CHAPTER SEVEN

The Diary

September 7–8, 1888

I left my dwelling at nine P.M. and took a hansom to city center, and had a repast in a public house, aware that I had my Sheffield in my belt at my hip, under the shirt and the frock coat I chose to wear on these expeditions. It gave me a nice shiver of bliss to be sitting there amid men of business and journalism or whatever, serious men, being seemingly one of them, and them not knowing what lay beneath my coat, them not noticing me at all or if so only in passing, them never guessing in a million years that eight inches of just-sharpened steel held tight in a grip of fine English maplewood pressed against my flesh, rather uncomfortably but not without its own measure of pleasure. A man with a good knife feels king of the world, that’s for certain!

I ambled about, taking pleasure in the city at night. It was such a mad, delirious carnival, and because the weather was superior, most seemed to be temporarily jolly and taking pleasure in the fact that life had put so much on their table. In this way I passed the hours, partaking, enjoying, meandering, observing, and, one supposes, gathering. Everywhere the lights were magnificent and in them showed the red, pleased faces of common men, pleased again to be common and to be men. By midnight I had made my way to Whitechapel by avoiding the Underground railway and its steam-engined efficiency and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds entirely. The flesh parade was in full operation. Again I ambled, even took a stroll down Buck’s Row to see the spot of my previous action. There, flowers and candles and various memento mori had been placed on the street just beyond the bridge over the East London Railway tracks, exactly where I had felled poor Polly. A few others stood by, trying to absorb what had happened there, standing, pointing, hoping perhaps to find in the dark a clue the police had missed in full daylight. I suppose some thought that the murderer always returns to the site of his crime, and though in this case it turned out to be true, it happened not out of will or even vague plan but just because at the time the whimsy took me.

I returned to Whitechapel High Street, ambled down it, found a crowded public house—the Horn of Plenty—and had a stout. It wasn’t for nerves, for mine were steady on without a problem; it was to kill time. But I had wanted plenty of time, and to make my way on foot in a moseying fashion, so that no hansom cabman or horse-tram driver could remember, no matter how small a chance that might be. One couldn’t be too careful, except in the act of commission, where one had momentarily to be bold as a pirate, to strike and go to red carnage, and then obsequiously depart under cover of darkness and unprepossesion of being.

Sometime after two, I slipped out; the crowd was thinning, and again I was worried about standing out. Now my course took me down Whitechapel, where the crowds were more or less thick, and I began my wend through smaller streets until I found myself at Hanbury and Brick Lane, another thoroughfare known as a Judy broadway. It was well lit, and though the crowds were thinner, the business—which, after all, is based on the eternal fires of lustful loins and the eternal availability of opened thighs—still produced a human density. I glanced at my watch, saw that it was nearly three, and instead of continuing down Hanbury, took a right to eat up some more time and wait for the crowds to thin further. I stopped for another stout, finding a seat at the bar where I could keep an eye on the street, and there watched for constables and, at a certain time when the street seemed devoid of them, wandered out upon it.

I spotted her right away. This one was short and thick but obviously a Judy on patrol, trolling for her thruppence. She wore two rings on her left hand, middle finger; I had already conjured a use for such a clue. It fit neatly into the overall plan animating my campaign. I approached her, moving a bit faster than she, until I was just behind her left shoulder, where I adjusted my pace to hers and made certain to violate the commonly understood social principles of space, coming far too close, so that my intention was clear. She turned, but not fully to face me, and I saw her doughy profile at the quarter-angle, the broad nose, the painted-on brightness of inexpensive coloring. I could smell her eau d’toilette. She flashed a sliver of a smile, enough for me to see amazingly strong teeth, and more or less whispered, “What’s it, then, dearie? Bit of sport for the gentleman?”

“I am indeed hoping for just such, my dear,” I said. I had timed it perfectly, intercepting her before and making the connection exactly at the Hanbury Street junction.

“We’ll find a lovely private spot, then,” she said, and led me to the right, into the darkness, down Hanbury.

We drifted slowly, my love and I, along the dark block, lost in a canyon of dark brick, illuminated here and there by a late reader’s light. Ahead, another block away, we could see the brightness that was Commercial Street, and see the traffic upon it, the drift of the gals and beaus and visitors and innocents. As a twosome, we were too close, not quite a couple but not strangers, either. Ghostlike apparitions drifted by us now and then, a Judy, a John, an early-rising workman, who could tell?

Near the end of the block, as I had anticipated—for I had probed the area for possibility a few days earlier—she indicated a rightward turn with her head and put her weight against a door, and it opened to reveal the dark passage that was the throughway to the backyard of 29 Hanbury. We slipped along a dark corridor, passing a mute stairway at the left, and came to nestle near the way out.

“Got a present for Annie, your lordship?” she asked. She had a rheumy, wet slough to her voice, as if her lungs were full of death, and seemed a little blurry, not drunk as a sailor but in that zone of vagueness that the gin confers before it hammers one into full-bang disorientation.

I pressed the coin into her hand, and she took it greedily, sliding it into some hidden pocket of her voluminous dark dress. I said, “Come, let’s move a bit, into more privacy.” I had a fear that this place was too vulnerable, that noise would rise through the house or that another Judy and her companion of the minute might enter 29, not knowing it was occupied.

And here is where what happened began to deviate from the ideal. I had imagined a hundred times since picking the site how we’d end up in the backyard, and how I’d cut her hard, and how fast she’d die, and how I’d do what must be done, and how smoothly it would all go. But no plan survives contact with the world beyond the mind.

“Sweetie, here’s fine, come on, then, let me pull up me petticoats and we can—”

As if it had a will of its own, my left hand shot out like a snake and bit hard at her throat. Recalling now, I realize that I was not prepared to be defied, I was certainly not willing to argue, and my threshold of frustration was dangerously low, though I had been unaware, thinking myself blissfully composed and utterly in control of both self and lady. It was not so. My hand clamped at her larynx and began to squeeze with the full force of my musculature and my will behind it. Even in the dark, I saw the surprise light her face as the oxygen was pressed off, and though so cinched she could not cry out, her throat’s machinery began to manufacture unintelligible noises of despair, dry clicks and hitches, half-grunts, spitless, noiseless screams, the sound of inner structures rubbing frictively against each other, words that no letters exist to approximate, a whole product line of constricted-throat expectorations, and one hand feebly came to beat against my pinioning arm. I knew this would not do, not here, not indoors, where at any moment we could be interrupted, and so with my right hand, I grabbed her fleshy biceps and put force behind, bumping her along, if you will, shoving her with my chest, guiding her with one hand to arm, one to throat, all the while strangling. It was as weird a dance as has ever been danced, an uncoordinated shuffle of bodies set against each other with the ultimate progress to the way out ten feet, then seven, then four away.