Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

He didn’t react, but I knew he’d hear and figure out a way to make the exchange easier. He turned, held out his broad arms, and began to chant, “’Ere now, back it up, then, people, let us do our work.” Nobody backed up, but it brought him to whisper distance.

“Hello, Mr. Jeb,” he said. “Oh, this one’s a dandy, it is.”

He gave me the rest. At ten-forty-five A.M. Thomas Bowyer, an agent from Mr. McCarthy, the owner of the court, knocked on Mary Jane’s door to make another attempt to get her to pay rent, which was several weeks in arrears. No answer. Knowing the property, he moved around the corner, where, owing to the odd angles of the court’s haphazard design, two windows permitted vision into her room. He reached in one with a broken pane, pushed the curtain aside, and saw her remains on the bed about ten feet away. Horrified, he ran back to his office, and he and McCarthy went to get the blue bottles, and the circus commenced. Now, nearly three hours later, all the stars were in accord: I noted Arnold, chief of H Division; Dr. Phillips, the examiner; and a chap who seemed to have stopped off on his way to his bank or brokerage. That had to be the famous Inspector Abberline from downtown. Abberline a hero in some accounts but not in this one, was of standoffish mien, his thinnish hair creamed over his pate, his mustaches drooping, his suit – not a frock-coat fellow, I’ll say that for him – immaculately pressed.

Any mysteries that the court may have contained were by now obliterated by the wanderings to and fro of coppers, reporters, citizens, the curious, maybe even, for all we knew, Jack himself. Yet for all the activity, there was no activity.

“Why is no one doing anything?” I asked Ross.

“They’re all waiting for Commissioner Warren to arrive. He will have bloodhounds with him, and that’s thought to be the latest in scientific detection.”

“Good Christ,” I said. These idiots didn’t know Warren was gone.

At that moment, Abberline’s frosty gaze struck me, and he came over. “Mr. Jeb, is it not? Here to find more avenues of criticism for our hardworking policemen, are you, and to make the apprehension of this brute more difficult?”

“Inspector, love me or not, allow me to give you some helpful information. I’m told you’re waiting on Sir Charles. I’ve just arrived and have not been sealed up here for two hours, so I know what you do not: That is, Sir Charles will never show up. At least not in official capacity, because he has no official capacity. He resigned late last night.”

If Abberline had a reaction, he kept it to himself, though I thought I saw a shade of gray pass across or beneath his otherwise grimly controlled face.

I watched as he went to Arnold, the two conferred, and an order was given. McCarthy was called up and, armed with an ax handle, began to pummel the door heroically. It yielded to his thunder, the door was sprung, and the official party entered. In seconds McCarthy emerged, went to his knees, and vomited.

“Oh, my,” I said.

Abberline came out, face blank as per normal, and signaled a fellow with some photographic equipment to enter. More science. For the first time the crime scene would be recorded by means other than memory. Then he came to me. “All right, Jeb,” he said, “you have helped, now I will help you. Constable, let the man pass, and we’ll show him what Jack has brought to London today.”

To the jeers and catcalls of the other press boys, I was led in. It soon became evident that this was no favor; Abberline meant to get me puking in the yard, too, so all the fellows could enjoy a good hard laugh at my destruction.

My first reaction was not horror so much as confusion. What I saw fit no pattern. “Dissonant” was a term that came to mind: It had no melody, structure, harmony, undertone, contrapuntal melody; it was just a random pile of notes, lines, and staffs. As my eyes adjusted to the darker palette of the room, I forgot musicality and moved next to the idea of a butcher shop in which the anarchists had detonated a small bomb, for heaps and piles of meat seemed to be laying about, and the walls had been spattered crimson.

I looked upon it – it was no she but only an it – as it lay at bed’s edge, and in a few seconds my mind was nimble enough to pick out the form that lay beneath the desecration.

“Holy Jesus,” I said.

“Not Jesus at all,” said the sanguine Abberline, “but Jack.”

Had she been a pretty girl? Had she a bonnie smile, a sparkle to the eye, a pert button nose, lips of cushion and comfort? I hope memory had the answer, because as of now, no one would ever know. It was not a face at all but a kind of mask of red death, after Poe’s helpful presentation of the apt phrase, all grisly and chopped, with chasms where features had been, all the more hideous for the fact that the more you looked at it, the less abstract it became, until it resolved itself into something precise and quite beyond metaphor, beyond literature, beyond even the great Poe. It took one’s breath and breakfast away, but fortunately, owing to Mother’s war on me, I had no breakfast to contribute to a festival of vomit; however, if nothing in my stomach raised itself up, I felt a shudder down to my knees and had a moment of wooze as I rocked back and forth. The cold of November, especially as admitted by the open window and now shattered door, kept well in control the odors that would have been choking, and that was a great aid in control of intestinal reactions, but I broke out in sweat and felt it roll down inside my suit.

“Who was she?” I uttered.

“Neighbors say a tart named Mary Jane Kelly, among other aliases. A nice enough girl, they say, no need whatsoever to do her up like this.”

“Can she be identified in such condition?”

“We’re looking for a Joe Barnett, paramour, who knew her best. He’ll have to make the identification official. That is, if he’s not the fellow himself.”

“I thought it was a Jack job.”

“Certainly seems as much, but the death cuts are on the right, not the left. Perhaps that’s how he found her and cut her lying down, finding it the easiest way.”

There was a sudden pop! and flare of illumination, as the photographer had finally gotten his kit assembled and in action. The flash device admitted the vapor of burned chemicals, whatever they were, strong enough to make me wince. He set about to take more pictures, snapping plates in and out of the box, adding flash powder to his device and the like.

I bent close and looked into the one undestroyed aspect of her visage, her eyes.

“If you’re looking for the image of her killer, save your effort,” said Abberline rather snippily. “Old wives’ tale. Seen a hundred in my time, no image on any of ’em.”

I stood, shaking my head. The great Jeb, at last with nothing to say.

“All right,” said Abberline, “you’ve had your peek. Now be a good boy and share your findings with your peers and keep them out of my hair while we set about to learn all that can be learned until Dr. Phillips makes his own determinations.”

I was escorted out and set free. I went to the press boys and told them what I had learned, and they appreciated my generosity. Though our papers were at war, we were friends and colleagues at ground level, and I shared what I had, then joined the general scramble to find a phone cabinet and get it off.

Iread poor Mary Jane’s letters. Perhaps as an homage to her youth in a reasonably happy family in Wales, she signed them in her Welsh baby name, Mairsian, as Mary Jane translates into that language. They seemed to be to an ideal mother, as her own had abjured contact with her whore daughter, which again seems to me a tragedy. Is not the passion between mother and daughter one of the most intense in human life? It should never be sundered, for the damage it does to both parties is incalculable. It says something for the hideous sanctimony of our age that Mary Jane’s mother cared more for the pressure of society than for any loyalty to the produce of her own loins. A whore daughter was a disgrace, and the poor mum probably sat up nights haunted by ghosts of sexual imagery, which she tried to banish but could not, of what was being done to her daughter by various blackguards and rogues. And yet what is done by them is really, as Mary Jane knew, nothing. It swiftly becomes so routine as to be utterly meaningless.