Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“No, I do not see that.”

“Only one possibility remains. In the church. Possibly in family, given a rector as father or brother, possibly by marriage to a Quaker woman.”

“You have it, sir. Exactly.”

“A soldier – raider, rather – experienced in Afghanistan, highly evolved military skills, dyslexic, Sandhurst, yet the son of a pastor or minister of some sort.”

“ Ecce Jack.”

I realized then: He had made his sale.

Against his campaign, my little foray into detectivism seemed trivial.

“All right,” I said, “it’s quite brilliant, so much further along than anything anyone else has said. You have a genius for this sort of analysis, I must admit. I am humbled. Why, it is as if you are Sherlock Holmes himself.”

“Who?”

“The detective Sherlock Holmes. The genius who can decode a crime scene brilliantly, sift through clues with ease, point out the plot, its purpose, and its perpetrator. In Conan Doyle’s book A Study in Scarlet. ”

“Never heard of it. As I said, let’s just stop the gutting of the whores. Now I turn to you for practicality.”

“Perhaps I can at last contribute,” I said. For even as I had been listening and recording in Pitman, I had been, in a different part of my mind, seeking utility for these new ideas.

“I await patiently,” he said. “As you know, I am somewhat bereft of practicality. I am an expert on one thing alone, the voice.” So Holmesian!

“My thought,” I said, “is that I am, after all, a journalist. While the Star is not the best of all papers in London, even if it is one of the loudest, my connection to it secures me entry into the journalists’ society. On our paper or on another, there has to be a fellow who has made it his speciality to cover issues of war. He’s been to many, he knows the officers and the civilians who supervise them well, and most of all, he already has cultivated a network of private informants. He is well known at Cumberland House, army headquarters. My idea would be to locate this man and somehow entice him to our aid. We would start with the broadest categorization of what you have said. We are looking for someone recently retired from active duty, with connections to intelligence, who is privately known by those who are privy to such things, as a superb operative in mufti, particularly in Afghanistan, who has a gift for languages and a reputation for that which we will call ‘efficiency,’ it being understood that such a word connotes the willingness to kill if necessary. He has been, further, much exposed to the horrors of battle and mutilation as performed in that hellhole, perhaps his mind subtly addled by it.”

“Excellent,” said Professor Dare.

“If we can get a list of such, some being more closely matched to the criteria than others, we can our own selves identify them and continue to winnow, by which method we can determine if the other markers are present: the dyslexia, the religious childhood, the superb night vision, the physical aspect of slightness, perhaps even the possession of poor Annie’s rings, though that may be too much to be wished. In that way, we can ultimately identify the one man who matches the template with perfection. Police notification would follow, then arrest, and we bathe in glory. I do like the glory part.”

“Then you may have it all, sir.”

“I am no hog. I will share, I swear.”

“And we’d better hurry, Jeb. After all, the quarter-moon fast approaches, on October 28. Our soldier of night will soon pursue another mission.”

It would soon be time again, since the campaign had obligations that needed to be met. I went on search, being careful to use what I had learned: I needed crowds – of Johns, citizens, and Judys – into which to melt anonymously. I needed quick access to dark streets. I needed at least one and possibly two escape routes. I needed to be cognizant of the police constables and their patrolling. I had to negotiate all these factors brilliantly, weighing them and finding a perfect balance, and remain aware that the task was made infinitely more difficult because Warren had put so many more blue bottles on the street, thinking the dragnet, the sheer number of uniformed men, plus a nice reward, would do the trick.

He was an idiot. For one thing, it is true of military and of police intelligences and also of engineers – and Warren was all three – that they conspicuously prepare for that which has already happened as opposed to that which has not. In my amblings around Whitechapel, I saw that the coppers were flooding the areas where I had already struck. They thought I was such a slave to habit (and as stupid as they were) that I would do the same.

It took no genius to look at the map and determine that aside from Long Liz Stride’s encounter, which had been governed by special rules, all the others had been north of the Whitechapel/Aldgate axis. So that was where the genius Warren deployed most of his troops. You could not go for a stout, or an apple from a coster’s stall, along the Whitechapel High Street without bumping into a constable with his ding-dong lantern and his whistle on rope. There were so many, they had naught to observe but themselves!

Meanwhile, as one progressed toward the southeast, the coppers seemed to dissipate, to thin, the spaces between them wider and yet wider again, block by block. At first I thought it might be a trap and that in some cellar along Stepney Way or Clavell Street he might have secreted a hundred men, ready to leap out upon the whistle and begin the hunt along the byways of the district’s quadrant, oriented southeast by compass. But he hadn’t the wit. Was the man stupid? Maybe he was merely slow and would eventually comprehend his own folly, but he lacked the adaptability and agility that the modern police executive needed. And who should know better than I?

My plans thus moved my area of operation away from the well used, down toward the river. For Jack, the area was virgin.

However, it did seem slightly different in element. Yes, dollies plied their trade down this way, but the road inclined toward the port, where the great ships bearing their Oriental loot tied up, and so the milieu became not only seedier but more infused with the accoutrements of maritime enterprise. The smell of riverine damp, that is, a kind of swollen density of water suspended in the atmosphere, seemed to fall like a curtain on these twisty streets, and the gist of retail somewhat altered, now presenting sailor’s dives with names like the Mermaid or the Bosun, or South of Fiji or Pitcairn’s Paradise, and as well what had to be Chinese opium dens (the smell outside started one hallucinating!) and places where tattoos could be inked on arms, chests, or, as I saw on one fellow, faces. If one looked during daylight hours down certain streets, or alleys or walkways between the humble buildings, one could see the maze of spars, masts, and rigging, the gathered, roped sails and crow’s nests of these behemoth vessels, as they berthed in the Western Docks in Wapping, or even farther out, on that strange near-island of wet creeks, swampland, and riverettes called the Isle of Dog, which offered a meander to the great River Thames and bent it around its own promontory and presented its own endless dockage. It was called Canary Wharf, where the East India Company, that grand circus of larceny and exploitation by armed robbery, unloaded, and where all the spices and silks and fruits and rice and whatnot were removed to be sold to poor Johnny English at sixteen times their cost in rupees or yen, and Johnny considered himself bargaineering in the process. This was the great mountebank’s engine that sustained our tight, lovely little land and, other than the dank warrens of Whitechapel and its brethren, kept it all green and happy, its victim-citizens as dim and blissful as mudlarks.