Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“I’s on me beat, and it’s near on three A.M.,” he began, and then told a dreary tale of walking down Goulston with his lantern, peeping into nooks and crannies, when his light illuminated a bright splotch of crimson on a crumple of cloth in the corner of a doorway arch that could be but one thing. He picked it up, smelled it to learn that the red was indeed blood and that stains of a certain ugly shade suggested fecal matter. He claimed that he thought it might be evidence of a rape, as he had not received the bad news about Mitre Square and Dutfield’s Yard, and then he noticed some words scrawled on the wall. He went straight back to the Commercial Street station and showed them the clue, and a wiser detective sergeant put the picture together, which is how now, at around five in the pale light of dawn, such a scrum had formed in front of the Wentworth Model Dwellings.

“What was on the wall?” Cavanagh demanded, rather harshly, as it was not this poor idiot who’d ordered it erased but Sir Charles himself, who had adjudged it important enough to arrive at the scene posthaste.

Long said in an uncertain voice, “It read, ‘The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ ”

“Jews?”

“Yes, sir, so it did, and here’s the odd-like part, even a bloke like me knows ‘Jews’ to be spelled J-E-W-S, but this fellow must have been off his chum, he spelled it all wrong, it was ‘J-U-W-E-S,’ it was.”

All of our pens took the strangeness down.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure as I’m standing here before you.”

We all shook our heads. Indeed, the Jews had been a theme in this thing, and my own paper, the Star , had not been circumspect in controlling speculation. Jews were, to so many, an alien element, and certain were quick to blame them. It would, for that same some, be quite helpful if the Jews or a Jew were in some way to blame, and the strange opacity of the graffito tended to point to that possibility, if to anything at all.

“Has the piece of bloody rag you found been definitely linked to the dead woman’s apron?”

“Sir, you’d have to ask at the mortuary, sir,” said Long, and then another copper – this may have been Constable Halse, of the City Police, who would make himself more visible in a few seconds – chimed in with “I can help with that; I’m just from the mortuary, as Commissioner Smith has put many of us out on the street, and yes, indeed, the rag matches by shape, texture, and size exactly the torn apron that was on the poor woman’s remains in the square.”

That was it, then. He had come this way. But were those his words? It certainly seemed so, for indeed they spoke to the central social issue of the case, and it seemed that he had indeed communicated a thought.

But … what thought?

Before we separated, we coagulated a bit on our own, we old boys who’d been on the case since Polly, even the penny-a-liners, treated for once as if they were equal, and we stood there in the pale light as Whitechapel came awake around us, and tried to make sense out of it. I cannot recall who said what, but I do remember the various arguments and now set them down as relevant and, moreover, typical of what transpired regarding this issue not merely in the week and the weeks that followed, but even now, twenty-four years after, is argued vehemently.

Some, I should add, believe poor Long got it wrong. It developed that the aforementioned Constable Halse of City had shown up before the erasure and inscribed in his own notebook a slightly different version. Thus there was no stationary target, which is why the damned thing still floats in the ether so provocatively.

Halse said the words were “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” as opposed to Long’s “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

That damned “not”! It drifts hither and yon like a balloon, untethered, on the zephyrs of the interpreter’s bias.

“Double negative,” said Cavanagh, university man. “Technically, grammatically, by all the rules, the two negatives cancel each other out, so the true meaning, regardless of the placement of the ‘not,’ is that the Jews are indeed guilty. It is saying, ‘The Jews are the men who will be blamed for something.’ ”

“That does not impute guilt,” said another. “It is neutral, simply stating the Jews will be blamed, and as we all know and have observed, the Jews being this era’s prime bogeymen, indeed they will be blamed.”

“So he’s merely a social critic, like Dr. Arnold?”

There was some laughter at the idea of killer as essayist, but then the subject drifted elsewhere. On and on it went for almost an hour, as the boys tossed various ideas to and fro. Was our nasty chap really mad or only pretending? Did he have a program, or was he random? Was he intelligent, even a genius, or pure savage brute out of the dark forests of the east, full of primal blood lust for arcane religious purposes? Could he even be, after it all, someone similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, two separate personalities in one body? Perhaps, as in the Scot’s fiction, the one did not know of the other. It was all quite curious – pointless in the end, I suppose – but one remark stood out and colored my reactions to all that was to come.

“Well,” someone said, “one thing’s for certain, the only man who could solve this one is Sherlock Holmes.”

Laughter, but not from me. Now, that was a damned fine idea. I had read Mr. Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” the previous year in a magazine where it was published, though I understand it has since come out in book form. Sherlock was exactly what we needed: a calm, dispassionate intellect with a gift for deduction, who could master a complex set of clues and make appropriate inferences, and through the swamp of this and that track a steady course that led inevitably to but one culprit. It was to be done, moreover, stylishly, with dry wit, wry observation, and despite a sort of academic diffidence, a true grasp as to how the world actually worked.

Where could we find such a man? Where was our Sherlock Holmes? I was ready to be his Watson.

Ihave been named.

It had to happen. If I am the demon incarnate, sooner or later some fellow will pin a moniker on me, first, to simplify communication of my charisma, and second, in some way, to diminish me by cramming all my nuances, improvisations, heroic acts of sheer will, bravery, and long-term shrewdness into one banal package that at first holds those attributes in high regard but eventually erodes until the name – and I – become commonplace.

25 Sept. 1888

Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper