The Art of Murder

Chapter 40

To Mrs Sonia Thomson 16 October 1888 And so, an interlude. I had, I thought, done exceedingly well. There were certainly a few precarious moments, especially on the night of the double murder. I had seen the whites of the policeman's eyes before I jumped, and for a fleeting moment I half-believed I had reached the end of the road, with my skull crushed against the tunnel wall or my body shattered under the steel wheels of the underground train. But that was not to be. The worst I suffered was a sprained ankle and a few lacerations and bruises.

But I needed rest. And, to be honest, I wanted to observe at my leisure the repercussions from my adventures. For this was all part of the creative process. As I started work on the painting, building upon my experiences and my almost perfect recall, I sniffed the air, so to speak. I sensed and relished the rising panic and animal fear of the dumb herd around me.

The newspapers were full of it, of course, and I too played my part, offering Archibald suitably sanitised renditions of the slashed bodies. I read with great amusement the inaccuracies and downright fictions concerning what had been dubbed 'the Whitechapel murders'. There was even a copy-cat murder. A whore named Ann Chapman was dispatched by a rank amateur. I was irritated when I first heard of this, but after a moment's pause, I realised the truth of the adage that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Then, of course, some of the falsehoods had been initiated by Yours Truly. I was particularly proud of the graffiti I had daubed on the wall close to the body of Elizabeth Stride, and the removal of the kidney, which I had already dug up and used in the preparation of my paints. The message had conveyed a subtle suggestion that the Freemasons might be involved because of the vaguely ritualistic aspect to the murder. It had been another amusing little decoy, just to confuse the Old Bill, as the local ovine community call the noble guardians of the law.

Suspects were rounded up. One unfortunate fellow, a worker in a local abattoir, had the misfortune of being spotted close to the scene of Catherine's sad demise. He was given the nickname 'Leather Apron' because of the garment he wore at work. He was pulled in for questioning and held in the cells for a few days. But he was eventually released because the police had no real evidence with which to present a case.

The police were, by and large, completely ineffectual, I'm pleased to say. I had chosen my theatre well, had I not, Sonia? After all, who gives a damn about a few repulsive, drunken whores? My work was conducted in a part of London which was, in the eyes of most people, beyond the pale. Wealthy gentlemen may have enjoyed visiting the Stew, dipping their toe into Hell and dipping their wicks into very rough receptacles, but that was merely the natural order of things. My victims were those who had fallen over the edge. If London had been portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch, Whitechapel would have been the lowest level of Hell, a place filled with barrels of pitch and fire and brimstone, the bodies of the useless tossed in at will to melt into the universal pit of nothingness. Why should a judge or a police commissioner, a university don or a bishop, care the slightest what happened there?

Inspector Frederick Abberline was the man at the centre of the investigation. And never a more plodding plodder have I encountered – again, I'm thankful, dear lady, if a little peeved, that I did not have a more interesting and challenging adversary. The police never really had a clue about me, and during the two weeks I spent lying low and painting, they called in for questioning literally dozens of nobodies.

It was at this point that I decided to become a little more playful. I started to write letters to the newspapers and the police. It was in the first of these, written in red ink – yes, I do confess this was a little melodramatic – that I introduced the nickname that will forever be associated with my work: 'Jack the Ripper'.

I can say in all honesty that I have no idea where the name came from. It just arrived on the page as I signed the letter to the Central News Agency. It was wonderful fun. I deliberately obfuscated the text, writing in the voice of a rather common, uneducated fellow, but nevertheless a man with a sense of humour. Here and there, I sprinkled the letters with tiny clues, egging on the police, trying to stir up a little fight in them. But to no real avail. The plodders continued to plod.

I spent a lot of time with your good husband during my fortnight's sabbatical. He was a curious fellow. The better I grew to know him, the more puzzling he became. Most striking was the fact that he was a man of both high and ridiculously low tastes. Now, you may say that many men are thus, but with dear old Archibald, it seemed this dichotomy was rather extreme. On the one hand, he delighted in frequenting the Reform Club and other such bastions of pretension and grandeur. He had high ideals, artistic integrity even. He wanted to make statements, to make his mark, to do something noble and worthy. In short, he had a great desire to encourage people to think; which is a quality I admire. But the corollary of all this well-intentioned public behaviour was the man's insatiable private lust for the low life. He had a seemingly limitless fascination with the seediest brothels, the worst pubs and drinking clubs. He took me to some of the most dangerous opium dens in London, places few people even knew existed, run by Chinese gangs – filthy, stinking rat holes close to the docks, where the air was so rank with opium fumes one barely needed to partake of the pipe to become intoxicated.

Together, during a three-night run of the dens in Limehouse, we witnessed two murders. One was a stabbing involving two Chinese dealers who dispatched a man who'd threatened to give them up to the police. The other involved the shooting of a young drugs runner. It was most entertaining. Although, I have to say, the high point of my nocturnal adventures with Archibald was the night he took me to the Mansion of Wonders, a fabulous misnomer if ever I heard one, because the venue was certainly no 'mansion' and the exhibits were some way short of 'wonders'.

The Mansion of Wonders was actually a couple of rooms to the rear of a shop at number 259 Whitechapel Road. Archibald informed me that until just two years before a famous grotesque, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, was on display there, and that the freak had been forced to sit in the shop window to attract the crowds. He is now in the London Hospital, of course. I'm sure, like most of the genteel classes in England, you have followed the strange man's story in The Times. But even with Merrick gone, there still remained plenty of interesting things to see at the freak show, although they were perhaps not in the same league. On the evening Archibald took me to the Mansion, we saw the Giantess of the Mountains, a woman no less than eight foot tall. She was more or less in proportion, though everything about her was laughably expanded. Her head was almost twice the size of mine.

In the next room sat the Siamese twins, a couple of elderly gentlemen joined by a six-inch strip of thick pink flesh along their sides. They had apparently been in the freak-show business for almost forty years. After we had enjoyed a good chuckle at the twins, they were taken away and Agatha, the world's hairiest woman, was brought in. For me, she was the oddest of the collection, because, if one were to ignore the fact that she was covered from head to foot with thick black hair, she was otherwise a normal human being.

Archibald was moved by the sight, I could tell. And I know why. It was the woman's eyes. They were perfectly shaped, large and dark brown, quite beautiful really. But the thing that must have stirred his emotions was the way those eyes peered out from that horrible globe of hair. They possessed an imploring stillness, an almost noble resignation. Archibald was deeply saddened by the experience whereas I felt a wonderful thrill. The woman's expression was so similar to that of Fred, the boy I had let drown so many years ago. Looking at Agatha, I felt something close to ecstasy. I wanted to laugh uproariously. It was only a sense of decorum that stopped me. I did not care about the sensibilities of those around me, but I did not want to draw attention to myself. At least not there and then.

After a while, I grew weary of Archibald's company and felt I was neglecting my work. I started to stay in my room most evenings as well as throughout the day, venturing out only to post letters from a variety of locations and to buy painting materials. I still went out with Archibald occasionally, and continued to supply him with drawings for the Clarion, but my heart was not really in it. I found I was becoming increasingly obsessed with my painting. Then, one evening at the beginning of this month, I suddenly knew it was the right time to move on, to claim my last victim and pass on to the final stage of my work.

It had grown chilly during the past few weeks, and I felt the cold even more because I had recently been closeted indoors for much of the time. I knew exactly where I was headed and who my victim was to be. It took me no more than ten minutes walking at a brisk pace to reach Dorset Street close to Commercial Road. Turning into the street, I checked my watch. It was 2 a.m. and there was not a soul around. Halfway along Dorset Street, I found the archway that leads through to a claustrophobic, cobbled courtyard surrounded by hovels. Mary Kelly, my last chosen victim, I knew to be staying in number thirteen.

It was very dark, the half-moon shrouded by thick cloud. Two narrow windows looked out from number thirteen on to the courtyard, and I could just make out a faint light behind them. From far off came an assortment of sounds. Close to, I could see that two of the panes of glass in the right-hand window were broken. It was obvious Mary had a man in there, so I kept to the shadows and waited.

The time passed slowly. I could not move around freely for fear of making too much noise, and the cold was creeping through my clothes. Eventually I heard the door to number thirteen creak open and a figure emerged into the freezing early morning. I caught a brief glimpse of him before he shuffled away into the alley leading back to Dorset Street. Approaching the door, I tapped quietly. When there was no response I tapped again. The door opened a crack and the face of a young woman appeared. She was tall, just a couple of inches shorter than me, and had a pretty if careworn face and long, blonde hair.

'I've finished work, love,' she said.

I looked down as though in resignation to distract her. Then, with a single shove, the door flew inwards and I grabbed Mary about the mouth. Dragging her across the room, I removed two pieces of rag from my pocket and tied one of them across her mouth as a gag. The other I used to bind her wrists. Guiding Mary to the bed, I pushed her so that she fell backwards. She writhed and tried to scream through the gag. Taking a length of rope from my bag, I tied her feet to the metal rail at the end of the bed. Pulling her bound wrists up over her head, I looped a length of rope over the rag binding and tied the other end to the head of the bed.

Ignoring Mary's efforts to break free, I surveyed the room. Even by the standards I had grown accustomed to in the Stew, the place was squalid beyond belief. There were piles of filthy clothes lying on the floor and thrown over the foot of the bed. The sheets were soiled and grey. The mean light I had seen earlier came from a gas mantle in the far corner. There was a fireplace in the wall nearest the door, but it was empty. The room was freezing.

Two rickety wooden chairs stood against the back wall, adjacent to the end of the bed. I extracted a box of matches from my bag and, finding some scraps of old newspaper on the floor, laid a fire in the grate. Grabbing a chair, I wrapped the legs in some of the repulsive clothes and rags scattered on the floor and smashed them against the end of the bed. The chair made a dull thud as it crumbled. I then yanked away the clothes and snapped the pieces of shattered timber until I had a nice pile of kindling for the fire. Within a few minutes, the flames were lapping and I could warm my hands in front of them.

'An extremely cold evening, I'm sure you'll agree, Mary,' I said to my prisoner.

She made some indecipherable sound through the gag, which I ignored. Then, satisfied my hands were warm enough, I set to work. I did not sleep after returning to my room but began painting while everything was fresh in my mind. I knew that it would only be a matter of time before pandemonium broke out in the neighbourhood and the sheep started bleating.

I lost all track of time, but sure enough, around 11 a.m., I heard the sound of the police racing to the scene and the raised voices of shopkeepers in the street below my window. I felt a delicious sense of being anonymously at the centre of everything, behoven to none, a Master of the Universe, a god who could pull the strings of the little people and make them dance. It was utterly intoxicating.

Looking down at myself, I noticed my clothes were still soiled with streaks of blood and there was a small lump of tissue caught in one of the buttonholes of my waistcoat. Without further ado, I stripped, put the clothes into a bag, washed thoroughly, checking my appearance in the mirror close to the bowl, and changed into fresh things. By 11.30 I was at the entrance to Miller's Court watching, with concealed delight, the scurrying and the palpable distress.

Just before I approached the door to Mary Kelly's room, my attention was drawn to a policeman. His back was towards me as he bent forward in the shadows and vomited noisily against the wall. My goodness, how people overreact, I thought as I took a step closer to the door.

Two men emerged. One of them I recognised as Inspector Abberline. He had the complexion of a ghost, the blood completely drained from his face. He looked up suddenly and glared at me. We had met once before, the day after my busy night dispatching Elizabeth and Catherine.

'Mr Tumbril,' he croaked. 'How pleasant.'

I doffed my cap.

'I think even you would rather not go in there,' Abberline added with a slight flick of his head.

The policeman who had been vomiting appeared from the shadows wiping his mouth and looking embarrassed. He was about to speak, but when he saw Abberline's expression he straightened his jacket and retreated.

'These things are never pleasant, Inspector,' I replied as politely as I could. 'But I have a job to do.'

Abberline fixed me with a cold look, and then, without uttering another word, walked straight past me towards the alleyway and the main road beyond.

Inside, things were pretty much as I had left them. Mary was opened up from throat to groin. Most of her organs had been removed and placed around the room. The fire was burning and there was an oily deposit running up the wall above the grate – human fat that had reconstituted after vaporising in the flames.

A doctor and his assistant were at the scene studying the body. They ignored me completely and I stepped over to the far side of the room, pulled my sketchpad from my bag and began to draw.

It was then that my world changed. My eyes followed the lines of ruin in Mary Kelly's body, tracing the red and the grey lacerations along her thighs and across her devastated face. Her features were almost unrecognisable as ever having been human. It was at that precise moment I suddenly realised I was wasting my time. There was no need to draw, no need to paint, no need to represent. My art lay there on the bed, just as my other recent creations had lain on the wet ground of dark alleyways. Furthermore, this work was on a grand scale. In itself, each murder was a beautiful piece. But together… together they formed a gestalt, a masterpiece. The bit players, the Abberlines and the Archibalds, the plodding plodders and the doctors studying the inanimate flesh, they were all characters in the finished work, angels in the corner of a Michelangelo, foliage bordering a landscape. It was magnificent. I was magnificent.

In a delirium, I returned my sketchpad to my bag, turned and walked out of number thirteen Miller's Court. Unaware of anything going on around me, I swung into Dorset Street, weaving my way back to my room on Wentworth Street. Reaching the door at the side of the corn-chandler's shop, I turned the key in the lock, closed the door behind me and walked along the narrow hallway. Slowly, I ascended the stairs feeling as though the world could not become a better place. The conviction that I had broken through into a new form of perception was almost overwhelming.

Outside my door, I thought I heard a tiny sound from inside. I turned the key quietly and pushed the door inwards. I had left the curtains closed, but it was past midday and the sun was bright, casting a sparse light about the room. In my haste, I had left my collection of bloodied knives and a saw in my open leather bag. A bloodied cloth lay draped over the side of it. The entire arrangement sat beneath my latest painting. Standing a few feet from the bag and the canvas, close to the middle of the room, was Archibald Thomson.