The other thing is that poor Annie, that’s what the newspapers say was her name, she was again a lone gal on a dark street, with nobody about to see or stop nothing. He fooled her into taking him into a backyard where it was even darker than the street, and that’s where he ripped her up, and you must have heard, as I have, it’s in all the papers, this time he did a job on the ripping.

I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.

See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Johnny Upright for his good and fair ways, done arrested him, and for a time, it seemed there’d be no more cutting. Johnny Upright got his man! Too bad, ain’t it so, that this Leather Apron wasn’t the true bad bloke, only someone the papers said was bad. They had to let him go. But Johnny Upright’s still on the case and you can bet on that one.

Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.

But as I say, even after the job he done on poor Annie and the ripping they say was horrible, and even though it was but a few blocks down, I know it’ll be all swell. Johnny Upright will save us, and then my man’s always on guard and won’t let nobody touch me. Well, ha-ha, “touch” me. Now I know I won’t send this letter to you, Mum, because you wouldn’t find it so funny ha-ha at all.

But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.

Your loving daughter

Mairsian

CHAPTER NINE

The Diary

September 24, 1888

To quote my many Cockney friends, it only hurts when I larf. And there is much about which to larf. I cannot help the larfter, for example, when I contemplate the accounts of the bumbling clowns better known as the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, the coppers, the Bobbies. Make that Boobies. What a show of idiocy.

Forget the idiocy of competing, distracting witnesses, the crushing of the crime scene until, if it wasn’t clueless to begin with, it was quickly rendered thereup, forget that one thing, they dismiss their own surgeon, according to the Star, who correctly placed the time of Annie’s journey at four-thirty A.M.

No, the issue here is Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Warren, the soldier fellow who runs the coppers in his dotage, a gift, one supposes, from the monstrous dowager Vicky as reward for having sent so many heathens to heathen heaven, so our merchants could move in and rob the survivors blind. Note how a certain pattern holds true: The more honorifics before a man’s name and the more initials after them, the bigger an idiot he is likely to be. Thus, he is at his worst when his best is most demanded by the situation. How our empire managed to crush all those wogs under such fools is a mystery, the answer, I suspect, having to do with a superior mechanical imagination as to machines than its poor victims as opposed to any genius among its leaders. We had got the Gatling, and they had not. Sir Charles is so pressured by my predations that he has lost all ability to discriminate. What is needed is the sharp intelligence of a single man who has the wisdom to penetrate the obvious nonsense and press hoo-hah and understand exactly how it happened and from that deduce who did it. Alas, such a man only exists in the fancies of a fellow named Conan Doyle, and his portrait is an ideal, not an actuality. I would tremble in my boots if Sherlock Holmes were after me, but dear Sherlock exists only in the vapors of the Conan Doyle mind, not on the cobblestones of Whitechapel! Ha, and double ha.

But idiocy doesn’t stop there. Even Dr. Phillips, whose expertise, if ignored, specified the deed’s time, is not immune. Upon discovering some sweetbreads gone from Annie, who needed them no longer, he expostulated that I—that is, a theoretical “I”—had sold them to medical schools. Indeed, yes, another ha. And how would a fellow go about doing such, I wonder, without giving up the jig? A far more judicious interpretation, even if equally untrue, would be that “I” am a researcher of some sort, an MD or a Doctor of Science in chemistry or some arcane element of body knowledge, and needed the U and the V for experimentation. From that supposition, all kinds of worthy enterprises could be hatched: One could go to medical faculties and inquire about “unbalanced” graduates with an interest in the areas inferred by these sweetbreads; one could inquire of pharmaceutical companies, who would know such things, what drugs had been and were still being or were possibly being implemented to affect these areas of the woman body. One could also take inquiries into a much lower realm, for example, and examine the nonoccidental element for magic uses of these two biscuits in preparing such products sexual as aphrodisiacs, pregnancy terminators, love potions, and the whole panoply of imaginative folkloric usage. All would be wrong, but all would nevertheless be intelligent deductions from the material at hand.

The only sensible man alive appears to be this Jeb of the Star, who quite helpfully noted and played all ruffles and flourishes with the missing rings. ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS! The fiend even took poor Annie’s rings. If only she’d have had a cat to murder, that would have blown the keg full to heaven. But the rings thing was perfect calculation on my part and perfect application on Jeb’s; his mission is to sell newspapers, at which he no doubt succeeded, and though I have a different product in mind, his enthusiasm at his “scoop” is a first stop on the way to my triumph. It pleases.

Yet in all the mirth, a certain melancholy cannot be denied. First, poor Annie has been lost in all this. It seems that I, her slayer, her strangler, her vivisectionist, am the only being on earth who laments her passing, doomed enough by corrupted lung as the poor lass was, testimony of Dr. Phillips proving the point. I could solipsistically argue that my intercession spared the poor lady much in the way of pain and dissolution, in exchange merely for time, a year’s worth. But I will not. Each man’s death and et cetera diminishes even me. It was my agency and I am the bloke all are on the prowl to bring down and see floating beneath the gallows arm, suspended by a stout piece of hemp. I am guilty, guv’nor, at least by your laws.

Like that of Polly before her, Annie’s character flaw appeared to be alcoholism, perhaps brought about by the wretched and crushing fates of two of her three children, one an early death, the other a cripple who had to go into a state ward. As before, there was no net to capture the falling Annie, and she landed in Whitechapel’s most wretched slum, the Wicked Quarter Mile, as it has been called, selling notch and lip for enough bad gin to drown the pain. There is little else to tell; the most remarkable thing about her was the encounter with me and, I suppose, her surprisingly strong, straight teeth, so unusual that even Phillips remarked on them in his report. If anyone of celestial royalty is listening—as an atheist, I doubt it, but one must abide by the ceremony—I hereby apologize for the botch I made of the passing. The business of the left hand and the constriction of the throat happened, as it were, spontaneously, but nevertheless, it speaks as an expression of and extension of my will which would not be denied, so I will not deny responsibility. The knife at least takes these angels quickly and sends them painlessly to their god and his heaven, if that is where they in fact go, or possibly just into a painless forever of dreamless sleep. The strangulation business is ugly, to say nothing of difficult to manage and slow to take effect. My apology and my pledge to all who come before me never to repeat the sacrilege.