Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“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.