“Sir, it’s a clue,” I said. “It might lead you to the fellow. One wonders how—”

“Nonsense,” he said. “We recorded the words, and Long will give them out. However, the message chalked upon the wall is clearly excitory in intention, meant to focus anger on certain elements. I will not have a riot in this city and need to call the Life Guards to quell it—”

“As upon Bloody Sunday, Sir Charles?” someone asked, alluding to the great man’s most famous (heretofore) blunder. I think the person who spoke was me, now that I remember it.

“I’ll ignore that crack, sir,” he replied. “The larger point is that London needs no blood spilled. Public order is the first order of business, on orders of the Home Office, and all orders will be followed.” With that, he turned, then turned back. “You, who are you, sir?”

“Sir, I am Jeb, of the Star.”

“Lord of the rings, eh? Do you know the man-hours you cost us checking into reports of strangers with rings? An abomination.”

“It’s a fair clue, fairly reported,” I said.

“You should be advised, sir, that I have sent a letter to your Mr. O’Connor in complaint of your misrepresentations of our efforts.”

“Sir, with two more butchered on a single evening, and the case’s most important clue having been erased, it seems your efforts have come to nothing. The public has—”

“By God, sir, we at the Yard will do our duty, and intemperate commentary and preposterous, misleading clues in the press only worsen matters. I assure you, the Yard will prevail, good order will be kept, and all will be as it should be. We will catch this nasty boy and see him hanged at Newgate Gaol. But you must do your part, for we are all on the same side, and that part does not include making us look like asses. Good night, gentlemen!”

One perquisite granted a general is that he need not hang around to face the consequences of his decisions, and so it was with Sir Charles, who turned and was immediately surrounded by a flock of aides-de-camp who clucked and cooed around him and nursed him to a carriage, at which point he sped off into what had become the dawn.

Poor Constable Long was left alone to face us, while all the other Bobbies and detectives stood around, perhaps relieved that the big boss hadn’t made them perform close-order drill, as was his wont, in some cuckoo effort to instill military discipline on men who were underpaid and undertrained and overmatched.

“So, Long, out with it. You found it; the story, man.”

We crowded about poor Long as if we were going to devour him, to discover the red nose and bloodshot eyes of a man who’d soaked the better part of his brain in gin for a dozen years and smelled the same as well.

“I’s on me beat, and it’s near on three A.M.,” he began, and then told a dreary tale of walking down Goulston with his lantern, peeping into nooks and crannies, when his light illuminated a bright splotch of crimson on a crumple of cloth in the corner of a doorway arch that could be but one thing. He picked it up, smelled it to learn that the red was indeed blood and that stains of a certain ugly shade suggested fecal matter. He claimed that he thought it might be evidence of a rape, as he had not received the bad news about Mitre Square and Dutfield’s Yard, and then he noticed some words scrawled on the wall. He went straight back to the Commercial Street station and showed them the clue, and a wiser detective sergeant put the picture together, which is how now, at around five in the pale light of dawn, such a scrum had formed in front of the Wentworth Model Dwellings.

“What was on the wall?” Cavanagh demanded, rather harshly, as it was not this poor idiot who’d ordered it erased but Sir Charles himself, who had adjudged it important enough to arrive at the scene posthaste.

Long said in an uncertain voice, “It read, ‘The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ ”

“Jews?”

“Yes, sir, so it did, and here’s the odd-like part, even a bloke like me knows ‘Jews’ to be spelled J-E-W-S, but this fellow must have been off his chum, he spelled it all wrong, it was ‘J-U-W-E-S,’ it was.”

All of our pens took the strangeness down.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure as I’m standing here before you.”

We all shook our heads. Indeed, the Jews had been a theme in this thing, and my own paper, the Star, had not been circumspect in controlling speculation. Jews were, to so many, an alien element, and certain were quick to blame them. It would, for that same some, be quite helpful if the Jews or a Jew were in some way to blame, and the strange opacity of the graffito tended to point to that possibility, if to anything at all.

“Has the piece of bloody rag you found been definitely linked to the dead woman’s apron?”

“Sir, you’d have to ask at the mortuary, sir,” said Long, and then another copper—this may have been Constable Halse, of the City Police, who would make himself more visible in a few seconds—chimed in with “I can help with that; I’m just from the mortuary, as Commissioner Smith has put many of us out on the street, and yes, indeed, the rag matches by shape, texture, and size exactly the torn apron that was on the poor woman’s remains in the square.”

That was it, then. He had come this way. But were those his words? It certainly seemed so, for indeed they spoke to the central social issue of the case, and it seemed that he had indeed communicated a thought.

But . . . what thought?

Before we separated, we coagulated a bit on our own, we old boys who’d been on the case since Polly, even the penny-a-liners, treated for once as if they were equal, and we stood there in the pale light as Whitechapel came awake around us, and tried to make sense out of it. I cannot recall who said what, but I do remember the various arguments and now set them down as relevant and, moreover, typical of what transpired regarding this issue not merely in the week and the weeks that followed, but even now, twenty-four years after, is argued vehemently.

Some, I should add, believe poor Long got it wrong. It developed that the aforementioned Constable Halse of City had shown up before the erasure and inscribed in his own notebook a slightly different version. Thus there was no stationary target, which is why the damned thing still floats in the ether so provocatively.

Halse said the words were “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” as opposed to Long’s “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

That damned “not”! It drifts hither and yon like a balloon, untethered, on the zephyrs of the interpreter’s bias.

“Double negative,” said Cavanagh, university man. “Technically, grammatically, by all the rules, the two negatives cancel each other out, so the true meaning, regardless of the placement of the ‘not,’ is that the Jews are indeed guilty. It is saying, ‘The Jews are the men who will be blamed for something.’ ”

“That does not impute guilt,” said another. “It is neutral, simply stating the Jews will be blamed, and as we all know and have observed, the Jews being this era’s prime bogeymen, indeed they will be blamed.”

“So he’s merely a social critic, like Dr. Arnold?”

There was some laughter at the idea of killer as essayist, but then the subject drifted elsewhere. On and on it went for almost an hour, as the boys tossed various ideas to and fro. Was our nasty chap really mad or only pretending? Did he have a program, or was he random? Was he intelligent, even a genius, or pure savage brute out of the dark forests of the east, full of primal blood lust for arcane religious purposes? Could he even be, after it all, someone similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, two separate personalities in one body? Perhaps, as in the Scot’s fiction, the one did not know of the other. It was all quite curious—pointless in the end, I suppose—but one remark stood out and colored my reactions to all that was to come.