Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

Major MacNeese was married with two small children. His wife was a beauty but of a class that probably would have prevented a further rise in the army or society even had he not gone off on s/ID. He had secured, through connections, a fine job as assistant supervisor of the shipping department of the East India Company and therefore worked in their extensive rooms located immediate to Canary Wharf. It was such a fine job, surely a thousand a year, and it came to him so quickly that we quickly concluded it was part of some larger arrangement. We believed that his true employer, using his contacts, was an intelligence department attached to some governmental concern, army, foreign office, some tiny room in a Whitehall cellar, and he was possibly in charge of shipping men of low repute or criminal intent, purloined military documents, currency for payroll of spies, perhaps guns and powder, even dynamite, into or out of Britain under the guise of his civilian career. That made sense but was not terribly interesting, for a shipping executive of secret dynamite is still first and foremost a shipping executive. Ho-hum, and pardon me for nap time.

Major Pullham was more interesting. His employment, again gotten no doubt through contacts, was with the manufacturing concern of Jacoby, Meyers & Devlin, which specialized in selling various metal accoutrements to the army, such as mess-kit items, lanyards, belt buckles, and water bottles. Since he was the cavalryman of high renown – 8th Irish Hussar, recall, with all those initials scattered in his name’s wake – he knew all the generals of horse and all the procurement processes and was able to maintain his firm’s contracts for horse-related metal implements, such as bits, spurs, cinch buckles, and so forth, that kept the British hussar and light or heavy horseman firmly in saddle as he galloped through waves of Pathan, whisking them down with the sharp edge of his Wilkinson. Pullham had married above station to a wealthy and connected woman and was a sort of smooth charmer, being a handsome man with good manners, a courtly fashion, a ready wit, and a comfort that eased his way among the betters of society with whom he mingled on a daily basis.

The third fellow, Colonel Woodruff, was probably the bravest but also evidently the most severe. He lived alone, a dull little man in black, mainly, and had no true employ except his own intellectual curiosity. He spent his days in the British Library reading rooms (I had never noticed him, nor he me), where he was quite happily compiling the first English-Pashto dictionary and grammar, a document that was needed desperately by at least four other human beings on the planet. As I say, drab, with a clerk’s mien. However, he was an old hand, having been east since 1856, survived the siege of Lucknow during the Great Mutiny, and commanded a battalion of foot of the 66th at Maiwand, which stood off several separate horse charges; when our positions were broken, he was able, by shrewd land navigation and language skills, to get all his survivors back to Kandahar. Not satisfied with that accomplishment, he went back into the field in mufti and, for a week after the battle, brought stragglers back in. Then he and he alone made the desperately dangerous journey to Kabul, where he became Fred Roberts’s head scout and led the Roberts relief column back to raise the siege at Kandahar. It was he, on the night before the battle, who scouted the Khan’s positions and made Roberts understand how to attack. After the rout, he was awarded the VC for that, although he could have been awarded it for any of the actions of the previous week. After all of that, he went s/ID for the next full five years, doing God knows what in the high Khyber Mountain passes. To look at him, you’d have thought he owned a teashop or was a third-grade railway clerk.

So we rotated among them over the week before the approach of the first November occurrence of the proper moon phase, I doing more of the digging through files, Dare more of the on-scene reportage. I must say, he had a talent for it and seemed to enjoy it rather more than I would have thought. “It’s so nice to be among actual human beings in actual society for a change,” he said enthusiastically, “instead of locked amid books, no matter how stimulating they might be.”

We learned, first of all, that if no man is a hero to his valet, neither is he one to his detective. MacNeese, for example, while the exemplary servant to his employers, both nominal and subrosa, and to his family, occasionally bought a French postcard or two on his way home, for private titillation and release, we presumed. We weren’t sure what to make of it; perhaps, though there were no indications, were he Jack, the pictures would render him tumescent, and he needed that impetus to do the murders. Admittedly, it was far-fetched; more probably, the occasional secret release calmed him and turned him away from the temptations he might succumb to otherwise on his daily to-and-fro through the lascivious streets of Whitechapel.

As for Pullham, it was sex as well. (How much of human activity is infiltrated by desire! That was a lesson well learned!) However, it was sex after the fashion of an adventurer, which was clearly his personality type. He had two mistresses, one of whom his wife had no knowledge of and one of whom she did. He saw them regularly over lunchtimes, skipping the midday repast and thereby keeping his figure lean and dashing. Once he saw both of them on the same day, taking a late dinner with Lady Meachum. He was insatiable. It was observed that at any chance encounter with an attractive woman, he immediately went into full seducer’s mien, came alight, as it were, attentive, his hands seeming to accidentally touch and caress his prey, an invitation whispered into her ear, this to servant girls, clerks, shopkeeps, and high ladies as they came across his prow. The man was a satyr. Again, that might be a Jack indicator, on the theory that for a woman hunter, slaying the rude street girls was a refined pleasure to be enjoyed after having grown tired of endeavors involving mere sex conquest in the field. But again, it was kind of silly, wasn’t it? This man had everything, and if material values were important to him (marrying Lady Meachum seemed to indicate they were), why would he risk it all by knifing the odd tart during the crescent moon? I could make no sense of that issue. The other aspect that made him unlikely was energy. The fellow was engaged at all waking hours, in mandates of career, mandates of society via Lady Meachum’s importuning, or mandates of his perpetually engorged chuz, which seemed to guide him whenever his schedule would allow it.

That left Colonel Woodruff. His flaw was hardly a flaw. The man worked relentlessly and seemed completely isolated from society in his mad urge to decipher Pashto grammar and verb tense. Perhaps it kept the devils of memory and regret at bay. Equally, he did not mix with old military colleagues and recount the good old days; possibly, to him, they were not so much good as merely old, and he was content to leave them lie. In fact, he would go weeks without speaking to another soul. He was a priest, not only a priest but a damned Black Jesuit, of sublime discipline and isolation and absolutism. But once every ten days or so, he would allow himself a night off and indulge his solitary vice.

So odd. It must have been a habit picked up in the east, and one wondered what it did for him, except perhaps still the voices he must have heard, the visions he must have seen. Whatever the case, he left his rooms and walked – a great walker he was, his short little figure never slowing, his progress much more severe and less patient than that of other walkers and went to the dock area, and then went to one of three dens, unmarked on the outside, and spent the night.