“Evidently my father did something quite remunerative. I meant to ask him about it but never got around to it. I didn’t enjoy his company much. Horrible fellow. However, I do enjoy having the money that I never earned myself. It makes life easy, frees me for my fun, and pays for all of this.”

I looked about. The room was like so many of the professorial class I had seen behind London’s brick and ivy, all booky and leathery, with brass gas outlets for nighttime illumination so necessary to the soirees that drove their society and furniture heavy enough to crush an elephant’s skull and carpets from the Orient that would tell pornographic stories of Scheherazade’s actual relations with the Caliph if one but understood the code. What distinguished it from all the other Bloomsbury iterations was a contrapuntal melody that might be called “Throat.” It was quite extravagantly decorated in Throat. Was he a Sherlock Holmes of the voice?

That is, it was dedicated to matters pertaining to the vocal cords and their substructures, from charts of that particular organ in profile half-section complete to Latin labels for all the tiny flowerlike leaves and tendrils, charts on the wall that I took to be for eye but revealed themselves to be of the letters we call vowels; then strange devices on a large laboratory table that could be for torture but seemed for measuring breath, both intensity and consistency, including a tiny torchlike thing against whose flame one would speak, I’m guessing, and by that method give visual evidence of the absence or presence of the letter H, whose existence bewildered half the population of our city.

“I say, you take this phonetics business rather seriously, don’t you?”

“Voice is communication, communication is civilization,” he said. “Without the one, we lose the other, as those festivals of slaughter called wars attest.”

“May I write that down? It’ll do for an aphorism.”

“Go ahead. Claim authorship, if you prefer. As I say, I am beyond glory. I merely want to stop this nasty chap from gutting our tarts. That’s enough for me.” He bade me sit.

“I have to tell you,” I said, “I have not accomplished much. I go forward and back, upward and downward, I enter randomly or by system, and I cannot seem to get beyond what the police know, that a skilled, dedicated individual is, as has been said, ‘down on whores,’ and butchers them with such grace that he has yet to be caught or even seen.”

He drew reflectively on his pipe, the atmosphere he was pulling past the burning tobacco intensifying its burn so that more great roils of vapor tumbled forth. It was like the skyline of Birmingham.

He proceeded to ask questions that showed intimate familiarity with the material. How wide was the passageway Jack had taken Annie down on Hanbury Street? What were the dimensions of the pony wagon at the Anarchists’ Club, versus the dimensions of the gate, and how low to ground was that wagon? How many stone was Mr. Diemschutz, the pony-cart man? Over which shoulder were Kate Eddowes’s intestines flung? How quickly had the various teams of coppers arrived at Buck’s Row? Why did he only cut Polly but not eviscerate her like the others, assuming interruption in the matter of Liz Stride? Why was there no moon her night but quarter-moon the others? What explained the odd irregularity of rhythm between the murders? What was my opinion of the quality of mind of both Sir Charles and the number one detective, Abberline? Did I get a bonus for writing the Dear Boss letter?

“Now, see here,” I said, all fuddled up, “that is uncalled for.” Particularly since it was true.

“It is quite called for. As I have said, I have a gift for the Beneath of a piece of writing. Beneath ‘Dear Boss’, not entirely but mostly, lies our friend Jeb, for I recognize the boldness and clearness of his sentences united with his vividness of image. Those are separate talents, by the way, not a single general one for ‘writing.’ You are lucky to have them both. Anyhow, ‘Jack the Ripper’ is indeed vivid, if not quite accurate. It certainly echoes and deploys a genius for the exact and the resonant. It may indeed become immortal. I love the melody of ‘reaper’ in its own Beneath, and I like the ‘Jack’ for its onomatopoetic evocation of brisk, decisive action, as the snap cutting of a throat. I mention your clear authorship not to embarrass you or flatter you but to point out that the reason so many have tested their brains against the riddles Jack poses and failed is because they now see him as you created him—Jack, demon of mythology, folklore, mischief, a god of mayhem and slaughter—and that will occlude their thinking, cause them to miss what I would consider obvious. So even as I twit you, I do so because I want you to exile this Jack-demon idea from mind and concentrate instead on a human being who is knowable, trackable, and findable. Will you do me that honor, sir?”

“I will,” I said.

“Then let us turn this hellhound.”

“May I record in Pitman’s? This may be historic.”

“I doubt that. I hope only that it’s coherent.”

For the record, then, here is Professor Thomas Dare’s interpretation of the phenomenon of Jack the Ripper, as recorded with sublime accuracy by me on that date at that time, October’s third week, 1888, in his study at 26 Wimpole Street, London, England, via the Pitman method of shorthand. I have the papers before me as I translate them to English in my study, also London, England, in the year of someone else’s Lord 1912. Let me add, I did not bother to record my interruptions, which in any case were few and stupid.

“I begin with the conclusion and will then support it,” he began. “Here’s my somewhat radical final sum, new, I think, to the field. Our man is military. More, he is army; that is, a soldier.”

He paused, reading the look on my face, which was not stunned surprise but at least a minor bit of being taken aback, for this possibility had not been postulated previously. “Now I will track my argument through a series of subarguments, the first being attributes, the second being character, the third being physical, and the final being spiritual.”

He cleared his throat, rose, and began to pace back and forth while I sat, scribbling away in the Pitman notation.

“I say ‘soldier,’ but I mean not merely a soldier; rather, a certain kind of soldier, a type so rare that there are but few of them in London, much less the army as a whole. He is not an artilleryman, he is not a lancer, he is not an infantry lad. He is no engineer; he certainly has nothing to do with quartermastering or the medical ends of the profession of arms.

“His sort of soldiering is so rare it has no name, at least not a proper noun in the folk vocabulary common to newspapers and barroom chatter. Perhaps, as I believe this sort of thing is to become more, not less, utilized in the future, someone will christen him. But for now the closest I can come is ‘scout,’ or perhaps ‘agent,’ or perhaps ‘raider.’

“I will go with ‘raider,’ as it’s easiest off the tongue. Let’s define the attributes. The raider is used to operating alone. He is very well schooled in certain skills: He must be an officer, since he is literate, despite his dyslexia, and in these days few rankers are. Furthermore, like an officer, he plans well, scouts thoroughly, and memorizes routes in and out. He is not averse to killing, obviously, having done and seen much of that work. But for him, killing is not the point; it is part of the job. He’s always driven by task, not mere infliction of damage. He has purpose, design, agenda as his Beneath.

“This one, in particular, clearly served in Afghanistan, because the wounds he leaves on the bodies are typical of the sorts of mutilations that the Pathans commit against British troops, alive or dead, quite routinely. The women torture our wounded. They cut them open and pull their guts out while the boys are quite alive, but no one except the mountains can hear the screams. The guts are flung, the point being to attract buzzards, the further point being that relief columns will see the buzzards, find the bodies, and suffer the dislocating shock of the carnage, which must have a terrifying influence on morale. Jack has seen enough of it not to be agitated, either by seeing it or by doing it, but for him, it’s part of doing business in a certain methodology. It is restricted, I should add, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where so many have died so horribly. The Negroes of Africa are savages, but not so committed to dogma in their desecrations. The Pathan go more toward beheading and dismembering, as part of their primitive faith insists that by disassembling the body of the enemy, it follows that he will not bother you in the afterlife. From their point of view, it makes very good sense, if it is a little monstrous by our standards. We feel that a bundle of bullets out of Gatling, traveling faster than the speed of sound—yes, sound has a measurable speed—so that it shatters bone and shreds muscle is far more civilized.