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

Chapter 6

The administrative headquarters for the London police was situated among other unimposing gray buildings surrounding a barren courtyard. The one exception to the drab scene was a large, well-appointed barouche parked in front, the letters CW carved in gilt on its door. William assumed the barouche belonged to Sir Charles Warren, the London police commissioner.

As William entered the foyer of the building, he noted that the paint was peeling from the walls, and the gas fixture on the ceiling was crooked and emitted very little light. The general air of shoddiness surprised him. In America, the police headquarters for a major city, no less the country’s capital, would be immaculately maintained, a signal to the citizenry of a zealous and energetic attitude toward the eradication of crime.

“I’m here to see Commissioner Warren,” he explained to the officer seated behind a battered desk.

“Sir Charles is in conference,” the officer responded curtly, barely glancing up from his paperwork.

William took a step forward and cleared his throat. “I am Professor James of Harvard College with an appointment to meet with Sir Charles Warren. I have just made the crossing from America at his request.”

The response was immediate. “Terribly sorry, sir!” The officer pushed his papers aside and spoke obsequiously. “I’ll inform Sir Charles at once.” He scampered off, supporting William’s hypothesis that, for the English, the propensity to be supercilious was equaled by the propensity to grovel, and that both behaviors emanated from the same place.

The man returned quickly and ushered William into a room very different in its appearance from the shabby outer area. Two men were seated at a polished mahogany table. There were gilt-framed portraits on the walls and a green and gold damask drape on the window. The table had been set out with a silver tray, on which was placed a bottle of whiskey and an assortment of sandwiches.

The man at one end of the table had a red face, a large, overly waxed mustache, and a well-tailored uniform with a profusion of ribbons and medals. He was seated comfortably in an upholstered chair, pouring himself a glass of whiskey as though he was in his club or at home in his drawing room. William was reminded of the pictures he’d seen of British officers camping out in style in the African bush.

On the other end of the table sat a small man with a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore shirtsleeves slightly worn at the cuffs. It was hard to tell from his expression what he was thinking, but his back was very straight, and there was the slightest suggestion, given his position on the edge of the chair, that he wished to be off doing something else.

“Ah, the American professor,” said the large man, raising himself partially from his seat and extending a hand, not very far, so that William had to lean forward to reach it. “Charles Warren here. We greatly appreciate your willingness to cross the Atlantic to assist us. I was just telling Inspector Abberline here that we would do well to send more men to interrogate in the East End, where, I’m sure, our perpetrator lurks in some tawdry hovel or musty cellar. My own speculation leads me to assume that he is a barber or perhaps an indigent surgeon or butcher, given the testimony of Dr. Phillips, our esteemed police surgeon, on the expert way in which these poor women were dispatched.”

William thought he saw a grimace skim the features of Abberline.

“Be that as it may, our attorney general has instructed us to pursue even the more remote avenues of possibility. To this end, we sent for you. Inspector Abberline spoke highly of your work in…the area in which you work…and assures me that your expertise could, conceivably, be helpful. We must, in short, leave no stone unturned.”

William nodded his head. “Your obedient stone,” he said gravely and caught a flicker of amusement cross the face of Abberline.

“What’s that?” said Warren, who had been refilling his glass, which he raised to William before he could respond. “Some spirits, sir, after your arduous journey?”

“No, thank you,” said William. “Given that I am on an abbreviated visit, I should like to begin work on the case at once.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Warren. “Inspector Abberline will tell you everything you need to know. You have my full approval to go anywhere and see anything. If nothing else, you will be able to report that you have been privy to the inner workings of the famed Scotland Yard. And don’t feel undue pressure with regard to the case. It’s a knotty one, you know, and if we do not solve it, it means only that it cannot be solved.” At this, Warren rose to leave. “I am at your disposal, sir, should you need me,” he said, “but Abberline here is a capable second.” He gave a short nod in the direction of the inspector, who also rose from his chair. “No, stay where you are.” Warren waved regally. “I shall have your men show me out.”

As soon as he was gone, Abberline, who had seemed frozen in his upright posture until now, jumped up with alacrity and strode over to the closet, where he took out his coat. “I will take you to see her if you like.”

“What’s that—who do you mean?” asked William.

“Catherine Eddowes,” said Abberline brusquely. “The last victim. You can still see her. She’s been on ice for more than a week, and they plan to bury her tomorrow. It won’t be pretty, but as you’re a scientist with medical training, I thought it would be useful. I’m going over to the mortuary now.”

William expressed eagerness to accompany the inspector and, after a short hansom cab ride, found himself walking through the dank halls of the London morgue. He was not unfamiliar with morgues. While in medical school, he had been lectured on muscular disease at the Boston City Morgue, and on the process of rigor mortis at the morgue of Harvard Medical School. But both places had been relatively benign settings, more reminiscent of a hospital or a laboratory, with scrubbed floors and whitewashed walls.

The London morgue was entirely different. The building was in a state of extreme decrepitude, the stone walls crumbling and mildewed. As William followed Abberline through the dingy corridors, a feeling of oppressive gloom descended on him. Hard as he tried to push the image from his mind, he was reminded of the nightmarish episode of his youth, when, lying in bed, he had sensed the presence of a monstrous creature, the very embodiment of undiluted evil, lurking in the corner of his room. That creature, though a figment of his deranged mind, had resembled a real figure he had once seen as a child, and that had impressed itself indelibly in his memory. He had been walking with his father on a street in New York when he had noticed a young man, practically naked, huddled at the side of a building. The man was shivering and covered with sores, and when they had approached nearer and were about to pass him by, the man had suddenly bared his teeth and growled with animal ferocity, turning his face upward so that it seemed to engulf William’s vision. The image had engraved itself on his consciousness, so that he never forgot it. It had returned in his illness and, since then, had presented itself to his imagination as what the devil must look like, the devil in the form of a ferociously desperate and suffering human being.

It was just such a figure, he thought now, that had lain in wait for the poor women of Whitechapel, and he was about to see one of these women after she had been visited by this diabolical creature.

For a moment, he felt prompted to tell Abberline that he must turn back; he could not view the body after all. But as soon as the thought occurred to him, he knew that he would not act on it. His fears were psychic phantasms, and horrifying though they were, his rational will could dispel them. If he could face down his imaginary demons, then he could face the remnants left by what a real one had done.

The main area of the morgue was poorly lit, the air heavy with the odor of must and incipient rot. Death was palpable, not just in fact but in that more pervasive sense that reached out to include oneself. One felt not only that the people taken here were once alive and now were dead, but that this would be one’s own fate too. It was rare that one believed, more than abstractly, that death would come, but here one understood, felt in one’s bones and sinews the inevitability and certainty of it.

In the large dim room, two bodies were in the process of being “prepared.” One, a young woman who had drowned, lay on a wooden plank, her nightgown still tangled with her limbs. Her long, lank hair covered most of her face. The very struggle that she had endured in the act of dying was there, dramatically rendered in her face and body. The other, an old man, lay on a table, wholly exposed to view. He was being washed down like a side of beef by an emaciated young man with an iron around his leg.

“Who’s that?” asked William, glancing at the man, who appeared to be neither a nurse nor an orderly.

“One of our convicted felons,” said Abberline matter-of-factly. “They do the rounds of mortuary duty, cleaning the corpses and whatnot.”

William looked surprised. “Are they trustworthy for matters of such…delicacy?”

“That’s debatable.” Abberline shrugged. “If I could, I would discontinue the practice, but it’s been mandated by Sir Charles as the most efficient use of criminal labor. It’s had some unfortunate repercussions in this case, I should note. I was not here when the first victim was brought in, and it seems she was washed and her clothes discarded, valuable evidence lost. Since then, I’ve given strict orders that nothing be touched or done away with, but these people have a tendency to ignore what they’re told.”

William looked with distaste at the disreputable fellow washing the corpse and gazed around the room, with its worn and grimy appurtenances.

Abberline nodded, following William’s gaze. “Yes, the facility is not good. But changes in this area happen slowly here. We make do with what we have. Step this way, please.”

He led William through a small recess to another room, where bodies that needed to be specially photographed for purposes of record keeping were displayed before being removed for burial. This room was even more oppressive than the outer area, the sense of claustrophobic enclosure added to the foul odor of rotting corpse. As William entered, he noted that a curtain had been hung in the corner. Abberline walked over to it and then motioned to a chair in front for William to be seated.

“Best to get off your feet for this,” he noted. “It’s not a pretty sight, and I’ve found that viewers take it better sitting down.”

William sat, and Abberline pulled the curtain.

The image took a few seconds to take in. At first it looked like a fancy leather jerkin was hanging from a hook, but a moment brought the recognition that it was not a coat, but a body suspended from a collar around the neck. It was Catherine Eddowes, who had been hung in this way for the purpose of photographic recording. What made the body hard to identify was the maze of stitching, where it had been reassembled, in light of the extensive slashing. Black thread crisscrossed the abdomen and breasts, the neck, and most grotesquely, the face, delineating the gashes that the murderer had made under the eyes. There was a zigzag of black thread at the left side of the head as well, where a severed ear had been reattached.

“As you see, she was cut up considerably,” said Abberline without inflection. “None of the others were so extreme.”

“Do you agree with Warren, that the cuts show…facility…in the use of a knife?” asked William haltingly, after taking a few seconds to gain his bearings. He concentrated his attention on the crisscross of stitches on the abdomen of Eddowes’s body, which struck him, despite his limited experience with surgery, to be excessive for the purpose of removing internal organs.

Abberline walked over to the body and paused. “No,” he said finally. “This is not the work of a trained surgeon or even a butcher. The cuttings are not directed toward the excision of the organs, though that is the result. They are largely gratuitous, vicious, and undirected, as far as I can see.”

“But they seem to reflect a certain pattern,” said William, forcing himself to stand and move closer to the body to examine the stitching, which seemed to move out in spokes from the navel. He kept his head down and tried to take small breaths from his mouth, not wanting Abberline to see that the mixture of the odor and the image before him was making him faint and nauseated.

“It’s true the lines repeat themselves here,” said Abberline, his finger tracing the parallel lines of the stitching, “almost like the killer were stabbing rhythmically, operating in a trance or a methodical sort of frenzy, which I suppose would conform to a certain style of lunacy. It’s what may have caused the medical examiner to assume some sort of medical expertise. The slashes under the eyes, too, are symmetrical, and for no apparent reason. Dr. Phillips postulates that he may have had in mind removing the eyeballs, but then the slashes would have been higher up, and gouging rather than slashing would have been in order.”

“It’s a ghastly sort of evisceration,” noted William, standing back and forcing himself to gaze squarely at the grotesque spectacle of the hanging body. “Perhaps the goal was to appall future viewers. Like us.”

“It’s possible.” Abberline nodded. “The letters suggest an inclination to frighten and taunt. It’s confusing and one of the reasons I thought that your psychological expertise might be of help.”

William looked at Abberline and felt a wave of affection course through him. He knew that a portion of his regard for other people came from knowing that they held him in regard. He also knew he was not unique in this; most people responded well to those who responded well to them. It was how bonds beyond the family were established and how altruistic action often received its impetus. “I will do what I can,” he promised.

The two men stood silently staring at the body before them. So strong was the underlying force of human physiognomy that, despite the massive mutilation, William felt he could discern what Catherine Eddowes had once looked like. She was about his age, in her early to midforties, and would have been an attractive enough sort of person, correcting for poor nourishment and dissipation. Indeed, it struck William, as he gazed at the figure before him, that he could make out not only what this person had once looked like as a woman, but also what she had looked like as a child before that. Perhaps he saw the child in the woman’s corpse because his dead son was so present to his imagination. Or perhaps it was having just seen his sister and having recalled the child she once had been behind the bedridden woman she had become.

It occurred to him as well that Catherine Eddowes might have been such a child as his sister, a little girl who tagged behind an older brother, pushed aside when other, more enticing forms of entertainment diverted his attention. Girl children were often neglected and ignored, so it might have been with Katie Eddowes (hadn’t the sign referred to her that way?), but with the added element of poverty to degrade her. As she grew older and began to develop as a woman, she would have been drawn to men for money and a fleeting sense of intimacy; the inevitable abuse would have followed. In her squalor and desperation, she would have turned routinely to strangers, and finally, to one who might have seemed kinder and more interested than usual. This man would have led her into a dark alley, where suddenly, his gentleness disappeared: a vicious look in the eye, a glint of a knife, and then the sudden pain of being cut, before the blankness of unconsciousness set in.

An imagined life and death for this woman flashed through William’s mind, and he recalled the placard over the pail: “Arms for her chilren.” If she had had children, where were they? Would they know that their mother was a grotesquely stitched corpse hanging from a hook in a London morgue?

He sat back down on the chair, leaning forward, his head in his hands, knowing that he was close to being sick.

Abberline stood respectfully silent for a few minutes. Finally he spoke in what was a surprisingly passionate tone for a man normally so formal and inexpressive. “It makes you wonder about the nature of human beings,” he said. “Made in the image of the divine, they tell us in church, but no God made the one who did this.”

William looked up. For all the disgust he felt at the image before him, he was roused to oppose Abberline’s words. “I must differ with you there,” he asserted with surprising force. “It is my conviction that a divine spirit exists in us all, which transcends—even redeems—such viciousness.”

Abberline gave a dry laugh. “I’d like to believe you,” he said, closing the curtain on Catherine Eddowes’s corpse, “but I can’t say I do.”