Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

I passed the Aldgate pump, then Houndsditch and Duke, and there spied the spot where I’d come upon Mrs. Eddowes and put a proposition to her so she’d lead me into the darkness down Mitre Street. When I reached Mitre Street, I turned, finding myself surrounded on either side by low residences undistinguished by anything except that they were sublimely undistinguished. That led, within half a block, to Mitre Square, and on normal days, a lone man entering its portal might attract some suspicion, for what would his business be, but not today, as it still enjoyed its celebrity from my earlier visit.

I cannot say it was packed cheek by jowl like an exhibit at the Great Exposition, but gawkers were all about, most of them clustered in the right-hand corner, near on the wooden yard fence, where Mrs. Eddowes met her fate. I felt no need to approach it and infiltrate the mob just to see a patch of flagstone no different from any other flagstone; instead I took in the whole of the place, seeing in the sun that which had been shrouded in the shadow.

It was a series of brick structures of no particular style or pedigree surrounding for no reason a small patch of space in the middle of a city wilderness. No care, no thought, no wit, most assuredly no brilliance, had gone into its design, if it had indeed been designed, but far more likely, it just happened, as various structures appeared along slipshod principles around it, and someone finally got the idea to crush the wild grass between them under flagstone. Why was it even called a square? Nothing about it suggested the acute angle.

The murder, however, drew many to this otherwise undistinguished lot, and if you guessed the murderer would return to the scene of his crime, you would have been right, I suppose, but at the same time, if you perused the crowd for just such a man, I, the authentic guilty party, would have been the last upon which your eyes would light. Murder has a peculiar odor, and some are drawn to it despite themselves. Many of the people were singles, men mostly but a few ladies as well, all of them unsure how to act, possibly a bit ashamed, but unable to stay away. They stood around stiffly, trying to remain inconspicuous, as if Major Smith and his blue bottles were likely to sweep them up. Nobody made eye contact or really acknowledged each other; out of deference to the newspaper image of Jack under his topper in his opera cape, nobody wore a topper: It was strictly a bowler or slouch hat locality, the clothes all dark and lumpy, as if Mrs. Eddowes would have been insulted by a splash of color.

I glanced over to the left and saw the church passage from whence I had escaped, and again thanked the God whom I knew did not exist for providing it, copper-free, for that reason alone in His Grand Plan, just as I owed Him for constructing this helpful place so I could improvise brilliantly that night. I meant to leave that way as soon as I got over my disappointment at the prosaic nature of the square and its lack of drama or dynamism in the daylight, but at that point I was discovered.

My guilt was known. It was pointed out. The jig was up. I had returned to the scene and paid the price. All that is true.

It is also true that I was discovered by a dog.

I do not know what higher sensitivities these creatures have, but this one knew. She saw into and through me. She had me, whether by rude particle of blood scent adhering to my flesh (I had meticulously burned all the clothes I wore that night and bathed scrupulously) or some instinctive warning system that highlights predators, or maybe by shrewd analysis of my uninterest in the site of the body for the channel of escape, I know not.

She was a small Scottish West Highland terrier, dead white to proclaim virtue and justice, proving that symbolism of times appears in reality just as readily as it does in fiction, poetry, or art. Her bark was not alarming, but it was insistent; truly heroic, she pulled hard to assault me, plunge her fangs into my flesh, and bring me down.

“Maddy, my goodness, you must stop at once, oh, bad lady, bad bad girl,” yelped her embarrassed master, a grandmotherly type under a straw bonnet with more than a few ribbons, posies, and bows, another murder gawker embarrassed to be stirred into human contact by her doggie’s misbehavior.

But Maddy knew and would not relent. She screamed aloud, “It’s he, it’s Jack, it’s the knifer, the ripper, the killer, oh, you foolish people, if you would but look into this blackguard’s soul, you would see his evil and smell the blood he spilled not thirty feet away!” Unfortunately, since she spoke only terrier, the doltish humans about her paid no attention whatsoever and went about their nervous murder-site gawking.

The mistress bent and scooped up Maddy and hugged the squirming thing to her bosom, but Maddy kept trying to alert civilization to the threat it faced, although to no effect.

“Sir, I am so sorry, I cannot fathom what has got into her today, she is usually so polite.”

“Madam,” I said, “do not be concerned. Dogs, children, and women universally loathe me, but on the other hand, gentlemen do not much care for me, either.”

“Well, sir, at least you’re not a Mason!” said the lady, a rather game riposte, I thought, and it brought our conversation to a pleasing close, as we had chatted in the enjoyable language of high irony. I bent, bowed, removed my bowler in a sweeping, overmagnanimous gesture to signify theatrical-sized graciousness, and turned smartly to abandon the square.

I walked to the church passage, and it was much narrower by day than I recalled by night, with the brick walls pressing in fiercely but a meter or so apart. As I meant to make egress, I turned and saw that the lady had gone back to her ruminating on the events of the square, but Maddy, ever vigilant, had me fixed in a baleful glare.

Was he our Sherlock Holmes? Could the long-hoped-for genius intellect at last be entering the fray? Lord, I did so hope. I also, ambitious wretch, did so hope that I’d be the one to take it all down.

Two days hence I met him at the Reform Club, at Pall Mall next to the Traveler’s Club, in the high club land of central London. His tweeds were magnificent, flowing like the land forms of the heather itself, and again he seemed utterly unimpressed by the figure he cut with his wavy blond hair, his aquiline nose, his round specs, and his general air of Porthos amid the corpses of freshly skewered Richelieu swordsmen.

“Do sit down,” he said, “and pay no attention to the various Irish revolutionaries about you, as they are not apt to plant a bomb in the only place in London where you can have a good dish of lamb stew.”

“As I speak with a wee but insistent Dublin brogue,” I said, “I suspect they would not explode until I left the premises, for fear – misplaced, of course – of blasting one of their own.”

I knew there were no revolutionaries about, not even many radicals, rather that wan and forlorn tribe of misbegotten and guilt-bearing mere liberals, who wanted change at only a slightly increased pace over the progress of a turtle across the Sahara.

We sat in a corner nook of the great cigar- and pipe-smoked room, amid lustrous mahogany walls lined with books and portraits of various liberals from Anne Boleyn on down, and he offered me a cheroot and a drink, the first of which I took, the second of which I turned down.

“Probably a wise decision,” he said. “I have too many times awakened after a night with friend Jack Barley in the arms of a whore whom I promised to marry and thereby render licit. And bourgeois. Believe me, it takes more than phonetics to get out of that one with phiz intact.”

I laughed, loving again a wit based on shock, which I had not encountered in so pure a form. Perhaps Wilde had it in him, for his was also a sharpness of the knife as applied to moral convention (and how, as it turned out, poor man!). I wondered then, as I do now, if Wilde knew Dare and borrowed from him. I knew I would borrow from Dare. And I certainly have!