The Star led the pack, and the Gazette was not far behind in pursuing the mad-butcher thematic. It was a newsstand natural. It played brilliantly on primordial fears of lurkers with knives, and what evil simmered and boiled down dark city alleys or in precincts where whores sold their bodies to the night. There was probably a sense of divine punishment, unstated because there was no need to state it. The victim was beyond the pale of Queen Victoria’s formal, dark-garbed, earnest empire of rectitude, where the strength of conformity was just as strong on the home island as a bayonet’s steel in the outer rings of our Christian conquest of the world.

You could see that pattern play out in the fate of the poor woman whose fate it was to encounter the butcher’s Sheffield. It turned out, courtesy of someone named Jeb on the Star who was running this story as if his life depended on it, that the poor dear’s name was Mary Ann Nichols, called Polly by all who knew and used her. She was exactly as expected, the dreg of a system that had no place for her, except to spread and pump her cunny in an alley, drop off a thruppence, and forget all about it in the next few seconds.

She is exactly what our system must necessarily produce. A disposable woman. If she does not have the sponsorship of a male, there is nothing for her except the meanest of charity interspersed with the whore’s plight. Darwin’s absolutism becomes the ruling principle of her existence: She develops cunning, deceit, cleverness as her only means of survival, her only goal the thruppence that will get her the day’s glass of gin. She becomes horrid and disgusting, blackened by the streets, rimmed with grime, her teeth rotting, her hair a scabrous mess, her body flaccid and fallen, her language and discourse degraded, and thus we are able to dismiss her from our view without qualm. She is sewage. She exists only for those randy men in the grip of sex fever, and when they have spent their pence and jizz, off they go. Any sane system would spare provision for the wretched creature and possibly save her from her wretchedness. Possibly men will invent it someday—but I doubt it.

The Star brought this tragic nonentity to banal life. No one read of it with more fascination than I. The method of identity: The police noted a laundry marker on one of her underclothes and, in a bit of time, found the laundry, displayed the morgue picture, and identified her. So Jeb, with that advantage, was able to track her last day’s odyssey toward a pool of blood in Buck’s Row. She was forty-three, he tells us, mother of five children. Her character flaw, for which God above and I below exacted our justice, was alcohol. It destroyed her life and, I suppose, killed her. After twenty-four years of marriage to a locksmith, as Jeb told the tale, her husband, finding her frequently inebriated, kicked her out. A divorce followed. There was no place to go but down and no place to land but the bottom. Her shabby last few years were mainly about raising enough money per diem for that glass of blissful gin or several, plus a grim bed in a doss house, of the many that festered in Whitechapel for her and others of the ilk.

Jeb constructed a template of her last hours. The details the plucky bastard unearthed were quite interesting. At twelve thirty A.M. she left a public house called the Frying Pan (who could make up such!) and shortly thereafter returned to her lodging house, where it turned out she hadn’t the cash to spend the night. Out she went. She met a friend and they had a nice chat, even if Polly was quite drunk, and Polly told the friend that she’d had her doss money three times that day but always drank it through, but she claimed that she’d get it again and everything would be all right. Then Polly walked on down Whitechapel Road and, when she saw a potential tryster following her, diverted to the far darker Buck’s Row to earn that doss fee. We know what happened next, don’t we?

Jeb’s account was also notable for the narrative it gave of police movement, and it contained a warning that I took seriously. It seemed that minutes before the dispatch of Polly, two constables on their patrol entered and coursed Buck’s Row from opposite directions. I saw neither; obviously, neither saw me. Yet it is in the record, Constable Thain being the first in one direction, then Sergeant Kerby in the other. Within minutes of my departure, first along came Cross, then a Constable Neill who made the second discovery (after Cross) and signaled to Thain, turning up again like a bad penny. Finally, a Constable Mizen arrived, he being the copper Cross alerted.

Good Lord, it was like Victoria Station when the express from Manchester arrives! All those men on that black, bleak little street in the space of twenty minutes or so, during which a dastardly deed was done unseen. How close I came! How lucky I was! How the whimsies favored my enterprise!

It taught me an important lesson. Luck would not always be my companion, so I must plan more carefully. I must choose the spot, not the woman, henceforth, based on the patrol patterns of the constables, thereby decreasing the chances of discovery in flagrante. I must examine the spot for escape routes so that I would not hesitate in disarray if noted, but could vanish abruptly. I also must locate less well-traveled areas of Whitechapel than the one I had so foolishly chosen, that close to a main thoroughfare lit brightly by gas illumination and the glare of grog houses and constable’s lanterns.

This was good to know, as certain auspicious signs suggested that I must strike again, soon.

CHAPTER SIX

Jeb’s Memoir

Success is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and -girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads—if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”