“I hope you have plenty of adjectives in your little pouch, Reporter Jeb,” said Inspector Collard. “You’ll need every last one of them.”
Though normally I enjoy badinage and consider myself more than adequate at the quick riposte, I did not have enough oxygen left to consider such a thing. The air seemed thick, and the more I inhaled, the more reluctant it was to inflate my lungs.
“But the face is for show. It’s really the gut that’s remarkable,” said Collard coolly. “Had a bit of the fray in earlier days in Africa and saw enough of this kind of butcher’s work done on the wogs we loosed our Gatlings upon to last me forever. This poor daisy looks like someone blew off a three-pounder in her stomach.”
The allusion to explosion was apposite. Indeed, not a bomb but a human stick of dynamite called Jack the Ripper had blown up her belly, pulling, yanking, flinging, cutting out this, that, and the other thing, and when finished, as one could tell from close by, he’d stabbed. And here I go to mute. You can imagine. Actually, you cannot.
But it was now that head cheese Smith and a small retinue showed, and in seconds a tall chap of scientific imperturbability whom I took to be Dr. Brown arrived. He went straight to the body, touched it full-handed, shaking his head, looked up at the man who had to be the first doctor, and nodded.
“I’m guessing not an hour dead,” Brown said. “Maybe not half. She’s still warm as a biscuit. Do you agree, Doctor?”
“Absolutely, though I thought of a bun, not a biscuit. I did no poking about, leaving that for a man who knows his forensics.”
“You did well, Doctor. The crown thanks you. Time of death”—he pulled out his pocket watch—“one-forty A.M.”
“Does it accord, Collard?” asked Smith.
“Perfectly, sir. Constable Watkins found the body at one-forty-four A.M. and whistled; a watchman at Kearley came out, and he puts that notification at one-forty-five. A.M.”
“He killed another bloody woman at one A.M. at Berner Street, or so says the Yard,” said Smith. “You can say this for the bastard, he’s got a fine work habit.”
I was writing that down in the dizzying blur of Pitman when Smith noted me. “Reporter pukka wallah?” he asked me.
“I am,” I said. “Jeb, the Star.”
“Well, favor me by not using the juicy quote I just uttered. It sounds casual, but Peelers see enough of this raw hacking so they usually joke about it on-site. It doesn’t play well with the public.”
“ ‘Commissioner Smith solemnly told the Star that this new murder demanded the utmost in professionalism from all authorities, and pledged to provide it,’ that sort of thing, sir?”
“This man will go a long way. All right, Jeb, stay close, don’t make us look bad, and make no mistakes.”
“He never makes mistakes, sir,” said Collard.
“Yes, the fellow who uncovered the Mystery of Annie’s Rings. How poignant that was. How many extra papers, I wonder, did it sell?”
“My job, sir. That’s all.”
“May I interrupt to point something out that might be a clue?” said the surgeon.
“Good God, a clue! How novel! If you please,” said Smith.
“I note raw hem in the bunched cotton at her neck. May I unbunch it?”
“Why would you not?”
The doctor’s fingers probed the rolled lineaments and glibly separated one sheaf. He unspooled it, being sure to keep it off the body itself, so as not to contaminate it with blood or other fluids. It turned out to be apron or, rather, half an apron. A rather large segment had gone missing.
“A trophy, I wonder?” said Collard.
“Possibly. More like a missing piece of a puzzle,” said Smith. “We could not miss such a thing, nor the shape of what’s missing. Planted somewhere else, it would link sites for some mad reason that only this fellow understands. He likes that we wait, we wonder, and he explains when and if it pleases him. But it is something new; it is a communication. He has a message to put out. That’s why you’re here, Jeb. You explain it to us.”
“Perhaps it’s for himself,” I said. “He has taken organs before but has learned they are perishable. Or he’s eaten them already, with a fine claret and field beans from the South of France. He wishes to have something to cling to, to clutch tight to bosom, to look upon and remember his moment of glory. Something more meaningful than Annie’s famous rings, perhaps, which would carry no texture, no odor, no absorbency.”
“Mad as a monkey,” said Smith. “But in a highly organized way. This is no hot-blooded maniac. It’s something I’ve never encountered. A cold-blooded maniac. I believe he’s got a plan behind all of this.”
It proceeded then at a slow pace. I felt no pressure myself, for it was Sunday early, and the Star didn’t publish on Sunday, which meant my deadline wasn’t until seven A.M. tomorrow, Monday, over twenty-four hours away—so I knew that we had to be thorough, steady, fair, and well organized. The rush to deadline would not be an excuse, although I had yet to make a mistake.
I meandered about Mitre Square. The coppers had let more and more people in, including some of those aforementioned daily reporters. I shared what I had with them—you don’t want your peers hating your guts if it’s not necessary, now, do you?—and they appreciated Jeb’s cooperative nature. I saw that Constable Watkins was freed up and chatted with him, getting good quotations. Sometimes the directness of the nonliterary can be a refreshment. He said she’d been “ripped up like a pig in a market.” Good line, that.
Just when I thought I was done and could get back home, grab some sleep, curse out my mother again, then return to the office refreshed for a long session at the Sholes machine, what should enter the yard but a copper who raced to Smith in alarm.
I could see the jolt of electricity it supplied to the worn-down crew of police executives. Smith seemed especially to pop to life and began shouting orders. I moseyed to Inspector Collard, who seemed in a rush to leave. “I say, what’s it all about?”
“They’ve found the missing apron piece not four blocks off. And the bastard has left us a message.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Diary
September 30, 1888 (cont’d)
I strode through the night, imagining what I’d left behind. It may have been my happiest time in the whole adventure. Again, I had missed apprehension by the width of a hair, so I was feeling invulnerable. I felt my superior intelligence was validated on the grand scale, and in a game against not only my enemies but the entire city of London, from working girls to academic aristocrats. I was on the verge of not merely victory but triumph. I was routing them. They had no idea who and what I was, why I was doing what I was doing, what drove me. The last was important, because without knowledge of it, they assumed I was a chaotic madman and could be caught only by the net of chance, not logic. And all the lists of “suspects”—Jews, Poles, boyfriends, witnesses who lied—published by the newspapers proved that our best minds were hopelessly out of the game.
I eventually reached Goulston Street. It was deserted. By day a buzzing commercial street (the poultry market was thereupon), it was by night closed down, not a beer shop or Judy part of town, and the shuttered costers’ sheds along either side of the street were unpatrolled and locked. I could see piles of fruit behind iron gratings, hear the squawk and bustle of crated chickens that hadn’t been sold and had therefore earned another day of life in their tiny dung-crusted dungeons, smell the shit from the horses as it formed a steady presence on the dirt road. All the pennants—why are market streets usually festooned like medieval jousting tournaments?—hung limp in the moist though not rainy air. It had the feel of a city abandoned by its citizens, who’d fled to jungle or cave to escape a portended doom. Perhaps I was that doom, or at least its harbinger.