The Night of the Ripper

~ TWENTY-TWO ~

Police Constable Watkins found the body.

At one-thirty he’d passed through Mitre Square on patrol; the tea warehouses lining it on two sides were dark, the dwellings facing them were empty and the square itself was deserted. Fastening his lantern to his belt he continued on his rounds. Watkins kept his eyes and ears open as he walked but all was quiet. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, and the beat was a short one; fifteen minutes later he had already retraced his route and returned to the square.

It was then, as he entered, that he saw the woman lying on her back in the shadows of the southwest corner.

She wore a black straw bonnet over her dark auburn hair, a black cloth jacket, a thin white vest, a linsey-woolen skirt and a dark green print dress with a pattern of daisies beneath the outer clothing. Brown ribbed stockings and a pair of men’s laced boots encased her feet, while a piece of a coarse white apron and a bit of ribbon were tied loosely around her neck. Obviously she’d taken precautions to protect herself from the chill of the night.

But nothing had protected her from the cold steel of the knife.

She lay on her back with both arms extended, the left leg straight and the right bent at the knee. Her upturned face was a Hallow’een horror; part of the nose had been cut off, the lobe of her right ear nearly severed and both lower eyelids were nicked. Her cheeks, jaw and lips were gashed, and the throat beneath opened in a yawning crimson cavity from ear to ear.

The knife had not halted there. Her upper garments bunched above her breasts to expose the naked flesh below. She’d been disemboweled; the intestines were pulled out and draped over her right shoulder, with a detached segment lying beside the left arm. The pavement beneath the body was bathed in blood.

Police Constable Watkins wasted no time. Remembering there was a night watchman on duty inside one of the tea warehouses, he ran over and banged on the door, then pushed it open as the man appeared. “For God’s sake, mate, come to my assistance,” he cried. “There’s another woman cut to pieces.”

The Acting Police Commissioner for the City of London was Major Henry Smith. At two o’clock he was notified of the crime at the Cloak Lane station; by the time he arrived on the scene with three detectives and an inspector the hunt was under way. In the hours that followed a series of shocking discoveries were made.

The first surprise came when Smith viewed the corpse. In spite of the mutilations, detectives identified her as a woman who’d been found lying drunk in Aldgate Street earlier that evening and taken to the Bishopgate police station. Sober again shortly after midnight, she was released from her cell and sent on her way. Sometime within the next forty-five minutes she’d met her murderer.

Major Smith took over. After Dr. Blackwell had arrived and examined the body, he ordered the corpse removed to the city mortuary. The contents of the victim’s pockets offered no immediate clues, and Smith was much more interested now in tracing the killer’s possible escape route. He sent his men off to search the surrounding area, knocking on doors and stopping every passerby in the streets.

One of the detectives made a discovery; he came rushing back and led Smith to confront surprise number two.

In a narrow close off Dorset Street a public sink bubbled with red-streaked water. A few telltale drops still remained when Smith reached it. “The murderer must have stopped here on the run to wash his hands,” the detective said. “The way I see it—”

He was interrupted as another searcher came up to Major Smith.

“You’re wanted over in Goulston Street, sir,” he shouted. “Constable Long’s just found something there.”

What he’d found was a piece of the victim’s white apron, soaked with blood. Dr. Blackwell had noticed that a piece had been missing, obviously hacked off by the killer’s knife. And here it was, lying beside a passageway — surprise number three.

But as Major Smith appeared on the scene another surprise claimed his full attention.

Behind the spot where the bloodstained piece of apron lay, a dark doorway loomed. On its black dado wall were three lines scrawled in chalk. Smith stared at the message.

The words were still there at five o’clock when Sir Charles Warren arrived. Major Smith waited for him with City Police Inspector MacWilliams and two detectives.

Warren studied the message through his monocle, then scowled.

“Rub it out.” he said.

Major Smith had suffered enough surprises over the past few hours, and this one was the final straw. “But Sir Charles — this is important evidence! I’ve ordered one of my men to fetch a camera, and as soon as it’s daylight we’ll photograph the writing—”

“Daylight be damned!” Warren plucked his monocle free and gestured with it. “We can’t wait any longer. There’s a Sunday morning market at Petticoat Lane, and the costers will be up and about in a few minutes now. If any of them catch sight of a message like this we’ll have race riots on our hands.”

“Might I make a suggestion, sir?” One of the detectives spoke softly. “If it’s the Jews you’re worried about, couldn’t we just rub out the first line? Maybe only the one word—”

Warren shook his head. “I’ll not take chances. Wipe it out, man — all of it!”

The detective hesitated and Major Smith stepped forward.

“Begging your pardon, Sir Charles, but I’m in charge here and I refuse to permit this.”

“Blast your permission!” Warren roared. “You city police have authority over Mitre Square, but this street is under metropolitan jurisdiction. I give the orders here, and I want that writing removed — immediately!”

The detective glanced at his superior, but Major Smith made no sign. Warren turned to Inspector MacWilliams and the other detective; neither man moved.

“Insubordination, is it?” Warren’s face was grim. “If that’s your game, I’ll wipe out the bloody thing myself!”

And he did.

But no one could wipe out the message published in the papers.

“TWO MORE EAST END ATROCITIES,” was the headline in The Daily Chronicle, “HORRIBLE MURDER OF A WOMAN IN COMMERCIAL ROAD EAST. A WOMAN MURDERED AND MUTILATED IN ALDGATE. GREAT EXCITEMENT.”

Among those excited was John Montague Druitt, a barrister who tutored at a boy’s school in Blackheath. He also maintained chambers at King’s Bench Walk in London, and frequently spent weekends there when not playing cricket. It was a healthful outdoor sport, beneficial to the mind and spirit, and the doctors recommended it as an excellent remedy for melancholia.

But what did they know of melancholia? What did they know about how it felt to fail at law, fail at teaching, fail even in normal relationships with the fair sex?

Druitt read the news and the moming sunlight disappeared as angry clouds of memory descended. He’d set up practice here with no success; he’d turned to teaching and that wasn’t working out well either, not with those unkind rumors circulating about him and some of the younger boys. As for women, it was they who had failed him. The female is indeed deadlier than the male; he remembered the cutting remarks, the piercing laughter, the wounds of rejection. Even his own mother had failed him, for the recent news of her confinement in a mental institution was like the stab of a knife.

Sometimes he tried to put all this out of his mind, and lately it seemed to him that he’d succeeded only too well. There were gaps in his memory, whole days and nights he couldn’t quite account for. Last night, for instance; where had he been last night?

Was it all a dream? Like the trip to Venice where the funeral barge floated on the water — a black gondola gliding through the oozing slime of the canal?

Melancholia. That was his mother’s affliction, that’s why they put her away, and now there were times when she couldn’t remember. Was that to be his fate?

Somehow the accounts in the newspaper brought back the failures and the fears, but last night was still a blank. Why did he keep thinking about knives?

Reading about the murders, John Montague Druitt wondered if he was going mad…

A Polish refugee named Severin Klosowski read the paper too but he was not mad. To rise to the rank of feldscher, a doctor’s assistant in the army of His Imperial Highness, Czar of Russia, calls for the keenest intelligence, and his was razor-sharp. Just because his command of English was not yet perfect, just because he’d been reduced to odd jobs of barbering, these stupid clods in Whitechapel took him for a fool; even the whores laughed at him. But there were ways to pay them back for their ridicule. They might mistrust his appearance, his bushy mustache and foreign dress, and make fun of his accent, but he knew a trick or two. Like the little one he played, showing them two polished farthings in the dark, which they mistook for sovereigns. In the end he always got what he was after; one way or another, he had his revenge.

No, he was not mad, merely clever. More clever than all the whores and all the police put together. It was just that these newspapers made trouble for him with their stories about suspicious foreigners. Perhaps the time had come to think about moving on. If he could speak the language better maybe he would change his name and go to America. He was already learning American slang and that would help. There were a few whores less in London now, but America was a different story — didn’t they call it the Land of Opportunity?

Yes, a clever man could find opportunities there, of that he was certain. Meanwhile he must be careful. Careful and clever. No one would ever get the best of Severin Klosowski — not if he took pains to sharpen his wits the way a skillful feldscher sharpens his knife…

There were some who missed the morning newspapers because they slept. Dr. Trebor was one of them; he didn’t get around to reading a report until late in the afternoon. And it was then, in the Evening News, that he read the story which sent him into shock.

The Central News Agency gives us the following information, namely, that on Thursday last a letter bearing the EC postmark, directed in red ink, was delivered at their agency.

Dr. Trebor wasn’t amused.

Neither was Mark, who read the same story in his own newspaper that evening. His dismay was not lessened as he scanned the rest of the account.

According to the story, another message — this time on a postcard bearing the cancellation stamp “London E. October 1,” had been received today. It too had been written in red ink, in the same style of handwriting.

Mark remembered last night only too well. It had been a “double event,” just as the postcard promised. And the killer “couldn’t finish” the disfigurement of the first victim. He “had no time to get ears for police”—but the paper stated that one of the second victim’s ears was nearly cut off.

None of these details appeared in the morning press, but the card had already been mailed. Unless one of the police or onlookers was a practical joker, this message came from the murderer himself.

Jack the Ripper. So now they knew his name.

Mark shuddered…

Others saw the same story, but they didn’t shudder.

Dr. Forbes Winslow prayed.

Sir Charles Warren cursed.

And Jeremy Hume laughed.