The Night of the Ripper

~ FIFTEEN ~

Mark wasn’t the only one who saw the paper. All London was reading the news.

Inspector Joseph Chandler read it with particular interest, because of his own involvement.

At six in the morning he was walking down Commercial Street on his way to the police station when two workmen accosted him. They’d been hailed by an elderly market porter who’d found a dead body lying in the backyard of his lodgings at 29 Hanbury Street.

By the time Chandler arrived there a crowd had already gathered before the house; he fought his way through and ordered his men to keep the yard clear. Then he saw the corpse. He saw it then, he saw it now, and he knew he would see it again in his troubled dreams.

The middle-aged woman with dark brown hair was sprawled before the steps of a passage leading into the yard beside a fence. The victim lay on her back, legs parted in an obscene parody of invitation. Her stomach gaped, open and disemboweled; the intestines were drawn up on her right shoulder, still connected by a cord dangling from her abdomen. Two flaps of lower abdominal skin rested above her left shoulder in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut from behind in a jagged wound that encircled the neck. She wore a handkerchief as a scarf, but that had not protected her from what amounted to partial decapitation.

Chandler couldn’t forget the first sight of that bruised and bloody face, the bulging eyes, the swollen tongue protruding from between yellowed teeth. Thank God the newspapers hadn’t printed the details!

At his orders a constable obtained a piece of canvas from a neighbor and covered the body. Help was summoned, Inspector Abberline was notified, and then he waited.

But not in idleness. Chandler searched the yard. It was unpaved, but he saw no footprints, nor any indentations indicating signs of a struggle. The woman must have been suffocated, then lowered to the ground before the knife was used. He’d found patches of blood, some as large as a sixpence and others mere pinpoint drops, and there were smears on the fence about a foot above the ground. Under the circumstances this was understandable; the puzzle lay elsewhere.

It lay beside the body in the shape of a bit of muslin cloth, possibly a handkerchief, resting next to a comb and a paper case which must have come from the slashed-open pocket under her skirt. It lay beside her feet; the two brass rings torn from her fingers, a few pennies and a couple of new farthings placed there as though in mocking payment for services rendered. It lay at her head as a piece of paper wrapped around two pills, and as part of an envelope. On the back of the envelope was the seal of a Sussex regiment, and on the other side was a London postmark dated August 28th. It lay near the water-tap across the way in the form of a wet leather apron. Pieces of a puzzle, all of them; pieces that made no more sense than the pieces of bloody flesh and internal organs that Chandler would hide from sight but not from the eyes of memory.

When the stretcher arrived the body was carried away to the mortuary by two constables and after that Abberline took charge. Reading about it now, Chandler gave thanks that his role in the affair was ended. Let Dr. Phillips fit these pieces together, or take them apart in his autopsy…

Dr. George Bagster Phillips was too busy to read anything in the papers. Too busy, and too angry.

The whole affair was disgraceful, no other word for it. Twenty-three years as a divisional surgeon of police, and still no adequate provision had been made for him to carry out his duties. How did they expect him to perform a decent examination under conditions like this?

It was bad enough that the borough didn’t have a proper public mortuary; instead he was forced to conduct his autopsy in a make-do shed, with incompetent assistance.

Incompetent? What they did before his arrival was almost criminal. Two nurses had stripped and washed the corpse, just as in the Nicholls affair. He raised a devil of a row with the clerk in charge but there was no help for it now and all he could do was set to work as best he could.

And wicked work it was. The nurses had left one article of apparel untouched — the handkerchief around the neck of the cadaver. Now, when he removed it, the head nearly came clean away. Whoever used the knife had almost succeeded in cutting through the spine.

The murderer had done a more thorough job below. The abdomen had been entirely laid open and the small intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments before being placed on the corpse’s shoulder. But the greatest damage was in the pelvic area; the uterus and its appendages, along with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed.

Obviously it was the work of someone who had enough knowledge of anatomy to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.

As for the knife itself, Dr. Phillips fancied it had to be extremely sharp; not a bayonet or an ordinary butcher’s tool. His findings indicated the use of a thin, narrow blade, probably six to eight inches long. An expert’s weapon, an expert’s skill, but a madman’s deed.

Dr. Phillips made careful notes of his discoveries for future publication in The Lancet. That’s where such information belonged, in a medical journal, not the popular press. Matters were already bad enough without stirring up morbid imaginations…

But the stirring had already started.

In the smoky confines of the Coach And Four Public House, barflies buzzed over the latest news. From early morning on patrons had stopped by to contribute gossip and theory about the “ ’Anbury Street ’Orror.” Some had actually been spectators at the scene, and several already identified the victim as Annie Chapman.

“Dark Annie” they called her, or “Annie Sievey,” seeing as how her husband, the late-lamented, had been a maker of iron sieves. No better than she should be, perhaps, but what’s a poor widow-woman to do? A bit long in the tooth for going on the game, and in and out of the infirmary as well, worse luck.

Tim Donovan said he saw her in the kitchen of the Dorset Street lodging house at two in the morning; skint, she told him, but would he hold a bed for her until she went out and found some nicker for the night? A little the worse for drink, he reckoned, but still walking straight enough as she went off.

And Mrs. Long caught sight of her as late as five-thirty. On her way to Spitalfields Market she was, when the brewer’s clock struck, so no doubt about the time. And no doubt about the man and woman she saw talking on the pavement just outside 29 ’Anbury Street. She’d paid a special visit to the mortuary since, just to ’ave a look-see; the deceased was the same woman and no mistake. Too bad she didn’t give much heed to the man, but she did catch a smidge of their words as she passed by. He said, “Will you?” and she said, “Yes.” No need to be an Oxford graduate to guess what they was up to, but it was none of her affair and she went on down the street. Just to think, if Annie copped it ’arf-an-’our later like the papers said, then she was most likely the last one to set eyes on the pore thing, outside of the murderer. God knows what the dirty devil did to her in the backyard there on ’Anbury Street!

God, and Jerry the publican. He knew because he’d put together all he heard, confiding it to his eager customers.

“They say ’er ’ead was cut clean orf ’er body.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And ’er female orgerns was removed…”

The young man in the frogged morning jacket read the first accounts of the crime while seated over breakfast in the subdued silence of the drawing room. As he scanned the report the thin mouth beneath his mustache twitched and his hands trembled.

Stop it, he told himself. You’re not a child. No reason to act the fool over a newspaper story.

But he took pains to hide the paper in his lap when Watkins brought the tea tray, and he busied himself with a silver crumb-scoop until the butler left. Thank heaven the old fool hadn’t noticed the newspaper; no one must know he read such trash, not Mama or Papa, and certainly not Grandmother. They thought they were shielding him from that sort of thing. No wonder he had to keep reminding himself he wasn’t a child — they still treated him like one.

If so, then why hadn’t they protected him better? Sending him off on that bloody cruise when he was only fifteen, and little George as well, even younger. They had been responsible.

Thinking about the cruise he found himself atremble again, but this time in anger rather than fear. Couldn’t they have foreseen what would happen? The H.M.S. Bacchante—the very name of the vessel was an omen. Warm tropical nights in the West Indies, and his shipmates all tiddly, urging him on.

“Drink up,” they said. “Be a man.” And from that to the inevitable. “You’re not a man until you’ve had a woman.”

Well, he’d had his woman. It was only a lark, slipping ashore after a word with the watch; they’d made all the arrangements in advance. Just a bit of slap-and-tickle, they said, and no harm done.

But harm it was. They didn’t know how he hated it, hated the dark woman in the dark room, hated the dark eyes laughing at him as he fumbled to perform the dark deed. And they didn’t know about the rash.

Only the doctor ever learned about the rash, and he’d kept his secret well. Only the doctor understood what it was like to fall prey to such a horror, to endure the ravages of a vile disease. Sometimes he thought he might go mad, sometimes he thought he was mad, but there was no help for it, one had to keep up appearances.

And it wasn’t hypocrisy to do so. It was they who were the hypocrites, all of them, pretending such things didn’t exist. As if everyone didn’t know about Papa and his women! Not just the actresses, or even the wives of his dearest friends — he did the deed with common courtesans in Paris and all over the Continent. What a farce! How could Papa lower himself like that? The deed itself was loathsome, and the creatures one coupled with were disgusting.

James was the only one who understood. Dear James, so much more than a tutor, so much more than a friend. It was he who helped him find a new life with the artists and free spirits who shared his feelings and his tastes. James was the one who’d made it possible for him to slip away for a night on the town, taught him to dress discreetly — dark clothing, a fore-and-aft cap like the ones so many chaps wore nowadays. Discretion, that was the ticket, not to attract attention like a swell on the randy.

What jolly times they’d had together! Oh, once or twice there’d been a bit of a near thing — that raid on the house in Cleveland Street, for example. One of the lads had blabbed but they managed to hush it up nicely. If only poor James hadn’t suffered that dreadful accident two years ago! Brain injury, they said; laid him up for months.

It was then that he’d started going out on his own, quite alone. It was then that he’d really discovered the East End with all its delicious diversions, its perils and pitfalls, trollops and tarts.

Those damned whores were the worse. Taunting him, baiting him, because somehow they seemed to know what he was after. “Not good enough for the likes of you, eh, dearie? You’re the sort who prefers a touch of backgammon.”

Backgammon. A filthy term from a filthy mouth. What right did scum like these have, mocking him? No wonder he suffered seizures; it was enough to enrage anyone.

But now, after all that had happened, it was time to lay doggo, at least for a while. Presently he might go again, might have to go, just to put matters to the test for his own satisfaction. But he must be awfully, awfully careful lest someone — Mama, Papa, or even Grandmother — found him out.

And that would never do. Not for Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence, son of the Prince of Wales and grandson of Queen Victoria…

“God Save the Queen!” That’s how George Lusk opened the meeting and that’s how he ended it.

He wanted to make it perfectly clear; forming the Vigilance Committee was a patriotic duty. And by the morning of September 10th it had actually become a necessity. This panic in the district, the patrols searching everywhere, the wild accusations and arrests following Annie Chapman’s death, all added up to one thing — the Jews were in danger.

So he summoned them, a group of loyal, innocent people like himself and the local vestrymen, and presented his proposal.

It was the only way, the only sensible way, to combat vicious prejudice. Form a committee of responsible residents, offer full cooperation to the police, make recommendations to the authorities for protection and precautions, arrange for decent private citizens to conduct inquiries on their own and report any and all evidence of suspicious behavior.

As a builder and a respectable member of the community he was willing to chair the Committee; that was a step in the right direction. And they agreed to a further proposal, the posting of a sizeable reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer.

All in all it had been a good day’s work, and George Lusk was satisfied. It was probably too much to hope for that the Committee would actually bring the killer to justice, but at least its formation might achieve his primary purpose and quiet this hysteria about the Jews.

Unless, of course, one of their own proved guilty of the crimes.

Lusk hadn’t mentioned this last possibility to his associates nor did he dare tell anyone. But the hideous hypothesis haunted him; the more he read and heard, the more he wondered if the murderer could be the man whom the newspapers were accusing, a Jew nicknamed “Leather Apron.”

It was to laugh, this “Leather Apron” business. But John Pizer wasn’t laughing.

Ever since they’d found that leather apron in the backyard where the nafke had been killed, there’d been a tsimis going on. At first they thought it belonged to a slaughterman, and then some troublemaker began telling tales, giving those journalists his name.

And for what?

Everyone knew he wasn’t a slaughterman. He was a boot-finisher, that was a fact. Everyone in the trade wore such an apron, so why shouldn’t he have one too? Just because he sometimes wore it on the street the momsers called him “Leather Apron”—but did this prove he was guilty?

They said he hated women, said he had cursed and threatened to attack them. As if that was any of their business what he felt about these corvars or what he did to them. And this they couldn’t prove either.

But he’d guessed what they were thinking and his brother and sister were ready to swear he stayed inside the house with them. From Thursday night until Monday morning he stayed, and then the police came and arrested him.

Sergeant Thicke, he was the one who took him in. A good name for that shmuck—thick in the body, thick in the head. He searched the house and found five knives. Nu, so the knives were long, their blades were sharp; they had to be, for his line of work. Again this proved nothing.

At the Leman Street police station they made him stand in line with others they’d arrested. Then they brought in the stupid women who’d spread gossip about seeing the killer and his victim together and asked them to identify him. None of them could say for sure that he was the man they saw. A man, some crazy foreigner, told about seeing him quarrel with a woman in Hanbury Street before the murder, but even the police admitted he was meshugga.

At the inquest they found out about the leather apron lying in the backyard on the scene of the crime. It belonged to one of the lodgers, John Richardson his name was, and his mother had washed it and left it there.

After that they let him go. And now maybe the worst was over. Maybe he could even sue the newspapers for printing those stories about him. That would put a stop to all this “Leather Apron” foolishness. John Pizer always hated that part the worst. If he had to have a nickname, why couldn’t they just call him “Jack”?