Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

She is exactly what our system must necessarily produce. A disposable woman. If she does not have the sponsorship of a male, there is nothing for her except the meanest of charity interspersed with the whore’s plight. Darwin’s absolutism becomes the ruling principle of her existence: She develops cunning, deceit, cleverness as her only means of survival, her only goal the thruppence that will get her the day’s glass of gin. She becomes horrid and disgusting, blackened by the streets, rimmed with grime, her teeth rotting, her hair a scabrous mess, her body flaccid and fallen, her language and discourse degraded, and thus we are able to dismiss her from our view without qualm. She is sewage. She exists only for those randy men in the grip of sex fever, and when they have spent their pence and jizz, off they go. Any sane system would spare provision for the wretched creature and possibly save her from her wretchedness. Possibly men will invent it someday – but I doubt it.

The Star brought this tragic nonentity to banal life. No one read of it with more fascination than I. The method of identity: The police noted a laundry marker on one of her underclothes and, in a bit of time, found the laundry, displayed the morgue picture, and identified her. So Jeb, with that advantage, was able to track her last day’s odyssey toward a pool of blood in Buck’s Row. She was forty-three, he tells us, mother of five children. Her character flaw, for which God above and I below exacted our justice, was alcohol. It destroyed her life and, I suppose, killed her. After twenty-four years of marriage to a locksmith, as Jeb told the tale, her husband, finding her frequently inebriated, kicked her out. A divorce followed. There was no place to go but down and no place to land but the bottom. Her shabby last few years were mainly about raising enough money per diem for that glass of blissful gin or several, plus a grim bed in a doss house, of the many that festered in Whitechapel for her and others of the ilk.

Jeb constructed a template of her last hours. The details the plucky bastard unearthed were quite interesting. At twelve thirty A.M. she left a public house called the Frying Pan (who could make up such!) and shortly thereafter returned to her lodging house, where it turned out she hadn’t the cash to spend the night. Out she went. She met a friend and they had a nice chat, even if Polly was quite drunk, and Polly told the friend that she’d had her doss money three times that day but always drank it through, but she claimed that she’d get it again and everything would be all right. Then Polly walked on down Whitechapel Road and, when she saw a potential tryster following her, diverted to the far darker Buck’s Row to earn that doss fee. We know what happened next, don’t we?

Jeb’s account was also notable for the narrative it gave of police movement, and it contained a warning that I took seriously. It seemed that minutes before the dispatch of Polly, two constables on their patrol entered and coursed Buck’s Row from opposite directions. I saw neither; obviously, neither saw me. Yet it is in the record, Constable Thain being the first in one direction, then Sergeant Kerby in the other. Within minutes of my departure, first along came Cross, then a Constable Neill who made the second discovery (after Cross) and signaled to Thain, turning up again like a bad penny. Finally, a Constable Mizen arrived, he being the copper Cross alerted.

Good Lord, it was like Victoria Station when the express from Manchester arrives! All those men on that black, bleak little street in the space of twenty minutes or so, during which a dastardly deed was done unseen. How close I came! How lucky I was! How the whimsies favored my enterprise!

It taught me an important lesson. Luck would not always be my companion, so I must plan more carefully. I must choose the spot, not the woman, henceforth, based on the patrol patterns of the constables, thereby decreasing the chances of discovery in flagrante. I must examine the spot for escape routes so that I would not hesitate in disarray if noted, but could vanish abruptly. I also must locate less well-traveled areas of Whitechapel than the one I had so foolishly chosen, that close to a main thoroughfare lit brightly by gas illumination and the glare of grog houses and constable’s lanterns.

This was good to know, as certain auspicious signs suggested that I must strike again, soon.

Success is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and -girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads – if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”

“He’s right. Readers need to attach a human identity to whoever’s doing the talking. It makes the thing have a complete sense to it,” said Mr. O’Connor.

“If you get the name, you’ll be way ahead. Also, cultivate that copper. The bastard detectives will play awesome, as if they’re university men among the pig farmers, but they probably don’t know half as much as the sharp-eyed street constable. Maybe your friend has resentments against them from slights delivered with which you can pry information out of him. Envy is the juice in which the world bubbles, with dashes of malice tossed in to bring the human stew to a delicious boil.”

I did all of that, napping at the paper. It worked out surprisingly well. Indeed, Sergeant Ross gave me the name out of thanks for the light the Star ’s original story had shone on him, more than the poor man had ever got in his life, after years of dedicated work. Most important to him, it turned out, was how his mention had buzzed off the gentlemen from the Metropolitan Police Bethel Green J Division, CID, who had been handed the investigation.

Via the Records Department, I got to poor Polly’s husband first, and even broke the news to him. If I’d had a shred of human mercy left, I might have allowed the fellow a moment of repose after hearing that the woman he once loved, the woman who gave him five children, made his food, and gave him her body for twenty-six years before she lost her soul to demon gin, was now dead horribly in the gutter, all cut and minced. Quite the opposite: Knowing him to be vulnerable, I pressed him and got good details. My ambition was as fully sized as any addiction to opium by now. It had been a bit of time since he’d seen her, but through his eyes, I was at least able to give the poor old girl some humanity. That’s the rub of the newspaper game, I realized. It helps me, it does indeed, but it helps you, too, in the long run, though the gain may be a bit late to play out.