“Who was she?” I uttered.
“Neighbors say a tart named Mary Jane Kelly, among other aliases. A nice enough girl, they say, no need whatsoever to do her up like this.”
“Can she be identified in such condition?”
“We’re looking for a Joe Barnett, paramour, who knew her best. He’ll have to make the identification official. That is, if he’s not the fellow himself.”
“I thought it was a Jack job.”
“Certainly seems as much, but the death cuts are on the right, not the left. Perhaps that’s how he found her and cut her lying down, finding it the easiest way.”
There was a sudden pop! and flare of illumination, as the photographer had finally gotten his kit assembled and in action. The flash device admitted the vapor of burned chemicals, whatever they were, strong enough to make me wince. He set about to take more pictures, snapping plates in and out of the box, adding flash powder to his device and the like.
I bent close and looked into the one undestroyed aspect of her visage, her eyes.
“If you’re looking for the image of her killer, save your effort,” said Abberline rather snippily. “Old wives’ tale. Seen a hundred in my time, no image on any of ’em.”
I stood, shaking my head. The great Jeb, at last with nothing to say.
“All right,” said Abberline, “you’ve had your peek. Now be a good boy and share your findings with your peers and keep them out of my hair while we set about to learn all that can be learned until Dr. Phillips makes his own determinations.”
I was escorted out and set free. I went to the press boys and told them what I had learned, and they appreciated my generosity. Though our papers were at war, we were friends and colleagues at ground level, and I shared what I had, then joined the general scramble to find a phone cabinet and get it off.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Diary
November 11, 1888
I read poor Mary Jane’s letters. Perhaps as an homage to her youth in a reasonably happy family in Wales, she signed them in her Welsh baby name, Mairsian, as Mary Jane translates into that language. They seemed to be to an ideal mother, as her own had abjured contact with her whore daughter, which again seems to me a tragedy. Is not the passion between mother and daughter one of the most intense in human life? It should never be sundered, for the damage it does to both parties is incalculable. It says something for the hideous sanctimony of our age that Mary Jane’s mother cared more for the pressure of society than for any loyalty to the produce of her own loins. A whore daughter was a disgrace, and the poor mum probably sat up nights haunted by ghosts of sexual imagery, which she tried to banish but could not, of what was being done to her daughter by various blackguards and rogues. And yet what is done by them is really, as Mary Jane knew, nothing. It swiftly becomes so routine as to be utterly meaningless.
The Mary Jane revealed is not without interest. She seems bright, though hardly brilliant, at least in her powers of observation and her knowledge of her own self. When I read of her weakness for the taste and blur of gin and how it drove her to destruction, I am not so moralistic (Jack? moralistic?) as to see it as a “weakness,” a flaw that only discipline and punishment can overcome, if one were to make the effort, and since Mary Jane was one of eleven children, no parent could spare the time to make the effort.
Her symptoms seem to me more of a sickness than a weakness. For some reason she needs the drink, it completes her, it fills her with confidence and self-value. Thus it can be treated only with medicine, not moral posture.
Why, in our modern age, has not science created something to relieve the symptoms of alcohol longing? If we can create substances that enslave people—gin, opium, tobacco, laudanum—why can we not create substances to unslave them?
I suppose, now knowing Mary Jane, I wish to construct a dream world in which she was retrieved from her descent, and thus it was not her under the blade of my butcher. She’d had her six kids and was happily married to a mill foreman in Manchester and her brightest boy would go to university, the next would take up a trade, the third would go to service, and the three girls would marry solid men and repeat the cycle. However true that may be, some other unfortunate would have been the subject of my enterprise on November 9, and who’s to say she was more or less deserving of what mad Jack served up that night.
It should come as no surprise that I am by now tired of Jack. His use is at an end. I hope to kill him soon and go on about my life, that is to say, the life I deserve, the life I am destined to have, the life I have so brilliantly contrived and boldly acted to obtain. It’s fine that I feel a little down now. It’s to be expected.
CHAPTER FORTY
Jeb’s Memoir
My prime regret was that I had been so wrong about Major Pullham, and even as we were set to prevent him from getting what he so desired, the actual Jack was stalking Mary Jane. I cursed myself for imposing my prejudice upon Dare’s superior, Holmesian deducting process. I had been a fool to open my mouth.
And all the time I was preening, feeling so brilliant, clever Jack was engineering a carefully wrought scheme: He had to make sure she was alone and asleep, which, it seemed to me, would have involved a careful observation of the site. It’s true she helped him considerably, according to neighbors, by singing until she passed out, alerting any watcher that she was in her dreams and alerting Jack that he had free passage, but again, that information was available only to a careful watcher. It showed all the attributes of the well-planned military mission. Then there was the fact that a few nights before the crime, a barkeep at the Ten Bells named Brian Murphy had been coshed to death on his way home late. Most of the coppers dismissed it as just another robbery crime, maybe pulled off by the High Rips or the Bessarabians, who may have been in cahoots with Murphy, but it was odd that he was known to be conversant with the girls. Could that have had anything at all to . . . Well, it mucked up considerations and clarity, so I tended to dismiss it, so as to concentrate on the play we had before us still.
The truth is, we should have gone with Colonel Woodruff. He was, after all, the better possibility, assuming the professor’s analysis to be correct (I still believed in it and him). I could not but think of a scene in which we smashed out the window as the colonel was about to strike and, seeing the Howdah, knowing the jig to be up, he threw himself toward us and, without thinking, I double-blasted him to hell. Yes, Mary Jane would be alive, yes, Professor Dare’s genius would be proclaimed, but more to the selfish point, I would be the hero and have whatever it was I desired and be the success I believed myself, having achieved my destiny. No, no, all gone, and as I thought about our choice, I realized it was I who had pressed for the major instead of the colonel, on grounds that the theft of Annie Chapman’s rings suggested a material aspect the colonel lacked.
I saw that I was wrong! The truth was, I didn’t want it to be the colonel. No one did or could. The long years of service, the VC, the blood spilled by him and from him, all spoke to a kind of nobility, and that such a man could commit such crimes seemed not merely grotesque but in some way an indictment of humanity. It was too dark a message to be acknowledged.