Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

That foray into the cavity took most of her from her stomach, but at least a quarter of the tubing remained, and so I repeated the act, removing all but remnants of what remained, and flung them over the same shoulder. Again the phenomenon of unraveling, as the yards of curled loop became, under the process of being flung, a long and stringy ribbon.

Thus was she excavated. Now, pièce de résistance. Dr. Gray was my guide, Sheffield’s legendary sharpness my facilitator, but will to complete the task was the true coal that made my furnace rage. I dipped into the crater I had created, searched downward through wreckage and liquifaction, and even though my gloves cut off the subtle sensations to my fingers, found what I desired. I thought of them as the woman’s biscuits. Once found, I quickly removed, by suppleness of hand, the two trophies I will leave to the reporters to identify, if they dare.

I stood, after cleaning my blade on her dress, and restored it to its place. I deposited my trophies in an inner pocket, where, after wiping and wringing them, I was certain they would not be moist enough to stain through the heavy wool. I peeled the gloves from my hand and put each in a different pocket, gave my suit a quick examination so that I was confident its darkness and the darkness of the quarter-moon night would camouflage it well. I clutched the two rings in my pocket to make sure I had them both, and departed through the same door by which I had come.

On Hanbury I took a right but didn’t bother with either Brick Lane or Commercial Street, as both, I feared, would be too well lit to conceal the moisture from the dear lady’s insides if it sneaked through the wool. Instead I turned down Wilkes Street and continued to more or less track my way helter-skelter through the dark warren of Whitechapel. I saw only the occasional ghost and once or twice heard a gentle call—“Sir, is the gentleman seeking something?”—but shook my head firmly and continued on my way at a medium, somewhat relaxed pace. I looked at my watch in the farthest light of a gaslamp I encountered, and saw that it was not yet four-thirty A.M.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jeb’s Memoir

It was about six-twenty A.M.—I could tell by the clock on the spire of the Black Eagle Brewery just down the street—when I arrived, in pale, moist dawn, a ha’penny’s worth of moon above the western horizon. At 29 Hanbury, there was no cordon of coppers, no wagons drawn up, no sense of municipal officialdom. Rather, I saw something between a group and a crowd of citizens already formed; it lacked the crowd’s anger and purpose, being not packed, angry, clamoring to all get somewhere at once. Too, it was more than a group, for it had purpose and focus, not random togetherness, as its organizational principle. I suppose it was something oxymoronic, like a “crowd of individuals,” that is to say, each of the men—mostly workers—was there but not bonded with any other particular person. They were there because of the fascination of death, fate, slaughter, crime, murder, all those Big Things that have an eternal pull on heart and mind. I was the same, except that I had a mission, not just a fascination.

Thus I slid through them easily, and no one felt pressured to block the way or forbid me passage. It turned out they were clustered at an open door, and I could see that it revealed a passage through past No. 29 to what was presumably a yard in back. I entered the tunnel, again found no resistance, and moved along the shabby walls, the peeling paint, the unvarnished wood, all of it screaming its message of messy squalor, Whitechapel style.

I reached the doorway, took a quick peek out, and saw nothing to impede my progress. Only a single man was there, and he was kneeling over what I knew to be the body, to my immediate left at the foot of the steps, next to the fence, though in the still-dim light, from my angle, I could make no sense of the corpse: It appeared to be some kind of spilled, opened suitcase, as I saw mostly disheveled clothes and could make out no identifiable features. I did what no other would do; I stepped into the yard.

The man looked up, his face grave and his demeanor stilled by trauma. “Dr. Phillips– Say, you’re not the surgeon.”

“No, Inspector,” I said. “Jeb, of the Star.”

“Bloke, Old Man Warren doesn’t like you press fellows mucking about.”

“I’m fine with that, but since I’m here first, I’m a responsible writer and not a screaming lying hack, and I can get your name in the largest newspaper in the kingdom, you won’t mind if I peek about a bit, will you then, Inspector . . . ?”

“Chandler.”

“First name, rank?” How quickly I made him a conspirator!

“Inspector Joseph Chandler.”

“Thank you.”

“All right, but don’t dawdle, and I’ll show you the particulars.”

That’s how I met the lady who turned out—by eleven-thirty that morning, another Jeb scoop—to be Annie Chapman. I met her; she did not meet me. All she did was lie there, her guts spread to the sun, moon, and stars.

“God,” I said.

“Ever seen an animal gutted?”

I lied. “Many a time, hunting red Irish stag.”

“Don’t know if our boy is a hunter, but he does like the knife.”

I immediately noted, as I bent over her, the difference between her and her sister in martyrdom, Polly Nichols, and that was her tongue. It was bloated like a hideous sausage, so wide an impediment that her lips were distended about it.

“Seen anything like that, Inspector Chandler?”

“Unfortunately. It happens as a consequence of strangulation. He crushed her throat before—”

He pointed. As before, the two deep eviscerations in the left quarter of the throat, leading around to the front before petering out. As before, clear of blood, as it had all slobbered out, sinking into her clothes and the ground and leaving spatters on the fence, where she had been cut. The dawn rendered it more as to coloration but not as to truth; in the pale light it was a kind of purple or lavender. I had yet to see the mythic red.

“Look here,” said Chandler, “this, too, is extraordinary.” He pointed to her possessions, which had been neatly arrayed, as if for an inspection, next to her roughly shod feet, between them and the base of the fence. I wrote down what I saw: a few combs broken and whole, another piece of raw muslin that I thought the ladies secured as a handkerchief for wiping up the fluids generated by their profession. A crumpled envelope lay next to her head.

“Quite tidy,” I said.

“Maybe he’s something of a perfectionist.”

“He certainly did the perfect job on her middle parts.”

“Aye, that he did.”

Yes, no doubt. I will here spare the reader and myself another recitation (vide, the diary, previous chapter) of the destruction.

“Quite nasty,” I said. “Obviously mad as a hatter.”

“You wouldn’t want to meet him in the dark. Not without a Webley, that is.”

Suddenly a third man joined us.

“Dr. Phillips, sir?” asked Chandler.

“Yes, yes. Oh, God, look at that.” He was brought back by the carnage inflicted, as would all men be.

George Bagster Phillips, the surgeon of the Met’s Whitechapel H Division, which would take over the murder cases, slid by me, drinking in the detail. He seemed to assume I was another plainclothes copper, and Chandler was so nonplussed by the arrival of the higher rank that he never introduced me. Meanwhile, other cops were drifting in, taking a look at the body. They stomped about in their heavy black shoes, flattening all upon which they trod, trying to be efficient but, as per expectation, doing damage to the scene far more than uncovering any clues. They were like penned hogs fighting to get to the trough. A supervisor was trying to impose some semblance of order. “Now, now, fellows, let’s be thorough, let’s be organized, let’s not rush through the scene. We need clues.”

“Here’s a dandy,” said Chandler. He had bent and turned the envelope, which said “Sussex Regiment” on it. That seemed to be the first break! And I was there to witness it.

“Good work, Chandler,” the supervisor said. “Now you others, you do the same.”

Well, I knew that it took no great genius to notice an envelope on the ground, but Chandler seemed so pleased with the nod, he again forgot to explain who I was and what I was doing there.

At about this time, Dr. Phillips arose from the body, scribbling notes to himself on a notepad.

“Sir,” I said, “have we a time of death?”

“She’s cold except where her body was in contact with the ground, and so I’d put time of death at about four-thirty A.M. Rigor is beginning to set in.”

“Any interesting tidbits?”

“I noted bruises on one finger. It wasn’t broken, but all blotchy blue, as if roughly treated. I saw the indentations of rings, so he clearly helped himself to her jewelry. It can’t have been much, given her circumstances, but I do wonder why.”

“Did the killer remove any parts of her?” She seemed not merely destroyed but looted as well.

“I’ll know when I get her back to the mortuary. It’s quite a shambles in there now.”

“Any man stains on her, indicating an attack of a salubrious nature?”

He turned and looked me full in the face. “I say, who are you?”

Well, the jig was up. Two constables quickly escorted me to the street. My time in the yard at 29 Hanbury was finished.

It was about now that genius of O’Connor came into full play. I did not race back to Fleet Street by hansom, eating up the minutes in traffic, stuck behind horse trams and delivery wagons and other hansoms. No indeed. Instead I went to the Aldgate East Underground station, which had just opened at seven, and found a telephone cabinet. I picked up the instrument, waited until one of the girls at the Telephone Exchange came on the line, and in five seconds, I was talking with Henry Bright.

“Woman in backyard, 29 Hanbury, Whitechapel. Tongue swollen as if strangled, two deep cuts to neck, as at Buck’s Row. Henry, this next part is nauseating.”

“Spit it out, young fellow.”

“He pulled out her guts and flung them over her shoulder. They quite unraveled. It looked like spaghetti, purpled spaghetti.”

“Superb,” said Henry. “Oh, excellent.”

I went on with details, putting Dr. Phillips there, confirmed the lack of identity of the victim, and told him I’d be headed next to the mortuary.

“Splendid, lad. Bang-on splendid.”

So the Star was again first with the worst. I don’t know how they did it, but Henry Bright turned my notes into serviceable prose, as abutted by official responses garnered by someone at Scotland Yard, mostly piffle, and the story was on the street by eleven A.M., beating all the other afternoon boys by a good thirty minutes. In O’Connor’s world, that was a mighty triumph.

But the true depth of Henry’s greatness was expressed on the front page. It bore one word:

FIEND!

Who in passing could not pick that up for a shilling and lose him– or herself inside, where “ ‘Jeb’ on the scene at Whitechapel, and Henry Bright at the Star” had all the nasty details?

FURTHER MUTILATIONS

INTESTINES TOSSED

POLICE FIND CLUE

WARREN: NO COMMENT

And now on to my greatest triumph. It was so simple I hesitate to give it away. But it made me a legend, it earned me a ten-pound cash bonus, it went to six replates, and it impressed even Harry Dam, though I had yet to meet him. I went on a certain day back to Whitechapel, looking for a gal who knew Annie. I found her on station, as it were, in a slow patrol down Wentworth, looking haggard and ill used, which was clear indication that she was haggard and ill used.

“Madam, Jeb of the Star; I saw you at the occasion of Annie’s death.”

“You,” she said. “Reporter, news fella type. You wrote nice about poor Annie, everybody read it and remembered the poor gal.”

“May I buy you a gin? Perhaps we could discuss her some more.”

“I likes me gin, sure,” she said, and we shortly were arranged at a table at the Ten Bells, a watering and ginning hole to the trade.

The chat was general and pleasant and sad for a bit, and like all of the unfortunates I would meet, she turned out, once one was by her defenses, to be an all right sort, brought low by her love of the fiery blur she held in the glass before her, but she didn’t produce anything I could use for the longest time, and I began to wonder how to pass her off without buying her another thruppence of bliss, when she said in response to nothing I had been clever enough to ask, “Wonder what the bloke done with ’er rings?”

“I say, what rings?” And then I remembered Bagster Phillips remarking on her bruised finger and surmising the absence of the rings.

“Annie had them two brass rings. Nothing to ’em, but they was dear to ’er. They was wedding rings, she said. ’E cuts ’er guts out plain, and ’e takes them rings. ’E’s off ’is chum, that one.”

I nodded.

And thus the next day’s Star front page, consisting entirely of:

ANNIE’S RINGS

FIEND STOLE VICTIM’S BELOVED WEDDING BANDS

POLICE HAVE NO EXPLANATION FOR BIZARRE THEFT

That moved the story hard for a few days, being the sort of homey, horrifying detail the shopkeeps and shopgirls and clerks and barristers’ assistants could get an emotional fix on. Where were Annie’s rings? If the fiend was one of my readers, he’d be wise to chuck them in the Thames and think no more. But I thought I detected a whiff of vanity in him; he just might be arrogant enough to keep them. Be interesting, I thought, if it was the evidence of the rings that sent him to the gallows.

Many other issues drifted in and out of focus over the next weeks, all of them ultimately meaningless and not worth recording here, one of them being what time it was the poor girl expired, as several highly dubious witnesses reported hearing, seeing, and not seeing things at conflicting times during the morning. The coppers believed them and dismissed their own surgeon’s learned opinion. What utter foolishness!

But in the end, only one thing lingered: a business of the Jews. I suspect the large influx of them excited anger, fear that they would bring alien ways to old Albion, undercutting the labor market and driving good Englishmen out of work. Of the seventy-six thousand occupants of Whitechapel, thirty to forty thousand were Jewish, while of that same total population 40 percent were below the poverty level. Thus, in many minds, Jews equaled unemployment. So there was no love for them to begin with when the murders started.

This anger began to coagulate at their commission. We of Fleet Street were no help at all. One of our reporters—not the famous Jeb but the Yank calling himself Harry Dam, whom I didn’t know except by name, as, recall, his absence “with a floozy” had gotten me into this game in the first place—had reported even the week before Annie’s death that a fellow named “Leather Apron” was a suspect. That was, by the way, what many called Jewish butchers. That a leather apron was found soaking in a tub in the yard of 29 Hanbury (yes, I had missed it, as had the clomping coppers for quite some time) didn’t help matters, even if it was soon proved to have nothing to do with the case. Still, the Leather Apron whisper would not go away.

Harry played up the Jewish characteristics of this beast Leather Apron, intimating mystical use for the blood and certain body parts of poor Polly. And the killer hadn’t even taken any body parts! One day Mr. O’Connor, who knew a replate story if ever there was one, ran the headline LEATHER APRON: ONLY NAME LINKED TO WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. I suppose I didn’t approve, but I was hoping to be taken on permanent-like, so who was I to go against the great man’s judgment?

Then the Manchester Guardian wrote, “It is believed that (Scotland Yard) attention is directed to a notorious character named ‘Leather Apron.’ . . . all are united in the belief that (the killer) is a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Jewish type.”

You could feel a fever building. I was part of it but had no tool by which to stop it. I also had no will to, being largely agnostic on the issue and knowing no Jews and feeling a little suspicious of them myself. That indifference, plus my customary greed and ambition, got the best of my low character; I had signed on to ride the train as far as it would take me, and damnation to all crushed beneath its progress. I had no idea how far that would be.

The mobs responded to this campaign as mobs do: violently. Crews of young toughs roamed Whitechapel and roughed up individual Jews. The coppers seemed to pick up anybody with a Jewish name and bring him in for hard questioning: among the arrestees, Jacob Isenschmid and Friedrich Shumacher.

Finally, a Jewish slipper maker, actually nicknamed Leather Apron, was arrested and interrogated. It turned out he had knocked a Judy or two about, but that was all, and he was in no way affiliated with knives or the sort of carnage our fellow had made twice. He had well-proven alibis and was let go.

But the Jewish fear grew. On several occasions, mobs formed outside the Spitalfields police station where this Leather Apron (John Pizer, by name) was incarcerated. Anti-Jewish graffiti began to appear mysteriously on tenement walls and storefronts. A very uncomfortable tension, palpable and unsettling, began to course through the lower orders—I love them in principle, but I was to learn on this adventure that they can be reprehensible louts in ungoverned mobs and need stern leadership to harness their rage—and violence was in the air. If our killer was a Jew, killing on some kind of twisted religious grounds, I had no idea what mischief might be released. For that and that alone, I began to hope that early suspicions of a doctor or a surgeon played out, for if it were an upper-class nob, it’s unlikely that a mob would head into Kensington with torches and pitchforks. For one thing, the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards would stop them with Gatling guns before they got across the street, just like the black-skinned ugga-buggas, and that would be a bloody day for old London.

Among all these voices, one was not heard from. The killer’s. His weekly schedule was not kept, and he did not strike again for two weeks after Annie. What was he doing?

September 10, 1888

Dear Mum,

I never heard from you after the last letter, but maybe that’s because I didn’t send it. Ha-ha! Maybe when they catch this fellow, I’ll send it and this one and you and Da can have a good laugh about how your bad daughter survived what all about is calling “the autumn of the knife.”

You know the fellow is back and he cut up another girl. He even stole her wedding rings! It’s been in all the papers, so I know you heard about it, and you’ll be worrying because this time it’s so close by me. Well, I am writing to tell you don’t be worried! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I have a guardian angel now!

I have a fellow, a nice man, he doesn’t beat me or try and shove me about to be a certain way. He lets me be, and what more can a girl ask, plus he brings in a good penny as he works as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market, where there’s a lot of packing and loading and ice chipping to do, so when he gets home, he’s a tired fellow and we’ll have a glass of beer at the pub. He wants me to stop with what I do bringing in the money, and maybe that’s in the cards, who can read the future? But I’ll tell you, he won’t let no other fellow on to me, well, on to me to hurt me. As I said, see, it’s different down here, all of us are so close to going under that it’s more forgiving of certain things. There’s no high and mighty. Nobody’s high, nobody’s mighty, you do what you has to, and you helps out them what needs it and in turn, when you’re down, they’ll help you back. The girls is all so nice, not like some I’ve known.

The other thing is that poor Annie, that’s what the newspapers say was her name, she was again a lone gal on a dark street, with nobody about to see or stop nothing. He fooled her into taking him into a backyard where it was even darker than the street, and that’s where he ripped her up, and you must have heard, as I have, it’s in all the papers, this time he did a job on the ripping.

I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.

See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Johnny Upright for his good and fair ways, done arrested him, and for a time, it seemed there’d be no more cutting. Johnny Upright got his man! Too bad, ain’t it so, that this Leather Apron wasn’t the true bad bloke, only someone the papers said was bad. They had to let him go. But Johnny Upright’s still on the case and you can bet on that one.

Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.

But as I say, even after the job he done on poor Annie and the ripping they say was horrible, and even though it was but a few blocks down, I know it’ll be all swell. Johnny Upright will save us, and then my man’s always on guard and won’t let nobody touch me. Well, ha-ha, “touch” me. Now I know I won’t send this letter to you, Mum, because you wouldn’t find it so funny ha-ha at all.

But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.

Your loving daughter

Mairsian