Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“Mad as a monkey,” said Smith. “But in a highly organized way. This is no hot-blooded maniac. It’s something I’ve never encountered. A cold-blooded maniac. I believe he’s got a plan behind all of this.”

It proceeded then at a slow pace. I felt no pressure myself, for it was Sunday early, and the Star didn’t publish on Sunday, which meant my deadline wasn’t until seven A.M. tomorrow, Monday, over twenty-four hours away – so I knew that we had to be thorough, steady, fair, and well organized. The rush to deadline would not be an excuse, although I had yet to make a mistake.

I meandered about Mitre Square. The coppers had let more and more people in, including some of those aforementioned daily reporters. I shared what I had with them – you don’t want your peers hating your guts if it’s not necessary, now, do you? – and they appreciated Jeb’s cooperative nature. I saw that Constable Watkins was freed up and chatted with him, getting good quotations. Sometimes the directness of the nonliterary can be a refreshment. He said she’d been “ripped up like a pig in a market.” Good line, that.

Just when I thought I was done and could get back home, grab some sleep, curse out my mother again, then return to the office refreshed for a long session at the Sholes machine, what should enter the yard but a copper who raced to Smith in alarm.

I could see the jolt of electricity it supplied to the worn-down crew of police executives. Smith seemed especially to pop to life and began shouting orders. I moseyed to Inspector Collard, who seemed in a rush to leave. “I say, what’s it all about?”

“They’ve found the missing apron piece not four blocks off. And the bastard has left us a message.”

Istrode through the night, imagining what I’d left behind. It may have been my happiest time in the whole adventure. Again, I had missed apprehension by the width of a hair, so I was feeling invulnerable. I felt my superior intelligence was validated on the grand scale, and in a game against not only my enemies but the entire city of London, from working girls to academic aristocrats. I was on the verge of not merely victory but triumph. I was routing them. They had no idea who and what I was, why I was doing what I was doing, what drove me. The last was important, because without knowledge of it, they assumed I was a chaotic madman and could be caught only by the net of chance, not logic. And all the lists of “suspects” – Jews, Poles, boyfriends, witnesses who lied – published by the newspapers proved that our best minds were hopelessly out of the game.

I eventually reached Goulston Street. It was deserted. By day a buzzing commercial street (the poultry market was thereupon), it was by night closed down, not a beer shop or Judy part of town, and the shuttered costers’ sheds along either side of the street were unpatrolled and locked. I could see piles of fruit behind iron gratings, hear the squawk and bustle of crated chickens that hadn’t been sold and had therefore earned another day of life in their tiny dung-crusted dungeons, smell the shit from the horses as it formed a steady presence on the dirt road. All the pennants – why are market streets usually festooned like medieval jousting tournaments? – hung limp in the moist though not rainy air. It had the feel of a city abandoned by its citizens, who’d fled to jungle or cave to escape a portended doom. Perhaps I was that doom, or at least its harbinger.

I eased down Goulston between the shuttered stalls and the blank wall of this or that apartment building, looking for a nook where I could do my business without observation. I was alongside something calling itself the Wentworth Model Dwellings, a grim brick fortress against the night for those fortunate enough to afford the tariff, when I espied an archway that contained a door to whatever squalor and degradation lay on the several floors above. It was perfect.

I nipped into it, and first thing, I pulled the damned lump of apron from my pocket and dumped it. It did not fall right – I wanted the blood to show conspicuously so not even the thickest of the thick could miss its implications. Some fluffing was required to achieve the proper show.

That done, I fetched a piece of chalk from my trousers, where it had been secured for just this purpose. I had thought carefully about the message for almost a month, parsed it as lovingly as any poet does his poem, for it had to carry certain messages and certain implications but nothing more. I found a suitable emptiness of wall and began to inscribe my message, large enough to be seen as language, not scrawl, taking my time. I had thought it out as a visual expression, lines perfectly symmetrical, a quatrain of long, short, long, short, a few brisk syllables, perfectly clear as to meaning and intent and—

Good Christ!

I nearly leaped out of my boots.

As I labored in intense concentration and was nearly through the third line, something – someone – had poked me in the small of the back.

I turned, aghast, my heart hammering like a steam engine gone berserk and near exploding, reached back for the Sheffield, and turned to confront the enemy I must slay.

It was a child.

She was about six, frail and pale with a raw burlap makeshift sack on, her grubby feet bare, her hair blond and stringy, flowing down her face over huge and radiant eyes, skin like pearl yet here and there smeared with dirt.

“Would the gentleman care to buy a flower?” she said. She held out a single wilted rose.

Was this a scene from Old Man Dickens? Perhaps Mrs. Ward, who produced her share of the lachrymose treacle for genteel, tea-sucking lady readers, or even the humorless Hardy? They’d both killed off lads and lasses every fifty pages or so to make a dime or so off their penny dreadfuls. But this was not literature, it was real, this thin-shouldered beauty standing for all the dispossessed, the impoverished, and the slowly starving, cowering under their bridges and by the railway tracks in the cruel London night, aware that even crueller temperatures lay a month anon.

“What on earth are you doing out by yourself, child?” I said.

“Wasn’t no room in the doss ternight, so me mum took me under the bridge. I think she’s dead, though. She’s been coughing up blood awful bad. I could not wake her. I been walking an hour. Found a rose, thought I might sell it to a gentleman. Please, sir. It would mean so much.”

“You cannot be out here alone. It’s a dangerous time and place. Have you no people but your poor mother?”

“No, sir. We moved in from the country some months ago, for work, but Dad could find none. He went away some time ago, don’t know where to. Been alone with Mum ever since.”

“All right,” I said, “I shall find you a place to be.”

“Sir, just a penny for the rose is all I needs.”

“No, no, that will not do. The rose is worthless, you are without price. You come with me now, child.”

And so, the message unfinished and forgotten, I wrapped the child in my coat and lofted her to my torso, where she soon fell asleep across my shoulder. I headed up Goulston. At a certain point I looked back at what I had abandoned, wondered if I could get back to finish once I had attended to the girl, but instead saw, a block behind and approaching the nook where I’d paused for labor, the bull’s-eye lantern of a copper, swinging to and fro, at the end of the fellow’s long blue arm as he bumbled along, searching for rapers, robbers, bunco artists, pickpockets, and even the odd whore murderer such as myself.

Good Lord, I thought. Had this small girl not interrupted me, I’d be there still, finishing up my task. But no, she came along, I forgot that which had brought me there, and I abandoned my post. So once again my escape was too narrow to calculate, my luck too vast to appreciate. The whole episode seemed divinely plotted, though there was no room for divinity in my thoughts.