Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

I brought my focus down and, in childish tantrum, began to stab at various massifs left in her innards, a kind of mechanical up-down of arm, fist, and knife point, and I could feel the thing bucking into various and sundry structures left aboard. Then my rage exited the excavation proper and moved to skin unopened and unflayed on abdomen and pubis; I stabbed, I stabbed, I stabbed, again feeling point overcome the tensile elasticity of the skin and give way to the subcutaneous tissue beneath, and I further felt that human aspic split and sunder to my enraged energies. Suddenly, I was spent.

I looked at what I had wrought. The face was ruined, a seething mass of dappled black in the lightlessness of the square. It required color to express its truest, purest horror, but it would be the coppers who got the benefit of that display, not me. I would not let myself view the body. I was not squeamish. How could a squeamish man author such an atrocity? I suppose I was still in shock and suddenly, as well, became aware of the passage of time, and knew I had other appointments to keep. I rose, secured the blade in my belt, peeled off my sodden gloves and pocketed them, made sure the apron – so important – was still in my frock coat pocket and Judy’s sweetbreads in the other, rose, and pivoted without a sound.

I crossed the square, clinging to shadow. I didn’t want to leave the same way I had entered, by the opening to Mitre Street, because that copper might have circled on his beat and been headed down Mitre Street even now, and I’d hate to run into him as I exited the square. I turned in to the blackness where I’d seen him, finding it a narrow brick lane between two buildings, and rushed down it. I heard the harsh, overpropelled pitch of the police whistle and realized that constable or another had just discovered the body. Another close-run thing! I continued unabated until the passage delivered me to a dark street leading on the right to Aldgate, on the left to more darkness. This had to be Duke, from which I had seen my thrush emerging a few minutes ago. I took the darker option and came shortly thereupon – insane! – another Duke Street. I was therefore at the corner of Duke and Duke, and despite the bloody business of the evening, I could not suppress a grin at the absurdity of such a thing and the centuries of confusion it must have engendered. Soon I was beyond Houndsditch and moving at a comfortable pace toward the next duty of the evening. As for what was going on in that little chunk of London I had left behind, I neither knew nor cared.

It was all different. For one thing, the Peelers weren’t the embittered lackeys in a class war between constables and detectives, and for another, there was no looming figure of mad authority like Sir Charles Warren to impress fear and confusion and other idiocies of his ill-trained, overused crew.

All this is ascribable to the higher level of proficiency of the City of London Police over their much more intellectually impoverished brethren of the Met’s H Division. They ran a far cleaner crime scene: no crazed wandering this way or that in rogue hope of encountering something even they would recognize as a “clue,” such as a note saying, “I am the murderer and I reside at 15 Cutthroat Terrace, W3.” Whichever executive was calling the directives gave each man a zone that was his and his alone, and the man crawled it, touching, feeling, looking. They brought in, first thing, a large supply of bull’s-eye lamps, as all the constables carried, and dim as they were, lighting and placing them about brightened the scene considerably. The Met’s rozzers never would had thought of such a thing. Most astonishing of all was how they treated we Johnnies of the press.

“I’m Jeb, the Star ,” I’d said to the first constable I’d encountered as I arrived on-site and slipped through the crowd gathered at the Mitre Street entrance to the square.

“Yes, sir,” said the constable. “Now, if the gentleman will follow me, I’ll lead him to the gallery where we’re asking reporters to collect until we’ve throughly examined the scene. It shan’t be a long wait, and Inspector Collard will speak with you directly as soon as his duties allow him. Our police surgeon, Dr. Brown—”

“Full name?”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, will arrive shortly and supervise the removal of the body to the mortuary.”

“May we see it?”

“Inspector Collard will make that decision, sir, but our policy has been to cooperate with you lads in order to get the best information out to the public.”

“If you know my reputation, Constable, you’ll know I don’t make mistakes.”

“Yes, sir, as you say, sir.”

I followed him to a roped-off area in the center, where I learned that I was the first of the real reporters on-site – the others were penny-a-liners – and took a few seconds to look about. The square was quite small, particularly in scale to the larger industrial buildings enclosing it, mainly vast, mute warehouses of sheer brick, two owned by Kearley and Tongue, one by Horner and Sons. Beyond, over the hulk of Horner’s building, I saw an even larger behemoth that I knew to be the back wall of the Great Synagogue where the Jews gathered each Saturday for their worship. I thought that made it less likely, rather than more, that a Jew was involved, for a Jew would be careful to absolve his own heritage group by distance if nothing else.

All the activity was centered in the southeast corner of the space, where a wooden fence seemed to mark off a yard behind it; another house was hard by it, maybe a few feet away. Certainly someone in that house had heard something! Meantime, a doctor—he was in a white medical coat – stood by, not doing much (I was later to learn he was a local, the earliest to the scene, who had pronounced the poor girl dead, and he had not touched the body save to determine how warm it was, and infer from that a time of death. She was too much in disarray for him to get any closer.) The others were detectives or detective constables, some of them sketching, some of them looking at goods on the ground that must have been the victim’s, perhaps to make a catalog.

I kept waiting for the others to show up – where was Cavanagh of the Times or Renssalaer of the Daily Mail or any of the boys I’d run into at these damnable sites? No sign. I guessed they were still tethered to the Berner situation, looking at Jack’s last crime, and couldn’t get over here, though it was under a mile. The Star was lucky again, as was I; having a chap in the building when the call came got him to the place first and fastest, while the other rags had to round up a late-night second-stringer, their fancier boys having been sent to Berner.

In time, a large fellow with a walrus moustache, a derby, and an overcoat that could have concealed an army rifle came over to our little crowd, looked at us, and singled me out with his inspector-intense vision. “You’re Jeb of the Star, is that it?”

“That I am,” I said.

“You other fellows, I’m taking Mr. Jeb for a look-see on the poor gal. You’ll have to hold here because I can’t have you all mucking up the crime scene. He’ll tell you what he sees, won’t you, sir?”

“I will, they can be sure of it,” I said.

If there was discontent, the large officer didn’t care, and his bulk and seriousness of mien stood firm enough to close out any objections. I dipped beneath the rope and made to accompany him step by step to the body.

We made it to her but halted a few feet out, so the details were not exact yet. I could see general derangement, mussed clothes, implications of disorder, but it was somehow so abstract at this distance, I could make little sense of it.