“Madam, Jeb of the Star; I saw you at the occasion of Annie’s death.”

“You,” she said. “Reporter, news fella type. You wrote nice about poor Annie, everybody read it and remembered the poor gal.”

“May I buy you a gin? Perhaps we could discuss her some more.”

“I likes me gin, sure,” she said, and we shortly were arranged at a table at the Ten Bells, a watering and ginning hole to the trade.

The chat was general and pleasant and sad for a bit, and like all of the unfortunates I would meet, she turned out, once one was by her defenses, to be an all right sort, brought low by her love of the fiery blur she held in the glass before her, but she didn’t produce anything I could use for the longest time, and I began to wonder how to pass her off without buying her another thruppence of bliss, when she said in response to nothing I had been clever enough to ask, “Wonder what the bloke done with ’er rings?”

“I say, what rings?” And then I remembered Bagster Phillips remarking on her bruised finger and surmising the absence of the rings.

“Annie had them two brass rings. Nothing to ’em, but they was dear to ’er. They was wedding rings, she said. ’E cuts ’er guts out plain, and ’e takes them rings. ’E’s off ’is chum, that one.”

I nodded.

And thus the next day’s Star front page, consisting entirely of:

ANNIE’S RINGS

FIEND STOLE VICTIM’S BELOVED WEDDING BANDS

POLICE HAVE NO EXPLANATION FOR BIZARRE THEFT

That moved the story hard for a few days, being the sort of homey, horrifying detail the shopkeeps and shopgirls and clerks and barristers’ assistants could get an emotional fix on. Where were Annie’s rings? If the fiend was one of my readers, he’d be wise to chuck them in the Thames and think no more. But I thought I detected a whiff of vanity in him; he just might be arrogant enough to keep them. Be interesting, I thought, if it was the evidence of the rings that sent him to the gallows.

Many other issues drifted in and out of focus over the next weeks, all of them ultimately meaningless and not worth recording here, one of them being what time it was the poor girl expired, as several highly dubious witnesses reported hearing, seeing, and not seeing things at conflicting times during the morning. The coppers believed them and dismissed their own surgeon’s learned opinion. What utter foolishness!

But in the end, only one thing lingered: a business of the Jews. I suspect the large influx of them excited anger, fear that they would bring alien ways to old Albion, undercutting the labor market and driving good Englishmen out of work. Of the seventy-six thousand occupants of Whitechapel, thirty to forty thousand were Jewish, while of that same total population 40 percent were below the poverty level. Thus, in many minds, Jews equaled unemployment. So there was no love for them to begin with when the murders started.

This anger began to coagulate at their commission. We of Fleet Street were no help at all. One of our reporters—not the famous Jeb but the Yank calling himself Harry Dam, whom I didn’t know except by name, as, recall, his absence “with a floozy” had gotten me into this game in the first place—had reported even the week before Annie’s death that a fellow named “Leather Apron” was a suspect. That was, by the way, what many called Jewish butchers. That a leather apron was found soaking in a tub in the yard of 29 Hanbury (yes, I had missed it, as had the clomping coppers for quite some time) didn’t help matters, even if it was soon proved to have nothing to do with the case. Still, the Leather Apron whisper would not go away.

Harry played up the Jewish characteristics of this beast Leather Apron, intimating mystical use for the blood and certain body parts of poor Polly. And the killer hadn’t even taken any body parts! One day Mr. O’Connor, who knew a replate story if ever there was one, ran the headline LEATHER APRON: ONLY NAME LINKED TO WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. I suppose I didn’t approve, but I was hoping to be taken on permanent-like, so who was I to go against the great man’s judgment?

Then the Manchester Guardian wrote, “It is believed that (Scotland Yard) attention is directed to a notorious character named ‘Leather Apron.’ . . . all are united in the belief that (the killer) is a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Jewish type.”

You could feel a fever building. I was part of it but had no tool by which to stop it. I also had no will to, being largely agnostic on the issue and knowing no Jews and feeling a little suspicious of them myself. That indifference, plus my customary greed and ambition, got the best of my low character; I had signed on to ride the train as far as it would take me, and damnation to all crushed beneath its progress. I had no idea how far that would be.

The mobs responded to this campaign as mobs do: violently. Crews of young toughs roamed Whitechapel and roughed up individual Jews. The coppers seemed to pick up anybody with a Jewish name and bring him in for hard questioning: among the arrestees, Jacob Isenschmid and Friedrich Shumacher.

Finally, a Jewish slipper maker, actually nicknamed Leather Apron, was arrested and interrogated. It turned out he had knocked a Judy or two about, but that was all, and he was in no way affiliated with knives or the sort of carnage our fellow had made twice. He had well-proven alibis and was let go.

But the Jewish fear grew. On several occasions, mobs formed outside the Spitalfields police station where this Leather Apron (John Pizer, by name) was incarcerated. Anti-Jewish graffiti began to appear mysteriously on tenement walls and storefronts. A very uncomfortable tension, palpable and unsettling, began to course through the lower orders—I love them in principle, but I was to learn on this adventure that they can be reprehensible louts in ungoverned mobs and need stern leadership to harness their rage—and violence was in the air. If our killer was a Jew, killing on some kind of twisted religious grounds, I had no idea what mischief might be released. For that and that alone, I began to hope that early suspicions of a doctor or a surgeon played out, for if it were an upper-class nob, it’s unlikely that a mob would head into Kensington with torches and pitchforks. For one thing, the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards would stop them with Gatling guns before they got across the street, just like the black-skinned ugga-buggas, and that would be a bloody day for old London.

Among all these voices, one was not heard from. The killer’s. His weekly schedule was not kept, and he did not strike again for two weeks after Annie. What was he doing?

September 10, 1888

Dear Mum,

I never heard from you after the last letter, but maybe that’s because I didn’t send it. Ha-ha! Maybe when they catch this fellow, I’ll send it and this one and you and Da can have a good laugh about how your bad daughter survived what all about is calling “the autumn of the knife.”

You know the fellow is back and he cut up another girl. He even stole her wedding rings! It’s been in all the papers, so I know you heard about it, and you’ll be worrying because this time it’s so close by me. Well, I am writing to tell you don’t be worried! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I have a guardian angel now!

I have a fellow, a nice man, he doesn’t beat me or try and shove me about to be a certain way. He lets me be, and what more can a girl ask, plus he brings in a good penny as he works as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market, where there’s a lot of packing and loading and ice chipping to do, so when he gets home, he’s a tired fellow and we’ll have a glass of beer at the pub. He wants me to stop with what I do bringing in the money, and maybe that’s in the cards, who can read the future? But I’ll tell you, he won’t let no other fellow on to me, well, on to me to hurt me. As I said, see, it’s different down here, all of us are so close to going under that it’s more forgiving of certain things. There’s no high and mighty. Nobody’s high, nobody’s mighty, you do what you has to, and you helps out them what needs it and in turn, when you’re down, they’ll help you back. The girls is all so nice, not like some I’ve known.