his return home.”

“Seems amenable,” he said.

“I will rendezvous with you at a spot outside his place at nine P.M. You will then be off and, well rested, I will remain on station until, say, two A.M., following him anywhere he goes.”

“Yes, I have it. I will work one long day at the detective’s trade; you will work two half long days with a break in between.”

“On the following day,” I said, “we’ll exchange schedules.”

“No, no,” he said. “Since you’re so damned good at fetching records, you might as well return to the municipal seats and do similar searches on the other two. At a certain point, say three days hence, we’ll meet and consider next moves. Does that feel efficient? And if Major MacNeese proves uninteresting, we’ll quickly move on to Major Pullham, time being an element in our urgency.”

“Very good. If there’s any ‘promising’ behavior, we’ll mark it and make a determination then.”

“Yes, remember that Jack, by my theory, is a scout first and foremost. If he has a plot running, he’ll reconnoiter first. That should be behavior easy to recognize and give us ample preparation time. He never improvises; he’s got it all well thought out in advance.”

Excellent plan. However, in practice it was not nearly so neat. What we hadn’t figured on was the utter boredom of detective work, and for highly cognitive men with playful imaginations always on the lookout for spontaneous wit, unusual images, irrational occurrences of moment, the odd cloud formation, a beautiful face, a well-cut suit, a particular shade of color on the hubcap of a cabriolet, a tone in the air that reminded one of a particularly thrilling passage in Wagner, all the little irrelevancies that life regularly throws up to the overbusy of mind, the ordeal was degrading, exhausting, and excruciating. Detectives we might be playing at, but detectives we were not. We were either too intelligent or too silly.

Major MacNeese was married with two small children. His wife was a beauty but of a class that probably would have prevented a further rise in the army or society even had he not gone off on s/ID. He had secured, through connections, a fine job as assistant supervisor of the shipping department of the East India Company and therefore worked in their extensive rooms located immediate to Canary Wharf. It was such a fine job, surely a thousand a year, and it came to him so quickly that we quickly concluded it was part of some larger arrangement. We believed that his true employer, using his contacts, was an intelligence department attached to some governmental concern, army, foreign office, some tiny room in a Whitehall cellar, and he was possibly in charge of shipping men of low repute or criminal intent, purloined military documents, currency for payroll of spies, perhaps guns and powder, even dynamite, into or out of Britain under the guise of his civilian career. That made sense but was not terribly interesting, for a shipping executive of secret dynamite is still first and foremost a shipping executive. Ho-hum, and pardon me for nap time.

Major Pullham was more interesting. His employment, again gotten no doubt through contacts, was with the manufacturing concern of Jacoby, Meyers & Devlin, which specialized in selling various metal accoutrements to the army, such as mess-kit items, lanyards, belt buckles, and water bottles. Since he was the cavalryman of high renown—8th Irish Hussar, recall, with all those initials scattered in his name’s wake—he knew all the generals of horse and all the procurement processes and was able to maintain his firm’s contracts for horse-related metal implements, such as bits, spurs, cinch buckles, and so forth, that kept the British hussar and light or heavy horseman firmly in saddle as he galloped through waves of Pathan, whisking them down with the sharp edge of his Wilkinson. Pullham had married above station to a wealthy and connected woman and was a sort of smooth charmer, being a handsome man with good manners, a courtly fashion, a ready wit, and a comfort that eased his way among the betters of society with whom he mingled on a daily basis.

The third fellow, Colonel Woodruff, was probably the bravest but also evidently the most severe. He lived alone, a dull little man in black, mainly, and had no true employ except his own intellectual curiosity. He spent his days in the British Library reading rooms (I had never noticed him, nor he me), where he was quite happily compiling the first English-Pashto dictionary and grammar, a document that was needed desperately by at least four other human beings on the planet. As I say, drab, with a clerk’s mien. However, he was an old hand, having been east since 1856, survived the siege of Lucknow during the Great Mutiny, and commanded a battalion of foot of the 66th at Maiwand, which stood off several separate horse charges; when our positions were broken, he was able, by shrewd land navigation and language skills, to get all his survivors back to Kandahar. Not satisfied with that accomplishment, he went back into the field in mufti and, for a week after the battle, brought stragglers back in. Then he and he alone made the desperately dangerous journey to Kabul, where he became Fred Roberts’s head scout and led the Roberts relief column back to raise the siege at Kandahar. It was he, on the night before the battle, who scouted the Khan’s positions and made Roberts understand how to attack. After the rout, he was awarded the VC for that, although he could have been awarded it for any of the actions of the previous week. After all of that, he went s/ID for the next full five years, doing God knows what in the high Khyber Mountain passes. To look at him, you’d have thought he owned a teashop or was a third-grade railway clerk.

So we rotated among them over the week before the approach of the first November occurrence of the proper moon phase, I doing more of the digging through files, Dare more of the on-scene reportage. I must say, he had a talent for it and seemed to enjoy it rather more than I would have thought. “It’s so nice to be among actual human beings in actual society for a change,” he said enthusiastically, “instead of locked amid books, no matter how stimulating they might be.”

We learned, first of all, that if no man is a hero to his valet, neither is he one to his detective. MacNeese, for example, while the exemplary servant to his employers, both nominal and subrosa, and to his family, occasionally bought a French postcard or two on his way home, for private titillation and release, we presumed. We weren’t sure what to make of it; perhaps, though there were no indications, were he Jack, the pictures would render him tumescent, and he needed that impetus to do the murders. Admittedly, it was far-fetched; more probably, the occasional secret release calmed him and turned him away from the temptations he might succumb to otherwise on his daily to-and-fro through the lascivious streets of Whitechapel.

As for Pullham, it was sex as well. (How much of human activity is infiltrated by desire! That was a lesson well learned!) However, it was sex after the fashion of an adventurer, which was clearly his personality type. He had two mistresses, one of whom his wife had no knowledge of and one of whom she did. He saw them regularly over lunchtimes, skipping the midday repast and thereby keeping his figure lean and dashing. Once he saw both of them on the same day, taking a late dinner with Lady Meachum. He was insatiable. It was observed that at any chance encounter with an attractive woman, he immediately went into full seducer’s mien, came alight, as it were, attentive, his hands seeming to accidentally touch and caress his prey, an invitation whispered into her ear, this to servant girls, clerks, shopkeeps, and high ladies as they came across his prow. The man was a satyr. Again, that might be a Jack indicator, on the theory that for a woman hunter, slaying the rude street girls was a refined pleasure to be enjoyed after having grown tired of endeavors involving mere sex conquest in the field. But again, it was kind of silly, wasn’t it? This man had everything, and if material values were important to him (marrying Lady Meachum seemed to indicate they were), why would he risk it all by knifing the odd tart during the crescent moon? I could make no sense of that issue. The other aspect that made him unlikely was energy. The fellow was engaged at all waking hours, in mandates of career, mandates of society via Lady Meachum’s importuning, or mandates of his perpetually engorged chuz, which seemed to guide him whenever his schedule would allow it.

That left Colonel Woodruff. His flaw was hardly a flaw. The man worked relentlessly and seemed completely isolated from society in his mad urge to decipher Pashto grammar and verb tense. Perhaps it kept the devils of memory and regret at bay. Equally, he did not mix with old military colleagues and recount the good old days; possibly, to him, they were not so much good as merely old, and he was content to leave them lie. In fact, he would go weeks without speaking to another soul. He was a priest, not only a priest but a damned Black Jesuit, of sublime discipline and isolation and absolutism. But once every ten days or so, he would allow himself a night off and indulge his solitary vice.

So odd. It must have been a habit picked up in the east, and one wondered what it did for him, except perhaps still the voices he must have heard, the visions he must have seen. Whatever the case, he left his rooms and walked—a great walker he was, his short little figure never slowing, his progress much more severe and less patient than that of other walkers and went to the dock area, and then went to one of three dens, unmarked on the outside, and spent the night.

At first we had no idea what the places were, and thought they might be brothels, but he stayed way too long for a brothel visit. Professor Dare volunteered to wait him out while I went back home to catch up on sleep.

The next day the professor reported that after the colonel had left, he himself entered to ascertain the nature of the vice and discovered it to be an opium den, where men of all races paid to lie on divans and a Chinaman would bring them long-stemmed clay pipes; they would imbibe (is that the term?) and pass into a trancelike stage, not quite sleep but more a tranquil semiconsciousness with their eyes locked on infinity, their bodies still, their breathing imperceptible, their minds voyaging to wherever. Since the drug was more of the sort that stilled the body than animated it, it would never act as an enabler of the kind of vigorous action that Jack demonstrated.

As the end of the first week of November approached, we had nothing except a load of information on three heroic officers guilty of only the petty sins of human yearning for various denominations of comfort. But if Professor Dare had lost faith in the veracity of his thesis, he never admitted it to me. Quite the opposite, he was adamant that it had to be one of these three, and as he pressed his case, perhaps I saw a hint of the violent zealotry of the kind that Harry Dam had reported. I do not mean there was threat in his behavior, just dogma. He knew, he knew, he knew. He could not be wrong. That was the bedrock of his conviction.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Diary

November 3, 1888

I write this one quite drunk, ha ha. I felt I needed to real relacks relax. The pressure is building, I am crushed between lives, I am so close, but yet there is much to do. I will allow myself some diversion.

One place, ha ha ha, I knew to be safe was the Tailor’s Thimble, in Marylebone, far from the slough of despond called Whitechapel. It is uncharacteristic of me to let go, as I subject myself from long habit, long, long, long habit, to the utmost of disi discipline and letting go is is not a thing I do easily.

But the Thimble, in the afternoon, is largely empty, and so I sat and had three glasses, then a fourth, of champagne.

“Celebrating then, are we, sir?” a feller asks.

“Indubitably, friend. Feeling generous. Care for a glass?”

“Wouldn’t mind if I did, and thanking the gentleman kindly.”

So he scootched up on a stool and I nodded to the barkeep and soon enough my new friend was having a quaff of bubbly as well.

“Never had it before,” he said. “It tickles the nose.”

“It tickles more than that after time,” I said.

“What business is yours, sir?” he asked.

“I handle rearrangements,” I said. “Business is good. There’s a lot of rearranging to do. And you, sir, what would yours be?”

“I was a rigger. That is, sir, I rigged the ropework on the construction cranes we used in the digging of the tunnels of the Underground. Not just tunnels, sir, but buildings, too, bridges, anything requiring heavy weights moved and placed. Raised in the trade, trained by my father, who was trained by his before him. People take it for granted, but it’s a tricky business and, done wrong, can spell all sorts of mischief.”

“So when I sail blithely from the City to Marylebone or cross over a river wide and deep enough to drown a battalion, you’re the lad who made it happen?”

“A tiny part of it’s my work, sir. It was good work. I raised three kiddies and now all are in trade or honest labor.”

“Well, by God, sir, you’ve provided civilization with a long ton and a half more than I have. Here, porter, the bottle. This man drinks to his fill on my tab!”

The bartender scurried over, made a bottle ready with ceremony, and Mr. Hoyt, for such was the name, and I had a merry time together. He was quite a decent man and laughed at my bad jokes and puns, never grew intemperate even though the company had jettisoned him at sixty-five without so much as a farthing or a fare-thee-well. We both wept a tear for his wife, and agreed that liquor eased the pain.

“And you, sir? If you do not wish to speak, I understand. But somehow the burden is less when you share it, even for a bit, even with a stranger.”

“There was a woman, I lost her. There was a friend, I lost him. I hate them for the pain they caused, I miss them for the love they provided. It’s a banal story. Commonplace, pitiful. I try not to get all weepy, because in other respects, I was so lucky.”

“But it’s love that’s most important, now, isn’t it. When all is said and done, love is what lasts, or the pain of it missing, that lasts as well.”

“It’s surely so,” I said, turning to more bubbly.