What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Chapter 20

No sooner did William walk in the door of Henry’s flat than his brother announced that a man had been by to report an arrest in the Whitechapel murders. William was half inclined to ignore the message. He was tired from his journey and had become familiar with false leads and the sort of mistakes the police were prone to make. He had just spent the day with Abberline, who had not mentioned that anyone was under investigation. And since when would a serious suspect be apprehended when the inspector was out of the office?

Henry insisted that the man had come directly from Abberline, though, who had made a point of requesting that William report to police headquarters at once to observe the interrogation.

When William arrived at Scotland Yard, he found that, indeed, an interesting scene was in progress. A swarthy young man with disheveled hair, hollow cheeks, and dark, flashing eyes stood flanked by two officers in one corner. He was wearing a long, shabby coat that suggested that he was a university student, a Jew, or an anarchist, and since the uniform of these groups overlapped, the young man could conceivably belong to all three.

On the other side of the room, some four or five officers were attending to an older man in uniform with a puffed-up manner. He was barking orders, and they were scurrying in and out of the room, handing him notes and official documents.

In the midst of this scene, William spotted Abberline seated alone in a corner. He walked over to the inspector. “Is it possible that you have a suspect?” he asked.

“I don’t have a suspect,” replied Abberline testily, “but our assistant commissioner, Sir Robert Anderson, apparently does. He has just come back from the Continent and assumed control of the case. Commissioner Warren is perfectly satisfied to hand over the reins, so long as he isn’t bothered. The result is that Sir Robert,” Abberline spit out the honorific, “has arrested someone who suits the cut of his prejudices. I thought you might find his methods of interest, given your work in psychological deviance.”

He made this assertion with a sneer but seemed disinclined to say more, and William felt it best to leave him alone and mix among the officers nearby. He did this, as he sometimes did at professional meetings when he wished to get a sense of prevailing opinion or pick up salient facts. He walked about with an indifferent air, peering casually over the shoulders of the milling officers, glancing at the documents in their hands, and eavesdropping on their conversation.

After an interval of perhaps a quarter of an hour, Anderson suddenly spoke to the assembled group. “Welcome, gentlemen,” he began in the pompous, affected tone that William had come to associate with higher ranking officials in this country. “In the short time I have been back on English soil, I am pleased to have made significant headway in the Whitechapel case that, until now, has baffled some of our allegedly best officers.” He glanced superciliously at Abberline, who glared back at him. It was clear that the two men loathed each other.

“I now present to you Mr. Benjamin Cohen, a suspect whom we apprehended only this morning.” Anderson gestured with a flourish in the direction of the young man in the long coat who had been led to the center of the room.

“Upon what evidence do you arrest this man?” demanded Abberline angrily.

Anderson turned to the inspector and spoke slowly, as though to a dimwit. “A plethora of evidence, sir, which I will now enumerate for you.” He gave a nod to one of his officers, who handed him a sheet of paper. “First, Mr. Cohen’s knowledge of medicine. He is said to have helped a local physician with stitching and dressings and to have accompanied the local midwife on some of her cases.”

Abberline mumbled under his breath, “No good deed goes unpunished,” but Anderson ignored him and moved on. “Secondly, Mr. Cohen has frequented Zionist meetings and, not satisfied with the extreme forbearance of our government toward his people, has protested at various rallies regarding what he deems the ill use of his race. This deep-seated hostility toward Christian society conforms to the message that was written on the wall near the site of the Eddowes murder.”

Abberline seemed about to speak, but Anderson continued without pause.

“Thirdly, there is the suspect’s socially incendiary tendencies. I have the exhibits here of the books found in his room.” He again nodded to the officer next to him and was handed a number of books that he held up by way of demonstration. “Darwin, Marx, Fourier. He is also a member of a Masonic society and is a known freethinker.”

Abberline muttered, “First a religious zealot; now a freethinker,” but was ignored.

“Finally,” pronounced Anderson, casting a triumphant glance at Abberline, “we have an irrefutable piece of material evidence in our possession.” He motioned in the direction of another officer, who came forward and handed him an envelope. Anderson opened it and extracted its contents. “I will pass among you these two photographs, one that was found on the premises of Mr. Cohen’s business and the other that you may recognize from the newspapers if you did not see it here already.”

He handed the photographs to the officer to his right, who passed them to Abberline. He and William looked down at the photographs together.

The first was of a woman seated on a chair. She was naked, though her posture was rather formal and unrevealing, the body positioned sideways, so that only one breast was discernible, and the legs crossed in what might even seem like a prudish posture. The face, however, was turned directly to the camera and registered no embarrassment. The woman was not pretty and not young, but her expression commanded attention, as though, for the purposes of the photograph, she held herself in some esteem.

The other photograph was of a woman stretched out on a slab in the London morgue, her eyes closed, her head thrown back. A line of stitches across the throat indicated where the head, almost severed by the knife’s incision, had been stitched back into place. It was not immediately evident that the two photographs were of the same woman, but a moment’s inspection made clear that they were. It was Polly Nichols.

Anderson stood in smug silence as the photographs were passed around the room. Finally, he spoke again. “If more evidence is needed, we also have a witness. Mr. Nathan Rosenzweig, greengrocer, has provided us with an excellent description of the man who conferred with Polly Nichols on the night of her murder. ‘A thin individual, five foot seven or five foot eight, with dark hair.’ Benjamin Cohen to the letter. We have Mr. Rosenzweig here to make the identification.”

A small, neatly dressed man had been led into the room and was pushed forward.

“You saw the perpetrator speaking to Polly Nichols on the night of her murder?” asked Anderson.

The man looked about him nervously. “I saw someone speaking to someone who might have been Polly. I knew her only in passing. She sometimes sold flowers near the Aldgate Market. Can’t say I knew her.”

“But you thought it was Polly.”

“It might have been Polly. She weren’t the most distinctive-looking girl, and it was dark.”

“And you saw the perpetrator talking to her,” said Anderson, ignoring this caveat.

“I saw her talking to a gentleman. Whether or not he was the perpetrator is another matter,” clarified Rosenzweig.

“A somewhat slight individual of medium stature, dark hair.”

“I suppose that’s right,” said Rosenzweig sulkily.

“This man?” The assistant inspector pointed to Cohen.

Rosenzweig looked at the suspect for a moment. “The man I saw was light complected,” he finally noted. “This man is dark.”

“You said he had dark hair.”

“Dark hair, but fair skin,” Rosenzweig insisted. “It’s not an unusual combination.”

“It is unusual among your people!” snapped Anderson and then motioned for the suspect and the witness to be ushered from the room. Once they were gone, he blithely addressed the gathering. “I rest my case, gentlemen. The final proof is in this man’s recanting of his former testimony in the face of a Jewish perpetrator. It is clear that he knows the man is guilty but will not turn against one of his own race.”

William had been watching Abberline’s face as Anderson made his comments and could see that it had gone from being very pale to very red and that his lips were trembling with anger. He seemed about to voice his objections and, one could tell by the livid expression on his face, that the result would be impolitic—or worse.

William cleared his throat and rose to his feet. “Excuse me for interfering, sir.” He addressed Anderson with exaggerated deference, having found that a bumbling manner, when combined with his gangly, unkempt appearance, could disarm more belligerent sorts of people. “Do you know me? I don’t know if you do, but I’m Professor James from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was summoned here to help with this case by Sir Charles Warren, who seems, for reasons I hardly warrant, to have a high opinion of my abilities.” He shrugged and assumed a puzzled air, as if to demonstrate his humility.

“My professional expertise is in the new field of psychology, which is, you know, something we Americans have pioneered in our limited sort of way. Seeing as I’m here at some expense to your government and would want to be of help, I feel inclined to make a few observations and pose a few questions, if you’ll indulge me.” He looked around innocently, and as no one said anything, proceeded. “First, it would be helpful in the case of an identification of a suspect to arrange a line of men of similar general appearance from whom he might be picked out. It’s something we’ve learned to do regularly on our side of the Atlantic, seeing as we have so much experience with violent criminals, ours being a more lawless and uncivilized society.”

He paused, allowing this observation to sink in, and then continued. “Could you tell me Mr. Cohen’s business?” He had overheard certain details relating to the investigation while mixing among the officers earlier that he now judged to be relevant.

The officer holding the folder coughed before responding. “He is a bookseller,” he finally said.

“A bookseller?” William lifted an eyebrow and looked around him in mock surprise, wondering, as he did so, if he ought to have pursued a career in the law (it was one of the few professions he had not considered, which, by itself, was something to recommend it).

The officer felt prompted to add, “There are quite a number of small book dealers in the Jewish quarter of the Whitechapel district.”

“I see,” said William, nodding encouragingly. “And where was the photograph found?”

The officer coughed again. “It had been found in one of the books in his shop.”

“A book that was for sale?”

The officer acknowledged that it had been in a book for sale.

William appeared to ruminate on this fact for a moment. “It would be odd, don’t you think, for a criminal to place on sale a book with a photograph of his victim in it?” he finally queried no one in particular. “And why were you looking through the books?” he asked abruptly.

There was a good deal of shifting and murmuring among the officers attached to Anderson.

“We were seeking evidence of the man’s conspiratorial activity,” said the officer under interrogation. “He had been involved in a protest against labor practices at a London factory, and we had been asked by the proprietor to investigate.”

“An employee labor squabble, of course.” William nodded. “And you have hit on an excellent pretext to put him out of commission as an agitator for workers’ rights.” He delivered this last observation with a bluntness that he had not displayed until now.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Anderson angrily, “but that is an unwarranted supposition.”

“I beg your pardon,” said William, resuming his previous humble tone. “What I meant to say is that it seems perfectly logical to assume that someone who agitates in one area might have socially aberrant impulses in another. I myself would have assumed as much until I became involved in psychological studies that contradict it. But our research has shown that the social protester, though an impediment to many established interests in society, is of quite a different mental composition from the psychopath. As to the witness you brought forward to support the identification, he never pretended to have seen either the victim or the perpetrator clearly.”

“The clannishness of these people is well-known,” insisted Anderson, whose face had grown as red as Abberline’s.

“Again, that sort of supposition is subject to debate. Indeed, to rely on it is likely, in my opinion, to instigate an insurgency among the Jewish population of the East End that might prove inconvenient and costly to your government.”

“You doubt that the perpetrator is a Jew?”

“Yes,” said William, assuming an authoritative tone. “I believe that the writing near the murder site is the result of Jew baiting rather than Jewish conspiracy.” He had, in fact, as Alice had recommended, queried a professor of Hebraic studies at the University of London as well as a local pawnbroker and been told that the misspelling of Jews had no correlation to any secret spelling in the annals of the race.

Anderson glared at William for a moment and then turned to the officer on his left. “Let Cohen go, but put him under watch. We will see where it leads us,” he instructed curtly and then gave a stiff nod, turned, and left the room, a phalanx of officers following sheepishly at his heels.

As soon as they were gone, Abberline stood up and shook William’s hand. “You have saved me from an outburst that might have ruined my career.”

William brushed aside his thanks, but Abberline insisted on explaining the reasons for his anger. Sir Robert Anderson had a deep-seated distrust of Jews and Catholics and had devoted his career in government to blocking parliamentary efforts to give these groups a greater voice. He had been involved in the false implication of Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders in an effort to thwart Irish Home Rule. His present vendetta against Cohen was probably connected to discrediting the admission of Jews to Parliament. “These people have a network of spies and coconspirators,” Abberline concluded. “Anderson has ties to the foreign office and is probably fed much of his material through that channel.”

William recalled that Mrs. Lancaster, the medium, was married to someone in the foreign office; she too had tried to finger a Jewish subject, although there had also been that odd moment when she veered off from this line, almost, it seemed, against her will. He could not forget her insistence on the killer’s stained fingers.

His thoughts turned to the nude photograph of Polly Nichols. He remembered the odd expression on the face of the woman in that picture who would become Jack the Ripper’s first victim. He was now convinced, with Abberline and Mrs. Lancaster, that Polly was the first, not the second. Despite her nakedness, she had looked dignified, even proud, in the photograph, not the usual expression of a prostitute who sold her body for money. William sensed this piece was important, though he did not know why. Where was the photograph taken? Who had taken it? And how had it gotten into Benjamin Cohen’s shop?

“The picture of Polly Nichols—I want to study it,” he said to Abberline. “And the address of Benjamin Cohen. Could you please make it available to me?”

It seemed he would get his chance to visit the bookstalls of Whitechapel after all.