Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“Sir,” I said, feeling the chill as we stood next to the wooden slats of the door in the gate that led into the yard where poor Liz had been killed what seemed so long ago, “I was not here that night, so I need some guidance if I’m to put this one together in a story. It’s my weakest account.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “But do recall, I have not been here, either. Perhaps the two of us can work it out.”

With that, we opened the gate and confronted Liz’s falling place, which was now bare and prosaic, a simple joinery of brick wall to the pavement of the yard. Looking inward, we saw not much space, hardly justifying the name “yard,” hardly bigger than Miller’s Court, just an opening between the crazed and unplanned construction that marked the East End where the bricklayers designed the city on the fly. We could see a couple of small shops and, deeper in, a stairway running to the balcony of a small cottage. Nothing at all remarkable.

“I make it here,” I said, pointing to the spot where it seemed certain Liz had been discovered, just beyond the rotational arc of the open right-hand door.

“So it is.”

“Jack has killed but not desecrated. He is caught by an interloper who has just opened the gate. He freezes. The driver of the cart, sensing his pony’s sudden reluctance, jumps off his wagon and strikes a match. He sees the body in the cone of light. He goes racing off to alert colleagues, and Jack slides out in the narrow gap between the pony cart and the gateway.”

“That, I believe, is how the papers had it,” he said. “Do you have another idea?”

“Hmm,” I said. “I’m just astounded how he was not spotted as witnesses and coppers arrived. The driver did not hold on his alert. He returned with three colleagues from the club almost immediately” – I pointed to the two-story building that formed the northern boundry of Dutfield’s Yard beyond the gateway, and its doorway just twenty feet beyond where we stood – “by way of its main entrance, which fronts on Berner. It was quite full, as some sort of anarchistic meeting was taking place, and in under a minute more of those men poured into Berner Street and were very soon swarming thickly on the area. Meanwhile, the coppers were quick to arrive – street constables, that is – plus many people from Berner, and farther up, from the well-traveled Commercial. It was hardly an obscure spot.”

“I cannot answer for what the newspapers say. Perhaps you should discuss this with your friend Harry Dam, when he is not busy constructing an auto-da-fé for the Jews. But what you are describing does not seem to me impossible. Remember, he’s slight, and thus the pony won’t shy at him, thinking him a child and fearing no whip from him. He’s slight enough to squeeze between the cart and the gateway and be gone quickly.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but the pony is already alerted, already skittish, by smell. It seems just as likely that the sudden appearance of a figure from the dark, child-sized or not, would have caused the nervous beast to create a disturbance.”

“Who knows the minds of ponies?” said the professor.

“Fair enough,” I said. “But does it not strike you odd, Professor, that we are hard upon the single building in London that is regularly trafficked by revolutionaries, secret policemen, spies, the whole monkey house of Mittleuropean battle between autocratic governments and the men who would overthrow them. This building would be, would it not, full of intrigue, plot, plan, various stratagems and deceits, to say nothing of talents for escape and evasion?”

“Have you been talking with someone?” he asked. “That does not seem like your sort of intuition.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It just came to me in the writing.”

“Ah. In any event, what difference does it make, ultimately? They’re all politicals. Such men would have no interest in a fellow cutting up whores, because it advances no revolutionary cause. They are a hard breed.”

“Indeed. However, all those men, no matter of what faction, have one thing in common, which I would term ‘fear of raid.’ They are haunted by raids, have memory of raids, have themselves escaped raids. The raid spells their apprehension, execution, imprisonment, or exile. It means that all they stand for is destroyed. Theirs is a dangerous universe and a fragile one. So does it not stand that they would have an escape from such a place? They are not the sort to be caught like rats in a trap. Come, let’s examine.”

We walked into the unlocked building, entering by way of that side door onto Dutfield’s Yard, finding ourselves in a dingy corridor, which in one direction, back, seemed to lead to a printing shop from the mechanistic sounds, and in other direction, toward the street, where a kind of foyer must have offered a stairway that presumably led to the large meeting hall upstairs. There the workers were bellowing out a hymn to worker solidarity much sung in radical nests across Europe. It was so loud its vibrations seemed to be banging hard off walls and wood. Instead of joining the chorus of heroes, I took Dare to a door just a bit down the corridor toward the foyer. It, too, was unlocked, after the anarchists’ happy assumption that property is theft and no hindrance should be placed in the way of those in need. I was certainly in need. This in turn took us down a few steps into a cellar, which contained what cellars contain: crates, rusted tools, refuse, scrap, rat holes, spiderwebs, dust, the smell of dankness.

“Hardly a highlight of one’s London tour,” said the professor.

“Let’s see, however, if it contains treasure, which may be found in the most unlikely of spots.”

We poked about, undisturbed. It was rather dark, so the going was somewhat difficult as we bumped and bumbled about until I said, “Hello, what’s this?”

I pointed to the cement floor, where squibs of candlewax had accumulated, as if much illumination had been required on this one spot.

“Very Sherlock Holmes of you, sir,” he said. In a second I pushed aside the nearest crate and found it easy enough going. It slid three feet to the right and, when moved, revealed a ragged but ample hole chopped into the cement, though all its excavation debris had been carefully swept away. The two nubs of a ladder stuck beyond the edge of the hole.

“I would say tunnel. Isn’t this interesting? Built, I’m sure, to save the anarchists from goons hired by the tsarist secret police or foreign agents being hunted by our own Special Branch. Wouldn’t you think that a brilliant tactical mind like the colonel’s would have understood the high theoretical possibility of such a structure existing and looked for it? Perhaps that is why he chose this spot, knowing a secret escape was possible.”

“Capital thinking,” said the professor. “It existed theoretically, now it exists actually. By God, this is a wonderful discovery.”

“Shall we see where it leads?”

“We have a moral obligation to do so.”

I went first. It was not a long descent, perhaps ten feet, and it led to no vast underground chamber but into what appeared to be a kind of abandoned sewage containment, though of ample height and width for a man to nearly stand. One would expect a lantern at the base of the ladder to assist the escapees, and there it was, a primitive candle-powered implement whose contribution to illumination would be more helpful to morale than practicality. As the professor eased his way down, I found matches carefully wrapped against moisture, unwrapped them, ignited one, wincing at the flare, set the wick aflame, then closed the glass front of the piece, which magnified its vividness somewhat. Lifting it in my left hand, I exposed the gap in the ancient terra cotta through which the anarchists had battered their way to gain access; sweeping the lantern about, we saw that the length of space ran about ninety feet or so. At the same time, the miasma of abomination rose to our noses, for at one time this was a privy, to Romans, to medieval Londoners, who knew? Perhaps it contained Samuel Pepys’s shit or Messrs. Johnson and Boswell’s. It was said London was undergirded by abandoned tunnels and chambers; the anarchists had simply encountered one and put it to use against emergency. We were not alone, however, for then we heard the skittering or chittering or scrabbling or whatever word may be used to describe the sound of large numbers of rats. We had entered their kingdom, though the firelight drove them away from us, not from fear, I’m guessing, for what would five hundred such creatures fear from us, but because the blaze of light disturbed their delicate darkness-adjusted eyes.