Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

He said, “By the way, I’m Collard. My first name is ‘Inspector.’ Dr. Brown, our surgeon, will be along in a bit, as will, I’m sure, Commissioner Smith.” Smith was the high sheriff of the City of London Police, the rough equivalent of the Yard’s Sir George Warren.

“Yes, sir.”

“Jeb? First name or last?”

“Last. My first is ‘Reporter.’ ”

“Very good, then. Some spirit. I like that. As for the particulars, we have called in all our officers and are mounting one of the biggest dragnets, if not the biggest, the City of London has ever seen. We have detectives everywhere, canvassing for witnesses. If anything’s to be found, if this mad brute left anything behind, we’ll find it, I assure you.”

I took this down in Pitman while answering, “As a reporter and citizen, I am grateful.”

“Now, as to the body, I must warn you to steel yourself.”

“I have seen all the other bodies, except for the concurrent one on Berner Street.”

“I hear it’s not too bad.”

“I hear that as well.”

“Well, this one is very bad. From your accounts, I suspect it’s the worse by several degrees. As I say, time to be all manly and stiff-upper-lip, all that brave-Englishman rubbish you journos preach.”

“I will try and buck up and play the game.”

“So has said many a rookie to murder, only to end up vomiting fish and chips in the gutter. You have been warned.” He led me to her.

Must I describe this? I suppose I must. I will not censor, but I will go hazy on the details, for myself as well as readers.

She lay on her back, her palms outward and up, one leg bent over the other. Her dress and petticoats had been scrunched up to her shoulders, with no concession to Victorian modesty. She lay bare from collarbone to pubis, showing things that are never seen, much less acknowledged, though I cannot conceive a fellow getting an illicit masturbatory thrill off the spectacle. If so, he’d be as guilty as Jack.

After that, the thing that struck me was new to Jack’s crimes, the redness of the blood. I realized I was noting this for the first time because the City of London coppers had put so many more lanterns in place, so the degrees of illumination, color, and detail were amplified. This being the first time I’d encountered it in the raw, I was almost knocked flat by the visceral power of the color. It touched so many primal, mythic chords. It seemed to spring not merely from the girl’s body but from the slaughter in the last act of Hamlet, the quartering of William Wallace, the beheading of Mary Stuart and Anne Boleyn, the many mythological tales in which beings were sundered for dubious reasons, like the death of Oedipus’s father or the sack of Troy, our sense of the suspicious lack of it in Richard Caton Woodville’s glorious-seeming battle paintings. When cut, we bleed. And bleed. And bleed. The kindness of night’s dark had shielded me from this base epiphany until now.

Near upon that was the face. Or, should I say, was not the face. There was no face. He had taken it. What animal hatred could propel a man, supposedly in some fashion civilized, to do such a desecration? He had removed her nose, he had jabbed her eyes, he had flayed the lower half of her visage until it resembled some hideous slop of thick red jelly upon a sleeping woman.

“Good Christ,” I blurted.

“I hope you have plenty of adjectives in your little pouch, Reporter Jeb,” said Inspector Collard. “You’ll need every last one of them.”

Though normally I enjoy badinage and consider myself more than adequate at the quick riposte, I did not have enough oxygen left to consider such a thing. The air seemed thick, and the more I inhaled, the more reluctant it was to inflate my lungs.

“But the face is for show. It’s really the gut that’s remarkable,” said Collard coolly. “Had a bit of the fray in earlier days in Africa and saw enough of this kind of butcher’s work done on the wogs we loosed our Gatlings upon to last me forever. This poor daisy looks like someone blew off a three-pounder in her stomach.”

The allusion to explosion was apposite. Indeed, not a bomb but a human stick of dynamite called Jack the Ripper had blown up her belly, pulling, yanking, flinging, cutting out this, that, and the other thing, and when finished, as one could tell from close by, he’d stabbed. And here I go to mute. You can imagine. Actually, you cannot.

But it was now that head cheese Smith and a small retinue showed, and in seconds a tall chap of scientific imperturbability whom I took to be Dr. Brown arrived. He went straight to the body, touched it full-handed, shaking his head, looked up at the man who had to be the first doctor, and nodded.

“I’m guessing not an hour dead,” Brown said. “Maybe not half. She’s still warm as a biscuit. Do you agree, Doctor?”

“Absolutely, though I thought of a bun, not a biscuit. I did no poking about, leaving that for a man who knows his forensics.”

“You did well, Doctor. The crown thanks you. Time of death” – he pulled out his pocket watch – “one-forty A.M.”

“Does it accord, Collard?” asked Smith.

“Perfectly, sir. Constable Watkins found the body at one-forty-four A.M. and whistled; a watchman at Kearley came out, and he puts that notification at one-forty-five. A.M.”

“He killed another bloody woman at one A.M. at Berner Street, or so says the Yard,” said Smith. “You can say this for the bastard, he’s got a fine work habit.”

I was writing that down in the dizzying blur of Pitman when Smith noted me. “Reporter pukka wallah?” he asked me.

“I am,” I said. “Jeb, the Star. ”

“Well, favor me by not using the juicy quote I just uttered. It sounds casual, but Peelers see enough of this raw hacking so they usually joke about it on-site. It doesn’t play well with the public.”

“ ‘Commissioner Smith solemnly told the Star that this new murder demanded the utmost in professionalism from all authorities, and pledged to provide it,’ that sort of thing, sir?”

“This man will go a long way. All right, Jeb, stay close, don’t make us look bad, and make no mistakes.”

“He never makes mistakes, sir,” said Collard.

“Yes, the fellow who uncovered the Mystery of Annie’s Rings. How poignant that was. How many extra papers, I wonder, did it sell?”

“My job, sir. That’s all.”

“May I interrupt to point something out that might be a clue?” said the surgeon.

“Good God, a clue! How novel! If you please,” said Smith.

“I note raw hem in the bunched cotton at her neck. May I unbunch it?”

“Why would you not?”

The doctor’s fingers probed the rolled lineaments and glibly separated one sheaf. He unspooled it, being sure to keep it off the body itself, so as not to contaminate it with blood or other fluids. It turned out to be apron or, rather, half an apron. A rather large segment had gone missing.

“A trophy, I wonder?” said Collard.

“Possibly. More like a missing piece of a puzzle,” said Smith. “We could not miss such a thing, nor the shape of what’s missing. Planted somewhere else, it would link sites for some mad reason that only this fellow understands. He likes that we wait, we wonder, and he explains when and if it pleases him. But it is something new; it is a communication. He has a message to put out. That’s why you’re here, Jeb. You explain it to us.”

“Perhaps it’s for himself,” I said. “He has taken organs before but has learned they are perishable. Or he’s eaten them already, with a fine claret and field beans from the South of France. He wishes to have something to cling to, to clutch tight to bosom, to look upon and remember his moment of glory. Something more meaningful than Annie’s famous rings, perhaps, which would carry no texture, no odor, no absorbency.”