CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Diary

October 15, 1888

I had to see it, of course. It had been a darkened, even a dream, landscape, in a part of the city I hardly knew. I acted on instinct, boldness, without hesitation, and thus, like Cardigan at Balaclava, my headlong, crazed charge through the enemy phalanxes enabled me to survive for another day’s fight.

I waited, I waited, I waited. Today was long enough after, the air was coolish, the sun bright, and it seemed as good a time as any. I wandered out, seeming merely to take a stroll as might any Londoner, and meandered casually this way and that, though trending toward Mitre Square. Being no fool, I would now and then double around to make certain no one was following, though that felt impossible. Indeed, no one was on to me, I was just another citizen, strolling haphazardly block by block, perhaps on the way to an appointment, a meal, an assignation. Nothing about me was remarkable.

Now and then I passed an apothecary’s, a tobacconist’s, or an out-and-out newstand, where this afternoon’s leader boards blazed away with the latest revelations. It was all old milk, reheated ever so slightly for misleading sale. Jack, Jack, Jack. Jack everywhere, Jack nowhere, Jack spotted in the Thames Tunnel, Jack observed in Hyde Park. Who Jack, where Jack, how Jack, why Jack? When they imagined Jack, I had to laugh. Their Jack was a skulker, a creeper, a lurker who slithered through the fog in a giant topper, with some kind of curving Oriental blade clenched in his fist, held close to his face, which was shielded by the cape he drew tight around his neck with his other hand. His posture was feline, for he moved by cat law, silky, silent, gliding on only toes to ground. Ha and ha again. I was as normal a bloke as you could imagine, nobody but the thrushes saw the blade, which in any case was a straight piece of Sheffield steel, as found in every kitchen in Great Britain. I walked through crowds, shoulders back, head erect, my garb not at all theatricalized along West End variations on cunning evil, and never in my adventures had I glimpsed so much as a wisp of fog. I had a fair, somewhat blocky face, hair of modest attainment, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a top hat. Was I going to a ball after my dates with murder, is that what they thought? Perhaps to Buckingham for tea with the queen? Newspapers: What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?

As I got deeper into Whitechapel, the roads clogged up with horse traffic, and the costers’ stalls became obstacles on the sidewalk for pedestrians, all of us squeezing around the choke points, careful not to get shit on our boots or to be crushed by horse tram or beer wagon or speeding hansom. There were dollies out, I suppose, for theirs was a twenty-four-hour-a-day business, men needing notch at any odd stolen hour, but they did not dominate as they did during the evening hours, nor was there the sickly glare of the gaslights and beer shops and public houses to give the place its customary demimonde grotesquerie. It was just business as usual among Brits themselves, the low dregs of empire drawn here, more and more Jews, Indiamen, Teutons, Slavs, and Russkies, so much so that English did not prevail in the constant din of shouts and shills. The overwhelming miasma of the horse deposits that no street sweeper, no matter how energetic, could keep up with, occluded both the nose and the eyes (which wept unavoidably, and who could blame them?), as well as the drifting tang of methane, that other more deadly horse product, headache-inducing if sampled too intensively. The shops, the stalls, the pubs, they fled by in no pattern, as did the various appliances that sustained a horse-drawn economy, troughs, hitching rails, gates leading into yards for the unloading of goods, stables here and there, and the constant noise of the brutes themselves, sometimes a neigh or a whinny, sometimes a cloppity-clop as shoed hoof struck pavement, sometimes the general bluster and sigh of the beasts who basically carried the city on their broad backs without a complaint or a speech. All and all, there was no palpable sign of Jack panic, giving the lie to the conceit that the city was clenched in a fist of fear. Newspapers again, telling a tale that wasn’t.

I passed the Aldgate pump, then Houndsditch and Duke, and there spied the spot where I’d come upon Mrs. Eddowes and put a proposition to her so she’d lead me into the darkness down Mitre Street. When I reached Mitre Street, I turned, finding myself surrounded on either side by low residences undistinguished by anything except that they were sublimely undistinguished. That led, within half a block, to Mitre Square, and on normal days, a lone man entering its portal might attract some suspicion, for what would his business be, but not today, as it still enjoyed its celebrity from my earlier visit.

I cannot say it was packed cheek by jowl like an exhibit at the Great Exposition, but gawkers were all about, most of them clustered in the right-hand corner, near on the wooden yard fence, where Mrs. Eddowes met her fate. I felt no need to approach it and infiltrate the mob just to see a patch of flagstone no different from any other flagstone; instead I took in the whole of the place, seeing in the sun that which had been shrouded in the shadow.

It was a series of brick structures of no particular style or pedigree surrounding for no reason a small patch of space in the middle of a city wilderness. No care, no thought, no wit, most assuredly no brilliance, had gone into its design, if it had indeed been designed, but far more likely, it just happened, as various structures appeared along slipshod principles around it, and someone finally got the idea to crush the wild grass between them under flagstone. Why was it even called a square? Nothing about it suggested the acute angle.

The murder, however, drew many to this otherwise undistinguished lot, and if you guessed the murderer would return to the scene of his crime, you would have been right, I suppose, but at the same time, if you perused the crowd for just such a man, I, the authentic guilty party, would have been the last upon which your eyes would light. Murder has a peculiar odor, and some are drawn to it despite themselves. Many of the people were singles, men mostly but a few ladies as well, all of them unsure how to act, possibly a bit ashamed, but unable to stay away. They stood around stiffly, trying to remain inconspicuous, as if Major Smith and his blue bottles were likely to sweep them up. Nobody made eye contact or really acknowledged each other; out of deference to the newspaper image of Jack under his topper in his opera cape, nobody wore a topper: It was strictly a bowler or slouch hat locality, the clothes all dark and lumpy, as if Mrs. Eddowes would have been insulted by a splash of color.

I glanced over to the left and saw the church passage from whence I had escaped, and again thanked the God whom I knew did not exist for providing it, copper-free, for that reason alone in His Grand Plan, just as I owed Him for constructing this helpful place so I could improvise brilliantly that night. I meant to leave that way as soon as I got over my disappointment at the prosaic nature of the square and its lack of drama or dynamism in the daylight, but at that point I was discovered.

My guilt was known. It was pointed out. The jig was up. I had returned to the scene and paid the price. All that is true.

It is also true that I was discovered by a dog.

I do not know what higher sensitivities these creatures have, but this one knew. She saw into and through me. She had me, whether by rude particle of blood scent adhering to my flesh (I had meticulously burned all the clothes I wore that night and bathed scrupulously) or some instinctive warning system that highlights predators, or maybe by shrewd analysis of my uninterest in the site of the body for the channel of escape, I know not.