The Art of Murder

Chapter 25

To Mrs Sonia Thomson 14 October 1888 June was a very busy month. I was obliged to organise my family affairs in Hemel Hempstead, bury my father, and help the authorities with their investigation into the fire at Fellwick Manor. I was aware of a few suspicious voices being raised, but nobody came out with any clear accusations and there was no evidence to incriminate Yours Truly. Naturally, I played the role of grieving son beautifully. My father had few friends and we had no remaining family connections. His unmarried elder brother had died of cholera some ten years ago, and Mother, like myself, had been an only child. I inherited everything.

After an appropriate length of time I was able to escape to Oxford where I had still to attend to the matter of satisfying my professors that I was worthy of a good degree. You may wonder why on earth this would matter to me; but, you see, I'm one of those people who, once something has been started, likes to finish it in style. This I succeeded in doing, and in June, I was ready to make my farewells to the university town that had opened up so many new opportunities for me.

But, for some reason, I could not quite bring myself to board the train. I lingered for two days. Most of the students had left and the place began to feel unnaturally quiet. Before dawn on the third morning, as I lay in bed, I realised what it was that was holding me back. I packed a bag with some bread and a bottle of ale, and headed south past Christ Church and over Folly Bridge.

The sun had been up for an hour by the time I reached Boars Hill and the day was already warming up. After leaving the track at the edge of the city and passing into the fields close to Boars Hill, I neither saw nor heard another soul. The only sound was the buzzing of insects. Clancy Hall was surrounded by a fence on three sides and a wall on the other. The driveway was gated but I found a way over the wall to the east of the gate, close to a copse of trees, and traipsed across a patch of knee-high grass that led me to the edge of the carefully manicured gardens close to the house.

I sensed the place was deserted long before I reached the double front doors and tried the bell. The windows were shuttered; the driveway empty and freshly raked. I tried the bell a few more times without really knowing why and then took a few paces back to the far edge of the driveway, to stare at the blank walls and shutters.

I was crossing the lawn to leave when I saw a solitary figure some fifty yards away: a gardener working on one of the flowerbeds. He was wearing steel-capped boots and had thrust his spade into a heap of soil stacked high in a wheelbarrow. Arching his spine, he pushed back his cap, wiped his weathered face with a scrap of cloth and turned to watch my approach.

'Good day,' I said.

He gave me a suspicious look, his thick grey eyebrows knitting together. 'Sir,' he said, touching the front of his cap.

'I'm a friend of the owner,' I said, and nodded back towards the house. 'My name is Mr Sandler.'

'Pleased to meet you, sir.'

'I was surprised to see it all boarded up.'

'Well, perhaps you haven't been around for a bit, sir,' the gardener said mildly. 'Been this way for a while now.'

I was about to reply, but checked myself. I wiped my own sweaty brow with the sleeve of my jacket. 'Any idea where Mr Oglebee has gone?' I asked, staring the gardener directly in the eye.

'Mr Oglebee?'

'Yes, man,' I snapped. 'Mr Oglebee.'

The gardener shook his head slowly and I could feel the anger building up inside me. He clicked his tongue. 'Don't know about a Mr Oglebee, sir. Clancy Hall is owned by Lord and Lady Broadbent. Or at least it was. They died a few years back. Their son Charles is master of the estate now. But he lives in South Africa. Hasn't been back for, oh… at least three years.'

I looked into the old man's eyes, trying to see if there was any trace of artifice, but there was none. I simply thanked him, turned and walked back to Oxford.

Later, following the porters out through the gates of Exeter College and on to the Turl, I could not snap out of the puzzled reverie I had found myself in since leaving Clancy Hall. There was no one in Oxford to whom I could put the conundrum, and something inside told me that even if I were to mention what I had discovered, I would receive no satisfactory form of response. It was a little while later, as I sat alone in the train carriage allowing myself to be lulled to sleep, that I began to see the funny side of it and to accept what an amusing divertimente the whole thing had been. Oglebee, I realised, was even more of an enigma than I had suspected. I had been to London on several occasions prior to that, always with my father. They had been solemn affairs; silent train journeys with me obediently tagging along. All those trips were to the more salubrious parts of the capital, on visits to lawyers and meetings with Father's religious brethren. My plans now were very different.

The train pulled into Paddington Station with its usual cacophony and billows of steam. I followed the porter through a concourse milling with early-evening travellers. We stopped at Left Luggage and I gave the man a good tip. He doffed his cap and strode off with his trolley to find another customer. In the gentlemen's conveniences I changed, swapping my tailored suit for a pair of rough workmen's trousers, an old collarless shirt, a flat cap and steel-tipped boots. Folding my smart clothes into one of my cases, I removed a ripped canvas bag and stuffed it with a few essentials. I also removed a black leather bag which contained my paints and materials as well as a collection of knives and a newly sharpened saw. After putting my two cases into storage, I headed out through the main doors on to the busy street.

It was hot and sticky still, the air heavy and cloying. A storm was brewing. I went to hail a cab and found myself discombobulated. The cab slowed, but then the driver took one look at me and whipped on his horse. I had to smile at the efficacy of my own disguise. Turning, I walked a few yards back along the road and found another hansom waiting for passengers from the station. When I approached the cab driver and told him where I wanted to go, he gave me a puzzled look and was about to pull away without a reply when I told him I would pay double in advance.

'Show us it then, matey boy,' he said.

I pulled out half a crown and handed it to him. 'Righty-ho, sir,' he said. 'Jump in.' He flicked his whip and we were away.

I sat back as the cab wove a course through the busy streets, and simply soaked up the atmosphere of this incomparable place. London… the greatest city in the world by far. This was a city the Emperors of Rome would have envied. I know, dear lady, that you have yourself been to London many times. Your husband told me this. But I also know that you have led a rather cloistered life in the Berkshire countryside, so you must indulge me in my recollections of my sense of rapture upon finding myself here a free agent at last. Here I was, newly graduated from Oxford, a young man with very clear ideas of what he was about to do. No wonder I was excited.

The storm broke as the cab bounced over the cobblestones of Tottenham Court Road. From inside my cab, I could see pedestrians scatter for cover as thunder hammered overhead and lightning ripped open the sky. I heard the driver seated on his box behind me yelling at the horse and then his whip crack above the beast's rump.

The journey seemed interminable. Even my enthusiasm for the place began to wear thin. I had arranged my accommodation already, contacting a landlord through an advertisement in the Oxford Times. I wanted something in the heart of Whitechapel and had no qualms about the sordid condition of most of the dwelling places there. In fact, the filthier it was, the better I would consider it to be. I was quite confident that I could look after myself. As we approached the address of the lodgings, I asked the cab driver to pull over to the side of Whitechapel Road. I did not want the neighbours to see me arriving in a hansom. I jumped down, pulling my bag over my shoulder, and headed over the uneven, rubbish-strewn cobbles with my hat tugged low over my face and my head down against the still driving rain. The weather was on my side, I thought.

My new lodgings were on Wentworth Street. I rented a single room above a corn-chandler's shop. The shopkeeper, a Mr Girthwright, owned the building. His shop was crammed full of bird cages, broody hens, baskets of eggs, seed and corn. It was more farm than shop, and the stink of bird excrement and rotting straw seeped through the ceiling into the rooms above.

The room itself was wonderfully squalid. Just what I was looking for. I needed to soak up the atmosphere, melt into the crowd, become part of the local landscape. I was priming myself, making ready for my project, my grand work, the one that would make my name immortal.

It was a mean room, a low ceiling surmounting brown walls that had been papered last when Victoria was a young woman. The floor was of bare boards. There was a narrow bed, a rusted gas mantle, no form of heating. A single ornament hung on the wall above the bed: a crucifix. But, as crude and unprepossessing a place as this was, I knew from my studies of the area that this house was one of the better lodgings to be found here. It was not uncommon for four families to share a place this size, and the exorbitant price demanded for it – three shillings a week – was justified if I were to have my privacy. That was the last thing I could afford to sacrifice. I dropped my bag to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, looking around my new home, feeling immensely pleased with myself.

By the time I left the building, the sky had turned russet, casting a striking light across the buildings and the still-wet streets. The rain had passed and the stink of the place was reasserting itself. It was a smell I had never before experienced, a blend of so many odours: soot, tar, rotten food and human waste. There was also a salty tang to the air, the southerly breeze wafting into the narrow streets the stench of the river.

I had not visited a place even remotely like this, and it thrilled me inordinately. I knew all the stories about this part of London. How the poor had been expelled from the Rookeries around St Giles to the west of the City, their old slums razed. The countless, faceless hordes of bedraggled humanity had swept eastward just a few miles and turned the East End of London into the cesspit it now was. It was, dear lady, Hell on Earth, a place Londoners refer to as 'the Stew', and I loved it immediately.

How do I begin to express its unique atmosphere, especially to one so well bred and closeted as your good self? I've tried to convey the smell, but really this was just one element in the overall experience. Indeed, one could almost describe the process of walking out of my lodgings and on to the street as something of an overloading of the senses, for everything about it piqued and challenged my perceptions.

Immediately outside the door to my lodgings, a pieman had set up. He had placed a small box-shaped container on short metal legs on the cobblestones. On top of this lay a row of meat pies kept warm by a small fire burning inside the box. The pieman wore a short jacket and a dirty kerchief. His top hat was pushed back at a rakish angle and he wore a brown-smeared apron about his waist. A woman stood beside him. She looked ill, with pinched cheeks and dark hollows beneath her eyes. Immediately in front of the pie stand stood a young boy in a cloth cap, calling for customers. He was crouching on one knee and held a pair of coins in his hand which he tossed into the air. 'Toss and buy,' he called, inviting customers to have a turn at guessing which way the coins fell while they waited for their pie.

It was the time of the evening when the streets were beginning to fill. The few residents who had jobs were returning from their labours, and others, the prostitutes or 'brides' as I knew they were called by the locals, were just about to start their evening's work.

The workmen looked particularly bedraggled. I saw a young man, his face as pale as death, hair already thinning, eyes hollow. He almost knocked my shoulder as he swayed, half-drunk, along the narrow pavement. I caught the stench of him, fish and brine, and I knew that he was a waterman, one of those who pulled corpses from the Thames in the hope of finding something valuable, be it a farthing sewn into a seam or a gold tooth pulled from a corpse.

Crossing a lane that led on to Whitechapel Road, a group of four exhausted figures passed by. These were paupers on their way from the labour yard where those without any gainful employment spent twelve hours a day breaking stones and rocks for a few pennies. Then a more colourful sight: a 'budgerigar man', a slight fellow in an off-white top hat standing behind a hastily erected table covered with a frayed cloth. Four budgerigars perched along his outstretched arm. On the table top lay four cards. 'Guess the card and win yourself a night out!' the man called as I approached. I ignored him, but watched fascinated as a young couple stepped up.

The girl was giggling as her male friend offered the budgerigar man a farthing. 'Which one would the lady like to choose?' the man behind the table quizzed, ogling her. 'Could be your lucky night, my darlin'.' The girl tittered stupidly and nuzzled up to her beau. The young man chose for her, second from the left. The budgerigar man pocketed the money and lowered his arm to allow one of the birds to hop on to the table. The budgerigar paraded importantly up and down next to the cards, then stopped and pecked at one of them: the second from the left. The woman squealed and threw her hands to her mouth. I walked on, wondering how many times the budgerigar man would let the couple win before he turned the tables on them.

Now, dear lady, you must not think me a completely idle fellow because this little exploratory trip was serving a definite purpose. I was heading somewhere and I knew exactly where it was. My destination was the Pavilion, or the 'Pav' as the locals preferred, a music hall of the most wretchedly sordid kind, but an entirely suitable place of entertainment for the residents of Hell.

How do I begin to conjure up a clear portrayal of the Pav? It would be much easier for me to paint the place. But I will try. I want you to have every detail.

The front of the building gave no clue as to what went on inside. It looked like a simple, decent theatre. But beyond the doors, the place was a haven for the lower orders. Great rough wooden tables ran the entire length of the main hall, and upon either side of these stretched benches. By nine each evening every single space on the benches was taken, beer mugs were constantly refilled with cheap, watered-down ale, and the venue burst into life.

As you may gather, I went to the Pav on many occasions. Indeed I purchased a box there for no less than five guineas. I was captivated by the place that very first night of my new life in London. Before I had slept a single night in the Stew, I had made myself at home at the New Royal Pavilion Theatre, to give it its proper name. What was it that I loved so much there? I hear you ask. I think it was the sense of barely masked hopelessness, the ludicrous lengths to which people go in order to forget temporarily the vileness of life. Thomas Hobbes once wrote: 'Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', but any nascent realisation that the average person may have of this may be dispelled with enough beer down their throat; enough rowdy music, sly innuendo and double-entendre; enough time with a whore on their lap. Or, for the richer desperadoes, enough opium in their blood. But it's all a ridiculous falsehood, all a pretence, and it amused me enormously to watch the faces of the cattle at the trough, trying to make all that is bad in the world go away. Only one thing makes that disappear, and it is not something you find in a music hall. At least, not directly. At least, not until Yours Truly arrived in the neighbourhood.

But, dear lady, forgive me, I digress again. I seem to have something of a penchant for it, do I not? Let me get back to the point. There were two very important consequences to my sojourn along Whitechapel Road and my trip to the Pav. First, it led me to the women I was later to slaughter. And second, it was the place in which I was to meet your husband, Archibald, a man who ended up playing a significant role in the events which were to unfold during the late summer and autumn of this year.

I've not mentioned Archibald before this point. This was not, of course, due to any desire on my part to save your feelings. You must know me better than that. But now I come to the part of my story when Mr Thomson makes his first appearance.

No doubt you knew one face of the man. I knew several. We would doubtless agree that Archibald was a hard-working, intelligent, industrious and quaintly ambitious fellow. These things will be said at his funeral. Goodness, I wish I could be there! But there were other aspects to your husband, about which I imagine you had little inkling.

The Pav, that wonderful establishment, was not merely a music hall. The owners earned a tidy sum from all the four-penny pieces handed over at the admissions desk and the half-penny a pint they charged for the slops they passed off as beer, but they, like all of us, were greedy men who knew a captive audience when they saw one. Imagination not being their forte, the theatre owners turned the floor above it into a brothel.

I discovered this on my second visit to the Pav and was thrilled by the revelation. I had spent all of twenty-four hours in Whitechapel, and in my mind had already started to sketch in the details of my planned endeavour. I had decided that there would be four women. Why four? Symmetry perhaps. Four suits to a deck of cards? Four sides to a square? Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Actually, none of these ideas crossed my mind. Some, I understand, after the event, tried to find connections between my work and the doings of the Freemasons, the Anarchists, even members of the Royal Family, for Hell's sake! None of these things were in my mind in July. I admit, I played around a little, leaving false clues, but these were for my own amusement and had no foundation in political or, the Devil help me, spiritual reflections. So why four? It just felt right.

Four women. I had given some thought to the methods and procedures, but had yet to select my candidates. And I did feel the need for structure here, some element of form. Because all art has form, no matter how loose it may be. When I learned of the brothel above the Pav, some of the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I now had a fitting source for my human materials.

Now, dear lady, you may already have surmised an important fact about Yours Truly. That is, I have no desire for women. Indeed, I have no sexual drive whatsoever. I don't know why this is, and I don't care. It is not something I ever dwell upon. I know that for generations to come learned men will postulate and ponder, they will probe what they believe to be my mental make-up. But they will not know me as I know myself, no matter how clever those men may be. They will suggest all manner of sexual aberrations, but really, you have to believe me, there is nothing to that theory. And, quite frankly, I could not be more pleased, for what a terrible waste of energy sex is. What purpose does it serve? If you gain no pleasure from it, it is merely an act of procreation, and the last thing the world needs is more children. So I was not in the brothel for the usual reasons. I was there to paint, and to select.

Soon after I stumbled upon the existence of the brothel above the Pav, I made it my business to explore the place. Exploration is key to what I do, an essential discipline that enables me always to keep one step ahead of the police. Careful not to draw attention to myself, I rapidly learned how the upper rooms were laid out and how some of them interconnected. I soon discovered a clever little network of secret passages and escape routes built into the shell of the building.

Now back to Archibald. I met him some two weeks after arriving in Whitechapel. I had been making nightly excursions to the Pav and its brothel. To the girls, I was known as 'The Painter', and they all seemed to like me because I never touched them, just sketched. It was a Friday night, growing late. My model was becoming impatient, even though I had paid her twice her normal fee and all she had to do was recline decorously on a chaise. I too began to tire, not of work, but of the woman's sighs and restlessness. Dropping my pencil on the sketchpad, I tossed her the robe she had arrived in and told her to get out. Angry now, I put the pad and pencil on to the bed and lit a cigarette. Pulling myself up from the chair and shaking my head irritably, I paced over to the door, stepped out on to the broad landing and leaned over the balcony. I could hear the noise from below, every note of the penny opera. It lurched to screeching halt and the Master of Ceremonies bellowed to the crowd: 'What now, ladies and gentlemen? What now?'

I had seen and heard it all before, of course. I could picture the scene. The Pav's favourite, Marie Lloyd, would be ready in the wings. I could hear her entrance music. I could picture her striding on to the stage with her umbrella. It would jam and she would declare: 'Oh, Gawd! I ain't 'ad it up for ages!' And there, on cue, came the roar of laughter from the baying crowd. Oh, what simple things can please.

Then I heard a succession of new sounds. A crash, a scream, the blast of a whistle… a police whistle. Peering over the balcony, I caught a glimpse of two constables charging through the main door to the theatre. I turned on my heel and dashed for the door to the room I had rented. Except, in my startled frame of mind, I went for the wrong one and fell into the room next to mine.

I picked myself up and received another surprise when I saw the figures on the bed. Yes, one of them was your beloved husband, my dear lady. He was unaware of the commotion below, lost in his own lusts. But when I charged in, I made such a noise he jumped up, a look of horror on his face. The stupid trollop on the bed, one of the girls I knew, Catherine Eddowes, pulled a sheet up over her scrawny frame.

'What the hell!' Archibald blustered.

Ignoring the pair of them, I dashed across the room. Reaching the wall to the right of a small window, I felt along the cheap, lumpy wallpaper. Archibald pulled on his trousers and plucked at his jacket.

'What's going on?'

I didn't even turn round. 'Coppers,' I hissed.

'Oh, fuck!'

Crouching, I found the leading edge of the hidden door in a notch in the skirting. Running one finger up to waist-height, and, a few inches to the left, I found the latch, tugged it and let the door swing out. In a flash, I had crawled into the opening and was about to shut the door again when Archibald pushed himself in after me, almost crushing me against the back wall of the narrow concealed passageway behind the bedroom wall. He just managed to yank the door shut before a loud bang told us the police had reached the landing outside.

In the dark, behind the door, we held our breath. Then, using for cover the noises coming from the room – the door crashing open and the squeals of the prostitute – I groped my way along the hidden corridor. Three steps on, I reached a stone wall and felt the rungs of a short ladder screwed to the masonry. I pulled myself up in the darkness and with my left hand felt above my head for the escape hatch. My hand touched rough wood and I recoiled as a splinter slid under one fingernail. Ignoring the pain, I pushed on the trapdoor and levered it up.

Pulling myself through the opening, I found myself on the roof, the cool night air very welcome after the stifling, airless escape route. I slumped back, panting, against a sloping section of tiles. Archibald's stocky form appeared, silhouetted against the light from a yellow half-moon. I had forgotten he was behind me. He stumbled upright and took two steps towards me before leaning back against the same section of the incline and pulling a silver cigarette holder from his trouser pocket. I could see his face in the moonlight: round and sheened with sweat, and those black dog-like eyes of his. 'I think I owe you a drink,' he said.